skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>also is a decent description of individual humans

A friend of mine was moving from software development into managing devs. He told me: "They often don't do things the way or to the quality I'd like, but 10 of them just get so much more done than I could on my own." This was him coming to terms with letting go of some control, and switching to "guiding the results" rather than direct control.

The LLMs are a lot like this.
Physical pain is one of the most subjective concepts in the Universe.
I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a construction site.

In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive".

In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.

After this is revealed, Lisa asks the scientist about the tests. He shrugs:

"I'm not going to lie to you, Lisa. I never ran the tests."

It's funny on a few levels but what I find most amusing is that his incentive is left a mystery.
> Stuff like this seems to bother me more than it rationally should.

It's bothering you a rational amount, actually. These people have done serious damage to lots of lives and humanity in general. Society as a whole has at least as much interest in punishing them as it does for financial fraudsters. They should burn.
The housing problem in the USA is mostly a NIMBY. It is difficult to get projects from the ground.
FD: I have been following this whole thing for a while, and know personally a number of the people involved.

The AlphaChip authors address criticism in their addendum, and in a prior statement from the co-lead authors: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08032-5 , https://www.annagoldie.com/home/statement

- The 2023 ISPD paper didn't pre-train at all. This means no learning from experience, for a learning-based algorithm. I feel like you can stop reading there.

- The ISPD paper and the MLcontra paper both used much larger older technology node sizes, which have pretty different physical properties. TPU has a sub 10nm technology node size, whereas ISPD uses 45nm and 12nm. These are really different from a physical design perspective. Even worse, MLcontra uses a truly ancient benchmark with >100nm technology node size.

Markov's paper just summarizes the other two.

(Incidentally, none of ISPD / MLcontra / Markov were peer reviewed - ISPD 2023 was an invited paper.)

There's a lot of other stuff wrong with the ISPD paper and the MLcontra paper - happy to go into it - and a ton of weird financial incentives lurking in the background. Commercial EDA companies do NOT want a free open-source tool like AlphaChip to take over.

Reading your post, I appreciate the thoroughness, but it seems like you are too quick to let ISPD 2023 off the hook for failing to pre-train and using less compute. The code for pre-training is just the code for training --- you train on some chips, and you save and reuse the weights between runs. There's really no excuse for failing to do this, and the original Nature paper described at length how valuable pre-training was. Given how different TPU is from the chips they were evaluating on, they should have done their own pre-training, regardless of whether the AlphaChip team released a pre-trained checkpoint on TPU.

(Using less compute isn't just about making it take longer - ISPD 2023 used half as many GPUs and 1/20th as many RL experience collectors, which may screw with the dynamics of the RL job. And... why not just match the original authors' compute, anyway? Isn't this supposed to be a reproduction attempt? I really do not understand their decisions here.)
Absolutely no such law. Think about how we (as a society, not the "freedom of speach absolutists") interpret the 1st Amendment. Newspapers with an ideological bent (like NYT WaPo) would immediately fall foul of it.
Docker buildx: action suddenly failing with no change in workflows
Props to you both for doing this -- I wish you steady sustainable growth and long-term success!
These sorts of cases are why I wrote srgn [0]. It's based on tree-sitter too. Calling it as

cat file.py | srgn --py def --py identifiers 'database' 'db'

will replace all mentions of `database` inside identifiers inside (only!) function definitions (`def`) with `db`.

An input like

import database
import pytest

@pytest.fixture()
def test_a(database):
return database

def test_b(database):
return database

database = "database"

class database:
pass

is turned into

import database
import pytest

@pytest.fixture()
def test_a(db):
return db

def test_b(db):
return db

database = "database"

class database:
pass

which seems roughly like what the author is after. Mentions of "database" outside function definitions are not modified. That sort of logic I always found hard to replicate in basic GNU-like tools. If run without stdin, the above command runs recursively, in-place (careful with that one!).

Note: I just wrote this, and version 0.13.2 is required for the above to work.

[0]: https://github.com/alexpovel/srgn
This is just down to the jury :/
> Drivers under the influence isn't necessarily reckless, but is banned due to a strong association with reckless action

I’m trying to understand this. It is well documented that consuming alcohol impairs thinking, reaction time, motor function, etc. How is the decision to drive a multi-thousand pound vehicle in the proximity of other humans while in that state not itself reckless?

You seem to be arguing that the problem primarily exists when some percentage of impaired drivers start to drive recklessly. But given the baseline impairment, how is the act of driving not inherently reckless?

Drunk driving crashes don’t just happen because someone decided to go crazy and drive 130mph or something similar. They also happen because the impaired person fails at basic aspects of driving like staying in their lane, stopping in time, seeing pedestrians, etc.

> The crime of DUI is not contingent on the actual facts, risk, and danger presented in a given situation.

DUI is a crime based on the fact that people driving under the influence are significantly more likely to harm others, and the baseline risk is high enough to make driving in such a state unacceptable. Even with laws in place banning it, alcohol is a leading cause of vehicle related deaths and there are quite a few of them every year.

It seem problematic to argue that these laws aren’t based on actual facts and real danger when both are well documented.

> The association with realized harm is probabilistic in nature

The same could be said about almost every kind of harm you can think of. It’s unclear what someone is supposed to take from this statement.
Plasma biomarkers in chronic single moderate–severe traumatic brain injury
As I said, I’m not claiming that it currently is a net positive for consumers. But even then, I don’t agree with your assertion. There are things that benefit the average person that aren’t optional, and not being optional doesn’t indicate it isn’t for your benefit. It could hypothetically be possible that people benefit from advertisement overall but would irrationally choose to opt out if they could. Just as some people would opt out of social security if they could but would probably regret it once they need it. Just to clarify, I’m not saying this is happening here, but the argument „I can’t opt out so it can’t be for my benefit“ is flawed.
Do you have a nice reference for this? I could really use something like this, this topic comes up a lot in my social circle.
I haven't read that paper but it seems like it's fixing a different problem of Byzantine fault tolerance. Most consensus systems that are internal for an organization don't have the Byzantine issue so it simplifies the problem.
> reputation

A caveat that "reputation", like competence, is more variagated and localized than is often appreciated. As with someone who is highly competent and well regarded in their own subfield, while simultaneously rather nutter about some nearby subfield where they don't actually work.

One can have a reputation like "good, but beware they have a thing for <mechanism X>". Or "ignore their results using <technique> - they see what they want to see". Subtext that gets passed among professors chatting at conferences, and to some extent to their students, but otherwise isn't highly accessible.

When people speak of creating research AI's using just papers... that's missing seemingly important backchannels. And corresponding with authors. Attempting research AI as developing-world professionally-isolated professor.
I suggest you look into how many things were published without such scrutiny, because they sold.
Having no experience with treesitter I find the query language rather hard to parse. From a practical point of view and experimenting with the library I’m not surprised to go with this nested For loop approach.
> If the daily threads at on r/nursing subreddit are even mildly representative, the status quo in nursing is unsustainable

Call me a skeptic but every career subreddit is dominated by the whiniest complainers imaginable (easily lapping even the HN commenters who froth at the mouth at the thought of RTO).

Using this as a key point of an article seems flimsy at best.

> Personally, I’m betting on two out of the three, but I’m not telling you which two.

Also lol at this.
> from one fraud case to call all scientists dishonest

I specifically mention that the majority of scientists are not dishonest. The majority of scientists are not running academia. The majority of scientists are suffering from this system, to differing degrees.

If I were as rude as you, I'd extrapolate on reading ability, especially since it is not just one fraud case.

Regardless, even if I was wrong on that, all my other criticisms of academia still stand, like exploitation of the phd students. I really hope the grad student unions get what they want.

I appreciate your response though. Makes me feel confident that it is just salty people on HN that hate truth, because otherwise, why would you mischaracterize what I said?
There's evidence that the turning point was in the 90s but I suspect the real underlying problem is indirect funds as a revenue stream for universities, combined with the imposition of a for-profit business model expectation from politicians at the state and other levels. The expectation changed from "we fund universities to teach and do research" to "universities should generate their own income", which isn't really possible with research, so federal funding filled the gap. This lead to the indirect fund firehose of cash, pyramid scheme labs, and so forth and so on. It sort of became a feedback loop, and now we are where we are today.

Translational research is probably part of it but I think it's part of a broader hype and fad machine tied to medicine, which has its own problems related to rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and monopolies, among other things. It's one giant behemoth of corruption fed by systemic malstructurings, like a biomedical-academic complex of problematic intertwined feedback loops.

I say this as someone whose entire career has very much been part of all of it at some level.
They're laughing their asses off when some CEO of an AI company comes out and asks investors for $7T for AI chips. Sure bro, here's 1/4 of the US GDP for your AI chips.
When you virtue signal these things are not important.
> Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact.

Publishing and citations can and are gamed, but is impact also gamed on a wide scale? That one seems harder to fake. Either a result is true and useful, or it's not.
Bosses are firing Gen Z grads just months after hiring them
TSMC is basically the Spacing Guild, nobody messes with them
>Jones Act is not what killed the US Merchant Marine Fleet. Globalization is what killed it.

"Protectionism isn't what killed the US industry. Having any overseas competition whatsoever is what killed the US industry." This is farcical.

If globalisation is when the market lacks protectionism and as a result the manufacturing all moves to cheaper shores, then this was not globalisation by dint of US shipbuilding having abundant protectionism.
And perhaps that's the problem: they're 4 to 6 times more expensive than decent stores (Old Navy runs ~$40, on jeans, for example, vs. the $200-$300 base price on Proper Cloth), which themselves are a few times more expensive than the drop-shipped junk bin of Amazon.

There's not enough "slack" in a (normal? middle class?) person's budget to support that. (There's no slack, really / I don't think I can justify living at such a price point.)
Since we're here, I hope someone creates another all encompassing SP/IDP emulator like samltest.id used to until the owner stopped paying. That made my life so much easier as a developer when SAML stuff came up. No one else has come close.
Definitely a big part of it. Chips enable better EDA tools, which enable better chips. First it was analytic solvers and simulated annealing, now ML. Exciting times!
The section on speculative execution is interesting.
"This approach allows each forward pass to generate multiple tokens without compromising performance, thereby significantly reducing memory access consumption, and enabling several orders of magnitude speed improvements."

Does anyone know if the "several orders of magnitude speed improvement" is accurate? I'm doubtful.

Very interesting though! I'll be playing around with this on the weekend!
I don't see advertisements for, say, crude oil. But I do occasionally see them for Shell, Husky, etc.
That actually sounds pretty low for the amount of labor and trouble they caused.
Author here. Thanks! Yeah this is my hope too.

Egwalker has one other advantage here: the data format will be stable and consistent. With CRDTs, every different crdt algorithm (Yjs, automerge/rga, fugue, etc) actually stores different fields on disk. So if someone figure out a new way to make text editing work better, we need to rip up our file formats and network protocols.

Egwalker just stores the editing events in their original form. (Eg insert “a” at position 100). It uses a crdt implementation in memory to merge concurrent changes (and everyone needs to use the same crdt algorithm for convergence). But the network protocol and file format is stable no matter what algorithm you use.
When was this? I was up in TVC (and later in that newer building up the road from it) in 1996 prototyping the BBC News Online publishing system with Fujitsu ICL. Didn't meet anyone from the Ceefax team though.
I’m not aware of one for 3.2 yet, but the Dolphin de-tunes are pretty unburdened Palo Alto Ostensible Values: https://huggingface.co/cognitivecomputations/dolphin-2.9.4-l....

Good luck fixing that neighbor’s wagon.
> ...[bio people make money by] spin their research off to a startup... ...mathematical and astronomical research [is] fraud-free...

You are talking about a part of the academy that relative to medicine, so few people do.

Show up to a bank looking like someone who knows math, and they'll cut you a huge check. Is that not fraud?
I take your point - admit it's a leaky abstraction.
Yeah, I guess neither of them is a great analogy
If it is possible to advance your career by publishing uninsured research then we've just renamed the problem, although I do like the idea of adding this structure. Eventually there could be so much of it that it would become an accepted norm that your research isn't actually published in a journal until five years after you informally publish it. Other scientists in the field have to be abreast of the latest findings, so now these informal publications are the true journals.
Firewall lets it through: cups-browsed explicitly listens for printers advertising themselves. If it's firewalled off, how can it receive the printer advertisements?

I don't know what default firewall rules are configured, but on distros that run it I'd assume it's allowed through, otherwise no reason to run it.
Good to hear it’s still in use! That’s very kind.
> I am always glad to see people pursuing creating their own programming language. More people should give it a try, IMHO.

I must agree that it's certainly lots of fun and a learning experience, but I must also always think of this amusing quote I once read somewhere: "What is a gentleman? A computer scientist who doesn't invent his own programming language."
As it should be :)
> The word "deal" implies some kind of (commercial) transaction that has a price tag associated with it (deal = good price).

The value that Meta received is equivalent to what Meta is now paying their third-party transit provider to transit this same volume of traffic to DT. My napkin math suggests that this is tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, at 3.5Tbps and pennies per megabit.

> DT's customers pay for "Internet access", and since Meta is on the Internet, the customers should be able to connect to it.

What do you mean by "on the Internet"? Meta is "on the Internet" by virtue of paying transit providers to propagate their IP prefixes within the DFZ.

You can't just show up at an IXP or other peering location, announce your routes, and expect them to propagate globally. You need to convince at least one transit-free network to carry them before you're truly "on the Internet". Meta used to pay DT for transit, and now they don't. Meta is now "on the Internet" via third-party transit, rather than directly via DT.

> Why should Meta pay DT anything?

Meta doesn't need to pay DT anything, but if they're not paying, they shouldn't expect free connectivity services from DT. This traffic can now flow between DT and Meta via transit, instead of directly between DT and Meta.

> If 'dealing with it' entails special connections to particular corners of the Internet to better serve their customer's then it is DT's job to do that.

Which is exactly what DT did by providing settlement-free peering, temporarily, while their links with other ISPs, who they do have a business relationship with, could be beefed up. Now those links can handle the traffic, and now the traffic is flowing over them rather than over direct peering with Meta. No traffic was dropped in the process; neither DT's customers nor Meta were or are being harmed.
yep and so is the stat showing cnn is the top news source.
My partner didn't drive until my daughter was 8yo. They bused around most places, as a result, daughter and wife now refuse any offer of a bus journey...
I have not read the latest paper, but their previous work was really unclear about metrics being used. Researchers trying to replicate results had a hard time getting reliable details/benchmarks out of Google. Also, my recollection is that Google did not even compute timing, just wirelength and congestion; i.e. extremely primitive metrics.

Floorplanning/placement/synthesis is a billion dollar industry, so if their approach were really revolutionary they would be selling the technology, not wasting their time writing blog posts about it.
If one only cares about democrats vs dems (or left vs "far right" in Europe) one also doesn't REALLY care about politics.

Caring = caring to understand how the system works and how the incentives work for participants in it.

If I'm super generous I would guess maybe 0,1 percent of the population cares by that definition.
> Quite shortly the English pub will be extinct, part of history.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Many of the described style of pubs are alive and well, often in the form of a Sam Smith’s.
I've seen "summarise this" and "explain this code" buttons added to technical documentation. This works reasonably well for most common situations, which is probably the reason it's one of the few "production" uses for LLMs. I didn't know Amazon was using it though.

Microsoft has a note on some of their documentation, something like; "this article was written with the help of an AI and edited by a human".

I have a feeling this won't lead to informative to-the-point documentation. It will get bloated because an LLM will spew out reams of bullet point ridden paragraphs, which will need a "summarise this" button to stop the reader nodding off.

Rinse and repeat.
Rust Test Tagging
I think it would be better to have separate grants for replication studies. If something becomes a mandatory administrative burden, people will see it as low-prestige work and try to avoid it. And the kind of people who are good at novel research are often also good at ignoring duties they don't like, or completing them with a minimal effort if forced to.

But if there is separate funding for replication studies, it will become something people compete for. Some people will specialize on replicating others' work, and universities will pay attention, as they care about grant overheads.
They definitely try to replace part of the people this way, starting with the areas where it's the easiest, but obviously it will continue to other people as the capabilities improve. A big example is sports journalism, where lots of venues have game summaries that do not involve any human who actually saw the game, but rather software embellishing some narrative from the detailed referee scoring data. Another example is autotranslation of foreign news or rewriting press releases or summarizing company financial 'news' - most publishers will eagerly skip the labor intensive and thus expensive part where journalists go and talk to people, look into old records, etc, if they can get away with that.
It depends. Some banks will ask for root origin of funds. Say you earned some money 20 years ago, invested them with various brokers into stocks all over the world, real estate etc. And then cashed a large sum into your account. If any one of those transactions is flagged they will require you to go back 20 years and collect those invoices that you earned and then you have to collect every transaction from the brokers, this may involve foreign jurisdictions where record keeping and querying is not available from 20 years ago.

So you will fail the disclosure and the bank will flag you in the shared blacklist DBs, they close your accounts and you are out of the system. This is happening enmasse to people who invested in and cashed out of real estate abroad(asia/africa/sa) some time ago. I imagine it's the same with foreign stock markets. And you never know what will be required 20 years in the future, thus most financial advisors discourage "moving money around". They even have a whitelist of brokers, stocks and jurisdictions, anything outside that is uninvestable for normal people just because of KYC/AML paperwork requirements.
That's why there are four axes of documentation.
In addition, if you’re obese already, you’ll have much more difficulty with lots of cardio exercise than someone who is much lighter. The answer, is, unfortunately, “both” for most people. Sure, you can build muscle and keep the same weight… but there’s no amount of muscle you can build that will turn someone who weighs 300 lbs into a healthy weight.
“US nursing crisis” are the search keywords you will want to use.

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/4304685-americas-nurs...

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/07/health-care-worker-shortage...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-data/fact-sheets/nursing-sh...

https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2023-04-13-study-projects-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493175/
You can still optimize various layers of memory for a specific model, make it all 8 bit or 4 bit or whatever you want, maybe burn in a specific activation function, all kinds of stuff.

No chance you'd only get 1% speedup on a chip designed for a specific model.
Photographer Stephen Shore Walks Out of Lecture over Audience's Use of Phones