skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We can declare that our code only works with lists of numbers, or lists of strings. Therefore, nil is not expected. If (car list) returns nil, it can only be that the list is empty, because if it were not empty, it would return a number, or string, or widget or whatever the list holds.

Even when we have a heterogeneous list in Lisp, like one that can have symbols, numbers, strings or widgets, we can almost always exclude nil as a matter of design, and thus cheerfully use the simpler code.

We cannot exclude nil when a list contains Boolean values, because nil is our false.

We also cannot exclude it when it contains lists, because nil is our empty list.

The beauty is that in many situations, we can arrange not to have to care about the distinction between "item is missing" and "item is false" and "item is an empty list", and then we can write terser code.

When you see such terse code from another programmer, you know instinctively what the deal is with how they are treating nil before even looking at any documentation or test cases.
This is a really nice website.

Few things, for me the domain name is difficult to remember

The page doesn’t fully scroll down for me and the discord button is not accessible on mobile

Other than that the site it nice
> ARM is fast, cool and quiet.

Macs are fast, cool, and quiet; are there other ARM machines that are fast and not super expensive servers?

(Edit: To be clear, I'm skeptical but also if you know of one I'd be very interested)
Like a fish in water, you just don't know the problems you have, because you never considered it could be otherwise.
One problem you have, is that it costs hundreds to thousands of dollars to buy a large display and then they are so huge and heavy they are effectively geolocked to where every you put them, forcing you to buy many of them and just go without in many places you would otherwise use them.

Another problem you have is you are constantly asked to travel places to be physically present with people because apparently it makes you collaborate with them better. But because there's no other choice you just do it... it's not a problem to be solved, it's just a fact of life.

Obviously I'm making assumptions here, but these are the types of "problems" VR solves. By and large people don't acknowledge them because it takes too much imagination to think it could ever be different. I have full confidence that you'll dismiss all these problems right now in your reply - as much confidence as I have that when the tech reaches the right point that it truly solves them in a convenient and comfortable way, you'll embrace it and declare they were obvious all along.
Yes, as far as i remember the limit was somewhere around 1kbyte total parameters size.
Weizenbaum was certainly cynical of and horrified by people’s willingness to accept these machines so easily. But this paper didn’t express those concerns directly, but felt rather hopeful and forward-looking. Yes, look how ridiculous this sample interaction is. But the fact that we all agree that this is ridiculous, means we can all agree to move forward together, with a common understanding of what “better” is.

I am not sure if I agree with this sentiment (the way forward in computing has arguably never been entirely clear), but I still am excited for the future
Performance difference between the slowest [0] and fastest [1] "i7" processors is ~100x so it's best to specify the model.

I suggest >9000 passmark score like the 10th gen i7-10710U [2] or newer, or earlier if it is a higher power chip.

[0]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2630U...

[1]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-14700...

[2]https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i...
That's not relevant, since the point of discussion is if enough people will buy the thing.

If it makes you look like a dork and yet it's the third most selling EV, you might blame the judgment of the average car buyer of the US (for whom you seem to have contempt), but you can't dispute that the product sold.
> Who is Tom Schelling's audience?

Politicians setting policies for use of nuclear weapons during the cold war, IIRC. Among others, at least.

I read parts of that book many years ago, I recall the major theme is that voluntarily sacrificing control over the situation can be a powerful way to force the other party to do what you want. Like if you and me are playing "chicken", speeding towards each other and wanting the other to turn away first, you ripping out your steering wheel and throwing it out for me to see is a guaranteed way to force me to turn first and lose. This kind of stuff.

I guess it ties into the larger topic here in that you can avoid being held accountable if you remove the ability to make any choices yourself.
Thank you! A blame focused culture rewards the least amount of risk taking, the most ass covering, and so much useless bureaucracy because you naturally accumulate systems to convert individual blame to collective blame like change review boards and multiple sign-offs for everything. Folks do the bare minimum because that's the safe subset.

I'm never going back to that kind of culture, it's soul crushing.
not that it should matter in "principle", but the stupid thing to me is that he's not some small time developer trying to make ends meet. he's extracted quite a bit from from it... in the hundreds of millions, but it's still not enough.

i could even understand if he suddenly went full value extraction mode. there are ways to do it ruthlessly and coldly, but his actions have this angle of being petty as well.

his blatant disregard for WP users while trying to gaslight them into thinking he's their champion, general "assholery" (for lack of a better word) to those who have been in the ecosystem for a long time who dissent.

i guess the mask is truly off.
So are nazis cutting the wages of teachers, nurses or caregivers? Are the nazis coming for your profession?

Are these nazis in the room with us?
https://archive.ph/Z6HBL
I've explored the mystery shopper apps a few times.

A common task is to take photos of shelf's and the products / pricing.

Its framed as "make sure our employees are doing it correct" but based on the strict image requirements (needed for later computer processing) I have the feeling it is actually a competitor trying to get shelf and price info. It feels a little cloak and dagger.
If you are not doing gaming, there are still things that can make them obsolete. Driving big screens (like multiple 4k screens), hardware acceleration for video playback (hevc/av1 is on recent models only, you need hardware acceleration particularly for 4k playback). Also for laptops that actually travel, TPM is a bit of a must to me. It's bad enough if your laptop is lost or stolen, it's a lot worse if your private data is freely accessible to anyone who finds it. TPM wasn't standard on laptops.

Otherwise agree, my main work computer remains a i7-6700k, plenty of power for anything I don't run on a server, plus low idle usage. Never needed more than 64GB RAM. I have no use for PCIe 4 or 5 speed (any nvme speed over 2GB/s is kind of wasted on me).

[edit] and watch the battery. I had batteries starting to swell after 4-5y on many laptops. You might even want to replace it preventively and while you can still find the model.
Have you ever looked at all the code that it needs to do that? Plus an integration lib like mobx-react. And even then the performance doesn't compare to Svelte 5, Solid, etc.
USB-C is amazing, but my 2019 laptop has it.
In the United States, you mean?

Because other countries adopted similar security protocols and still MH370 and Germanwings Flight 9525 happened. And the 2004 Russian bombings.

You do have a point insofar as that 9/11 changed the game: previously a hijacking just meant you'd get an unscheduled vacation and would likely be released unharmed. Now the assumption is that it's a suicide mission so passengers will fight back.

This is nothing to do with the TSA's security theatre; it's simply because most people don't want to die.

To think overwhise is "my magic rock keeps away heffalumps" levels of reasoning.

Because there have been zero heffalump attacks since 9/11.

Zero.
Svelte 5 is almost heaven, I thought. But it's full heaven.

To keep it short: The Svelte team did a remarkable job improving every aspect but preseriving the characteristics and distinctive features (fast, small, easy, elegant).

Now, where I struggled (using Svelte 5 on a business logic heavy SPA since RC in April):

Signal in general are extremly easy to use, but quite hard to track. You have to "know" or "find out" if something is reactive. Vue makes it easy with their .value API, but also not 100% foolproof.

With React: Everything is a value. Unidirectional data flows. It's very easy to follow the flow of the data.

With Angular: Data pipelines are built using RxJS. Hard to learn, but extremely powerful. You can follow the data flow quite well. Not as easy as with React, but once you are good with RxJS, still easy enough.

With Svelte 5: Runes look like values. This mental model is good enough most of the time. It's especially great in small contexts where you exactly know where your variable comes from or where everything is reactive. But Runes also behave like signals and proxies. So, you sometimes need to know exactly what is in your bag. Is it a value? A signal ($state with value or $state.raw with object or array)? A proxy ($state with array or object)? In larger contexts it gets really hard to track.

Why is Svelte still full heaven to me: I realized that Runes are just the basic building blocks. They are the common basic toolkit. I don't have to use them in large business logic areas of my apps. I can create (nominal typed, using TS of course) custom wrapper classes, e.g. to only allow signals, not proxies. This wrapper classes could disallow mutation. Passing those around makes it type safe. If I see a value, it is a value. If I see a type of my reactive wrapper class, it is reactive. Or, I can use RxJS and Svelte 5. Or I can mimic Vue's or Solid's APIs (as Rich showcased).

There's a spot in the new docs (wip) where the Svelte team is going to explain Runes. I think they're also (as other Signal experts - I hope Prof. Signal Carniato solves this for all of us :-)) working on better debugging tools.

I'm happy.

Big thanks and respect to the Svelte team.
Some of it is because many people's only contact with Lisp is via academia, and the academics who teach it actually don't care about developing anything with Lisp. They use it as a vehicle for concepts, and those concepts typically revolve around functional recursion.

The Scheme language and it surrounding culture are also culprits. Though Scheme isn't functional, it emphasizes pure programming more than its Lisp family predecessors. The basic language provides tail recursive constructs instead of iterative ones, and demands implementations to implement optimized tail calls.
I think you're underestimating how effectively the old-fashioned text-based design repels users who would lower the quality of the site. (Although as Usenet proves, high-quality moderation is also necessary.)
So if something doesn't have mass market application it's a solution in search of a problem? Because this is what your post implies
The economic calculation is often an accountability sink too. We can say that the economy has spoken, profit was made, case closed.

But we can also look for accountability in the political system. Maybe the hotel should be obliged by the law to pay real money instead of a voucher?
Unpopular opinion: Svelte 4 was much better. It was truly invisible and it used basic JS syntax to do what you wanted. Now runes ruined it.
Thanks, I found your response really helpful, and it helped identify some of the mistakes in my thinking. "In blameful cultures, avoiding accountability avoids blame, but that is not needed in a blameless culture." - that really made a lot of sense to me.
I upvoted you, because I think you have a valid point. The tone is unnecessarily aggressive though.

Effective and information-dense communication is really hard. That doesn't mean we should just accept the useless fluff surrounding the actual information and/or analysis. People could learn a lot from the Ignoble Prize ceremony's 24/7 presentation model.

Sadly, it seems we are heading towards a future where you may need an LLM to distill the relevant information out of a sea of noise.
When in doubt as to whether to refer to someone as a "friend" or as a "colleague", I normally ask myself "how many meals have we shared?"
Lack of accountability.

People cite the tragedy of the commons to discourage sharing of resources. The idea that common land should be divvied up into private ownership to prevent them falling into ruin. When really shared resources just need accountability between the people who make use of them. It’s just basic game theory:
If there is no cost to abusing your opponent, that strategy will get used. But if you’re going to be playing long term with the same people, systems will form to deter abuse.
> LLMs absolutely 100% can reason, if we take the dictionary definition; it’s trivial to show their ability to answer non-memorized questions, and the only way to do that is some sort of reasoning.

Um... What? That is a huge leap to make.

'Reasoning' is a specific type of thought process and humans regularly make complicated decisions without doing it. We uses hunches and intuition and gut feelings. We make all kinds of snap assessments that we don't have time to reason through. As such, answering novel questions doesn't necessarily show a system is capable of reasoning.

I see absolutely nothing resumbling an argument for humans having an "ineffable calculator soul", I think that might be you projecting. There is no 'categorical prohibition', only an analysis of the current flaws of specific models.

Personally, my skepticism about imminent AGI has to do believing we may be underestimating the complexity of the software running on our brain. We've reached the point where we can create digital "brains", or atleast portions of them. We may be missing some other pieces of a digital brain, or we may just not have the right software to run on it yet. I suspect it is both but that we'll have fully functional digital brains well before we figure out the software to run on them.
It’s a way to fully automate a Brazil scenario. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)]

Since at least in that scenario, there were humans in the Bureaucracy that could (but didn’t particularly) feel bad.

In this scenario, no humans need to be directly involved, which allows the scope and scale to be even more
Dystopian.
To combat illegal sports streaming and betting. On a deeper level it is to combat major crime organisations on a financial level. Italy actually has a lot of initiatives to do these things, though some obviously work better than others. One of the better is how every budget has to has through a government service, to tack illegal activities both internally and across borders. Many EU countries have various things like this, though in Italy is far more focused on the financial aspects because Italy obviously has a big past of organised crime to the point where these organisations rivalled the nation station.

The piracy shield is terribly implemented of course and does a lot of harm to things it wasn’t necessarily meant to target. Part of this is because the law itself is rather terrible and has already undergone multiple changes and amendments, but part of it is also that Italy has a rather tough “no fucks” policy toward major tech companies.
> there are not many tools to fight open-source corporate freeloaders.

and by design. These are freeloaders because open-source software's intention is to allow for people to freeload off it!

Why should "corporate" freeloaders be considered any different than just a regular freeloader? Just because they have some money?

If said software do not wish to have any freeloaders, don't use licenses that allow it. Use something like dual licenced AGPL or use a non-opensource license.

As an example, Epic's Unreal Engine is not open source, but source available. It's licensed so that hobbiests can use it free of charge, but high revenue generating projects must pay. It's a good license, as it makes their intentions completely clear and on the outset.

> AWS's freeloading on elasticsearch and others.

if elastic doesn't want it, they could've followed the same licensing model as Unreal Engine. But of course, elastic wanted the exposure and network effect of a truly open source license, but wanted to collect when someone manages to make money off it.
This is some conspiracy BS.

Why would Tesla have been invited to a summit that was primarily centered around United Auto Workers? Tesla is non-union. “EV” was only a pretext.

The summit didn’t invite any non-US carmakers, who also make EVs. It was an event about UAW. Everyone invited was UAW.

The administration even said as much:
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/05/white-house-answers-why...
Civil aviation does not have the same inspection process that the military does.

The old heavy tankers were all being flown at their limits for decades with nothing more than a dude with a flashlight looking at the insides of them and going "yurp, this is good to go!"

On Air Force aircraft, to include the B-52, thousands of inspectors either look at every single critical part on a regular basis or use random sampling to establish estimated fleet health levels.

https://www.airforce.com/careers/maintenance-and-repair/nond...

I'm willing to bet that each individual B-52 has more paperwork on it and more eyeballs that have seen x-rays and ultrasounds of it than every single aerial firefighting platform in the world combined.
> I am sure there are some hyper specific examples where it has happened as described, but as a “fact” about the world and as a justification for any course of action, it’s highly suspect.

You read that and understood “categorically proven to be an invalid concept”?
One of them is a real engineer, the other one is a back seat engineer.
Imagine a world where your language’s package manager became a company that basically offered “Package Management as a Service”. How effective do you imagine that would be?
I can see it. How FSD performs depends on the environment. In some places it's great, in others I take over relatively frequently, although it's usually because it's being annoying, not because it poses any risk.

Being in the passenger seat is still off limits for obvious reasons.
Also, usually these situations involve intentionally (or not, depending on how charitable one is being) passing back and forth between different divisions/groups.

So the only one with consistent power over all groups is an executive so high up the food chain (in some cases not even the CEO!) that they can plausibly claim ignorance.
If Vue hasn't made a dent, I don't ever expect Svelte to. Angular was the only high-level competitor and I haven't heard that one in a long time already.

For a framework to eat into React's usage, it needs a strong evangelist (like Facebook has been for React)
Wouldn’t it just happen instantly and settle on some fixed point?
Oh man, it really has been 5 years since 2019...
> a large fraction of humanity simply lacks the mental flexibility to adapt to prefix or postfix notation.

I doubt it. Firstly, there are entire prefix and postfix natural languages, which have capable native speakers of all intellectual persuations. But in natural languages, sentences do not go to very deep levels of nesting before people get confused.

In programming, we have the deep nesting quite often. Nobody has the mental flexibility to adapt to it. We indent the code instead.

Nobody can read a large Lisp program (or even a small one) if it is flattened into one long line, which is then wrapped to a paragraph.

Within a single line of Lisp, there is rarely much nesting going on where the prefix notation causes a problem. The rest is indentation.

Everyone doing serious programming relies on their editor for that, which helps them spot nesting errors.
> Even if we accept the most fringe, anthropocentric theories like Penrose & Hammerhoff’s quantum tubules, that’s just a neural network with fancy weights.

First, while it is a fringe idea with little backing it, it's far from the most fringe.

Secondly, it is not at all known that animal brains are accurately modeled as an ANN, any more so than any other Turing-compatible system can be modeled as an ANN. Biological neurons are themselves small computers, like all living cells in general, with not fully understood capabilities. The way biological neurons are connected is far more complex than a weight in an ANN. And I'm not talking about fantasy quantum effects in microtubules, I'm talking about well-established biology, with many kinds of synapses, some of which are "multicast" in a spatially distinct area instead of connected to specific neurons. And about the non-neuronal glands which are known to change neuron behavior and so on.

How critical any of these differences are to cognition is anyone's guess at this time. But dismissing them and reducing the brain to a bigger NN is not wise.
There's a lot of ways to implement that and most of them aren't a problem.

For example: If there isn't a speed of light, how fast does light go? If it's variable but not instant, then depending on the details causality violations could still be very rare or impossible. If it's instant, then how do we define instant for different observers? I feel like relativity-style calculations don't really work. If "instant" is agreed upon by all observers then we won't have causality issues.
You can't breakdown cognition into just "search" and "learn" without either ridiculously overloading those concepts or leaving a ton out.
REST: A Plug-and-Play Method for Accelerating LLM Without Additional Training
It’s far more situational than that. Yes, ebooks by themselves aren’t as good as physical books, but there are plenty of studies showing positive effects of multimedia tools in various subjects.

I don’t think AR is going to teach kids to read, but augmenting instruction in things like the trades, sciences, and sports all seem likely to have strong benefits. Experiential educational opportunities like museums and historical sites also seem like likely targets.

A good analogue is video. Video can be a great tool in certain subjects- I still swear everything I know about protein synthesis is from a video in college- but it is generally used as an secondary rather than a primary tool.

The video is from the 1970s and protein synthesis is explained through interpretative dance and and poetry. Its truly amazing https://youtu.be/u9dhO0iCLww?si=lTO95vbysVTB6DLa
Bloody red-bricks. My school had its 1400th anniversary while I was there.
The point of accountability is to deter harmful activity by ensuring actions/decisions somewhere result in consequences for who are responsible for them. Those consequences can be good or bad, though it is often used to refer to bad.

An algorithm has no concept of consequences (unless programmed to be aware of such), and the more plausibly whoever wrote it can deny knowledge of the resulting consequences, also the more whoever wrote it can avoid consequences/accountability themselves. After all, we can tell Soldiers or Clerks that ‘just following orders’ is no excuse. But computers don’t do anything but follow orders.

Most people/organizations/etc have strong incentives to be able to avoid negative consequences, regardless of their actions or the results of their actions.

Everyone around them has strong incentives to ensure negative consequences for actions with foreseeable negative outcomes are applied to them.

Sometimes, organizations and people will find a way for the consequences of their actions to be borne by other people that have no actual control or ability to change actions being performed (scapegoat). Accountability ideally should not refer to that situation, but sometimes is abused to mean that.

That tends to result in particularly nasty outcomes.