skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did, and I feel like only long and cold headed analysis brought me out of it. It's easier to believe that alarmism is warranted than to think it isn't.

The entire public sphere is freaking out about everything all the time, and catching sound bites, taking things out of context, lacking empathy for opposing viewpoints and clearheadedness. Alarmism these days is the default state. WaPo is participating in this hysteria campaign. Letting the hysteria come into your brain unchecked is not good, but that's the default situation for most people and it leads to alarmism.

I think things are much more boring than people make them out to be, and that it's much harder to keep this perspective. You can't make good decisions when your brain is conditioned to believe in a reality and near-future that is much worse looking than what the actual current reality and near-future looks like.

All this to say, I used to give into this alarmism. Post-extrication from this disposition, I try to be more self-aware and reticent to give in. It starts by seeking more facts and primary sources, or consuming summarized content from entities that are incentivized to, and with a culture of, sticking to the facts.
This was a such a refreshing talk. She was monitoring the FM channel using a spectrum analyser (as one does, of course, haha) and got curious about this strange signal showing up next to the FM radio Channel.

The talk is about her attempts to learn about the Radio RDS (Radio Data System) standard, using a sound card to decode signals, finding a bit of bus-related information in that stream is weakly encrypted and proceeding to chasing it down. Very entertaining.

I'm so glad such people exist. I wish I could be one of these fearless and supremely knowledgeable people!
But we’re talking about professional programmers here, not amateurs role playing.
I mean the reality is that in the same way that 2 * 0 is ONE.

Or if I were using latex:

2 \times 0 = 1_{+}

Because multiplication, being repeated addition and exponentiation repeated multiplication both behave the same way. When asked to repeat the operation zero times, they return the unit or 1 of the underlying group, which is typically denoted as 1_{whatever}

However, the 1 of addition is 0 when using the standard notation for integers
You were probably working at a fairly advanced tech company. As were the people you were teaching.

If by "ML concepts" you mean "how to implement ML" - do you really think that people who got to a job that required learning this, represent the population IQ distribution?
I thought the same but I came to like how youtube handles shorts, I'm not sure if that's a bug on their side but I consider that a great feature. When doomscrolling it will show already watched short at like 20 or so intervals, so I can both doom scroll for quick dopamine dose and stop when I realize I already watched this short so the brain handles separation more easily.
>Sometimes I spend more time on the test code than the actual code (probably normal).

This seems like the kind of thing that should be highly dependent on the kind of project one is doing, if you have an MVP and your test code is taking longer than the actual code then it is clear the test code is antagonistic to the whole concept of an MVP.
Trump couldn't do anything because he was being held at a deep state black site. The person you saw in the Oval Office was a body double hired off the dark web, who was deliberately making bad decisions to ruin Trump's good reputation and steal the election, probably.
The fediverse strategy of offering copycats of centralized adtech social media - but without the surveillance and ads - has not worked in the past.

Who knows, the launch of Loops might break that pattern, but it would be a more enduring victory to build attractive products that are 1) new and 2) not replicable in centralized form.
Will try, just not sure how my comment is at issue when this posting is specifically political content.
Can it vote?
The main issue is not a binary file that never changes. It’s the small binary file that changes often.
Shrank
> The fundamental flaw people make is assuming that LLMs (i.e. a single inference) are a lone solution when in-fact they're just part of a larger solution.

A solution to what problem?
If you're interested in figuring out how to gain focus / concentration in life without having to get an adderall prescription, look into Samādhi.

small disclaimer: You probably can't choose to only gain focus / concentration if you embark on this path. Other stuff is going to come along with it, since technically speaking, you'll be unveiling the nature of consciousness in the process.
We need more of those
Making Bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions is a terrible example because you absolutely cannot just tackle that by yourself. Not because it's technically hard, but because it's actually a people problem in disguise!

If you just walk up to the mailing list with the complete designs, documents, experimental results, schematics, trade offs, feasibility studies, you know what you're going to get? People saying "whoa, hey, great work but let's talk about this. I see here you've made assumption X about implementation area Y and that actually conflicts with the direction that we had in mind for the upcoming release, so let's talk more. To start, we'd like to see if we can explore option Z, thoughts?"

That ain't fun. It's rewarding but it ain't fun. Not like sitting down and messing with Legos in your own house is fun, or building a silly factory in Factorio is fun.
It's not only about having a concept for absence though. Zero provides a way to express both the absence of grain and having some grain in a unified way, a number.
>They developed a new tool eficheck, released in High Sierra on 25 September 2017. Each week until it was dropped from Sonoma, eficheck checked current firmware against a local database of versions known to be ‘good’, and with the user’s permission sent a report to Apple in the event that it found discrepancies.

What stops me from writing a malicious firmware implant which tampers with the local database every time the computer boots, and inserts itself as "known good"?

I don't see how it's possible to monitor the firmware from the OS, if the OS already implicitly trusts the firmware...

Also: Does anyone know of good resources for learning about firmware security from the ground up? Seems like this article already assumes a certain level of background knowledge.
Reserve requirements are completely different from capital requirements. US banks are required to hold about $108 in assets for every $100 they hold in deposits, and their actual holdings are typically in the range of around $110 to $115 in assets per $100 of deposits. Central bank reserves are one type of asset that commercial banks can hold; a 0% reserve requirement just means that commercial banks can hold all of that ~$108 in other assets if they choose to.

In contrast, Tether has historically admitted to having as little as $100.20 in assets per $100 in liabilities [0], with a significant fraction of it in crypto and other assets that effectively wouldn't even count toward banks' capital requirements. It has probably dropped below $100 in assets per $100 in liabilities - i.e., been insolvent - at some point, and even taking its latest audit [1] at face value, it has far less capital than would be needed for a bank with the same asset profile in the US or other developed countries.

[0] https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/1np5dpcwuHrWJ4AgUg...

[1] https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/6h4YWqZOXbwtBaPtYg...
Are rotary mixers better?
Dividing things by zero is not impossible for some definition of impossible. In the sense that you can always make progress in pulling a group of zero from a group of something and increasing your counter, you can be very productive when dividing by zero.

This has to do with rings and the relationship between the two identities of the two underlying groups. It ultimately stems from the distributive property between multiplication and addition
Yeah, Nvidia's pocketing the revenue, but it seems we’re in an era where revenue and profit do not matter, money goes where the hype is...
I wasn't trying to draw attention to comparisons for equality. Perhaps I should've used an arrow => instead of == to indicate "the result of this operation", but that probably would've caused confusion too...

The real point is that you can get some non-intuitive answers from letting that numeric tower make conversion decisions for you. It's just a rule, and it's not an amazing rule.
Show HN: Zephyr: New [WIP] NN Jax Framework; Short, Simple, Declarative
Hello HN! I have an early work-in-progress Neural Network Framework written on top of JAX.

Simple | Declarative | No need to learn duplicated JAX transforms or specialized manipulation functions

How to build a NN?
1. Make `f(params, x, hyperparameters)`
2. Initialize the params `params = trace(f, key, x, *hyperparameters)`
3. Use the function `f` you made: `f(params, x, hyperparameters)`
4. Optionally: use partial to bake-in the hyperparams: `model = f(_,_, hypermeters)` ; `_` will be explained in the README. You can also use `partial`

Its key difference with other JAX frameworks is its simplicity and straightforwardness. With other frameworks, the network is transformed to an (init, apply) which are pure functions and you basically don't use the actual code you've written and instead use this. With zephyr, neural networks look like neural networks: a function of parameters, input-data, and hyperparameters. It's also patterned for FP use, so partial application will a useful alternative to states in OO.

Lastly, it's meant to be declarative and simple. Neural networks are just functions, not objects that need instantiation or anything. This means code are usually shorter as declaration and usage/computation happens in the same place since those things are highly coupled and so placing them together results in less cognitive load. (No more wondering what the MLP(x)'s output-dim-per-layer is, since it's all bundled together).

It's early stage and so the core nets are few and unpolished, but I want to focus on the core first before moving on to implementing all core nets. Feedback on any part of it is very welcome!
what? no, the recommendation algorithm, which is inherently privacy violating - this also applies to instagram reels, youtube shorts, etc
> GIFs can have arbitrary frame durations and it generally works fine.

But we shouldn't be using animated GIFs in 2024.

The valid replacement for the animated GIF is an animated lossless compressed WebP. File sizes are are much more controlled and there is no generational loss when it propagates the internets as viral loop (if we all settled on it and did not recompress it in a lossy format).
Nvidia overtakes Apple as most valuable company
>... everyone realised what a horrible society results from...

Has this ever happened?

The GenAI thing is here to stay we like it or not, the same way mainstream shitty AI recommendations are here to stay. That does not mean there won't be platforms/places where you can avoid them, but that won't be the general case.
HN comments on political content need to follow the site guidelines, just as on any other content.
I am not sure I have ever owned more than one desktop alarm clock, but I have used a few, and in my experience by the time a real power failure occurs the 9v backup batteries have drained to the point that it resets anyway.

I have also lived in a country where blackouts quite rare, usually just local blackouts due to a tree hitting a powerline, so in any given year I wouldn't expect one.
It would obviously vote Republican.
> Should elephants have the same rights as people?

Only if they pay taxes.
Jokes aside, there's no legal framework for this kind of stuff. "Full rights" means citizenship, passport, ability to travel, requirement to pay taxes etc etc. There's no other kinds of not-exactly-people-rights
When put side by side with the comment about meth at playgrounds (note: definitely illegal, though again, police in SF are generally fairly unresponsive), it is clear that your reach of a pedantic defense is not how the author intends readers to interpret this passage. The implication is that SF is a dystopian nightmare where some woke enforcement squad is coming to arrest you for putting your banana peels in the garbage while applauding the drug addicts threatening your children.

The whole thing is a hyperbolic rhetorical flourish intended to provoke a knee-jerk fear/anger response among an audience previously primed by right-wing media but entirely personally unfamiliar with San Franciso, not a careful discussion of the benefits and harms or even the ideological underpinnings of various local ordinances.

Leading with "culture war" nonsense likely to provoke pointless arguments like this one is why this article is a poor fit for HN which people would be better served by skipping.
Beyond AI Hallucinations: RAG's Recipe for Reliable Responses
Explore how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as hallucinations and outdated knowledge and how combining AI with real-time data retrieval enhances accuracy and reliability of context-aware AI.
Hey! Thank you so much for trying it out. We really appreciate it. Yes, currently the price is at $0.02/page. or 2 credits.

Regarding the the image tags, that's something the LLMs are making up as they go along. Something we need to fix. There are no actual links to images as the images will not be pulled out/provided.
Not at all.

I’ve hated puzzle games all my life. Most likely because they’re artificial.
Shrinky dinky
I think I prefer shrunked in this context.
Does Google Earth/Maps/StreetView not count as mapping? I was feeling certain that all that infrastructure and data was invested into Waymo. It would seem that Google had a huge advantage from running mapping/camera cars for years and years, before SDC were even a glimmer in their eyes.
upd: silly mistake - file name does not include its full path

The explanation probably got lost among all the gifs, but the last 16 chars here are different:

> was actually only checking the last 16 characters of a filename
> For example, if you changed repo/packages/foo/CHANGELOG.md, when git was getting ready to do the push, it was generating a diff against repo/packages/bar/CHANGELOG.md!
Meet Loata - Your second brain in the cloud.
Turn your scattered docs & notes into an AI-powered knowledge base and get answers to your questions. No more digging through files. get early access at http://loata.ai

#beta launch in JAN 2025 on #iOS & #Android
> we have folks in Europe that can't even clone the repo due to it's size.

What is it about Europe that makes it more difficult? That internet in Europe isn't as good? Actually, I have heard that some primary schools in Europe lack internet. My grandson's elementary school in rural California (population <10k) had internet as far back as 1998.
It's a really great platform! My favorite place to experiment
"Our" computers aren't actually ours. Are they?

What is "sandboxing" in the age of Microsoft Copilot+ AI, Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini already or coming soon to various phones and devices?

Assistant, Siri, Cortana were dumb enough not to be a threat. With the next breed, will we need to airgap our devices to be truly safe from external influences?
> For many reasons, that's just too big, we have folks in Europe that can't even clone the repo due to it's size.

What's up with folks in Europe that they can't clone a big repo, but others can?
Also it sounds like they still won't be able to clone, until the change is implemented on the server side?

> This meant we were in many occasions just pushing the entire file again and again, which could be 10s of MBs per file in some cases, and you can imagine in a repo

The sentence seems to be cut off.

Also, the gifs are incredibly distracting while trying to read the article, and they are there even in reader mode.
Wow.

Whether you pasted LLM content or your own, so much is wrong about what you said (in such a confident tone), including logical, English usage, and scientific / factual errors, that I do not want to argue more, except to leave you with this link to peruse, and another sentence or two below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41957679

That link was of a reply by me to another comment(er) in this same overall thread.

Make sure to see my own reply to my own comment, at the link below the link given, and in particular, the Wikipedia links given there, about the nutritional value of various food items discussed here.

Now, that sentence or two that I mentioned above:

Factual error: near the top of your comment, you say that wheat has about twice the protein of corn (maize).

Wheat actually has more than three times the protein of maize - as a ratio. It also has a lot of other nutritional value.

See the relevant Wikipedia articles that I linked.

And in an absolute sense, it makes even more of a difference, because maize is below 3.5 grams, and wheat is above 12.5 grams in protein. So wheat has 9 grams more protein per 100 grams, than corn / maize. That makes a hell of a lot of difference to poor people, or others, who cannot afford or do not want to eat meat, for religious, cultural, ethical or other reasons.

And there are an increasing number of people in the west or in "developed" countries who are becoming vegetarian for ethical or climate reasons.

The founder of Y Combinator, and of this site, Hacker News, Paul Graham, also became vegetarian some time ago.

When asked why, by someone, he replied, "I was grossed out by factory farming".

See his reply here, 17 years ago, via this search:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58051

"It wasn't a deliberate choice. I just got grossed out by factory farming."

Factual error, or almost: in your last paragraph, you say that corn is an excellent source of energy.

Much less than wheat:

Corn / maize: less than 17 grams carbs per 100 grams.

Wheat: more than 71 grams carbs per 100 grams.

Again, see the same relevant, linked, Wikipedia articles about maize and wheat for proof.

My calculator tells me that 71/17 is over 4x.

Fat content in both is so low as to not matter.

And carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram, while fats have 9 calories per gram.

So should we all just eat fats only, for energy?

Of course not. There is much more to nutrition than just energy or protein or fat or whatever.
> and condones people doing meth at playgrounds (also completely false

Only false in that it omits that fentanyl is also condoned, or that it's not just playgrounds, but all public places.
Attractive people in the office don't spontaneously take their clothes off and have sex while the uglies sit around watching.
Don't forget military service. Time to bring back War Elephants--they deal Trample damage!
Dividing by zero is impossible because it's not defined. Simple as that. Same as undefined behavior in any other language or system. It's like playing chess and saying "but what if I lay my pawn sideways and place it on top of my head? What happens then?". It's not defined in the rules.
Very often these days I read about memory management as a differentiating factor. On one hand there's Rust with more "manual" memory management (I think) opposed to Go with its indeterministic GC pauses (see Discord blog posts about why they prefer Rust to Go because of that). On the other hand there's Go with its very simple automatic memory management. Where does Odin fit in?

I see that there are two paragraphs on memory management (https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#allocators) in the overview but they dive into the details very soon and don't really paint the big picture (I think the sentence "This means that Odin programmers must manage their own memory, allocations, and tracking" is not a great selling point, all other things being equal).
It's an interesting article, and there might be some truth to it. The western US is a more newly settled place, and so it's different.

Morally though, how does one justify that dealing meth on the corner is OK but putting your banana peel in the trash bin is wrong? I think it comes down to the idea that some people are accountable and others aren't. If someone commits a major crime, obviously there must be something wrong with their brain. It's a medical problem. If they commit a minor crime though, they're just selfish and prioritizing their own convenience.
Or maybe we can get regulate short-form media. I've never been a fan of such a wasteful format with so little accountability. You drastically shorten attention spans with such media that it doesn't benefit anyone. Although I've seen a few short-form media used to to explain small scientific phenomenons.
My dog already thinks he's a person. He wants to eat people food.
> by looking at me

Your presented person is very different from an amalgamation of clues which are not meant to disclose public information and are not you.

But this is easy to solve. Instead of rationalizing call up a customer and try it.
YouTube needs a way to turn it off though. You should be able to disable short-form media on the app so you can focus on long-form media.
Not the same, but Slay the Spire could be described as a "programmatic game". I play it when I just need to burn some spare cycles (especially if programming is inaccessible to me at the moment, like when I only have my phone)
I really enjoyed the article, as I am also a nerd who has played runescape for what seems like forever now, and now most of my interaction with the game is via programming.
I have two types of bots I use mostly, color bots, where a screenshot is taken and objects are detected by their surrounding pixel colors, and basic click bots.
I've actually found that ~100 lines of python code using pyautogui is more than enough to automate tons of annoying aspects of the game.

I am curious, is your Java client one of the many open source bot clients that actually calls into client code? Or is it some type of click script which does some repetitive inputs?

I have had bad luck with the former in terms of getting banned.
I mean if you think SQLAlchemy does the job for you that's great! My general contention is more "there are good ORMs". I believe Django is the good one, but if you think SQLAlchemy works well for you, go for it!
log 1000 is about 10 times smaller than log 1000000, when logs are taken to base 2.
The zoo statement: "We hope Colorado isn’t the place that sets the slippery slope in motion of whether your beloved and well-cared-for dog or cat should have habeas corpus and would be required to ‘go free,’ at the whim of someone else’s opinion of them"

The elephant (ha ha) in the room is another slippery slope leading to the question whether we should be killing and eating intelligent and social beings.
Show HN: AI agents working together in a virtual podcast studio. NotebookLM alt
Made this project in a couple of weekends after playing around with NotebookLM and seeing the hype for more projects like this. Let me know what you think!
In which case I would assume that domination over them by us would be illegal. I would absolutely support this. Future generations will look back on pet ownership with clarity. It’s right there in the word - ownership.
Please note that you should ensure that overflow doesn't happen, not detect when it happens. Once you let it happen, it's undefined behavior.

But you don't need to check each operation to ensure that none of them overflow. If you know that b and c are supposed to be bounded between -10 and +10, for example, the above line can't overflow. So just check that your supposition holds. In most cases, that boils down to a check on the inputs at the entry of the function.
>When making software that's supposed to be used, you can't mess around that much. At the end of the day, someone has to use it and if its weird it'll be bad.

More counter-examples: LaTeX, vim, Regex, Blender, SAP, most Unix CLIs...