skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> especially if you're doing varied, novel work.

What do you mean by that? In my experience they mostly help when you are doing mainstream, well-trodden work for which a company’s/project’s/domain’s inside knowledge isn’t needed. Maybe you mean the latter by “novel”?
After a couple of years of doing this, you've built up a backlog of your own, bespoke library code that makes you into a wizard. People are amazed at what you can do and perplexed with how little time it takes you to do it.

Nobody else can understand how it's built, but for some reason that's not their problem? It's not like they're taking the time to understand how React is built, either. But as soon as you do something on your own, whoooa buddy. Cowboy programmer alert. It's not good engineering if it's a single, coherent, vertically integrated system. It's only good engineering if it's a mishmash of half-solutions teetering on top of each other.
Canonical URL: https://faultlore.com/blah/everyone-poops/
I just noticed Halaska right next to it :)
SpaceX is basically a monopoly at this point. They defined a new kind of market and is the only one serving it.
The term "agent" is quite broad. In my definition, an LLM becomes an agent when it utilizes the tool usage option.

ChatGPT is a good example: you ask for an image, and you receive one; you ask for a web search, and the chatbot provides an answer based on that search.

In both cases, the chatbot has the ability to rewrite your query for that tool and is even able to call the tools multiple times based on the previous result.
And if that's the goal, there's some very simple ways to achieve that wither through CSS or even just plain HTML.
Javascript thinks that 11 < 3 but its still kinda useful anyway from time to time:

> [11,9,1,3].sort()
[ 1, 11, 3, 9 ]
We've already introduced you to Saby Explain, an open service designed to help you read and analyze query plans in PostgreSQL, and shared the insights on improving poorly performing queries using Explain recommendations.
In this post, we’ll highlight the key features that we believe will greatly improve your experience with our solution.
What is the mechanism to avoid this? Beyond using the web version. I'm not keen on the government telling me what apps I can and cannot use. I would like to continue using the app, I don't care about what the law says.
> I think digital money is just too abstract for kids, and even adults struggle with comparing amounts and truly grasping their significance. Handing over a stack of bills just feels a lot more significant than swiping your card, which is the same whether you’re buying a $5 coffee or a $5000 tranche of a home renovation. With cash, you have a lot of the stuff in your hand, and then you have less vs none.

But, that's how the world works. What major bills are you paying that you pay c cash for in the last decade? All the more reason to teach kids to operate in this way.
Another up-and-coming solution is Julia's simulation ecosystem [1]. It is powered by the commercial organization behind the Julia programming language, which has received DARPA funding [2] to build out these tools. This ecosystem unifies researchers in numerical methods [3], scalable compute, and domain experts in modeling engineering systems (electrical, mechanical, etc.) I believe this is where simulation is headed.

[1] https://juliahub.com/products/juliasim

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26425659

[3] https://docs.sciml.ai/DiffEqDocs/stable/
On the other hand, you can set read mode, and because the page is so basic, it works perfectly...
Theories are marketed too.
I am now using Modelica with OpenModelica at work to describe electromagnetic systems and it is an excellent language and, with OpenModelica, a excellent graphical user environment. Sometimes I think of it like SPICE but for multi-physics systems.

The Modelica library is quite mature and complete and the numerical solvers included with OpenModelica robust and performing.

It looks me a while to learn it but now it is paying out.

In addition the fact that Modelica is a standard implemented by several suppliers with an open source application is also great to avoid vendor lock in so that is a technology on which is safe to invest as an engineer and as a company.
The most important lesson from JWST's "baby Milky Way"
It's a little worse than that. Given two products that seem to do the same job on paper, the one with glossier marketing will win even if it is an unreliable pile of crap in practice.
Life on Ice
I do the same! Lately when something really infuriates me, I tend to lean into it, write the email with insults and all, and let chatgpt make it into something that won't get me fired.
Together with colleagues, I have been developing the dynamical systems modeling language "NESTML" for hybrid dynamical systems, that is, systems that contain continuous-time dynamics (expressed as ordinary differential equations) as well as being able to emit and receive discrete events that happen instantaneously in time. We strive for a minimal syntax, so you can write a model really concisely, for example:

model lorenz_attractor:

state:
x real = 1
y real = 1
z real = 1

equations:
x' = sigma * (y - x) / s
y' = (x * (rho - z) - y) / s
z' = (x * y - beta * z) / s

update:
integrate_odes()

parameters:
sigma real = 10
beta real = 8/3
rho real = 28

For events, there are constructs like "onReceive(in_port_name)" and "emit_spike()" (nomenclature there being clearly somewhat influenced from our neuroscience application domain).

It's still a work in progress, but we already have some cool applications, like a spiking neural network that learns and then replays sequences (https://nestml.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/sequence_l...).

I was frankly surprised that something like this did not already exist when I started development on NESTML. Modelica is similar, but does not seem to have support for discrete events. I realise all of this is a shameless plug ;) but in actuality we are of course very happy to receive comments and feedback! All development is out in the open on GitHub and it is GPL licensed. If someone knows of similar DSLs, I would be very happy to read your comments. Cheers!
hard to evaluate sustained high profits without context. is it due to continued innovation by the firm? or just rent seeking? both can be causes of profits but we should only be promoting one of those models
Alien life may look nothing like life on Earth
No, the reason is because there are different tradeoffs, and things that work well often trade off other things.

For instance, Dan is one of the best writers for illustrating a general point with dozens of rapid fire small examples. This gives the point credibility in a way that a writer who might craft an easier-to-digest narrative doesn't have, but can be tiresome for those don't like the style.
Is this generated by AI? Also how does power control or history cycles have anything to do with curing macular degeneration?
I'm having a hard time reading this as a reasonable suggestion, so I apologize in advance if I'm being closed-minded.

Do you not believe that this would lead to further bad outcomes? Children need something to do during the day, and with neither the ability to work, nor other obligations (not to mention their brains are not fully developed) it seems like they would end up far worse off than they would otherwise, even if the school was under-performing.
My take is that if the LLM outputs text for humans to read, that's not an agent. If it's making API calls and doing things with the results, that's an agent. But given the way "AI" has stretched to become the new "radium" [1], I'm sure "agent" will shortly become almost meaningless.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_fad
> Even after using Firefox's Reader mode, the paragraphs are too dense.

If you want to argue about other aspects of his writing style, fine. But those are normal-sized paragraphs. Scrolling through in reader mode, I saw maybe a couple paragraphs that stuck out as "too long to be a paragraph," and even those are only ~5 sentences (so maybe some of his sentences are too long?)

Social media has people thinking a paragraph can only be two sentences. At a certain point, you're basically just putting a line break after every sentence.
I really hate trying to carry conversation in restaurants for that reason, and because the background noise levels can often get to a point where you can only hear the person sitting right next to you.

You're absolutely right that 1) group composition, 2) room structure, and 3) motive(s) are all important factors. As someone else observed, having a "discussion leader" is also important in that sort of setting.
Do you use an specific tools to streamline the translation or format of your communication? I'm facing the same problem, but wonder how well an LLM would be at translating / understanding the domain specific terminology that we use.
Very cool, a bit like (total) recall for Windows, except I see you keep the data local ;)
Yeah, at least 90% of any job is just making license plates. I have worked on both very complex and challenging code and also very simple and easy code in my career, even within one job.
Model Evaluation with RandomForest and AdaBoost
Having lived next to someone who did that, and seeing how the Unibomber turned out. It’s tempting, but rarely actually helps resolve things.
It's on the front page with a little over 100 votes. Up votes are basically saying it's worth it...

If it wasn't worth reading it wouldn't have been up voted
What are the symptoms of snorting Adderall?

I am a child of the 1970s, so I was educated by staunch policemen about the signs of heroin, LSD ("Acid") and marijuana addiction. I've always steered clear of young men with red, crusty eyes, shaking hands and rapid, babbling speech. Because of these teachings and habits, I've never become addicted myself.

Besides avoiding Wall Street bankers, what tell tale signs might an Adderall junkie in my town or city exhibit?
It won't go for weeks, but days, and it takes some sideloading and finagling to get certain apk's to work, but I use a Sonim XP3+.

Runs Android Go, big battery that lasts a while, I can use Signal Messenger on it (though not super well), and it's tank-like in its construction. If you want to take that up a notch in terms of build quality, Kyocera sells a similar phone, the Dura XV Extreme+, which is roughly $250.

r/dumbphones is a decent resource. Unsuprisingly, it's not a large community, but it's a good place to get people's anecdotes about specific models.
> I’m thankful that my iPhone is old enough not to use LLMs.

Well, too bad for you, as a 3rd party we had no reason to artificially restrict our handsfree AI voice companion to new iPhone models: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id6737482921?mt=8

(shameless self-promotion)
The true "intelligence" I want isn't in rewriting or summarizing emails and texts IMHO - that's actually confusing and frustrating from a product usability POV.

What I'd truly love is the ability to dictate lists to Siri while walking, driving, or doing chores, and have Siri capture them in Notes as checklists, share them with my partner, and so on. I'd also like more contextual answers from my calendar, and the ability to access and share details from my notes, all in hands-free mode.
IMO the financial aspect is the strongest argument against assisted suicide. When the government can save money by encouraging you to kill youself the incentives are just really bad.
Somehow not surprised that the CEO who went viral for being awkwardly anti-woke has bad employment practices.
> You presume it has to be incredibly long range?

No. But you seem to presume engineers working on underwater communication are brainless morons.
Show HN: A graphema-color-emotion synesthesia
I'm not sure if this is controversial but here's my take: if your thesis can be so completely misunderstood on a cursory reading of a topic like this, it's either poor writing, or you're not writing in good faith, and are engaging in a kind of plausible deniability with regard to an unpopular opinion.

For me, the underlying problem with the piece (which I did read) is that it seems to accept and run with the basic idea that DOGE etc is about government reform rather than lack of accountability and self-serving grift. The tone in general is something like "well this is what you get for ignoring the need for government reform, a sort of monstrous crude reformer" rather than calling out the fundamental problems with conflict of interest and mismanagement afforded by further problems with lack of public accountability. It seems to me to have the same basic problems in ethical reasoning as blaming the victim arguments, although the contours are different.

I'm generally someone who is for deregulation in a lot of government, but that's not what we're seeing with DOGE. The problems are not about the orderliness of the disruption, it's about the nature of it and the ultimate actual goals of those involved, which are not in the public interest. Government reform in this particular case, in my opinion is just a fraudulent cover story for blatant grift and self-serving financial and social aggrandizement. No con artist is open about what they're doing; there's always a cover story, which is the nature of the thing. This piece at least indirectly supports that fraud by accepting its motivations and methods — if not its tact and pleasantness — at face value.

It's either poorly written to me, or disingenuous.
Visualizing All ISBNs (and $10k bounty by 2025-01-31)
I didn't know what it was, so: https://www.home-assistant.io
谢谢！more tk on distance

yes, bunches are "just" a commutative monoid (A,(B,C)) == A,B,C == ((A,B),C)

set boundaries mean that {A,{B,C}} != {{A,B},C}
> Now when people ask for FDM printer recommendations, I tell them that this hobby has two main paths: One path regards the printer as a tool to create things for other projects; the other path has the printer as the project itself.

This is undeniably true at the youtube content level.

But at the printer level I think consumers will crash into this far less if buying the latest. Creality’s three new Ender 3 V3 models are all low-tinkering models, even the cheapest. So are the Anycubics. Sovol’s latest machines like the SV06 Ace manage to be both fully open source and also highly tuned out of the box.

As much as I admire the build quality of (most of) the Bambu Lab machines, in real terms what they have actually achieved is making the closed source, closed build, hard to upgrade and repair, RFID-chipped-consumables printer acceptable to the market. They even almost succeeded in making printing dependent on the cloud, until their little distributed industrial accident happened.
Reading this, I realized a reason why I try to move as much of my computing life into Emacs as possible: because having full control over a, perhaps inferior, Elisp application does result in a better experience, as I have full control over everything.

At times I would think that my motive to do this was purely superficial (for fun, masochism, idealistic purity, etc.), but perhaps the software world is such a market for lemons that the best one can do is put all the watermELons they can get ahold of in their Emacs cart and go their way.
Another possible build is to use a mini-pc and M.2 connections

You'll need a mini-pc with two M.2 slots, like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-SER7-7840HS-Computer-Display/...

And a riser like this:

https://www.amazon.com/CERRXIAN-Graphics-Left-PCI-Express-Ex...

And some courage to open it and rig the stuff in.

Then you can plug a GPU on it. It should have decent load times. Better than an eGPU, worse than the AM4 desktop build, fast enough to beat the M4 (once the data is in the GPU, it doesn't matter).

It makes for a very portable setup. I haven't built it, but I think it's a reasonable LLM choice comparable to the M4 in speed and portability while still being upgradable.

Edit: and you'll need an external power supply of at least 400W:)
If you're thinking of Marcus Crassus, the dynamic there was that he'd offer to buy your burning property from you at a steep discount, and would only put the fire out if you agreed.
I agree. This feels like the norm now a days though. An initial soft launch, iterative improvements from there. If something catches on, great! If it doesnt, less money/time spent upfront investing in it.
users have been actively propagandized by the media against ‘AI’ but will probably find it useful in the cases where they use it
A1 mini is literally 179 USD
I suppose Epstein hanged himself or Jocelyn Cadbury shot himself, we shall not truly know.
I got the same vibe. I hate that I get those vibes wrong sometimes, but this story is so devoid of detail and life that it seems like the outline of a more realistic story.
This is generally referred to as an acausal modeling environment - you don't need to bring the causality of mathematical relationships, just bring the relationships.

There are several other tools in this space, not the least prevalent of which is Mathworks' Simscape product line [1]. Wolfram has a solution that is also very similar to Modelica [2]. Finally, I believe that you will find ModelingToolkit.jl [3] worth a look (along with Julia in general) if your interest is piqued here by Modelica. I believe MTK is a big slice of the future of acausal modeling tools.

[1] https://www.mathworks.com/products/simscape.html

[2] https://www.wolfram.com/system-modeler/

[3] https://docs.sciml.ai/ModelingToolkit/stable/examples/spring...
And where it's also hard to tell who is doing the work! I'm reminded here of psychics and cold readers. They can easily convince people that they have great mental powers by outputting ambiguous text and letting the consumers of it do most of the work. You'll see similar effects with Meyers Briggs tests and other sorts of business astrology: some people feel like they get a lot of value out of them, but rigorous tests don't back that up.
The revelations from the twitter files show that this is true. Social media works in tandem with US Federal Agencies to review what people see or don't.
That's exactly it, and I really like your observation that the "limit of 4" doesn't apply in some cases. Before/after class, we have the exact experience you mentioned here where people will transiently go around talking to different groups (often 2 or 3 individuals, sometimes more where there are more listeners than speakers).

What's really interesting about your observation is how the rule-of-thumb breaks down when the conversation is limited to more confined topics or: If the individuals see each other with some regularity outside the group setting (no need to engage in extended conversation about who's doing what) or some of the conversations involve topics brought up in the course of the class.
4o and o1 get this right.

LLMs should never do math. They shouldn't count letters or sort lists or play chess or checkers. Basically all of the easy gotcha stuff that people use to point out errors are things that they shouldn't do.

And you pointed out something they do now which is creating and run a python script. That really is a pretty solid, sustainable heuristic and is actually a pretty great approach. They need to apply that on their backend too so it works across all modes, but the solution was never just an LLM.

Similarly, if you ask an LLM a chess question -- e.g. the best move -- I'd expect it to consult a chess engine like Stockfish.
I was excited for the Genmoji, but they seem to be highly censorious and in general just have no idea how to represent many concepts as emoji.

The image playgrounds are obviously a nightmare that should never have seen the light of day.

The summaries are nice.
I thought Apple Intelligence would make Siri smarter but I have been extremely disappointed. Apple Intelligence is useless and makes Apple look stupid. Siri is still less than 50% useful and the only time it actually works is when I ask it to create a timer or an alarm. It's otherwise useless.

My kids and I have a game while I'm driving where I will ask Siri a perfectly reasonable question and we will guess whether or not it will answer it reasonably. I don't understand how it can be so bad compared to everything else out there.
Agreed - the edge-to-edge text can seem daunting and be a bit of a pain to read, depending on your display. I used reader mode to make it a bit more managable. Also worth noting the last ~30% of the page is two appendixes.

I think the article is worth a read, but doesn't necessarily introduce a new concept. Its basically stating that there are many broken products that you can buy, and they simply do not work. Typical wisdom says you should buy something you're not specifically good at building, or something that you're not "supposed to" build yourself because you specialize in something else. This article basically says that wisdom can be wrong and that there is value in building yourself. There are some good examples, but its definitely a position that you'd have to push to management at some companies because its a very bottom up position that many managers would not agree with.
For problems in the plane, it's natural to pick two coordinate functions and treat other quantities as functions of these. For example, you might pick x and y, or r and θ, or the distances from two different points, or...

In thermodynamics, there often isn't really one "best" choice of two coordinate functions among the many possibilities (pressure, temperature, volume, energy, entropy... these are the must common but you could use arbitrarily many others in principle), and it's natural to switch between these coordinates even within a single problem.

Coming back to the more familiar x, y, r, and θ, you can visualize these 4 coordinate functions by plotting iso-contours for each of them in the plane. Holding one of these coordinate functions constant picks out a curve (its iso-contour) through a given point. Derivatives involving the other coordinates holding that coordinate constant are ratios of changes in the other coordinates along this iso-contour.

For example, you can think of evaluating dr/dx along a curve of constant y or along a curve of constant θ, and these are different.

I first really understood this way of thinking from an unpublished book chapter of Jaynes [1]. Gibbs "Graphical Methods In The Thermodynamics of Fluids" [2] is also a very interesting discussion of different ways of representing thermodynamic processes by diagrams in the plane. His companion paper, "A method of geometrical representation of the thermodynamic properties of substances by means of surfaces" describes an alternative representation as a surface embedded in a larger space, and these two different pictures are complimentary and both very useful.

[1] https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/thermo/stat.mech.1.pdf

[2] https://www3.nd.edu/~powers/ame.20231/gibbs1873a.pdf
The only tool I appreciate is the text proofreading option. The summaries are ok but I could live without them. The rest is no good to me.
I think I’ve been trained for years to avoid Siri (because how embarrassingly bad it is) that I just never even think to “ask” my phone for anything.
The front page (danluu.com) has MM/YY on every post, at least.
Honest question, but how do we as a society culturally align on who has the right to space in low Earth orbit?

I understand there are treaties that prevent ownership of space in general, but it seems like at some point you could reach such density of satellites that at best, it impairs function, and at worst creates potential collisions.
You'd be surprised on how much government has their hands in US big tech companies.
What’s that boast again,

“move fast and break things” …