skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's been quite some time but New Relic is a popular observability tool whose primary goal (at least the original primary goal I'd say) is being able to tie together lots of distributed systems to make it easier to do request tracing and root cause analysis. I was a big fan of New Relic when I last used it, but if memory serves me correctly it was quite expensive.
How relevant is that though? If eg lightning can do the same thing isnt it only a matter of time? Genuine question, im new to west coast and lightly thinking about it, arent our options ultimately either regular burns, cutting trees down, or a mix? I see the insane amounts of underbrush and it seems impossible to clear it all regularly in a cost effective way, to avoid then need to burn. But IDK, very curious.
That's bullshit.
"Security" is not a binary switch. NAT is a useful tool in your security toolbox when you want a more nuanced take than either "ban all ports" or "let every port flap open on the internets, #yolo".
The tools typescript provides are a little pointless if it allows you to do stuff like this (imo):

const r1: { a: number; b: number } = { a: 10, b: 20 };

const r2: { a: number } = r1;

const r3: { a: number; b: string } = { b: "hello", ...r2 };

console.log(r3.b) // typescript thinks it's a string, but actually it's a number
Show HN: HN comment previews with Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B
I was inspired by the notification summaries on iOS 18 and really liked the idea of AI giving you a quick preview of the content before going to the content. I applied that to HN and built a Chrome extension that summarizes the sentiment and content of HN comments and previews it right next to the stories on the homepage. Makes it so much easier to decide whether I want to delve into the HN comments of a story.

It gave me a chance to play with Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B which has been great. Super fast, super cheap, huge context and does a great john on basic tasks like summarizing comment threads.

Get it here: https://github.com/StreakYC/hn-summarizer/

You’ll also need a Gemini API key from: https://aistudio.google.com/ to make the extension work.
Yann LeCun:India Must Embrace Open Source,Invest in Research to Become an AI Hub [video]
All these things were gonna happen anyway. Or if not these things then China would aim to dominate in some other field. You think the capital allocated to these projects would otherwise sit idle?

I don’t see any problems here

1. After China made a turn toward authoritarianism with Xi, decoupling - especially on the telecom side - is a hard requirement. They are objectively a huge national security risk.
2. Competition is healthy. I don’t see any problems with having another space race or another OS competing on the international arena.
3. I’m not too worried about China threatening USA in the long run anyway. USA still attracts the best talent from all over the world, many of which end up settling there long term. (I’m not American, so saying this as an outsider). You cannot become a citizen in China, and that’s unlikely to change in an ultra-nationalist authoritarian leadership. There’s so many factors (ultra-nationalism, changing demographics, less foreign investments, capital flight, overhead of doing everything themselves) that is slowly eroding Chinas economy.
Menthol and T Cell Depletion: Cognitive Benefits in Alzheimer's
Svbtle, a blog hosting service, follows this business model as well: https://svbtle.com/promise

I've let my card lapse on it for a few months and they never deleted anything (I just hadn't been posting either).
Challenges in Building a Real-Time Feature Engineering System
I'm reminded of how our understanding of human object recognition was affected by computer vision research.

For decades we knew that there were neurons with simple receptive fields in V1/V2 that extracted low-level visual features, and that those neurons passed information along the ventral visual stream, and by the end of that processing stream we had neurons in IT that represented different objects.

However, we couldn't really comprehend what sort of algorithm/process was capable of this seemingly magical inference. Coming up with an object representation that was invariant to out of plane rotation was seen as impossibly complex.

But then computer vision came along and showed us that with a relatively simple neuralnet and enough training data... it just kind of works.

Same thing is happening with LLMs right now -- a seemingly impossible, mysterious human capability (e.g., "understanding") isn't as complex as we think. Throw enough data into a network that does pattern matching/autocomplete and human-like intelligence pops out.
On the contrary, when it does snow in London it's a nightmare, and so I quite like our 5C brown/grey winters.
>it seems some people are really put off by this type of approach

As someone who has had to interact with legacy enterprise systems via RPA (screen scraping and keystroke recording) it is absolutely awful, incredibly brittle, and unmaintainable once you get past a certain level of complexity. Even when it works, performance at scale is terrible.
A group of coworker friends and I used to find the most creative ways to mess with each others' computers if they were left unattended. Some of the ones I can remember off the top of my head:

1. A Chrome extension that slowly rotated every <div> on the page (think 1 degree every 10 minutes). Would be hard to notice unless a page had been left open for a while.
2. Another Chrome extension that would redirect to a full-screen gif of John Cena that would only load after a random number of page loads.
3. A horn sound that would play after every successful git commit, regardless of computer volume.
4. A Slack bot that would scrape another coworker's insufferable Reddit comments, store them in a database, and then use ML to interject the comments into our conversations based on some basic NLP. This one was my favorite.
This is how I got MSI to honour their warranty in spite of their stance that any failure at all is due to user error, since their products don't fail
Congrats! How has Anthropic's latest release supporting computer use affected your planning/thinking around this?

PS:If you had this for desktop we'd immediately become a customer.
I agree.

There's surely however more to uncover for Physics.
Yeah, same,.. Real time game server written in PHP is really interessting. I also know PHP from the old days and now only from certain CMS systems, but not realtime projects. Im amazed! Nice! :)))
My friend an I were struggling to orient a couch correctly during a move. We were struggling to fit it through a door. So we wrote an app called "Will it fit"

You took a picture of the piece of furniture side on. Then you could tap to draw a polygon over the image. The app would then rotate the polygon to find the orientation with the minimum width.
Hello, isn’t part of what you were trying to achieve already taken care of if you use ‘volatile’ or a memory barrier? When writing Linux drivers these patterns are common. In some more exotic cases, even instruction barriers can be used to limit what the out of order or speculative execution is going to be
Guix fixes that in the spot.
Part of the motivation for Musk's rebranding of the Great Banality Laser as X is that he wants to turn it into a sort of super-app with payments, shopping, etc.

That and he just has a kooky fascination with the letter X.
The conversation involving "most modern BF implementations" is always a great one.
> If my company town sucks and I’m talented, I can find a better company town.

What's stopping the company from hiring a private police force to prevent you from leaving?

> For instance, if Im American living abroad, I still am required to file my taxes to the American state, even if my life and employment has nothing to do with my place of birth.

I think you are looking at current systems as they exist and claiming that these are inherent properties of states/corporations. There is a broad spectrum of corporation. You could have a company that is a dual partnership between owners, or a corporation in a social democracy that is compelled to "behave well" by a strong liberal government. On the opposite extreme, you could also have the Dutch East India company which was basically a colonial administration with as much power as a state. The subjects of the VOC were equally as oppressed (if not more) as someone living under totalitarian state control.

There is no inherent benefit that corporate control has over state control. I think the metric to look at is how democratic the implementation of a system is. Sure corporate control of your life might have less friction in its current iteration, but what if they gain more control?

> Is this a system like in ancient Athens, where regular folk were basically selected at random to serve in govt for a rotation? I like it! But, I don’t understand how this system precludes private property.

I was thinking more along the lines of Russia after the abdication of the Tsar, prior to Boleshevik takeover. Worker's councils (soviets) controlled their factory, and a council of soviets controlled each region. The Supreme Soviet was basically a top-level council. There is no private property because the "means of production" was controlled democratically by a council of workers.

I'm not saying this was a good system of governance (it collapsed almost immediately when faced with a centralized force), but I am just giving a counter-example to the statement that "the state is meant to move public funds into private control". That statement needs some qualifiers since there are many different examples of states.

I think that a more universal description would be "the state controls the distribution of wealth (or power)". This can either be the distribution of wealth from many to few, or few to many.
>You can see that happening a lot when somebody talks and then stops (searching for a word) and another person helpfully suggests the word they're searching for. If our way of talking was completely different - no next word prediction, another person shouldn't even be able to do that.

If it was purely word prediction, another person would be able to predict with 100% reliability the next word, as long as they had the same facts. The predictability is not because humans just construct sentences with no thought behind it, it's because natural language is highly redundant. A data compressor specialized in English would be able to do the same thing. Before LLMs existed there were Markov chains, and no one would argue that they had reasoning capabilities. Yet if the algorithm was stopped at "in" there was a good chance the next word would be "the", or "a", but not "in".

There's also the fact that the very purpose of language is to transmit ideas. If the next person can fill in a missing word, it's because the idea is being properly conveyed, or is not very novel. If you guess "cat" and the person says "Jupiter" instead, there's clearly miscommunication or it's something very wild.
> noice. i’m working on a similar cli tool for the octatrack.

Is this public yet or dare I ask you to invite me to the repository anyways?

There was a software for Octatrack that stopped being for sale while the author finished up their 2.0 version, but afaik, it still hasn't released (so I've been unable to get it), would be wonderful with an alternative for prepping Octatrack projects.
Small discussion including from author (9 points, 13 days ago, 12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41801018

Related in 2020 Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages (192 points, 159 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24642134
Yea it should cost more to break the contract than to honor it.
They should be underlined.
> Accepting that the notion of "superior" has to be culturally defined (it is a value judgement), it follows that cultures will always observe other cultures as inferior or superior based on their own definitions.

I think that's true. So when I say that Denmark is a better culture than Afghanistan, yes, I am making that judgment through the lens of western values. But as someone with four daughters, I simply cannot bend my mind far enough to consider Afghanistan's culture (or, perhaps, the Taliban's culture) as superior. (Though I admit that I might be able to if I were in the Taliban.)

But what I was aiming at was mostly the idea that it is morally superior to consider all cultures as having equal value. That position contradicts itself, even if the "morally superior" part is left unstated.

I will give you that all cultures have elements that are worthwhile.
> When we ask an LLM a question, something fascinating happens. It scours through its vast training data [...]

At inference time the model has no direct access to its training data (excluding RAG). Could still argue that the model's weights effectively encode probabilities to a similar end effect as if it were doing this, just that I'd be wary of taking it too literally.

> the most probable sentence [...] it's essentially about frequency - how many times something appears in the training data.

I think this frequency view becomes a bit nebulous when the LLM is generating continuations of text that has never occured before (which will be most cases, if including a system prompt).

Even for text that has occured in its training data, there's no guarentee that a model which has seen "My name is Xavier and I play the tambourine" would complete "My name is Xavier and I play the" in the same way. It may well choose "xylophone", despite it never occuring in that sentence, due to associating xylophone with instruments in its semantic space and having alliteration with Xavier.

At the very least, the "most probable" has to be worked out with respect to a large number of non-trivial rules, not just how frequently the phrase appears in training data.
The headline and the byline are vague but the article has 19 occurrences of Hoback. I read the article and had no confusion about this. I find it disingenuous to say they want to evade accountability by omitting it from the headline.
This, in a marketplace where words like "purchase" and "unlimited"[1] don't mean what you think they do. "Lifetime" surely can't mean that either.

The FTC has been growing some teeth again, and needs to stay vigilant.

1. https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/01/are-you-for...
Thunderf00t made a great 2 part video series about Spin launch on YouTube, and how their science doesn't make sense. Busted!!
Didn't realize LeCun had crossed over into political analyst. Meta sure does give people imagined affordances.
If you usage is mostly spreadsheets and web apps the 5 year old i7 will be perfectly fine.

I'm currently on a Quad Core Q9650 desktop from only God knows how many years ago, and it works perfectly fine after upgrading to 16Gb RAM and an NVME SSD, with the latter being what a 5 year old i7 may be equipped with.

On a laptop battery life is your main concern and it is something you have to look into.

Some newer peripherals may be a bit of a problem, but if you are mostly on the go you'll be fine.
> The controversy is on whether or not LLMs think.

It's impossible to answer that question, because we don't really know what "thinking" is and can't define it precisely.
We use PropelAuth, which doesn't get enough mentions in these types of comparisons.

I recently did a quick re-check of the landscape, and for our purposes, Propel still is the only provider that works. I was surprised to find that support for Machine-to-Machine API auth (ie., standard OAuth) isn't well supported.

Likewise, OIDC support is patchy amongst the other providers. I reached out to Clerk support, and for both these use cases, they weren't supported.

Propel is great.
Expanding Your Knowledge with a "Stuff I Didn't Know I Don't Know" List
The warranty is for the lifetime of the product. If it breaks, obviously its lifetime has ended so the warranty is no longer in effect...
Creative? I don't know about that, but here's something mildly interesting I did:

I came across the St. Petersburg Paradox[1] recently. The gist of this is that there's a coin-flipping game where if you go by the mathematical laws of probability, the expected payout is infinite. Meaning, you should play the game if offered the chance to play it for any finite amount of money. And yet most people will instinctively look at this and say "I wouldn't buy in to this game for more than $SOME_SMALL_AMOUNT".

To help myself understand the dichotomy, I wrote a simulation of the game in Java, and ran through 1 million rounds of playing the game, randomizing the coin flips, determining the payout, and then calculating the average.

What I found was that I wouldn't buy into this game for more than a few dollars. Because the infinite payout can only happen with infinite coin tosses as far as I can see, which would require infinite time, making that outcome irrelevant in the real world. And in a million game experiment, the average payout was usually around $20, with that outcome being highly affected by outlier outcomes. The usual outcome of individual trials was generally around $2 to $4 or so.

Useful for anything? No, but it was something fun to play around with.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
chill, be nice
There's something off about this year's "fall vibes"
Segway was introduced in 2001 and went on sale in 2002. By 2010 it was very much on a downslope.
And people I know in the uk, at least those working for large US companies, also have private insurance in addition to NHS.

Probably not a bad idea to get travel insurance if vacationing in the US. The other way around you may want some sort of additional insurance if traveling from the US to Europe.
"What is Staff-plus engineer at Back Market?" – interviews with staff+ engineers
Put some sort of grammatically-incorrect text on each page, so it fucks with the weights of whatever they are training.

Alternatively, sell text space to advertisers as LLM SEO
Today there are so many other solutions: Stytch, Descope, PropelAuth (For B2B companies), and others.

VCs went a bit ham on this category when Auth0 got bought. I sense that the general thought process was: Auth0 multi-billion dollar company -> Auth0 will become crappy under Okta > replace Auth0 and build a bit company.
Those areas would be burning exactly the same as before, starting in 20 places at 4 AM in the most windy night of the year. The criminals just would bring a can of gasoline.
a very clear analysis, that's also very well written
> I am still fascinated that Airbus is relatively well run and successful company, even though it's EU based, cross-border, with all the overregulation, bureaucracy and obstacles that come with that.

If it doesn't add up, maybe it's the other side of the equation that's the problem: Maybe the flaw or surprise in the equation is not Airbus but the other side - the beliefs about "EU based, cross-border, with all the overregulation, bureaucracy and obstacles" - maybe those aren't what you thought and don't have the impact you thought.

If the evidence doesn't match the theory, it's time to re-examine the theory.

I say that because those beliefs about the EU are a dogma of American big business and its fellow travelers, which prefers the US where they have so much power (and so little regulation or tax) rather than the more democratic power in EU.
- "I was going to say it isn't an apples to apples comparison but I will restrain myself"

That's the ignoble rhetorical device of applephasis
The first PowerPC chip was introduced in 1992! Itanium was in 2001, wasn't a from-scratch design and was famously a disaster!

Not really comparable.
They promised to keep the files hosted forever with live URLs so people could see them. I agree; it is a bizarre business model. I recall they had a limit on how much you could upload each month, so I guess they calculated how monthly fees would cover the lifetime storage.
Maybe it's not the exact same thing, but I got suckered into a similar thing for a "lifetime" NordVPN subscription for $120 or something, only to get re-billed 2 years later. I like the service so I kept it, but it really rankled me. Seems like you shouldn't be able to do things like this so easily - companies, especially telecoms, have gone full "fuck you" mode the last 10 years to their customers and this is a prime example.
EmergentMind: AI research assistant to Discover and Learn about papers
When they applied Heisenberg principle to vacuum to bring up zero point energy, Casimir force was found, etc., I understood thtis as the principle opposing nothingness.
immigration solves the birth rate problem, and is one of the big reasons why illegal immigrants is a hilariously terrible wag-the-dog wedge issue. make them legal, tax them, and have them contribute to the system as well.
"The optimize attribute should be used for debugging purposes only. It is not suitable in production code."

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-14.2.0/gcc/Common-Functio...
Wow, nice. Did they show up? Did they settle?
Clickbaity title but it's actually a neat educational video about the deep biosphere that mentions such creatures as desulforudis audaxviator and altiarchaeum hamiconexum.
When was that? If you remember, I'd love to see who predicted what.
I live in a city where the bicycle paths on walkways are so bad that this distinction is hardly there — I certainly know I would take a well sized lane over a narrow, indistinguishable from the walkway with missing bricks and tree roots every day of the week, especially in pedestrian-heavy areas.

But that balance heavily depends on the city, how well behaved motorists are there, how crossings are implemented how many pedestrians are there and (in my case) which material was chosen for the non-street bicycle paths. In my city they used slightly darker bricks and no bicycle symbols — that is basically indistinguishable from the rest of the walkway for pedestrians and after a few years those bricks have the tendency to present you with a bone-shaking surface.

Safety is important and you are correct that painted on lanes kill more cyclists, but safety is not the only metric, comfort is also important or how uninterrupted you can ride, how stressful interaction with other people is, etc. And in a city with a ton of pedestrians and uncomfortable bicycle paths on walkways you need to be more on alert there than on the road.

TL;DR: Which one is better cannot be answered for every case without knowing the context.
20 years ago, I was in the web site business. My partner and I had a customer who had a weird insistence that this site "HAVE ZERO JAVASCRIPT!" He'd heard something from someone about how it was bad, or whatever, and so was insisting we use NONE.

This made handling the forms way harder, obviously. In-page scripting to (e.g.) preserve form input properly on a failed submit, or to dynamically handle a date picker, was and remains pretty benign. So we set about creating a terrible example that would convince this guy to let us use best practices.

This meant I needed to write a perl script that created a no-javascript date picker. This date picker included an entry for every possible birthday for a user who might sign up, so it had every date from like 1/1/1930 through 12/31/1990 or whatever we figured was a reasonable boundary at the time.

We published the page and sent him a link, and in about 15 minutes we heard back. "Ok, I get it. Use scripting."

A potentially more horrifying example of programming chicanery came from the same era, when a reasonable solution to a given page problem was that I wrote Perl (using Mason) that wrote Javascript that wrote HTML.

I am not sorry.