skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are a lot of options in the protocol where it's not immediately clear what they do and why they are important

I totally disagree, your expectations for the protocol seems unusual. They are not frameworks, and need to game many options.

MQTT specification is like 3 pages.

For comparison try to read specification of HTTP3, or AMQP - those are hideously complicated.
Ancient hominin hands were a lot more like ours than we thought
Differences between React server components and server-side rendering
> So I can take it and use your name that is surely somewhere in the code and fill it with swastikas and hate speech and say that this represents your views?

That has nothing to do with the game being free. If you dedicate source code to public domain and someone slaps swastikas on it, it doesn't represent OP's views all of a sudden
I don’t understand why people praise Ramanuja so much. Why not this praise for Euler or Gauss?
Spend last two days to wrote this article, any feedback appreciated.
This is a world where Donald Trump, the man who calls his political opponent mentally disabled among other things is a serious front runner for the highest office in the nation. I have no idea how you can look at contemporary America and say people aren't allowed to say offensive things.
In 2015, when I was asked by friends if I'm worried about Self driving Cars and AI, I answered:
"I'll start worrying about AI when my Tesla starts listening to the radio because it's bored."
... that didn't take too long
I never said that. I said being against WFH is your own misery, because it's true.

Even if you LOVE the office, you should be encouraging WFH because it's better for you. Less traffic, less driving, higher quality of life for you to reach the office.

But you advocate things that directly harm you. That's pathetic, sorry there's just no other way to say it. It's not a virtue to be self-destructive, it's just kind of sad.

Also business owners do not care if you bend over for them. They're fucking you and leaving before you get up in the morning - talking real sweet to them won't make them like you. Again, you just look pitiful and nobody really cares and nobody is clapping.
This is a neat style, and I was pleased to see that the author included accessible text since the visible text on the page is all in images.
Good question. But even if it works I'm not sure if I want more bites or more hemorrhoids :D
Back in my day we just looked at the ctime of /dev/mouse
Or back in reality, that’s when you know the training data has been sourced from 2024 or later.
Linux removed 11 maintainers from Russia
Lovely excerpt that gives a good general overview of Mad history and highlights!

I was an avid reader as a child in the late 60s to early 70s. I eventually moved on to National Lampoon as a teen, but Mad will always glow in my childhood memory heart.

I still have a decent-sized collection of Mad paperbacks. Many (most, all?) were written by a single Mad artist/writer. My favorites of these were ones written by Don Martin and Al Jaffee.
> This I agree with. Callbacks cause a lot of weird side effects that makes code really hard to debug.

Also Django signals, Symfony events... makes things extensible but also hard to debug indeed.
not to even mention cost of living, which can be an enormous difference
One headache I've had with internal LE certs is bots abusing the CT logs to attempt probing internal names. As a result, I started requesting wildcard certs from LE. Somehow that feels less secure, because even though I'd probably recognize abuse of the cert - friends and family wouldn't. It's the same reason I don't want less technically adept friends and family having to deal with my own CA. Install one arbitrary cert ... what's the problem with this random, sketch one I downloaded?
Seems the article hasn't been updated to indicate his role as head of the Yuzu and Citra projects (recently DMCA'd by Nintendo).
some smart people find office collaboration more dynamic and effective
"if it can't be a unicorn why even live?"
> JS of the era was a pain to use

Was it really?

Outside of arrow functions, I don't really think CoffeeScript had a single important idea. And even then, the aversion to the `function` keyword in the JavaScript community never fails to make me laugh. Sure, sometimes the implicit scoping of the arrow function is nice, but man.
> massive influx of personal anecdotes

a.k.a. sampling from the distribution of interest. Once you have enough anecdotes, you actually have a representative distribution of the real thing. Selection may be biased but you can weight those data points as you like, it's still good data.
For example, when Amazon looked to build HQ2, they were entertaining packages from municipalities, many of whom gave tax breaks for building HQ2 there.

TSMC and Intel also shopped around the country for new fabs, a combination of geological stability, water resources, support by municipal and state governments. Offering tax incentives were a part of that package, with the expectation of increasing job opportunities.

The tax breaks are not for the land, but for operating there. These often involve contracts with milestones.
aaah I love me some AJAM ;)
What's the Zag gonna be?
Some bigger companies actually own very extensive office properties as part of their asset portfolios.
I have no idea how you could possibly have picked up the notion that Euler and Gauss are not praised enough. They are literally the top two names when you google "greatest mathematicians all time"

https://i.imgur.com/AzL6hVQ.png
XnView is good & multi platform. :)

https://www.xnview.com/en/
Determinate Nix
Of course it's not acceptable, but it's advantageous to us. That's why the republicans and democrats will never do away with it.

You're getting labor for a cost well under minimum wage. It's a sweet deal if you ignore humanitarian concerns, which our politicians do. The right doesn't actually want to end immigration, they just want to put in minimal effort to virtue signal to their voter base.

There are extremely simple and effective ways to end immigration. You will find exactly 0 republicans who advocate any of them. It's all talk on a stage to appeal to latent American racism.
It's your comment in the context of the FTC. You said it was fake, in the context of the FTC. Why are you debating yourself?
That's not quite right. By numerical precision they mean numerical precision, of which quantization is one method to arrive at reduced precision. They also perform experiments where they train from scratch for float32 and float16.

Reasoning, they should have replaced with: iterative computations with accumulating state. This paper, on the impact of quantization, is actually a lot more significant than it appears at first and I think the authors could have done a better job of discussing the broader implications.

The paper's core (and unsurprising) argument is that low-precision arithmetic significantly limits the representational capacity of individual neurons. This forces the model to encode numerical values across multiple neurons to avoid overflow, particularly when storing intermediate computational results. This distributed representation, in turn, increases complexity and makes the model vulnerable to accumulating errors, particularly during iterative operations. It's unclear from my initial reading whether low-precision training (quantization-aware training) is necessary for the model to effectively learn and utilize these distributed representations, or if this capacity is inherent. Regardless, while QAT likely offers benefits, especially with larger numbers, the fundamental limitations of low precision computation persist.

Why not just use a calculator? For some of the same reason humans shouldn't be completely dependent on calculators. It's not just the ability to perform fermi estimates that's constrained but internal computations that require physical "intuition" or modeling the trajectories of physical systems, the ability to work with growing algebraic representations, relative numeric comparisons of large magnitudes (where the model does not internally switch to a favorable format--notice this is easier to do in-context), and representing iterative computation on complex logical chains and hierarchical structures.

Why do we not see this in practice? I contend that we do. There is a small but quite vocal contingent in every LLM forum who insist that quantization, even 8-bits, results in severe degradation in quality despite what most benchmarks say. It's quite likely that common tasks and most tests do not require iterative computations where accumulating state representations must be accurately tracked and these individuals are encountering some of the exceptions.
And the primary role of Google "customer support" is to act as a firewall, not to help people.
Glad you've moved on from such a loathsome company.
From the paper's method section, a bit more about which type of ML algo was used:

An RF machine-learning model was developed to predict lithium concentrations in Smackover Formation brines throughout southern Arkansas. The model was developed by (i) assigning explanatory variables to brine samples collected at wells, (ii) tuning the RF model to make predictions at wells and assess model performance, (iii) mapping spatially continuous predictions of lithium concentrations across the Reynolds oolite unit of the Smackover Formation in southern Arkansas, and (iv) inspecting the model for explanatory variable importance and influence. Initial model tuning used the tidymodels framework (52) in R (53) to test XGBoost, K-nearest neighbors, and RF algorithms; RF models consistently had higher accuracy and lower bias, so they were used to train the final model and predict lithium.

Explanatory variables used to tune the RF model included geologic, geochemical, and temperature information for Jurassic and Cretaceous units. The geologic framework of the model domain is expected to influence brine chemistry both spatially and with depth. Explanatory variables used to train the RF model must be mapped across the model domain to create spatially continuous predictions of lithium. Thus, spatially continuous subsurface geologic information is key, although these digital resources are often difficult to acquire.

Interesting to me that RF performed better the XGBoost, would have expected at least a similar outcome if tuned correctly.
Yes, many people are asking for offices to be completely abolished, turned into housing, or other things. Also, working is about compromises, we had some full remote, but we did ask most people to come in 1-2 days a week to work with their coworkers who wanted to have an in person meeting. We never had an issue with it, most people came in because their coworkers wanted them to, maybe 1-2 were hardcore at home forever types like you seem to be. But that was the extreme minority.

But no, I don't think I'm grossly mischaracterizing anything. Even replies to my post are literal personal attacks against the OP for not wanting to stay at home, or actually making fun of the reasons people want to go into an office. It's truly toxic behaviour.
I’m not seeing people working with their own AirPods in. I would not think very highly of such an employee.
Every speck of light that doesn't have the 'flare' of a nearby star is not a star, but another galaxy. Sure, the one particularly detailed galaxy they zoomed in on looks cool. But the way they present this is missing the forest for the trees.
Haha I mean you could also argue Netflix is underpriced?
I wrote up some of my own notes on Computer Use here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/22/computer-use/
Thanks for the explanation.

Can you imagine feeling fine with more frequent WFH yourself, if something about the culture changed?

For example, could you otherwise get the vibe that people were engaged and wanted to be working together, even when it was on intermittent chat and videoconf?

(And if there were occasional in-person meetups, if only for more personalizing or focusing?)
Commercial real estate has been teetering on trigging the next Black Swan event for the past couple years. No one wants to be holding title to buildings that are vacant and not generating rent.
CFPB Finalizes Personal Financial Data Rights Rule
It would be much more interesting (and challenging) a platform to automatic trend recognition through news, while it could only be valid if personal, due to obvious bias any owner can introduce...
say more? (main author here)
It's an illusion. This is just inference running.
The problem with written language is that there's an inherent level of ambiguity. Now, this is fine for stuff read by humans, as we're pretty good at resolving that ambiguity using context and our own personal experience. Computers, however, are not good at ambiguity. They require explicitly defined syntax, as they just can't handle the ambiguous nature of natural language (at least, not without a shitload of processing power for a LLM)

Now, there's no reason we can't have an explicitly defined syntax that reads like normal written language. That's what SQL tries to do, after all. However, explicitly defined "natural" language has the tendency to get very unnatural very quickly. Human language is fluid and evolving in a way that a programming language just can't be. And no amount of emulating written language can eliminate the need to learn a programming language's syntax.
This is basically why I went with serif for body text in our branding. The particularly "soulless" parts of tech are all sans-serif.

Of course, that's just branding and it doesn't actually mean a damn thing.
Thanks for this, just the sort of primer I was looking for.

(I was wondering why the name seemed familiar, then realized... they also are the person who put together a bunch of password lists[1] that are incredibly useful.)

[1] https://github.com/danielmiessler/SecLists/
Claude has personality. I think that was one of the more interesting approaches from them that went into my own research as well.
HN archive has many recommendations

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

There's also tools like 'Show HN: All books recommended on Ask HN' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41881788 and 'Show HN: I mapped HN's favorite books with GPT-4o' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41473518
But when "hate speech" becomes censorable and a crime, then people are incentivized to interpret as broadly as possible their opponents' statements and claim they should be interpreted as dehumanizing or encouraging violence.

This can be done from both sides. Examples:

Not sufficiently (for whoever) enforcing immigration laws? "Trying to eliminate the majority population, gradual ethnic cleansing".

Talking about deporting illegal immigrants? "The first step on the road to murdering people they don't want in the country."

And if the local judiciary or law enforcement is aligned with the interests of one side or the other, they can stretch the anti hate speech laws to use the legal system against their opponents.
What will impact on engineering productivity be?
Marc Andreessen says AI model makers are in 'a race to the bottom'
The result for Qwen2.5-32B (49.49) is using CoT prompting. Only Steiner models do not use CoT prompting.

More importantly, I highly recommend to try these out firsthand (not only Steiner, but all reasoning models). You'll find that these reasoning models can solve many problems that other models with the same parameter size cannot handle. The existing benchmarks may not reflect this well, as I mentioned in the article:

"... automated evaluation benchmarks, which are primarily composed of multiple-choice questions and may not fully reflect the capabilities of reasoning models. During the training phase, reasoning models are encouraged to engage in open-ended exploration of problems, whereas multiple-choice questions operate under the premise that "the correct answer must be among the options." This makes it evident that verifying options one by one is a more efficient approach. In fact, existing large language models have, consciously or unconsciously, mastered this technique, regardless of whether special prompts are used. Ultimately, it is this misalignment between automated evaluation and genuine reasoning requirements that makes me believe it is essential to open-source the model for real human evaluation and feedback."
Seconding this, their XnView MP version works on various platforms, too: https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/

I especially like the batch operations, for when I want to do stuff with format conversions, resizing, EXIF data and other things. Really pleasant software.

I used IrfanView before then, it was honestly great for Windows. It was mentioned in the parent comment, here's their page, too: https://www.irfanview.com/

But my use cases have been regular image operations, never really the fancy AI stuff, no idea what the software landscape there is like (have to mention, given the topic).
I have to ask. Why would you say this?
European Patent Attorney here. AMA
IMO the only reason to not use ClickHouse is when you either have "small" amount of data or "small" servers (<100 Gb of data, servers with <64 Gb of RAM). Otherwise ClickHouse is a better solution since it's a standalone DB that supports replication and in general has very very robust cluster support, easily scaling to hundreds of nodes.

Typically when you discover the need for OLAP DB is when you reach that scale, so I'm personally not sure what the real use case for DuckDB is to be completely honest.
The only informational dividable from the statement is "we used a computer to analyze data".
There is something cult like, mystic, almost magical about Ramanujan that almost transcends the raw intellectual horsepower (which he certainly had).
> Evidently questioning the validity of dog whistle is a dog whistle itself.

I don't see anyone saying that.
Seems like the greater story is landlords taxing the economy to death.
> no excuse to allow illiterates and incompetents to determine the course of our civilization

Just a random question: what are your thoughts on eugenics?
I noticed some timeouts today. Could be capacity limits from the announcement
I found the “Computer Use” product name funny. Many other companies would’ve used the opportunity to come up with something like “Human Facing Interface Navigation and Task Automation Capabilities” or “HFINTAC”.

I didn’t know what Computer Use meant. I read the article and though to myself oh, it’s using a computer. Makes sense.
Mythbusters did an episode on this.
In this case it's Fracking
These are very relevant questions! Thank you!

We're storing IDs from a ghost column that is created in the table where you're inserting vector data. This works very well in practice and allows updating the value of the vectors in the table, because they're translated into a delete + insert in the vector index by updating the ghost ID.

We have abstracted away the quantization system from the index; for the initial release, vector data is stored in raw blocks, like in the paper. Query performance is good, but disk usage is high. We're actively testing different quantization algorithms to see which ones we end up offering on GA. We're hoping our beta users will help us guide this choice!

Incremental updates and MVCC are _extremely tricky_, for both correctness and performance. As you've surely noticed, the hard thing here is that the original paper is very focused on LSM trees, because it exploits the fact that LSM trees get compacted lazily to perform incremental updates to the posting lists ('merges'). MySQL (and Postgres, and all relational databases, really) are B-tree based, and in-place updates for B-trees are expensive! I think we came up with very interesting workarounds for the problem, but it's a quite a bit to drill down in a HN comment. Please stay tuned for our whitepaper. :)
You aint never been to Arkansas have ya? Its a meth joke.
It does and the paper mentions some papers that investigate similar strategies in its appendix, but the fundamental precision issues do not go away.
A very big attack surface for a simple sub-marine op...
A friend has one and two things: the frunk is awesome, and two BlueCruise is great. The frunk means there's a huge storage area for all the tools that used to be in the bed tool boxes or in the cab that no longer need to be there, freeing up a bunch of space of passengers and materials.

BlueCruise doesn't cover all freeways, but is such a game changer for commuting. It's not full self driving or Waymo but it's solid where it needs to be for a freeway heavy commute. Also it can now charge on the Tesla Supercharger network so charging is fine, esp on top of a home charger.

One problem I'll mention is it's got an electrically limited top speed, so while it accelerates great, it tops out low.
But chatgpt still logs into claude… this is like double spending across blockchains
ML is one particular field in the overall area of AI.
Interesting. My experience with maths education is pretty much limited to watching Numberphile and other YT videos these days, but Euler and Gauss get plenty of praise.
I think people are different that way. When I visit a city on my own, I tend to just wander around and find a nice spot or meet some interesting people and do whatever flows from that. Whereas when I am with certain friends or family, there is always a schedule and a destination.
Human pre-history was also mainly carbohydrates. The idea that humans lived off of primarily meat is fantasy - we eat more meat now than we ever have. Prehistorically, humans ate primarily gathered foods - nuts, fruits, and vegetation. I believe it's something like the average prehistoric human ate 100 grams of fiber a day. As opposed to the US ~ 2 grams of fiber a day, caused by our diets high in meats, saturated fats, and ultra-processed foods.
Fly.io Outage
We're noticing our development instances (which run on Fly.io) have been down for over an hour.
Users need more ability to intelligently contribute. I just hit this yesterday. 2-star review that was actually entirely about the third party that shipped expired stock, not about the product itself. All I could do is flag the review as "other", no text. (As it was the only review I also reported it under the something wrong with the product which does allow text.) And specifically give us "wrong version", "wrong product" and "seller, not product" flags. And don't reject my review that clearly called out that this isn't the real thing. I didn't simply get a counterfeit, the whole listing was counterfeit.

Abuse problems? Give more weight to squawks by people with a lot of purchases and not a lot of what are found to be bogus gripes.
That may be so, but the denigrate (and common case as this thread suggests) is to expand the notion to any offensive speech that is disliked by the offended person. That is much more subjective and hard to define. The fact that we have some (better) definitions doesn't really help. The desire to censure speech is widespread, for different reasons, many conflicting. And the fact that there might be a rough academic consensus on where to draw lines (at least theoretically if not practically) isn't good enough in practice to actually define clear rules.
This is like looking at the kids who collect Pokemon cards out of the sheer love of the Pokemon and playing the game compared to the scalpers and “investors” / “speculators”. Yes they may end up with a lot of money but they will always lack that sweetness, purity, and wholesome joy that you see when a kid finds and enjoys something.