skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sure, but talking about Turing completeness is not about efficiency, but about the computational ability of a system.

I know. That is part of my claim that this "talking about Turing completeness" is a distraction. Specifically because it ignores efficiency/speed.

> Again, the point is not that this is a good way of doing something, but that it serves as a way to point out that what it takes to make an LLM Turing complete is so utterly trivial.

And again, I KNOW that it's utterly trivial to create a Turing Complete system. I ALSO know that a Turing Complete system can perform ANY computation (it pretty much defines what a computation is), given enough time and memory/storage.

But if such a calculation takes 10^6 times longer than necessary, it's also utterly useless to approach it in this way.

Specifically, the problem with Turing Completeness is that it implies the ability to create global branches/dependencies in the code based on the output of any previous computation step.

> The "feature set" of Turing Completeness can be reduced to a loop, an array lookup, and an IO port.

This model is intrinsically single threaded, so the global branches/dependencies requirement is trivially satisifed.

Generally, though, if you want to be able to distribute a computation, you have to pretty much never allow the results of a computation of any arbitrary compute thread to affect the next computation on any of the other threads.

NOBODY would be able to train LLM's that are anything like the ones we see today, if they were not willing to make that sacrifice.

Also, downstream from this is the hardware optimizations that are needed to even run these algorithms. While you _could_ train any of the current LLM's on large CPU clusters, a direct port would require perhaps 1000x more hardware, electricity, etc than running it on GPU's or TPU's.

Not only that, but if the networks being trained (+ some amount of training data) couldn't fit into the fast GPU/TPU memory during training, but instead had to be swapped in and out of system memory or disk, then that would also cause orders of magnitude of slowdown, even if using GPU/TPU's for the training.

In other words, what we're seeing is a trend towards ever increasing coupling between algorithms being run and the hardware they run on.

When I say that thinking in terms of Turing Completeness is a distraction, it doesn't mean it's wrong.

It's just irrelevant.
Almost 12 years ago, I wrote my first web server in C. It was for a router/firewall device running Linux From Scratch(LFS), I can't recall the kernel version(2.6.x?).

Reading this just took me back and made me realize even though we have progressed so far with tech stack and new technologies(LLMs), there is so much joy in just writing plain C code. To me its just feels like working on a classic old 68 mustang and getting your hands dirty. What a joy!
>Okay to be clear, I've written a paper on exactly this topic which will be announced in a week or so. So you won't find anything on the subject yet, haha. But I use almost exactly this example.

I would use Floating Point arithmetic as the example/analogy: one trades off accuracy/precision for exactness/correct-ness when in the extremities. Answers near the more granular representations will be only be able to represented by their nearest value. If this is forsee-able, the floating point implementation can be adjusted to change where the floating point's "extremities'" are.

I used the above analogy and the following when articulating the magnitude of near-lossless-ness that large LLM's have managed to attain, especially when all of the humanities corpus is compressed into a USB flash drive; the Kolmogorov complexity re-mitted/captured is similar to a master-piece like the Mona Lisa having to be described in X many brush-strokes to achieve Y amount of fidelity.
I read posts like this and thank Buddha that I, for the last couple of decades of my working life, didn't work in an environment that necessitated using MS products.
Really funny how the US Court system becomes really interested in cases as soon as shareholders file a lawsuit.

When people file a lawsuit, it is given due consideration because sending it down to the dumpster.
I guess his point remains though that if all you need is infinite divisibility then using the rational numbers between 0 and 1 would be sufficient. I take it as that was what was meant and "real" numbers was just shorthand for that.
> Some of that information is lies, but a lot of people spread fact.

And how do you know which is which, hmmm?
You're bringing glass containers with you to restaurants for your leftovers?
> Dedoimedo writes his book in LibreOffice, but then must use Microsoft Office for when he wants to talk to the publishers.

Are these publishers using antiquated versions of MS Office from before it added ODF support?
It was less beautiful if you spent two hours stuffed into a subway car (because at first they kept trains moving toward where the device was, but they were slowed, so we stopped at two packed stations full of people who were going to be late for work.)
Fox News and OAN has taught us that even news agencies and journalism aren't the way to guarantee fact or truth.

Yellow Journalism is a term for over 100 years ago. People lying with a broad audience is nothing new.

addendum: and how many times have you read a news article from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal that's in your area of expertise that's made you go "wow, everything they've said here is wrong, said with an agenda, misinterpreted or other propaganda"?
This is awesome!

Is there a reason for the dramatic speed-up around delays of 1.8-2ms? On my machine Quick Sort takes 12 seconds at 2ms, about 6 seconds at 1.9ms, and just over 1 second at 1.8ms (with the default 300 items).
Scammers seem to be using AI generated voice extremely effectively, causing serious harm to their victims.

AI generated video seems to be getting used for that kind of thing now too.

Well done AI voice generation people, well done. /s
It's outrageous that anyone resigned or was fired over this other than city employees of Boston for lying about a stupid sign.
What do you mean? It's been there for years: https://packages.debian.org/docker.io

It’s an old version, and I think it isn’t supported by Docker Inc (for the reasons mentioned in the sibling comment), but it’s there.
Because eventually you'll want to insert an image with text wrapped around it, or really anything more complicated than straight-down text and tables, and "just write HTML and CSS bro" is insanely unrealistic.

Sure, WYSWIYG editors for Markdown could exist, but building these editors gets crazy complicated fast, and why would you when Office exists?
Alternatively the Supreme Court wants to issue an ruling that says invading people's privacy for profit, or to provide it to political parties, is legal and therefore not subject to lawsuits or legal challenges in future.
Death During Consensual Sex
Discussion (91 points, 2 months ago, 32 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41661673
"Now, my caddie chauffeur didn't need to inform me that holding stock is where people put money that is properly invested, therefore a shareholder lawsuit involves the most heinous of crimes: Theft of money. And the others don't."

(Futurama ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns8z1RYf9mM&t=1m11s)
Which still leaves stelae as already mentioned. There's also petroglyphs, ceramics, and paints. The point I'm trying to convey is that writing has never been limited solely to paper or even organic materials.
H5N1 isn't exclusively avian flu, and the current receptors for the strain circulating in the U.S. have much more affinity for binding sites found in human eyes (hence conjunctivitis being one of the most common symptoms) and bovine mammary tissue.

"H5N1" is a crude description of a wide variety of strains, some more amenable to avian hosts, some not.

As for why milk is being dumped into the wastewater system? Because that's where it goes.
Egyptian is afro-asiatic but not semitic, like Berber, somali and others
This looks quite serious (which would be unsurprising given that Fei-Fei Li and Christopher Ré are involved).

I'm also quite interested in the nuts and bolts: does anyone know what the current accepted leaderboard on this is? I was screwing around with GritLM [1] a few months back and I seem to remember the MTEB [2] was kind of the headline thing at that time, but I might be out of date.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.09906
[2] https://huggingface.co/blog/mteb
My VMware continues to work the same.
It's not funny, it's by design. Property owners and investors are usually given the most attention by courts because they matter more broadly speaking.
Befriend a Crow
Is this a freely available library (JS?) they use for this?
> When people file a lawsuit, it is given due consideration because sending it down to the dumpster

Broadly speaking, our post-War system of laws puts consumers at the top. Right below them, investors. Way below them, workers.

If you engage the legal and regulatory system properly as a consumer, you can move mountains. Even without a lawyer. As an investor, you typically need a lawyer, but with that hurdle met you're similarly powerful. As a worker, the system seems to presume you're SOL on arrival.
A $60B-a-Year Climate Solution Is Sitting in Our Junk Drawers
Colima is the way to work with Docker on mac nowadays. I appreciate Docker Inc folks trying to get some money, but Docker Desktop is just not worth it.
Literally a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42214873
There is a lot of really phenomenal metal based around WWI for anybody else interested. Bands like 1914 (sings exclusively about WWI, from Ukraine) and Warbringer (a couple of songs specifically about WWI) come to mind.
Relative, or absolute? Can't help feeling this is relative and so needs to be understood as such. Meta is going to be fine despite my boycott.
"L7" is hippie sign language for "square".
NetZeroAI harnesses advanced machine learning
algorithms to provide real-time data analysis and insights.
Our platform transforms raw data into actionable intelligence,
enabling businesses and individuals to make informed decisions and
optimize their operations for maximum efficiency.
Sounds like a task "easily" done with one massive painful line of `gst-launch-1.0 filesrc ... ! ... ! splitmuxsink`
Can you please elaborate a bit more about your issues with PyTorch on M4 mac. I read PyTorch has some support for Mac GPU with MPS backend, but not sure how extensive it is. I am looking for a new machine, and use of PyTorch and LLM inference are one of the main uses. Sorry for being a bit off-topic from the thread. Thanks.
> Big part of SF's public transport is rail-based

Right, keep that and keep investing in that. The tweet's point, if borne out, is the bus system could be replicated with better service at similar or lower cost. That either makes the system better. Or it frees up resources to pump into rail.
> Alternatively the Supreme Court wants to issue an ruling that (...)

According to the article, the supreme court actually declined to issue a ruling in this case. Curious if that causes you to update your beliefs in any manner.
But that's what I wrote?

> > swim up the randomly "wrong" rivers

And the reason for that is discovering new habitats. But the other comment I referred to, mentions this already so I left that out.

Didn't know about this though:

> spawning all these years but below the dams.

I thought, however, that it'd been funny if such a non-event (the fish didn't ...) had been in the news.
Refurbished heart pacemakers work like new
Big in 2018 (326 points, 86 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16856694

Moderate in 2020 (107 points, 42 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25237181
> Broadly speaking, our post-War system of laws puts consumers at the top. Right below them, investors. Way below them, workers.

That is not true. Failure to pay employee salaries is a very easy way to pierce the corporate veil. It is not just you become another creditor like a consumer or a supplier would be.
It's easy to believe when you learn that there are still parts of the world that struggle with literacy.
> Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users’ personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica...

Anyone following this case and care to share their thoughts of how likely the plaintiffs are to prevail? Is the expectation that Meta will settle out of court?
> Failure to pay employee salaries is a very easy way to pierce the corporate veil

Legally, yes. Practically, many employers bounce paycheques and get away with it. It’s tedious to enforce worker rights in a way it isn’t for consumers. (In most states, you can get the AG basically working for you by copying their office on a complaint to the company.)
People need to be told this usage of the word 'liberal' is completely bonkers
UAP Report to US Congress (Nov 2024) [pdf]
Just a fun, if not interesting report submitted to US Congressional Record this month regarding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).
I will never understand all the apologists.

They were crudely constructed.

There was no information attached to them (one of the things MIT hackers always did was place clear contact information, removal instructions, etc on anything they left somewhere public.)

The devices had large cylinders wrapped in plastic. Sure, they could be batteries. They could also be containers of explosives.

Some of them the character is angry, and giving the finger. Sure fits a "angry at the world" attitude of a bomb-maker.

It doesn't seem to occur to people that bombs can be designed to attract attention, and can be booby-trapped to try and kill bomb disposal teams.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to people that if you are a bomb squad or police commander, you don't have the luxury of saying "oh yeah, that thing strapped to the bridge support for an interstate, phsht, that probably isn't a bomb, that's probably just some weird vidyah game character" because if you're wrong, people die. No. You get people away from it and try to figure out what it is.

Oh, and it turned out there had been a hoax bomb left in a hospital earlier by someone who was acting deranged, and incidents in NY and DC right before all this.

Then a few years later, wouldn't you know...a few miles away, two assholes left a bunch of pressure cookers at the finish line of the marathon, killed a bunch of people and wounded dozens, murdered a campus cop, and then led police on a gunfire-filled chase through multiple towns.
Great point! It is not shade at all, you are trying to normalize this which I like. For unpaid, volunteer, or hobby code feeling a _need_ because its public can make coding less fun or prevent people from sharing code publicly they otherwise would.
Sure, but saying "isn't this just what any capitalist would do" necessarily demands a discussion of the legalities. Trying to ignore if it's legal or not in a discussion of if it's a normal end game for all companies is absurd. If it was legal to murder your business rivals, then sure, it would likely be fairly normal to do so, but it's not, so what's the point of mentioning it?

The outrage over his actions is specifically because it's likely not legal or ethical. Compare to the stuff Tim Sweeney is doing in his fight with Apple - he's done a lot of stuff that I would say is decidedly unethical, but understandable. It's also things where he's willing to pay the costs of doing it. Matt seems to fully believe this is legal, ethical, and completely justified and deserves to be lauded.
False. The human brain and eye is built to recognize foreground and background and shift focus and attention based off of blur.

Thousands of years of adaptation has honed the brain and the eye to be optimized for this type of view much moreso then the simple UX you see here on HN.

Not only does the blurred/frosted glass background look better but it should be clearer because that's what we've been designed to do.
> look at where democracy got us

It's gotten us far beyond anything humanity imagined before it - or than any other form of government has achieved - in terms of freedom, justice, security, prosperity, health .... It's like early Google investors saying, 'look where that investment got us' - as a criticism!

Name any non-democratic country that compares!
Many places in the world use it now.
Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest
Stanislaw Lem's short story "The Truth" https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-truth-by-stanislaw-le...
I'd like to know if there is a way to have FF developer tools automatically update CSS like Chrome does if you add a directory to its sources tab. Very useful.
> The devices had large cylinders wrapped in plastic. Sure, they could be batteries.

They were bog standard D batteries:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic#...

> Then a few years later, wouldn't you know.

This has literally nothing to do with anything.

> I will never understand all the apologists.

Well some people are rational and some people aren't so it's only natural that the latter don't understand the former (ie that's usually how it goes)
I’m not sure that citing three things that the traditional media has been happy to report on too is a very good way of making your point. The real danger is the content you don’t see:

“A [Rutgers Univerity] study […] asserts TikTok’s algorithms promote Chinese Communist Party narratives and suppress content critical of those narrative“

https://www.kqed.org/news/11999273/tiktok-stacking-algorithm...
FPGAs are massive meshes of 4-bit SRAMs mostly mimicking aluminium traces, they are minimum 4x or so worse than real chips made in the same process.
> Reading mean comments on Elon's social media platform is not "suffering". You can just turn it off and stop using it.

The comments have a real-world impact - does anyone claim otherwise? Why would we even imagine that people magicially forget what they read on X when they log off? The hate spreads and is inflamed, people are conditioned to cruelty, and we know very well where that leads in the real world: brutality, oppression, and harassment. Musk's goal is to terrorize federal workers into leaving their jobs - not just in their X feeds.

How do you not stand against that? How do you spend time defending this person?

> Stop comparing it to life under dictators. Talk to people who lived under Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao or Ceuasescu.

Only life under Pol Pot, Stalin, etc. is bad enough to be a problem and nobody else can be criticized? (And I didn't compare anyone to those people, you did.) That's an extreme standard. And again, do you wait until people are dying and being oppressed? They already are victims of hate, violence, and oppression in record numbers.
Being in the top 0.001% of developers won’t help if you don’t have a large network or good brand
I've heard this argument before, and generally don't buy it. It really comes down to how hard they're looking.

We have found many dinosaur bones that are hundreds of millions of years old. We have an Australopithecus skeleton (Lucy) from 3.2 million years ago. We have many examples of writing that would be similarly durable. Even if most things wither or decay or erode or get scavenged or build over, so 99% of it is gone in 10,000 years, there's still plenty that'd get buried and preserved. You give the example of monuments. They're not all that rare though. Every town has a few, usually right at the center, right where excavation would be most likely. I'm thinking of the world war memorials that every little English town seems to have, with the names of all their fallen soldiers. They're not ALL just going to turn to dust, right? There are temples in Egypt where you can still see not just what they carved in the stone thousands of years ago, but even the paint that they put on it.

So if we're all gone in 10,000 years and that traveller just buzzes by and doesn't scratch the surface or even look very hard, sure. But if they're excavating at the level that humans are today, it will be hard to miss that we had writing.
Chariots of The Gods.
Important today. Is usage of Excel increasing over time? Or decreasing?
Funny, my wife is primary care yet does on call via answering service. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.
Looks like a lot of work to make those
I went in to a hospital at just after midnight, and had my gall bladder out by noon. No, the surgeon wasn’t called in early, but the radiologist who diagnosed the gall bladder was.
It’s important today. Is Excel usage increasing or decreasing over time? That’s important.

If it even loses 5% usage per year that’s huge over time.
> The problem that I’ve just expressed ultimately occurs because languages like C force us to encode both kinds of assumption with a single assert statement: either all asserts are compiled in or none are.

It’s trivial to write a debug_assert macro in C, so no, you’re not forced to do that.
Let's not pretend that autocracy doesn't come with downsides. The same ease of decision that leads to the ability to build quickly (opposition is illegal) can lead to a fatal miscalculation like Putin did in February 2022.

Democracies are messy, but a lot less warlike. Current peace in Europe, after centuries of endless bloodshed, is nice to have. NIMBY is a bad problem for growth, but I am positive we can overcome it one day. Some places already did, by clever legislation (NZ, Israel, several cities in the US).

Even without wars, you can have autocrats making stupid economic decisions. I am not convinced that a septuagenarian apparatchik like Xi can wisely decide that software bad, manufacturing good. And yet he makes such decisions on behalf of 1,5 billion people and thus shapes the investment flows and future of the Chinese economy for decades to come, decades that he personally won't even live in.
I'm a Linuxbrew user, too, even on top of normal Ubuntu distros because (a) the rapid release cycle you mentioned (b) because so much of my workflow is built on top of Homebrew it was natural for me to just continue using it when I used Ubuntu at work

I will also confess(?) that I run it in "unsupported mode"[1] because (a) I often need to fix bugs in the software and tweaking ${whatever}.rb and $(brew reinstall -s -v $whatever) makes that painless (b) I keep my actual $(brew repo) pretty dirty, too, to cure a lot of stupidity introduced by running it in unsupported mode :-D I actually would guess some of the patches would be valuable to the wider community but I lump Homebrew and Elastic into the "I don't have enough emotional energy to survive their PR process" camps

1: I don't have the finger-wagging link handy, but McQuaid used to really get bent out of shape about people running --build-from-source; it seems they've changed their mind https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/4.4.6/docs/FAQ.md#can-...
i have created a library for generating frosted glass effect, this looks so good on icons.

https://github.com/JP1016/react-icon-blur
Huge problem. How do I view a document on my phone with LibreOffice? How do I show my document to a client with an unknown different environment?

The web is universal.

I’m pretty sure half of all Internet traffic is on phones.

Just look at the kind of business Google Workspaces and Office 365 are doing.

Heck, LibreOffice has an OSS competitor on the web with OnlyOffice.
Seen this dance many times
Another reason is that the harm can often be quantified and remedy easily justified.
The fact that they moved is even more sad. Discrimination is at its peak. I wonder if an american kid puts a nuclear sticker to its laptop, would people react the same way.