skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've always dreamed of full blown sandbox games with extremely advanced NPCs (which the current LLMs can already kinda emulate)

The future of gaming is going to get weird fast with all this new tech, and there are a lot of new mechanics emerging that just weren't possible before LLMs, generative AI, etc.

At our game studio we're already building medium-scale sandbox games where NPCs form memories, opinions, problems (that translate to quests), and have a continuous "internal monologue" that uses all of this context plus sensory input from their place in a 3D world to constantly decide what actions they should be performing in the game world. A player can decide to chat with an NPC about their time at a lake nearby and then see that NPC deciding to go visit the lake the next day.

A paper last year ("Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior", [0]) is a really good sneak-peek into the kind of evolving sandboxes LLMs (with memory and decisionmaking) enable. There's a lot of cool stuff that happens in that "game", but one anecdote I always think back to is this: in a conversation between two NPCs, one happens to mention they have a birthday coming up to the other; and that other NPC then goes around town talking to other NPCs about a birthday party, and _those_ NPCs mention the party to other NPCs, and so on until the party happened and most of the NPCs in town arrived on time. None of it was scripted, but you very quickly start to see emergent behavior from these sorts of "flocks" of agents as soon as you add persistence and decision-making. And there are other interesting layers games can add for even more kinds of emergent behavior; that's what we're exploring at our studio [1], and I've seen lots of other studios pop up this last year to try their hand at it too.

I'm optimistic and excited about the future of gaming (or, at least some new genres). It should be fun. :)

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442

[1] https://www.chromagolem.com/games
Pkl belongs to a related but different category of "configuration" languages, while we are talking about a pure serialization format. A serialization format can be used as a configuration language if designed carefully, but they are distinct.
I guess that stuff can probably only work in US of A. Wherever I am going, regardless of the transport method, there are multiple places where we could go in the same direction. You wouldn't be able to find out wherever one is going until the last minute or so.
Or maybe heroic efforts are being made to solve a very hard but worthwhile problem?

You don’t get to decide how long the road is to a complete solution. Just whether it will be worth it incrementally and in the end.

You don’t propose any constructive alternative.

Life, even just extending life of millions of people a bit, survival rates just a bit, is worth a lot.
Markov Eclipse
“Cardboard”: looked in vain for the uncountable singular of “boxes” (/“categories”)

Also: “cardboard” as a metaphor for the inevitable reduction in dimensions (here, of “personalities”)

Banach: if you mean the eponymous space, yes, are you returning to the county in “quantum-gravity”? Or maybe you refer to the theorem with Tarski?
I love the word just in a question, exactly because of what the article points out.

Just means, my suggestion seems unreasonably simple to me. It means I am looking for, and expecting, a reason it doesn't work.
The downside is if the suggestion does work, you can make someone feel stupid. But it is a great tool to get up to speed on a hatd problem to learn why the 'obvious' solutions won't work.
My understanding is that even though immunotherapy's mechanism may seem more natural than chemotherapy and radiation, and in some instances may be a magic bullet, up-regulating the immune system can have serious consequences. I remember reading about a clinical trial showing similar progression free survival but increased grade 4-5 toxicities (requiring hospitalization or being fatal). My assumption was that these are autoimmune conditions that are aggravated in some of the patient population.
Performance review, as per the linked post of theirs: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/02/19/perf/
What Are Bloom Filters? (2015)
The test was to check if people changed their minds. People were told they were lied to, it still didn’t change their minds.
Yea no, I get that, it's just that voting was still secure up until smartphones were ubiquitous. Now it's not.

It's not just about vote stealing per se, it's about any third party infraction of individual voting rights. It may not matter on a large scale, but it matters to individuals.

Not only that, but it matters that bosses can't coerce workers into voting for someone, or an abusive spouse, or any third party who might have an interest in swaying an election. It often doesn't take much to sway an election.

It becomes very problematic when a victim is unable to vote for someone who would stop abuse. For example, Russia decriminalizing spousal physical abuse. That same thing could happen anywhere, and then you'd have every asshole abuser at home forcing their family to vote for their choice.

Not having secure voting is a real problem, and one that is now unsolved thanks to smartphones.
Curbing the excessive emissions of an elite few can create a sustainable planet
I took it to mean in the performance review context.
Even now its a problem getting healthcare workers to wash their hands, its a constant task of enforcement.

We have had good and increasing evidence for the air borne spread of diseases since the early 20th century and yet even now airborne spread of viruses via aerosol is rejected by most. We have experiments showing that Covid and other viruses spread airborne in small 1-3 micrometre aerosoles and confirmed transit over quite large distances on the wind. We also have experimental evidence that it can survive in the air for many hours.

Yet the WHO still has not accepted that viruses spread this way and indeed many governments are rejecting it as well. This is a Semmelweis moment happening currently and its not just one scientist being rejected its hundreds all coming at the problem from different directions finding the same thing.
Thanks for the link. As someone who feels disenfranchised with a countercultural thread running through, a lot of it resonated with me. I do tend to vote third party as well (maybe not this election given the state of the GOP) — after all, it’s your vote, why give it to someone you don’t agree with?

Though I will say that if you didn’t vote, then you don’t get to complain about the system because after all by not voting you’re rejecting a core tenet of the system. I gotta read more things out of this library, this is fun to noodle on.
Reminder that redis has been forked into valkey - https://valkey.io/
It's true that there has been some progress in treating most cancers and particular success in treating some specific cancers e.g. with checkpoint inhibitors. But lung cancer is both one of the most common forms of cancer (it's still third even with the massive decline in smoking) and has a much lower 5 year survival rate than the other most common cancers, breast and prostate. The massive decline in smoking has played an outsized impact on the improvement in reducing both cancer rates and deaths from cancer generally
Rust also gives a custom error message [0] that explicitly explains that "comparison operators cannot be chained" and shows you how to rewrite the expression using `&&`.

Which makes me wonder whether they came up with this idea themselves or if they borrowed it from D.

In any case, I think that this is the only reasonable solution for new languages. Because if you go with C way it will be surprising for people who expect Python way and vice versa. So, making this syntax illegal is the only way to uphold the principle of least astonishment [1].

[0] https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
It is nice to have ideas that you can pick up but being so organized sounds so exhaustingly boring...I would have suggested a deck of cards with recipes that you can pick up randomly.

Also, what about that "who can cook them" column in that spreadsheet? Obviously there are personal prefs but you guys have the recipe stored, surely anyone can cook it.
Big in 2016 (202+119 points, 69+22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12231623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12548297
I think it depends on why they're merging. If the goal is just to increase size, as you point out doing it at the lowest cost will be the only POV.

If they're doing it for more strategic purposes, the calculation becomes more complex and there will be more "reverse" acquisitions where the entity closer to the target is prioritized.
Yeah, I feel the discussion around this is usually "random metrics can be gamed and may not reflect true value of a person's contributions". But neither does unmeasurable gut feeling!

If you use done tickets or whatever metric to _determine_ value that's a bad idea.

If you use it to ask questions or confirm impressions it can be useful.
I made a personal cyber security and privacy cheatsheet
Hey HN. I've worked in tech for a few years, and have recently finished a masters in cyber security.

A big part of the motivation to do the masters and gradually shift over to the security and privacy space was seeing just how many people - friends, colleagues, friends-of-friends etc - had little to no awareness of the dangers inherent online. I liken it to what it must have been like in medieval or wild west times; you could casually get stabbed or shot and that was a standard affair.

I also recognise that our attention is much more dearly-won and stretched than ever before between the myriad of social, entertainment, and news media services.

And so I decided to put together an accessible and motivational one-page source of how to do the bare-minimum to protect yourself as a not-so-techy person online.

This seemed like the place to finally post/get feedback on/figure out whether this is just a waste of time. Hoping the page seems like something you could otherwise helpfully throw a friend or family member's way if they're looking to try and be safer online.
- The flexibility in name is to support the plethora of programming languages.

- Commas are for readability as per English.

- Three digits are recommended for the encoder.

- Textual data is decoded into binary information in software so setting expectations, e.g. supporting ∞, facilitates interoperability by reducing impedance mismatches.

- If the implementation uses ɪᴇᴇᴇ doubles the rounding shall be as expected.

- Unicode surrogates are disallowed.

- We are following the Base64 standard exactly.

- It is essential for data to be structured as a graph, it simply occurs. Serialization on most data formats has the required support for graphs awkwardly layered on top of the encoding.

- The C# implementation defines the data model; essentially objects, array and scalars with multiple parents for nodes. The Formats section is to, as stated, facilitate interoperability.

- Limiting whitespace to spaces and tabs does speed processing. The ᴜᴛꜰ-8 bytes can be left in the input buffer rather than copied. All significant bytes are ᴀꜱᴄɪɪ.

- There are no unmatched angle brackets (that was a typo).

- I know the reasoning behind XML.
Years back (around 10) mysql did have multiple instances of false sharing[0].

Unrelated to mysql - I do consider using redis in any capacity a blunder (it's likely ok for nodejs users, I suppose)

[0]: http://dimitrik.free.fr/MySQL_Connect_2013/MySQL_Perf-Connec...
Ask HN: Career impact on working for PE owned SaaS
Is there a negative impact to a career if you join a PE owned b2b Saas? I've heard recruiters don't bother with you as you'll be seen as a low skilled
I'm not proposing any of that. I'm just saying that voting isn't secure, and that has very real implications. See my other response for more detail.
Great bit of semantic insight. Just signifies an assumption of simplicity. Which is different from signifying it IS simple.

Which makes it very nice for getting your assumptions checked.
Already integrated on bing

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2021/1...
But having separate applications can give you better perfomance and isolation than one single threaded process?

Or do you compare using separate processes to having multiple threads in a single process?
> I believe there is no other feasible encoding than UTF-8 for textual formats now.

I disagree, although I do not believe that this disagreement should have to affect some file formats, since some file formats should not need to care about the character encoding, except perhaps specific details, e.g. that ASCII bytes have ASCII meaning and non-ASCII bytes have non-ASCII meaning (which is true of UTF-8 and of some others).

> IEEE 754 doesn't define any textual format while it does have binary decimal formats. The correct wording should have been that numeric scalars follow a specific grammar to be interpreted as an IEEE 754 binary64 number in the data model.

OK. Although it seems clearly enough, probably the document should specify explicitly its working anyways, like you mention.

> There are several formats that do try to support native graph types, including YAML and Concise [1]. So that is hardly new.

I had seen Concise as well, and I have criticisms of that too. I did forget it though as I was writing my message.

I did have a idea to add a reference type too (you can see my other comment about TER and ASN.1X), although I would have it to not have the same meaning as the data it references (therefore meaning that it cannot result in cyclic graphs, even if it references itself). I think I should not have remote references, though. Concise encoding seems to have it have the same meaning as the data it references, and I think it is useful to not do this (you could use compression if you want to deal with many of duplicated data).
My Experience in Testing JetBrains' IDEs
One could make the argument that if you need to measure what your employees are doing, your business processes suck or you have the wrong employees. I feel like in a functional business, people will know who is and isn’t getting stuff of value done.
I learned years ago to either give constructive mutually agreed upon ahead of time peer reviews or not give any. I always run this type of stuff by the recipient to make sure that it isn't a surprise. Not too long ago I had one cartoonishly insecure coworker recruit another colleague to their cause of poo-pooing me. The latter wrote something like "they care more about doing things right than delivering quickly" because I surfaced too many obvious architectural issues in my PR comments (actual ones where they departed from our mutually agreed spec, not trite OO pedant nonsense). Thankfully my manager told me of it and dismissed it in much the same manner I did but I didn't feel great about being thrust back to junior high school social behavior.
Understanding Multimodal LLMs
Just in a statement is insulting if the other person has no idea why the statement is true. Why don't you just, in a question, is insulting if the suggestion is a good one.

There is weird symmetry here.
Maybe you can find the answer to your question in the original papers? These are probably the publications:

Ross, L., Lepper, M.R. and Hubbard, M. (1975) Perseverance in Self-Perception and Social Perception: Biased Attributional Processes in the Debriefing Paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 880-892.

https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.32.5.88...

Anderson, C.A., Lepper, M.R., & Ross, L. (1980). The perseverance of social theories:
The role of explanation in the persistence of discredited information. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1037-1049.

https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1037/h0077720
Discussion (25 points, 2 days ago, 11 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016225
To me, a more effective way to handle this situation is to convert these requests into a change order. Explain that this is a previously unplanned addition, and give it an estimated cost. Then ask the person requesting it if they want to pay for the upgrade.
I think the argument is that if a manager is so far removed from the work being done, that they don’t even know who’s doing what, than they’re a figurehead anyway.
Ruby's String Slice is Broken
I had a stab at fixing the mismatch between fridge and database by allowing you to exclude recipes with a particular ingredient. Surely this type of filter can be incorporated into other recipe apps.

Check out the demo video in the README: https://github.com/kassner/whattocook
Unfortunate things about performance reviews (2021)
I agree that the word “just” carries that connotation but I disagree that it’s a bad thing. When I ask if we can just do something my intent is exactly to communicate that I think the thing is simple, that the details are unimportant (to me, to us) and that it ought to be easy to do (and if it’s not, that’s a problem in and of itself).

A lot of things are like this, and so to excise the word “just” would be to stop using a word that often concisely and accurately conveys what I’m trying to say.

It would be better if the article just said “this is rude.”
The point of commercial software shouldn't to satisfy the need of their developpers to get paid for it but to reach that intersection where it is useful enough for many users to accept paying a decent price for it and allow dev to make a profit.

If that intersection is unreachable in the first place, there is just no sense to mention maintenance costs.
It’s federated anyway, similar to email. One account can take you anywhere, so if you make your own "guild" the users could just directly participate from matrix.org (or any other home(server))
While I mostly agree, it took Hitler 1 month to take over Poland. Russia is still struggling 2 years later (8 since you should count from Crimea).
Each medical innovation overcomes but one hurdle on a path to a treatment/cure, often revealing new hurdles that weren't visible (or important) until the first hurdle fell.

A good example is lipid nanoparticles, which for the first 15 years or more of their existence were horrifically lethal in every hominid, making their potential for delivering transformative genetic or immune cargo into cells impossible. Finally, PEGylation was introduced into their formulation, bypassing the toxic effect they had in precipitating out nearly all of each animal's platelets upon treatment. Within just a few years, LNPs became a very effective way to deliver MRNA vaccines to BILLIONS of human patients, effectively ending the worst of the Covid pandemic.

Medical revolutions are like evolutionary punctuated equilibrium -- barriers to advancement are overcome nonuniformly and often incompletely, requiring a lot of continued effort even after a revolution begins. So it shouldn't be surprising that more battles are won than wars. We should celebrate whatever victories we can. Cancer promises to be a war to end all wars.
Yeah, I'm connected to TPGI in australia, all my devices have it, seems to work.. something like 35% of my traffic goes over ipv6.

Only thing I had to do was tick the "use ipv6" button on my router.
It's the job of a manager to know what their reports are up to, and whether they're doing a good job of it, and are generally effective.

That's true, but it's not what employee metrics tools tell you. If you're using metrics tools to measure productivity then you're not really being a good manager. Metrics tell you are the quantitative details (eg a count of how much output there is), but as a manager what you actually care about in your day to day work is the qualitative details (eg how good the output is), how happy the team is, where the conflict is, etc. Metrics won't tell you that.

But...

Being a manager is about more than just getting people to do their job well. You also need to plan things, you need to know what's changing over time, you need to test whether your processes are working. I use metrics to measure the aggregate impact of my influence on managing my teams, not that of any IC on any of my teams. Employee metrics are useful for a big picture view.
10ish years ago Myleoma was a semi death sentence, it’s now coming close to being treated like a chronic condition. There are definitely improvements happening, but we’ll often miss them because it’s incremental rather than “we developed this cure for lung cancer and it’s no longer a problem”

Edit: some of the replies below are pretty bleak “it’s just a few months that’s nothing”. The difference between a 5 year and 15 year life expectancy for a parent being diagnosed with blood cancer around 60 is huge.
(2021) Small discussion at the time (49 points, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26197676
If this is a laptop, it helps to touch the aluminum chassis or an exposed metal part with your other hand.
Twice the words. But more importantly, if a DNS record is a bad idea, your version is likely to get a more detailed response. It can be valuable to get a compact answer like filtering rules or we don't have a local DNS server.
> Not sure where you’re from, but at least in the countries where I’ve lived (Canada and the US) your address was not in the phone book. It was a book of phone numbers - nothing more.

I'm pretty sure addresses were listed US West (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_West) telephone book White Pages.
Thanks for the feedback, fixed!
For a hardened linux distro, take a look at kicksecure [0], which uses debian as base image

[0] - https://www.kicksecure.com/
Good LLM prompt seed :)
They need some signal, and metrics are not one of those signals.

The metrics tell you one thing, but how to interpret it requires you to know what people are actually doing. And if you do know that then you don't need the metrics.

Add to that, I don't think I know anyone that could be trusted to not misinterpret the metrics. It is a great way to reinforce what you believe, you can take your gut feeling and finding a way to see it in the data. But that isn't helpful either.
Can somebody explain to me how anybody could verify or reproduce working address randomization and position independent executables?

This is basically what muslc does, but with the kernel itself offering a memset / malloc with randomized padding, right?

Also, what does ASLR brute force detection (SEGVGUARD) do? To me this sounds like malloc has a hook that maps process ids and tries to find heuristics of the allocated offsets?

Anybody know where those features are documented do someone can try to bypass/exploit it?
Either fork the process so the forked copy can dump its data (I think Redis itself does something like this), or launch a new process (with updated code if desired), then migrate the data and open sockets to it through some combination of unix domain sockets and maybe mmap. Or if we had OS's that really used x86 segmentation capability as it was designed for (this is one thing the 386 and later did cleverly) it could all be done with segments.
Because it's really, really slow compared to in-language variables? I've not yet ran out of memory because of program variables, and speed shouldn't be an argument for low memory footprint when it's already at best 1/10 of it's performance.
I figured out a good cadence; first threads discuss a schema and sketch/iterate over an ERD and C4 diagram. Then we have threads to build modules on top of a framework. It knows if we're working with python/typer/pydantic or go or typescript and various frameworks/design decisions... Key is keeping topics separate so contexts don't overrun. And be explicit to say "don't re-generate code just talk high level" etc.
facts themselves are fictions - they are only a description of memes which have achieved consensus. Persuasion is all about 'ambient propaganda' - just flood the information system with your memes-of-choice and we will come to accept them as true