skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He mentioned micro economic theory, the fact that it's widely taught, but in reality is incomplete. The point is, it's not small business that are "wrong" per se, it's the observers (?) who have gotten their understanding, model, and metrics wrong. Worse is, those same observers determine policy, regulations, build other ideas on that foundation of sand, etc.

Simultaneously, at the large entity (read: company) level we don't have a free market, but instead we have rony Capitalism (which all it shared w/ capitalism are nine letters_ . The thumb is on the scale. Those rules and regulations favor some over others.

What could go wrong?
Thanks for this writeup. I hope the author recovers soon.

Some of the situations feel familiar to my experience in other companies, so here's some advice to younger folks, which took me some time to grasp:

- Communication with the manager is critical. Better to overcommunicate than undercommunicate. It's a natural tendency for curious folks to do "side quests" and while you were supposed to work on X, you noticed that you can improve Y which in your opinion is more important. At the very least, drop your manager a Slack message like "hey, I was supposed to work on X but I have an idea about Y which can bring more benefit, I will take N hours/days to dig into that if that's ok with you" and see what's their response (also make sure to time constrain it to avoid getting sidetracked for too long). I was definitely burned by this in prev job: I shipped some nice things but I was supposed to work on something else which I didn't do, and each time my manager mentioned this (i.e. N months later in performance evaluation), I knew it was correct for him to point it out, but it made me feel bad.

- In bigtech the work happens in quarters. If you're unhappy about things you work on currently, take some time to prepare the work items you do want to work on, and seed your manager's mind before next quarter planning about things you DO want to work on, why, how is the impact and so on.

- When feeling overwhelmed with too many things on your plate, talk to your manager to dispatch some responsibilities to other team members. Don't be the messiah who needs to fix everything by yourself silently and burn out.

- For candidates: When doing interviews, you absolutely should do everything to streamline things and avoid distractions. Most likely use JS or Python for coding. Probably avoid TS, definitely avoid C++. It's too easy to get lost fighting the compiler or "reinventing the world" with languages like C/C++. You won't get extra points for going uphill, but you will get minus points for not finishing.
Yeah I've been surprised by how unsketchy torrenting is compared to how sketchy it should be. You'd think even just for videos, there must be absolutely tons of RCEs in VLC or whatever. Yet I've never seen one actually used.
I don’t know whether you are American or not, but I find it ironic that on a forum who’s demographic skews American, this sentiment of anti-individualism at the workplace is so widely shared.

America is supposed to be this super-freedom, super-individualistic place. Except when you are a worker at a workplace. Then you are supposed to spend at least 40 hours a week (except you are supposed to want to spend more time than that; and most do [except they don’t want to]), you are supposed to leave your politics behind, don’t talk about politics at work, you are supposed to do everything your boss tells you without question, and certainly don’t bring in your morals. Your workplace is a dictatorship (in a freedom loving country) and you are not supposed to complain about it. You are supposed to like your work, so you are not even entitled to your feelings. And suddenly your workplace is supposed to be this communist utopia, where every worker has a task, and the work is supposed to make them happy, and the whole workplace has a comradery of peers. Except you are all making money for your boss (or worse, your shareholders) and only keep a tiny portion of what you produce, but you are not supposed to complain and definitely not supposed to unite in bargaining for better, only unite in being exploited (except you aren’t supposed to see it that way).

The American workplace is probably as far away from the American dream as it possibly could be.
That's definitely possible, but in my experience it's not the same thing as actually being done when you're working at a bakery or wherever. Then you don't need to turn off your phone, avoid company messages, think about what project you have to do tomorrow. You don't need to care about the job at all until your next shift starts.
This sounds like a joke, but I experienced literally this in my Prius:

- Navigate home.

- Ok, showing nearby ski resorts.
You can be reasonably confident that unless there’s been a significant breakthrough (there hasn’t) if a smaller model beats a larger model it’s either fine tuned for a specific purpose or trained on the test data somehow (ie. fine tuned to have good metrics).

To be less snarky, they claim:

> These models are built on a meticulously curated high-quality training corpus

Ie. Good training data plus a small model beats a bigger model.

…but I’m skeptical, when I read:

> We observed that performance continues to improve with longer training, even beyond the Chinchilla optimal point. Therefore, we decided to train the 1.7B model on 1 trillion tokens and the 135M and 360M models on 600B tokens, as the performance gains after 400B tokens begin to slow on some benchmarks for these smaller models.

So they’re evaluating their models against various benchmarks as they train them and picking the practice that gives the best benchmarks?

I dunno.

The claim is basically good data > more parameters, but it’s just an observation of “this happened to work for us” rather than something you can usefully take (as far as I can see) and apply to larger models.

The claims they actaully make about performance are far more modest than people are making out.

The 1.7B model performs better than any other 2B models in their evaluation.

Seems nice. Not ground breaking. Not convinced it’s real rather than polluted training data personally.
Of course not. They got 4 years of fantastic work out of the guy before he burned out. That serves them just fine. The only requirement is that you have no morals.
When I stumbled upon this, I was blown away: there is a full-fledged book, currently an appropriate 287 pages, available in print with an ISBN number and everything, aimed at introducing non-programmers to computer programming with Emacs Lisp as their first programming language... and it is shipped as part of Emacs, kept up to date with the latest releases through the decades.

I'm amazed. What an achievement, and what a labor of love!
Personally, the Mac Mini will be my reentry into desktop computers after more than 1.5 decades [1]. Your comment got me thinking: could this be another perfectly calculated move by Apple? After all, I’ve only bought mobile devices from them until now. I’m eager to see Apple’s financial results for Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 to understand how this strategy plays out.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41996008
pdf is a common malware delivery mechanism
Yeah almond potatoes should not be parboiled in my opinion. I prefer to halve them (not smaller/slimmer pieces).
Why would I care about this when I can have the entire English Wikipedia on my phone? Really struggling to understand why people are so excited about this stuff.
None of those are options for this thing. They are all real DIY projects that some people have made. Some of these especially 3d printed ones have 3d models made by authors of each project. Still takes time to make clean and consistent illustrations out of them, probably less bad once you do it hundred times in a row and have a good workwflow. But for others especially ones made of cloth there is no choice other than drawing them by hand. I guess you could speedup the process by tracing over a photo. As for stolen without credit aspect, at the bottom of each page there is a projects name, author and website where it was posted, it also functions as link. One thing that could be better is making links accessible in printed version either as text or QR code of them, currently you can only access them only in digital version.
Clicking "Yes" on a "Do you want to upgrade to the latest version?" is not fundamentally different.
Boomers are 60-80 years old. That’s elderly.
AI Will Understand Humans Better Than Humans Do
moondream fits the bill, but dont expect too much for the performance on image description and all.
Huggingface TGI supports many models and more than one API:

https://huggingface.co/docs/text-generation-inference/en/ins...
I mean, brilliant ideas can still be fun to work on. Who cares if you don’t get appropriately rewarded for saving the company $50k/month, it was time well spent.

As opposed to working on that pointless crud thing your boss likes.
"Take EXPLOR, for example: here is a programming language with probabilistic execution (every instruction specifies the probability with which it should be executed) and no variables -- every instruction operates on either the screen image or other instructions" https://esolangs.org/wiki/Prehistory_of_esoteric_programming...
Downloading things from the AIA fields would mean triggering HTTP/HTTPS requests to an untrusted URL from a certificate you haven't verified - not a good idea. What firefox does is cache intermediates that it has seen elsewhere, the windows TLS stack can fetch additional certs from windows update on-demand (and actually starts with only a small bundle of trusted roots). There is no good solution for incomplete chains other than getting the sites fixed (or using a provider like cloudflare that solves it for them).
Thank you, BRB.
The license text just stops mid-sentence.
Dan McKinley's original, epic presentation on this subject (now nearly 10 years old?) can be found at https://boringtechnology.club.

It's up there with https://xyproblem.info in terms of URLs I know off by heart.
That's from a newly made account (green name), and it's flagged so it's not visible to most users (including me). There's no forum in the world with open sign ups that can prevent a few assholes from joining.
My comment was in response to the idea that the speakers are maliciously designed to hurt asahi Linux, which just seems obviously wrong given how much power Apple has over their devices. They could completely kill asahi Linux with a flick of the wrist if they ever want to. There’s no way that’s the reason for their complex speaker setup.

If they killed off asahi Linux, they would face far more backlash than if they just made it harder for them (with ostensible reasons why), while keeping it strictly worse than macOS.
Meta doesn't train on their internal data, at least not for open models. It would be a real PR problem if someone started dumping real Facebook chats out of them.

And this is from Huggingface themselves, arguably they have a lot of data as well.
Sagas are great for this and should be used when able, IMHO. It's still possible to mess it up, as there are basically two guarantees you can make in a distributed system: at-least-once, and at-most-once. Thus, you will either need to accept the possibility of lost messages or be able to make your event consumers idempotent to provide an illusion of exactly-once.

Sagas require careful consideration to make sure you can provide one of these guarantees during a "commit" (the order in which you ACK a message, send resulting messages, and record your own state -- if necessary) as these operations are non-atomic. If you mess it up, you can end up providing the wrong level of guarantee by accident. For example:

1. fire resulting messages

2. store state (which includes ids of processed messages for idempotency)

3. ACK original event

In this case, you guarantee that you will always send results at-least-once if a crash happens between 1&2. Once we get past 2, we provide exactly-once semantics, but we can only guarantee at-least-once. If we change the order to:

1. store state

2. fire messages

3. ACK original message

We now only provide at-most-once semantics. In this case, if we crash between 1&2, when we resume, we will see that we've already handled the current message and not process it again, despite never having sent any result yet. We end up with at-most-once if we swap 1&3 as well.

So, yes, Sagas are great, but still pretty easy to mess up.
For sure, the networking is on the OS level because in both I’m using the tcp stack provided by the OS. (Also GUI in Linux has less transitions and feels snappier in general.)

The remainder can be attributed to compiler optimisations or lack thereof.
In another company I had to completely replace ActiveAdmin with "vanilla" Rails abstractions as it was quite buggy and caused Rails to hang indefinitely as soon as you edited any ruby file. The admin part also turned out to be the most used part of the app, so it probably made sense to replace it in any case, but the bugginess at the time was more than I could handle.
This topic is like catnip on here.

The hilarious part is that usually it's about not using Kubernetes, Microservices, NoSQL etc. even though they've all been around for over a decade now. They are boring, stable and well understood by any definition.
"Hey Wikipedia, at what year did SSD speeds reach RAM speeds of yester-year?"
Indeed. And I think this is both a case of managing expectations (if you're always available, people will learn to expect it) and also of realizing what is and isn't expected of you.

Where I work, a normal workday is 9 AM to 6 PM with an hour lunch. There's some flexibility as to the actual hours, I usually do 8-5, others do 10-7. Yet, some people always put in very long hours for some reason, complete with gulping down a sandwich in front of their computer for lunch. I'm not sure what gives them the impression they have to do it, since it's clearly not expected from our common higher-ups.
Wouldn't that be because decent vehicles are an anomaly?
That's not quite true. The name is at least better and tries to warn you of the danger:

https://docs.rs/reqwest/latest/reqwest/struct.ClientBuilder....

https://docs.rs/rustls/latest/rustls/#rustls-takes-care-of-s...
Rivian's chief software officer is an anomaly.
This is just the tip of the iceberg example.
I’ve used both extensively since release. Anything but Adobe.

While I like the idea of the affinity products, I don’t like using them much. Probably just me but I find them quite clunky and have to look up how to do simple things in the guides. Never quite clicked at an intuitive level.

Whereas Pixelmator seems to fit directly into my muscle memory and I’ve never had to think about how to achieve something with it. Maybe because it’s so Mac-like.

Plus the team have consistently released big new features for it over the years, making it outstanding value for money.
Wasn't Intel's commercial compiler also dominated HPC space around that time period? I remember back then people would use cuda and icc for hpc stuff.
While this is true, I find myself depressed by the idea of exchanging coding for herding everyone in the right direction.

I’ve been trying to make that switch as it’s the only career prospect I have, but…
Airplane mode leaves WiFi on.
Just buy the patents and stuff. You wouldn't want to infect a working company with the Intel disease.

I wonder how bad "worked as a manager at Intel" poisons a resume.
There are tons of affordable and upgradable NUC form factor machines for running Linux, so why a Mac Mini (if you're not running LLMs locally, then the good support and fast integrated RAM might be a reason)?
I dunno how you authorize user actions. Especially complex cases that involve shared data. E.g. some user can see all materials, another can edit materials belonging to her group and also shared with him by others.
It's interesting to see all the comments about how physical buttons help keep your eyes on the road, but I’ve actually had the opposite experience. I'm probably not the typical driver, though—I tend to set everything just the way I want before starting a trip. While driving, I only adjust basic controls like the air conditioning, wipers, blinkers, and cruise control, all of which I can do in my Tesla without taking my eyes off the road.

Recently, I drove a Volvo and a Polestar and found that using physical buttons required me to look down to see what I was pressing. Even after over 20 hours of driving, I couldn’t adapt back to physical buttons scattered across the dashboard. I really missed the streamlined, contextual controls I’m used to.
the "rails doesn't scale" myth has been debunked for a decade now and anyone with the slightest clue about performance can scale a rails app using the same techniques that you'd use to scale any other language and framework

yjit and fibers have made things even better, and plenty more is coming I'm sure
Something always breaks my streak, but since last year or so I feel I am down to twice a year or something.
so, basically, you want a temu Rust? cpp2 is the way.
I work in IT and I don't need to think about that project that's running late or whatever. Yeah, I have to turn off my work laptop, but that's more akin to taking off my apron if I worked in a bakery.

Sure, it sometimes happens that I'm working on some interesting project, and I may find myself thinking about it after my workday is done. But it's because I generally love what I do. It wouldn't surprise me that, say, a pastry chef would possibly think about combining ingredients in some different way, too.

I think the only job where you absolutely wouldn't have to think about it is if you don't have any kind of agency and only do what you're told. I'm not sure that I would enjoy that kind of job.
You you actually feel fulfilled giving anything minimum effort?

Like, I’m not going to work overtime for free or anything, but the time I do work gets my best effort.
the network is never secure, that's why there's all this stuff going on about "zero trust"
So how would you design it instead?
Yeah but if H5N1 strains have a high fatality rate, a 50% effective vaccine is a big deal.
There might be ideas that work only in that particular context and you can't implement on your own outside of that. Otherwise, I agree with you.

>Never do it. It will never end up benefitting you, even if you find "allies" - who might even stab you in the back and take credit for the idea and then let you go once they get a promotion.

That's why I said to get allies from the higher ups. Not your boss or your peers. Preferably business people. And you don't need to give them all the details. Just let them know if would make them look good, have their approval and use them as a shield.
> People making these decisions likely only ever ride in the back seats of luxury black cars

Nuh, it's simpler than that. He makes money from cars not having buttons, that's all. He says whatever he has to say to increase his profits, regardless of whether he believes it, or whether it makes sense.
Knowledge doesnt amount to much on the LLM, i think what most are excited about is the artificial reasoning.
Interesting, but would be better if there was at least a screenshot in that Readme.
Portsmouth City Council among UK authorities hit by cyber attack
PodcastLM: An open-source AI podcast creator
Lacking the trailing dot that anchors the FQDN to the root zone, how would I be able to determine that I need to use the global root zone rather than local lookups? The DNS spec allows users to have local zones named similarly to all TLDs, which would be authorative responders for DNS requests that don't anchor to the root with a trailing dot - or have I missed something?
I would hope Simon would not fall victim to such shenanigans, and has his own test dataset.
SpawELO – small free matchmaking system for LAN parties
Feels like the phone capabilities didn't change much since 2018. What would be the android phone nowadays that we could write this article about?
Yeah, I can't relate even a bit with any of this.

I've got a full analog Fiat Punto 2017 and almost fully digital VW Polo 2024 and I find the second one more dangerous, distracting, I just can't but hate it (I know it might be me).

When I lease cars abroad the more digital they are, the more complex I find them to use and the more annoyed I am.

To be honest, pretty much everything that gets more digital I hate it, even more than cars it applies to house appliances. Wi-fi connected dish washers, smartphone-controlled ovens, smart fridges, they create more problems while solving made up ones.
Of course, but parent is saying we shouldn't worry about H5N1 because a vaccine exists...
Yeah that’s kind of what I’m after: ACEs mess up people’s sleep and cause early deaths. That makes sleep patters a strong predictor for all cause mortality, but the causal relationship is really ”ACEs cause both poor sleep and early death”.
⍃Kalvium, Bangalore, India (onsite in HSR Layout).

Hi folks, I'm hiring in the engineering team at Kalvium across SDE2 to Lead levels. We are building the google-maps of education - the only edtech where we bring a focused, standardized, digital approach to CS higher education. I speak about this on this podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be1yEJbyEkQ).

Here's 3 cool things we've done:

1. 100% AI based evaluators in B.Tech CS 4 year program.

2. Launched our full-fledged program in 20+ universities in India, where students are placed from 3rd semester onwards. This year we've had more premium universities signup: SRM, VIT, Christ, etc.

3. Solid business fundamentals - sustainability in every classroom with our revenue.

To align you to our approach: we seek out engineers who want to involve with this problem statements. Edtech v1.0 in India does not have a good rep (tell me about it!), but the problem statements remains: higher education system is broken, and not giving students the outcomes they are capable of (Here's the outcomes we deliver - https://kalvium.com/hire-from-us/).

Our main realization is: we can't rely on people to drive a significant change, rather it has to be a system which builds and uplifts skills in students. That's what we've built and launched in above universities (https://kalvium.com/heros/). We have a 12 year roadmap! it's a blue ocean, and we want to build and lead Edtech V2.0.

Note on team culture/equity: We plan on being a small core team that geeks out on learning and platform-izing it! Our pay is commensurate to experience with meaningful equity. We plan for a 4 year path of growth for every individual in our team. If this sounds like a meaningful challenge and place to build your career, please reach out to me via anil@kalvium.com with your resume.
Post: "If you’re comfortable, I’d like us to try and be 10% more vulnerable"

This comment: "I'd rather not have my manager forcing me to do group therapy."

How did "if you’re comfortable" become "forcing me", and "try and be 10% more vulnerable" become "group therapy"?
Could you explain your comment more? The way I understand it is:

- I have two servers with the exact same hardware
- one runs a Ruby on Rails web app
- the other runs a Vert.X web app
- both apps have similar features to the end users
- if I run both of them for a month, the server running the Ruby on Rails app will consume hundred times more energy in kWh compared to the server with the Vert.X app
- another way to look at it, to serve the same number of visitors, I would need hundred servers running a Ruby on Rails apps and one server running a Vert.X app

Is that correct?

It hasn't been my experience when I measured the long-term consumptions with energy meters in real-life scenarios. How did you arrive at your number?

By comparison, going from resistive heating to a heat pump is a 2.5x-4x jump in efficiency. 100x gains would be nothing short of spectacular.

I noticed the best energy savings when switching to Arm CPUs, but that's a separate topic.
I almost volunteered for this but was concerned that they were liberally using the NHS branding to disguise that they’re private