skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> an antibody to a correct-handed antigen would not automatically bind the mirror

I wouldn't expect it to, but rather I'd expect the immune system to learn the new antigen just like it learned the old one.
> Colleges started out as vocational schools for priests

Not really. Higher education started with Ancient Egypt's "School of Life" (surveying, mathematics, architecture, medicine etc - physical sciences) and "School of Death" (religion, philosophy etc - social sciences). Both were intended to produce graduates who would do actual jobs rather than being places of elite making connections or priests reciting religious texts.
Luckily public transit is amazing there.
My thinking exactly. He could've created a market for adding machines and, building on commercial success, use revenues to build more ambitious machines.
The concept of Rule Beating from Systems Thinking seems apt. You have some goal so you introduce a rule, but if you choose a bad rule, it ends up making things worse. The solution is to recognize that it was a bad rule, repeal it, and find a better one.
Awesome, thanks for being a subscriber from the beginning, that is great to hear! Time flies!
It’s for liability reasons. The driver is responsible for any damage caused to property or vehicles by passengers opening their door
2 million token size is not enough?
So cool, glad you've liked it all these years.
Sorry, completely wrong.
Fantastic shot! What's your mount/tracker?
The Australian government is targeting Meta on a wide range of issues and will keep doing so until they transfer more money to news oligarchs to compensate them for "loss of business model".
IME, people talking about aliens were engaging in psyops or misdirection. Unless you’re in the Serengeti, it makes more sense to assume horses before you jump to zebras.
> software engineering is different in many areas but today a lot of it is CRUD and plumbing

Which you can do away in a few days with frameworks and code reuse. The rest of the time is mostly spent on understanding the domain, writing custom components, and fixing bugs.
Have you considered politely asking for what you want?
I mainly develop TXR on a refurbished Intel box with a CPU that's like from around 2009 or something. It takes at least three times longer to rebuild everything than on modern machines. (It does have 32 gigs of RAM which is good for multiple virtual machines.) In fact I have one Dell box that was a server in a startup company that shut down in 2010. And that box builds the code significantly faster.
Are LLMs / AI attaining better results than the data they were trained on? For me, the answer is no: LLMs are always imperfectly modeling the underlying distribution of the training dataset.

Do we have sufficient data that spans the entire problem space that SWE deals with? Probably not, and even if we did it would still be imperfectly modeled.

Do we have sufficient data to span the space of many routine tasks in SWE? It seems so, and this is where the LLMs are really nice: e.g., scripting, regurgitating examples, etc.

So to me, much like previous innovation, it will just shift job focus away from the things the innovation can do well, rather than replacing the field as a whole.

One pet theory I have is that we currently suck at assessing model performance. Sure, vibes-based analysis of the outputs of the model make them look amazing. But is that not the literal point of RLHF? But how good are these outputs really?
> Overweight by definition is above average

Not true. Overweight and obese are defined on fixed scales. You can have a population that is 100% obese.
Not everyone considers their bodies to be “pesky”.
>[...]personal information of some Australian Facebook users was disclosed to the This is Your Digital Life app in breach of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). The information was exposed to the risk of disclosure to Cambridge Analytica and other third parties, and risked being used for political profiling purposes. [...]

The relevant law had been in force for two decades before facebook ever became relevant.
Zigbee has hardwired switch options so you aren’t replacing batteries, but I haven’t done a lot of them because they’re far from dirt cheap. Only in places where I find automations or smartphone control to be particularly useful, or where existing dimmers died and I figured I might as well upgrade.

Inovelli Blue are the ones I’m using, but at $50 each they’re competing against products like Lutron Caseta.

In some other places where it’s not just wanting the zigbee control, but also that the hardwired switch is in a stupid location, I’m using IKEA’s RODRET remote combined with their relatively cheap Zigbee bulbs, instead of Zigbee wall switches. They run on AAA batteries and seem to last quite a while, but I can’t say how long yet.

For plug-in lights where you just want on/off (garage strip lights for instance) their TRETAKT Zigbee outlet is a steal at $7. There’s a fancier version with energy monitoring too.

I sleep a little better knowing all my line voltage devices are from real brands with UL or equivalent testing, and the only cheap parts from mystery vendors with unknown certifications are 3V coin cell door sensors.
Detox day! Pick one day a week and no non-work device time. (Or non-work on work devices)
This is just Open Philanthropy laundering weird billionaire concerns again. The same people who decided they really needed to warn the world about garage borne designer pandemics (by totally misunderstanding what DNA actually is and does).
If busses are from Glasgow and trains from Edinburgh, then that loop thing is indeed from Tahiti.

https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/teslas-in-tunnels-i...

https://san.com/cc/vegas-loop-faces-numerous-trespassers-and...

Think about the capacity of an automobile vs a bus or a subway with several cars.
As someone mentioned in a comment up the chain, it's for liability reasons - if a passenger damages something with the door, the driver is on the hook.

Seeing how an autonomous vehicle is similarly liable for its impact on the environment it stands to reason this can and will be easily dealt with.
Taxis in Tokyo already have automated doors. The Toyota Crown's rear doors can open and close without the Cab driver getting out.
What I really like about protobuf is the DDL. Really clear schema evolution rules. Ironclad types. Protobuf moves its complexity into things like default zero values, which are irritating but readily apparent. With json, it's superficially fine, but later on you discover that you need to be worrying about implementation-specific stuff like big ints getting mangled, or special parsing logic you need to set default values for string enums so that adding new values doesn't break backwards compatibility. Json-schema exists but really isn't built for these sorts of constraints, and if you try to use json-schema like protobuf, it can get pretty hairy.

Honestly, if protobuf just serialized to a strictly-specified subset of json, I'd be happy with that. I'm not in it for the fast ser/de, and something human-readable could be good. But when multiple services maintained by different teams are passing messages around, a robust schema language is a MASSIVE help. I haven't used Avro, but I assume it's similarly useful.
Why do take T in this manner?

Won't it cause your hormones/sperm/hairline to get messed up?
sure, but if companies find that llm performance on tests is less correlated with actual job performance that human test performance, then that means the test might not be not a useful metric to inform automation decisions
Queen’s *Magic Tour* was also in 1986.
This is what keeps crossing my mind.

Even trivial things like an ETL pipeline for processing some data at my work fall into this category. It seemed trivial on its surface, but when I spoke to everyone about what we were doing with it and why (and a huge amount of context regarding the past and future of the project), the reason the pipeline wasn’t working properly was both technically and contextually very complex.

I worked with LLMs on solving the problems (I always do, I guess I need to “stay sharp”), and they utterly failed. I tried working from state machine definitions, diagrams, plain English, etc. They couldn’t pick up the nuances at all.

Initially I thought I must be over complicating the pipeline, and there must be some way to step it back and approach it more thoughtfully. This utterly failed as well. LLMs tried to simplify it by pruning entire branches of critical logic, hallucinating bizarre solutions, or ignoring potential issues like race conditions, parallel access to locked resources, etc. entirely.

It has been a bit of an eye opener. Try as I might, I can’t get LLMs to use streams to conditionally parse, group, transform, and then write data efficiently and safely in a concurrent and parallel manner.

Had I done this with an LLM I think the result eventually could have worked, but the code would have been as bad as what we started with at best.

Most of my time on this project was spent planning and not programming. Most of my time spent programming was spent goofing around with LLM slop. It was fun, regardless.
That's one way to look at science although it's a bit religious for my tastes. But it if were fully self-correcting, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Understanding why it isn't and how it fix it are social science problems.
I saw a video of a bunch of Waymos backed up on each other being too hesitant to make a turn. Kinda reinforced a fear I have of these things. Not to mention I would hate to try and wave one of these things to turn before me... or wink my headlights.

IDK, like I get the appeal for driverless cars, I just still don't like them.
Rubbish. I built a pipeline to handle document classification that successfully took care of ~70TB of mostly unstructured and unorganized data, by myself, in a couple weeks, with no data engineering background whatsoever. This was quite literally impossible a couple years ago. The amount of work that saved was massive and is going to save us a shit ton of money on storage costs. Decades worth of invoices and random PDFs are now siloed properly so we can organize and sort them. This was almost intractable a few years ago.
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> my favorite restriction is to try to do incredibly terse approaches for those first few. For example, do it all in a single Python line

Ha, this is pretty much my favorite restriction too. I try to do one single-line expression for input parsing, one for the part 1 solution, and one for the part 2 solution (eg [1]). Thought sometimes I can't manage it and I just fall back to solving it normally.

[1] https://github.com/benhaney/Advent-of-Code/blob/master/2024/...
Make your QEMU faster (2022)
I'm a bass player. The feel of the rhythm will carry you along. Especially if the rest of the band is U2. They had extremely solid time.

Now I'll have to re-listen to the material and see if I can get any inkling that he was struggling. I kinda don't think I will.
Yes, that dichotomy is present everywhere in the real world.

You need lye to make proper bagels. It is not merely harmless, but beneficial in small amounts for that purpose. We still must make sure food businesses don't contaminate food with it; it could cause severe — possibly fatal — esophageal burns. The "A little is beneficial but a lot is deleterious" also applies to many vitamins… water… cops?

Trying to turn this into an “it’s either always good or always bad” dichotomy serves no purpose but to make straw men.
Hey, thanks for the feedback!

re. intended purpose: Initially I started writing this to help tackle bigger problems - stuff you'd normally use multiple nested kubectl commands or write a lot of code for interacting with api-server.

Over time, I developed the shell environment around it and it became a daily driver for me as well. Indeed, there's a threshold where writing Cyphernetes becomes more economical than using kubectl but for doing most of the simple day to day stuff writing Cypher is too verbose.

The Cyphernetes shell has an early-stage feature that allows a syntax like you suggested - there's a tiny "macros" feature that lets you define custom procedures of one or more queries (currently shell only, not supported in the web client yet).

Macros are prefixed by ":" and you could define something like:

:pod condition

MATCH (pods:Pod) WHERE $condition

RETURN p.metadata.name, p.status.phase; // and whatever other fields you'd like

Then use it like this:
> :pod .metadata.name=~"foo%"

So it gives you a tiny way to customize how you do this day-to-day stuff.
Ships out-of-the-box with common stuff you do with kubectl like :getpo, :getdeploy, :createdeploy, :expose and so on - definitely a feature that could be developed further to make this more of a daily driver.
> Colleges started out as vocational schools for priests.

“Colleges” aren’t a particular well-defined class. “Universities” in the usual sense are specifically defined as distinguished from ecclesiastical schools, though the first were founded by religious communities, they had secular as well as religious degree programs.
More recent analog: https://simpleflying.com/tupolev-tu-22-booze-carrier-why/
The “you are the product” cliché might be the most underrated phrase of the last decade or two.

What Facebook did was not about some genius move where they got university students to sign up; it was about making it seem as if your customers are not who they actually are, and by exploiting the market contrary to how it’s supposed to work. Facebook is not the only one who did it, but they are perhaps the first ones who did it for social media and at such scale.

The bright idea of the free market—customers pay for things they get value from, which helps more of these things to exist—is turned on its head and inside out when the product customers pay for is people paying for things while those people are misled into thinking they are being provided a “free product”.

Any value the end user gets from the system is purely incidental. If it is harmful to the end user long-term, that is orthogonal to the bottom line. The company is not incentivized to provide the end user any value, the company is not interested in helping the end user succeed and prosper—rather, the company is incentivized to not let the end user leave in bulk (that would hurt the actual paying customers, that is the advertisers, and the bottom line) and to keep their eyes on the non-product for as long as possible (if riling them up by algorithmically chosen triggering posts works for that purpose, great).

This fosters monopolies, infects capitalism, and when it becomes the default engine of human interaction it infects society.
This experiment ought to be a great reflection on the importance of picking the right metrics to manage, rather than just focusing something that's easy to measure -- even if it might be directly related to the outcome / bottom line!

Both input and output metrics ostensibly play an important role when attempting to manage a system (especially when leading people), but the most crucial aspect is to start with a good causal model or put yourself in the right frame to discover one with very few iterations. Otherwise you will most likely steer the system into a crash and move on to the next one and repeat the same travesty.
"And I still have a hard time beating him in arm wrestling despite the 40 years of age gap."

Another example, from the article, that backs up what you are saying. Arm wrestling, is not a clear overall indicator of total strength or fitness. It's as much about technique, rules, psychology (through sh*t talking or facial expressions), and very specific muscle development than anything else. Doesn't show how much a person could lift or squat. Strength in one area, doesn't mean strength in another or if people in the past were "stronger".
Sorry. I was commenting from my phone and didn’t check to see if my post appeared properly. Overall correct on the logic.
Probably not for a large monorepo, definitely not ours.
I have never seen this explained, so thank you! Sounds like it's kind of "up to S3 and probably not predictable by you" -- which at least explains why it wasn't clear!

If you don't have "a lot" of keys, then you probably have only one prefix, maybe? Without them documenting the target order of magnitude of their shards?
Detecting Arbitrage in Sports Betting
Coincidentally there is literally the novel "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton - published in 1905, it's an excellent late-Victorian/Gilded-Age period novel about the slow downfall of Lily Bart, a woman who was in New York's high society, then through a series of unfortunate events and social reproaches, descended into lonely poverty. It was quite influential at the time, portraying the materialism and shallowness of the moneyed crowd.
Leak: Local code sync coming natively to Claude Pro
Taxi doors already automatically open and close in major Japanese metro areas.

There is a certain romance around good service, but the good service is not the reason why people use taxis here.

One could make a similar argument that self service restaurants serving revolving sushi, or tablet ordered sushi miss the good service of a great restaurant. Yet these places are wildly popular, because one goes there to eat.
Of course they do? Just because they created a platform long ago doesn’t make it public property all of a sudden?

The value of their platform is in both hardware and software by the way.
I was hoping for a lot more detailed advice given all the information I entered. For example, should I be going to bed earlier or later? For a big shift, give me suggested bedtimes (within reason) for a couple days leading up to travel. If I’m arriving at my destination during the daytime, should I try to spend some time outside? Should I sleep on the plane? At the beginning or end of the flight?

Finally, the intermittent fasting and keto diet suggestions demolish any credibility the site has. Even if it’s a valid technique, it seems too on trend to be taken seriously. You know that friend who recommends CBD for every ailment? Same deal.
Honestly this guy probably got paid so much that the reward will be higher than many "successful" startup outcomes.
You do realise planes already fly themselves right. And at some airports even land and takeoff.
For an unscrupulous attorney, a client like this would be great no? Talk about easy money.
I wonder how much this service costs. If it is as expensive as taxi services in Tokyo, it could fail. While I don’t think it’s possible for the cost to match that of a train, if this service materializes successfully, it could become the most disruptive innovation in Japan.

How about California or Phoenix?
Surely nobody has that binary a view?

What are the likely impacts over the next 1, 5, 10, 20 years. People getting into development now have the most incredible technology to help them skill up, but also more risk than we had in decades past. There's a continuum of impact and it's not 0 or 100%, and it's not immediate.

What I consider inevitable: humans will keep trying to automate anything that looks repeatable. As long as there is a good chance of financial gain from adding automation, we'll try it. Coding is now potentially at risk of increasing automation, with wildcards on "how much" and "what will the impact be". I'm extremely happy to have nuanced discussions, but I balk at both extremes of "LLMs can scale to hard AGI, give up now" and "we're safe forever". We need shorthand for our assumptions and beliefs so we can discuss differences on the finer points without fixating on obviously incorrect straw men. (The latter aimed at the general tone of these discussions, not your comment.)
The French? For Lord Nelson's flagship? Really?
That ship seems to have sailed at the same time boxed software went extinct.

How many companies still have dedicated QA orgs with skilled engineers? How many SaaS solutions have flat out broken features? Why is SRE now a critical function? How often do mobile apps ship updates? How many games ship with a day zero patch?

The industries that still have reliable software are because there are regulatory or profit advantages to reliability -- and that's not true for the majority of software.
Really exciting news.
And unfortunately, gas and coal in the meantime.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-cent...
I was tickled to scroll down and see my own stupid avatar. Claimed my profile and wrote a note.

Thank you so much to everyone in the Ruby community. I spoke at conferences around the world for 13 years, made a ton of friends, and officially retired from speaking at Rails World in Toronto back in September. Some of the best people I've ever met, and the community transformed my life and career.
Why? I'm going to encourage my engineers and other teams to use it. Using this API would 100% have prevented bugs created by accessing the generated structs directly, especially in the presence of an optional value.
Links for December 2024
Reconstructing a Music Recommendation Model
Hardware is still getting cheaper all the time as far as I can tell.

Though I had thought you were talking about stuff like eg producing more corn on a given piece of land, or making more furniture from less wood or so. Or even just making better batteries and solar cells.
Best bet is likely https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/docs/f..., which predates editions.
In my opinion Individual autonomous vehicles will solve most transportation issues not Individual autonomous cars. Currently to transport 60-70 kg person we are moving 2 mton machines ie cars. And those 2 mton machines are in use for just 30-60 min a day.
Also, replace "reading a paper" with "reading a startup pitch", "reading a company's marketing material" and any number of other things... Practically any time you ask a company what their value prop is you'll get a description as though we all just came out of the caves.
Look, there is a lot of profit on the table. None of the employment or societal concern matter at all.
PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON;

> If I have a list of restaurants with their reviews, naturally, I have a table of restaurants, each of which contains a table of reviews.

CREATE TABLE restaurants (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, name);
CREATE TABLE reviews (timestamp, restaurant REFERENCES restaurants(id), stars, message);
INSERT INTO restaurants (name) VALUES (...);
INSERT INTO reviews (timestamp, restaurant, stars, message) VALUES (...);
SELECT rv.timestamp, rv.stars, rv.message FROM reviews AS rv, restaurants AS rs WHERE rv.restaurant = rs.id AND rs.name = "Foo's Bar-B-Q";

> If I have a table of nested comments, naturally, I have a table of comments, each of which recursively contains a table of child comments.

CREATE TABLE comments (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, parent REFERENCES comments(id), body);
INSERT INTO comments (parent, body) VALUES (...);
WITH RECURSIVE tree AS (
SELECT id, parent, body, CAST(id AS TEXT) AS sequence FROM comments WHERE parent IS NULL
UNION ALL
SELECT c.id, c.parent, c.body, (sequence || '-' || c.id) AS sequence FROM comments AS c JOIN tree AS t ON t.id = c.parent
)
SELECT t.sequence, t.body FROM tree AS t LEFT JOIN comments ON t.parent = comments.id ORDER BY t.sequence;

Point being: what one "naturally" has is a matter of perspective. Trees can always be flattened into tables that reference other tables (or even themselves).
Obesity rates have roughly tripled in the last 60 years.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-18/Est...

The data isn't hidden or lied about. If you think the data is fudged, go pick up a high school year book or photo album from the 1950s or 1960s and take a look at the young people.
Thank you for sharing your work! It looks great.

I’m interested in knowing how you generate crosswords. Can you tell us more about that?