skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are multiple levels to data. If 57% of respondents to a self reported survey say they are going to do X, it doesn't mean that 57% of people are actually going to do X. But if you do the same survey again and now only 43% of respondents say they will do X, then that is clear evidence something has clearly changed, even if you don't know exactly what effect that something will have on X. That is very useful.

The problem is when people only look at self reporting. For example if in the previous scenario 57% responded X but only 54% actually did X, then someone might naively assume that after 43% respond X that 40% will actually do X. Or just as naively they could say 54% will still do X. Or they could apply any of an infinite number of other models. There exists a model that will spit out any given answer for any given input, so without that followup work to actually verify and understand the underlying mechanism, models are worthless.
For those not reading the article:

- The HN title is misleading. The real title is "When is it too hot to use a fan?"

- The article explains: "The key point: Above 35°C, humidity matters a lot. In very dry conditions, a fan could be counterproductive, whereas in very humid ones it could continue to help at much higher temperatures." They quote two controlled studies that show the same results so there's no reason to debate this.

It's just a bad title. There's nothing controversial here.
Markets are what you described. Participants that regularly beat the market are rewarded with more money (and confidence) which lets them bet larger size and have more impact on the market.

Uninformed bets should wash out as noise, and informed bettors should reverse uninformed moves so long as they are profitable.
Tell that to my usual Spring. Here come the 80s/90s and humidity until November.
Redondo Beach brought its homeless numbers to 'functionally zero'
I've spent some time looking at group decision making for specific situations and there are clearly some examples where they work very well--and I think you hit on one of the factors. The individual guesses don't affect the outcome and aren't being used to hedge anything. I think there are some other factors as well but I'm not sure I've ever seen a particularly persuasive framework for when prediction markets can work and when they don't.
> CSV does not have anything like that.

If you're using a fallible CSV dialect, your application does need to handle that case in some way (or in some cases it may be fine just to let it crash). Something like length-before-text is convenient because you don't have to worry about that case.
the same dynamic is true of insurance, credit default swaps, and lots of other financial products. this causes trouble from time to time but can be managed if the products serve a useful purpose.
Nothing at all to do with string theory (Hamiltonian reference string).

One /could/ potentially consider ASCII code points (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii) as a form of typed godel numbers, but it is very doubtful anyone on the committe in the 60's when ASCII was developed was thinking of "typed godel numbers".

As far as early languages that had a "CHR" function "CHR" was simply an abbreviation for "character", because the function returned the "character" (as a string type) that was represented by the integer argument:

https://qbasic.com/documentation/CHR$.html
Ah,the brave new world of everyone for himself. i ecpect finland,svedes, korea and japan and the poles to announce nuke ownership any day now. Lessons were learned, the isolationism has been planned for.
GEB and strange loop focus a lot on consciousness. Are you sure your definition isn't conflating intelligence and conscious? It feels like you are
I found them consistently slower in unary unicode tables, with sizes from 1.000 to 30.000. Binary search and hashtables were both better.

The reason might be that ordered search tables and perfect hashtables can be dumped to C code statically, roaring not, so there is the dynamic alloc and deserialization overhead.
Every major metropolitan area has something like this because the market for used office furniture is ubiquitous and not limited to a small geography of tech companies. If you need some sturdy training tables for projects or some metal bookshelves they can be had for next to nothing at these places.

The one thing that has become a bit harder to find are lab and assembly workbenches. That stuff used to similarly cheap 20 years ago.

Another fun one is the usually poorly named "electronics recycler" - the kind of stuff rolling through these can be astounding, and they usually have people earning minimum or close to minimum wage dealing with it all - which yields strange pricing (some great deals, some preposterous) and a lot of stuff just getting dismantled/crushed/shipped overseas.
Fischer is "simpler" if you have a Fischer clock (and "simplicity" is basically irrelevant if you have a programmable software clock). If you have to manually add time each move it's a whole other story. A traditional analog clock (as used for chess) only knows how to count a fixed amount of time for each player, and anything else is a manual adjustment. If you have to do it mechanically, surely a single byoyomi period (reset to X if the button is pressed while the needle is between zero and X) is at least as easy to implement as Fischer (move the needle back by Y every time, limited to some Z maximum).
There are so many implications to this story that are wild to think about.

How did the elephants know generally where this person lived? How did they know specifically which house she lived in? How did they know there was a funeral to crash?

I'd speculate that the answer is scouting, and the idea of elephants scouting for other elephants in a planned attack is so damn cool that I just want to assume that must be the answer in the face of knowing that I'm speculating.
So you can add credentials by clicking on the agent name and getting to the agent config. The agent in the video that had the credentials was a different private agent I have. Credentials were just added as a feature and I haven't built the functionality yet to fork them (need to fork only the keys not the value). But you can add credentials to any agent. If you can't find them, ping me at my HN handle at gmail and I can give you a quick walk through. Thanks again for checking Fabrk out!
This reminds me of a social studies teacher I had all the way back in like 1993. It was hot in the classroom and students would make paper fans and fan themselves. The teacher told us that the motion actually generates more heat and makes you hotter.

He was right technically of course - 30 students waving something will probably heat up a windowless classroom a degree or two - but it still felt much better to have the air movement.

The room I'm in now does get hot, and a fan pointing inward with one closed window doesn't help me feel more comfortable, but if I open 2 windows and have a fan pointing outward to create a current, it's great. Fans can blow hot air in an enclosed space and be unhelpful.
Before discounting it, I think the article has some very interesting, non-obvious conclusions. Fundamentally that, in humid conditions, fans are more effective at higher temperatures, while in drier conditions, since most of the sweat on you will already have evaporated away, fans in dry environments are only useful up to a lower temp, as after that they act like a convection oven.

The article did mention some studies spritzed participants with water, but didn't seem like they tested it across all possible conditions. Seems like spritzing yourself with water even in a dry environment would make a fan still a benefit at higher temps, given the proposed explanations in the article.
That's not the usage I'm familiar with, e.g. sci-fi novels will frequently use AI for actually intelligent and possibly sentient beings that just aren't biological (see Skippy in Expeditionary Force), the intelligence isn't usually a party trick or something that just looks like intelligence. While it's true that people use "AI" to describe e.g. enemy behavior in games, I don't think people fundamentally mean the same thing when they discuss AI in the context of AGI, which some people fully believe LLMs will become.

The term is fuzzy though and people mean different things by it.

Although your analogy does make sense, but I've never run into "synthetic intelligence" used as a term.
but the business internet (with static ip) is expensive.
I think evidence would make this a stronger argument. Most of the people I've known with modest stock grants ignored them, or at least that's what they said -- kind of "maybe it will be worth something, but probably not". For really large grants, I'm sure it's different, but that is a far smaller number of employees.
The anecdote of the Google executive is a lovely example of why the market failed to work as a predictions market. If you had a stake on Google executives continuing to drag their feet on filling that position based on their past performance, and then they saw that prediction and were so incensed that they stopped dragging their feet, then you lost your stake!! The existence of the market changed the outcome; that's the whole point of the objection here! If you believe the purpose of such a market is to affect the real world in such a way, then sure, that's a reasonable stance... but that's not a market for making predictions, that's a distributed market for bidding on contracts.
I know his work well, I must rephrase my question

he answers why it works well, but I don't think he really addresses why the "folding" pattern (as I called it) arises

I'm also looking at Erv Wilson's work (in the book by Nakamura) and he gets closer to addressing what I'm focusing on.
> By 31-Dec-2025, you should be in the situation where you are not even inconvenienced if Google or Apple or Meta were to suddenly ban your account.

Have you done this for yourself? What was your process?
See my comment above to the original statement
> the public are absolute drooling morons

"They" aren't aliens. "They" come from that same public, and are as much drooling morons as the rest of the public (what i frequently remind to the Russians who whine about the Russian government).

>to rebuild trust in our institutions

will see how appointment of Kennedy Jr. as the health services tzar would work here :)

Popular thinking among the Russian opposition is that the way Western societies reacted to Covid demonstrated to Putin the loss by those societies and by their institutions of the ability to act reasonably. And the inept reaction to the war in Ukraine seems to confirm that.
Salary discussion is protected, is not a feeling. https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...

Union organisation should also be part of those protections but the US is still in the 1800 of labour rights for the time being.
You've made that point three times now, I understand your disagreement and have addressed it
At a minimum, 4 years in college. The things required to do the 10gbit router are things you will never run into, learn, or be challenged by bit banging SPI with an existing Ethernet peripheral.

Pretty much by definition, the engineering required for "high performance" anything is completely divorced from the knowledge required to implement basic systems.
What do the fish drink?
Reimagining the Fedora Linux Installer: Anaconda's New "Web UI"
Why is it shocking?
That's probably the one thing I love the most about computer science. Every simple problem ends up being surprisingly complicated once you dive deep into the exact details.
Yes. A fire is a natural threat that is in everyone's interest to address as quickly and forcefully as possible. Sexual harassment is an element of interpersonal politics, which necessarily involves painstakingly slow progress and a lighter touch to avoid going backwards. Of course as we get better and better at preventing natural threats, those too start to transition into the realm of politics. eg "Why do we have so many building codes when structure fires are so rare?"
1. No, Google isn’t taking actual money bets from their employees.

2. No, Google isn’t taking actual money bets from their employees.

3. What employees do with their vested RSUs isn’t at all the same as hosting an internal gambling platform. Once they are vested, employees own the stock, they can do whatever they want. One could sell them all and use the money to bet on roulette, which I think is obviously gambling, but that’s also obviously not Google hosting a gambling platform internally?

I’m just surprised that Google hosting a platform where employees gambled was… allowed? This isn’t a moral judgement, I’m surprised that Google was operating a gambling platform internally and legal etc. thought that was a good idea.
Doesn't matter: if they can't secure their data, the contract is terminated, and they possibly get taken to court.
> It’s unlikely prediction markets affect natural disaster odds.

They don't need to. Predictions markets for natural disasters exist, we call them insurance companies, and the concept of moral hazard when it comes to insurance is a well-studied topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
I wonder what was the reasoning behind the last eslint update.
Yeah it's something we need to get better at.
The last one ("Your mail will look nothing like this") is corrupted, after a few milliseconds there's loud static.
Here's the punchline from the Product Brainstorming example, imagining new AI-driven features to add to Microsoft Word:

> AI-driven context-aware assistant. Suggests writing styles or tones based on the document's purpose and user's past preferences, adapting to industry-specific jargon.

> Smart template system. Learns from user's editing patterns to offer real-time suggestions for document structure and content.

> Automatic formatting and structuring for documents. Learns from previous documents to suggest efficient layouts and ensure compliance with standards like architectural specifications.

> Medical checker AI. Ensures compliance with healthcare regulations and checks for medical accuracy, such as verifying drug dosages and interactions.

> AI for building codes and compliance checks. Flags potential issues and ensures document accuracy and confidentiality, particularly useful for architects.

> Design checker AI for sustainable architecture. Includes a database of materials for sustainable and cost-effective architecture choices.

Right, so what's missing in Word is an AI generated medical compliance check that tracks drug interactions for you and an AI architectural compliance and confidentiality... thing. Of course these are all followed by a note that says "drawbacks: None." Also, the penultimate line generated 7 examples but cut the output off at 6.

The intermediate output isn't much better, generally restating the same thing over and over and appending "in medicine" or "in architecture." They quickly drop any context this discussion relates to word processors in favor of discussing how a generic industrial AI could help them. (Drug interactions in Word, my word.)

Worth noting this is a Microsoft product generating ideas for a different Microsoft product. I hope they vetted this within their org.

As a proof of concept, this looks interesting! As a potentially useful business insight tool this seems far out. I suppose this might explain some of Microsoft's recent product decisions...

https://github.com/microsoft/TinyTroupe/blob/main/examples/p...
Brian Kernighan is my favorite technical writer (alongside Doug McIlroy, but the latter didn't write any books, Research Unix manual pages are an art form in themselves). Basic books teach you the how, good books teach you the why, but the great books -- and Brian wrote some truly great ones -- teach you wisdom.

I read "Unix: A History and a Memoir", and it's a great book if you are into computer history, but it left me very sad. I don't know why, is it because Unix (in its philosophy) is dead? Is it because the people who help create and shape Unix are old and dying? I don't know. It's a great book but it left a void in my heart.
Dogs are amazing. And human brains/minds are without doubt even more complex than those of dogs. But it is typical for humans to not be aware of the true reasons of behaving or even feeling in the way they do.

When asked about causes of our behavior, we readily make up an explanation, and we believe our own explanations completely whether they are true or false. There is a considerable literature demonstrating in an experimental setting how easily the behavior is controlled by the factors that are not consciously perceived, and how it is rationalized post factum in plausible but arbitrary ways. More informally, many fiction writers show characters, for example falling in love and showing that through their behavior, but refusing to admit that they are in love, even when explicitly confronted with the facts.

Of course one can say that an adult human can at least in principle, sometimes, examine what is going on, while a dog is probably much less capable of such complex analysis and is more like a small child. This seems plausible.
This article is IMO quite a stretch based on the actual data.

> New research from two different groups of thermal physiologists favors the higher temperature limits, especially in humid weather. But the groups don’t agree on a single temperature threshold. One study, published on 6 November in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), reports that fans can relieve stress on the heart in elderly people in humid conditions at 38°C. The other, published on 17 October in JAMA, concluded there was little additional benefit from using a fan above 35°C.

The NEJM article is pay-to-read. The JAMA article took older adults, had them sit in a room at 36C, for 8 hours, getting very occasional light exercise and tested three different air movement speeds. The body temperature of the subjects was 38C, independent of fan speed, from which IMO one can conclude approximately nothing other than that the subjects' bodies were warmer than ideal under those conditions.

In my personal experience, the effect of air movement and body movement under conditions like this is dramatic. "Resting" (as the study had the subjects do) in the daytime (as the subjects did) is, for me, not so pleasant. Add a fan, and it's less unpleasant. Riding a bike can be very pleasant as long as there's plenty to drink. But I suspect that my rectal temperature would be more or less independent of any of this.
They don't use real money. It's no different than having a poker night with Monopoly money and the winner gets a prize.
How does a prediction market for say, hurricanes or earthquakes effect the outcome of those events?
That is exactly what I'm seeing - heuristics applied lazily. If it wasn't worth mentioning it was at least worth replying to, right? ;)
I think that we're kind of biased about these sort of things due to the limitations that evolution has placed on most animals.

We take for granted that we cannot regrow lost limbs or direct individual cells to grow into arbitrary organs as directed by our brains because we can't do it but there's no intrinsic biological reason why that must be so.

In a hypothetical first contact situation with intelligent life as we know it they may find it absurd that we can't do those things and wonder how we reached the technological level that we have despite having to spend so many resources on hospitals, work place safety and mechanical R&D instead of just growing what we need what we need it.

Our understanding of things like metal, glass, and computers would be totally different and far more implicit if we could simply grow organs or organisms that produce things for us on a molecular level if evolution had granted our brains the ability to control individual cells of our body.
There is quite some overlap, but the CSS generated by Figma is not really useful and of a grade I’d want in my application. On the other hand, there is a gradient where building in all the behaviour you could want in a designer application, makes the application so complex that it become unusable for designers.
I get where you're coming from, and obviously there are practical limitations on how deep one can and should go in an introductory class. But my recollection of AP Statistics 15 years ago is that, because the exam and therefore curriculum was so focused on running various tests on a TI-84, I learned way more about using this one specific graphing calculator than about statistics. I got a high score on the exam, but I never felt like I understood any of it until I got to college and took a statistics course that actually used calculus to show what was going on.
This is the Hacker News community. Let's be constructive and civil. Your comment would have more interesting and relevant if you had explained why this trading strategy is a bad idea instead of just labeling it as "idiotic".
Back in the day this was called Second Life
Like another poster pointed out, if an article whole premise is addressing terminology, it’s strange that they call something like a PowerEdge T320 a workstation. It’s not, the whole poweredge line is servers, although this one is a tower rather than rack mount.

I’m not a fan of having very strict labels for things like that, If you use a server as a workstation fine ! If your workload can run on a Mac mini you can call it your workstation as well if you wish!
Test-Time Training is incredibly powerful. Most recently, it has been shown that Self-Attention can in fact be viewed through the lens of test-time training, with a kernel-smoother "learning" from context. Simply replacing that with more powerful models than a kernel-smoother result in very capable and scalable models!

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04620
Semi-related: I had a dream about a law firm that specializes in suing casinos that prey on gambling addicts (in a way that violates the law), and has to make sure that their constant interaction with the gaming world doesn’t re-trigger their clients into old patterns.

Then it occurred to me that there are a lot of major lawsuits that depend on litigation finance, someone to front the cost of the lawsuit and return for a share of the winnings. So you could have a situation where gambling addicts are forced to resort to “their old ways” to get it off the ground!

(And leading to a paradox where, if they can bet on this case in a controlled way … maybe they really weren’t addicted the whole time? Like in the paradox about the lawyer who sues over getting a bad legal education.)
No AI-based tools were used to make the lore. One of our developers (not me) is more of an intense reader and retro gamer; he was the one chosen to write it.
Your tax dollars at work :/
You can embed a C/C++ program into arbitrary places using WASM as a runtime, so if you have any C++ program you want to automate, you can "lift and shift" it into WASM and then wrap it in something like TypeScript. This is surprisingly useful. WASM also removes sources of non-determinism, which may enable you to do things like aggressive caching of programs that would normally be slightly non-deterministic (imagine a program that uses a HashMap internally before dumping its output). I use this to run FPGA synthesis and place-and-route tools portably, on all operating systems, with 100% deterministic output: https://yowasp.org/

memory64 support will be very useful, because many non-trivial designs will use a lot more than 4GiB of RAM.
Just don't export that kind of road behaviour to other countries, please.

That's another important point he makes: these self-driving cars will probably not be retrained for every single country, so you risk exporting the dangerous behaviour of American drivers to other countries.

A better solution is less cars, more other modes of transportation.
Great piece, if you write more would love to read your thoughts on what makes a great trader vs. what makes a great forecaster.