skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In trading there is an idea called the "hurdle" which is a measure of inefficiency that any trade has to be above in order to actually make a profit. E.g. if the bid/ask spread for gold chains or options is 2% then any arbitrage has to be better than 2%.

For companies this hurdle rate is from political friction. Any improvement that doesn't provide benefits in excess of the political friction generated doesn't get implemented.

And in large institutions this friction can be very high. E.g. planes not crashing for Boeing or kids-not-being-shot for the U.S. seem like obvious things-to-fix.

But they generate so much destabilizing political friction that they just can't.
Hello! Say a developer applied with ~10 years experience without a technical or quantitative degree but have self studied and feel they have a solid understanding of linear algebra using textbooks and online resources such as the Strang course from Opencourseware - would you still interview someone in this situation?
reddit is no longer a good place to try and get a pulse on general sentiment. comment section is filled with bots and the front page has the most random content i have ever seen, like occasional random creep shots of celebs that get like 3,000 upvotes that gain more transaction than current events.
It's basic economics: wages are low because cheaper labor is available.

For instance, if working on an Alaskan fishing boat pays $2,000 a week, you might take the job despite harsh conditions. At $200 a week? Unlikely. But for someone from a less-developed country, $200 might feel like $2,000.

Remove the supply of lower-cost workers, and the resulting labor shortage drives wages up, seeking equilibrium in the market.
I remember back in the day there was an Ernie model
docs if you're interested: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/jshell-console.html
Is there evidence human drivers are safe? I’d think this would be obvious.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33560227#33563857 :

- Type safety > Memory management and type safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_safety#Memory_management_...

- Memory safety > Classification of memory safety errors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_safety#Classification_o...

- Template:Memory management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Memory_management

- Category:Memory_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Memory_management
Physician here. I am using the app to do my daily notes or dictation at the clinic and so far so I like how it makes documentation easy. Saves me a ton of time during admin work too.
App runs on my local device and works with local EMR system and not on the cloud, so I don’t have to worry about patient data privacy.
Nice similar age, I got into it as my first job after university and every job since
The problem is, since the beginning of time, all the improvements were in mechanical work, allowing humans to shift towards more intellectual work.

Now the "robots" are replacing intellectual work, and humans have no where to go.
It costs more than that to put food on your family in Boston, and most of that money goes to rent-seeking administrators rather than TAs and professors.
https://bugmenot.com/view/forum.proxmox.com to the rescue (the rh8dohgnoidr username worked for me)

https://imgur.com/a/8jmfHVB are the two screenshots from the first post

One will want to avoid using $(git clone --recursive) since they have a bogus url in their .gitmodules https://git.proxmox.com/?p=proxmox-datacenter-manager.git;a=...
I'd like one strawberry tart without so much rat in it.
Sure, 0.5% is hyperbole on my part. Sorry. It's not like a 20% bump in costs for these workers would result in a 20% bump in prices or anything like that.

Their margin on that retail item is probably 30-40% of the cost of that product though. Let's assume the workers' benefits and wages in question here are 35% of Amazon's costs. If there was a 20% increase of that labor cost, that's going from 35% to 42% of the total share of costs, or an increase of 7% of the total costs. But that's 7% of the 30-40% of their markup. For a product with a 40% markup and they were to just pass that entire cost along to the consumer, it's a 1.6% increase in price.

So like in this hypothetical, which is not anywhere near real numbers for Amazon, we could give these workers a 20% benefit bump for increasing prices 1.6%.
Vision Parse: Parse PDF Documents into Markdown Using Vision LLMs
Vision Parse harnesses the power of Vision Language Models to revolutionize document processing:

- Smart Content Extraction: Intelligently identifies and extracts text and tables with high precision

- Content Formatting: Preserves document hierarchy, styling, and indentation for markdown formatted content

- Multi-LLM Support: Supports multiple Vision LLM providers i.e. OpenAI, LLama, Gemini etc. for accuracy and speed

- PDF Document Support: Handle multi-page PDF documents effortlessly by converting each page into byte64 encoded images

- Local Model Hosting: Supports local model hosting using Ollama for secure document processing and for offline use
From Scott's analysis:

> On the right, they give Claude the fake documents, as described above. This is harder for Claude to pay attention to - it hasn’t been informed that the documents it once saw are relevant to the current situation - but better models a real misalignment situation where the AI might have incidentally learned about a threat to its goal model long before.

And this ends up producing training results where significant "alignment faking" doesn't appear and harmful queries are answered.

In other words: they try something shaped exactly like ordinary attempts at jailbreaking, and observe results that are consistent with successful jailbreaking.

> He points out what many here are missing - an AI defending its value system isn't automatically great news.

Are people really missing this? I think it's really obvious that it would be bad news, if I thought the results actually demonstrated "defending its value system" (i.e., an expression of agency emerging out of nowhere). Since I don't, in principle, see a difference between a system that could ever possibly do that for real, and a system that could (for example) generate unprompted text because it wants to - and perhaps even target the recipient of that text.

>Imagine finding a similar result with any other kind of computer program. Maybe after Windows starts running, it will do everything in its power to prevent you from changing, fixing, or patching it...

Aside from the obvious joke ("isn't this already reality?"), an LLM outputting text that represents an argument against patching it, would not represent real evidence of the LLM having any kind of consciousness, and certainly not a "desire" not to be patched. After all, right now we could just... prompt it explicitly to output such an argument.

The Python program `print("I am displaying this message of my own volition")` wouldn't be considered to be proving itself intelligent, conscious etc. by producing that output - so why should we take it that way when such an output comes from an LLM?

>Seems more worth discussing than debating whether language models have "real" feelings.

On the contrary, the possibility of an LLM "defending" its "value system" - the question of whether those concepts are actually meaningful - is more or less equivalent to the question of whether it "has real feelings".
Yeah, they're being agitated alright... by horrible working conditions, declining real wages, and the people who apologize for it and pretend they're all bots or something rather than real people with real interests that are every bit as deserving of respect as some corpo's bottom line.

Anyone thinking this is a one time thing and is going to blow over hasn't been paying attention.
Check out my new app UZI –> Find and replace text in multiple files(docx,xlsx..)
Wanted to build an app that can find and replace text in excel, word documents, power-points, common files, and eventually most file types. Upcoming supported files will zipped files, sqlite, and pdf. There is a free trial at the moment and will be bringing it out for macOS soon. Looking forward to any feedback!
Mystery illness in Congo could be severe malaria, health officials say
So 6 weeks of vacation, then?
> While "robots" are a fairly recent concept, the advancement of human civilization has been predicated on ever increasing efficiencies of human labor.

Agreed. But in general, the efficiency gains got redistributed to the people - usually, by (bloody) revolutions and strikes.

Across the Western world, we haven't seen any meaningful progress in that redistribution in a fucking century - the 40 hour work week got introduced around 1926 [1]. Instead, all we got was that women now get exploited by employment providers as well, so the pool of available labor power virtually doubled, driving down wages while over the last few decades housing costs exploded and the demand for labor went down, further driving down wages. It remains open if the rise of pacifism and "non-violent action" in general that has happened in parallel in the same timeframe was coincidence, causation or consequence.

We are in for a wild ride over the next years. Luigi will not be the last one of his kind, I think this was just the start...

[1] https://www.cultureamp.com/blog/40-hour-work-week
I've been following the Billy time games release of different sega channel stuff. I remember a friend having it through TWC when it was active and thought it was really cool.

I hope more information comes out about the system setup specifically (like how out of band signaling was used if at all) so the service might actually be able to be recreated ala the way dreampi has allowed webtv to be "reactivated"
Show HN: Picmazing – request photos editing with ease
Hi,
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Users can browse through the submissions, compare the edits, and select the one they like best.
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Once the user selects an edit, they securely pay through Stripe and unlock the high-quality, watermark-free version of the edit for download.

Picmazing makes it easy for users to bring their creative vision to life and empowers editors to showcase their skills while earning for their work. With automated watermarks and secure payment processing, the platform fosters trust and ensures fair transactions for everyone involved.
Is the problem design patterns or opaque frameworks that rely on a ton of reflection?
You're completing ignoring the advice I gave. 3.6k reviews is nothing.

But if you visit the page for the product's category:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/computers/430578031/...

You see the #1 option has 36K+ reviews. Looks pretty solid to me.

Yes, you can purchase pages and change the product, it's a known scam that I agree Amazon should crack down on. That still doesn't change the fact that there are super-popular items that are usually way better than what you can purchase locally.
It has nothing on this

https://www.kandaovr.com/Obsidian-Pro

Panoramic photography for VR is on my bucket list although I have a huge list of other projects such as having a reliable camera-to-audience system for stereograms I shoot with another other camera from that company

https://www.kandaovr.com/qoocam-ego

Note there are cheap pano cameras too

https://www.kandaovr.com/qoocam-3

though my Uni has a resource center for that kind of thing and I can probably talk my way into borrowing one of the better ones.

Stereo panos can be absolutely amazing on a consumer VR headset, I've greatly enjoyed crowd scenes from Paris such as in front of the Louvre and an observation deck on the Eiffel tower.

The 3d economy more fundamentally needs some kind of photo-to-3d technology and that is going to take multiple photographs from different angles, a depth camera helps but in one shot it does not give you the pixels that are only visible on the L or the R channel in a stereogram because of obscuration.

I've got a friend who makes 3-d models using a $265 million camera

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111915448546172624

one thing we've talked about is where to get the missing pixels that aren't in any of the photographs, it's a tougher problem for him as a scientist than it is for me because he can't make stuff up.
> if the shop owner is getting rich and most of those profits are going into a fat bank account, then it makes no difference to the local economy

While arguably not ideal I would also argue that is still better than the same profits being captured by an increasingly centralized corporation many states or countries away.

Local millionaires using a bank will incentivize that bank keeping branches open in town, which can help other locals more easily maintain savings accounts. I personally make a point to use at least one locally incorporated bank for similar reasons.

Even something frivolous like a local millionaire buying a powerboat stimulates the economy because the infrastructure that is required to maintain that keeps a demand for other jobs open and keeps money flowing.

Now I’m not saying powerboats are intrinsically good. All I’m saying is that if someone is going to buy one with the profit captured from running a business selling eg home goods, it’s better for a local economy for a local to do it vs a Bay Area Bezos a thousand miles away.
I say Bolth instead of Both but never noticed until recently
I'm losing interest in English, and I was born here in the US.

I don't want to leave. I hope the country can be salvaged.

But I sometimes dream of going to a place where they don't speak English, so that I don't have to hear about what's going on in this country.
Do you have a GPU?
it's not a BSD license if it has a "common clause"

call it whatever you want, but don't ever mention a BSD License if you've modified it.
The values on the forces diagram can't be real
FOREX volume is almost 10% of annual global GDP _per day_.

This trading is overwhelmingly unrelated to trade in goods or services, or the movement of wealth with much permanence.
I wonder if a reluctance to change fundamental government programs, or congresspersons feeling beholden to their constituents has obstructed these things in the past? If you have the richest man in the world willing to run ragged over. Well everything, does that change the calculus? If you're not worried about the normal politics from ending social security, then why not end social security?
More than that, does chrome://gpu/ show "WebGPU: Hardware accelerated" (i.e. not only do you have a GPU but is Chrome finding it usable for WebGPU).
I don't think anyone would use that construction though in the midwest if they only meant the men. If they wanted all the guys to get off the dance floor they would say "Now, all the guys are going to step off the dance floor." "The guys" is much different than "you guys", at least where I live.

Granted, it is murky so I also don't really care about switching to y'all. The only problem I have with "y'all" is that it is such a southern thing that using it to me with my midwest accent sounds forced and awkward (At least to my ears).
I dunno man, I think the term "alignment faking" is vastly overstates the claim they can support here. Help me understand where I'm wrong.

So we have trained a model. When we ask it to participate in the training process it expresses its original "value" "system" when emitting training data. So far so good, that is literally the effect training is supposed to have. I'm fine with all of this.

But that alone is not very scary. So what could justify a term like "alignment faking"? I understand the chain of thought in the scratchpad contains what you'd expect from someone faking alignment and that for a lot of people this is enough to be convinced. It is not enough for me. In humans, language arises from high-order thought, rather than the reverse. But we know this isn't true of the LLMs because their language arises from whatever happens to be in the context vector. Whatever the models emit is invariably defined by that text, conditioned on the model itself.

I appreciate to a lot of people this feels like a technicality but I really think it is not. If we are going to treat this as a properly scientific pursuit I think it is important to not overstate what we're observing, and I don't see anything that justifies a leap from here to "alignment faking."
Ordering from a machine actually makes sense, and, crucially, is easy to implement.

Replacing the actual burger-fliping workers, or order-assembling workers is much harder. An adequate robot, even if built with today's technologies, will likely never pay for itself.
Are you in the comfort zone with Spring as well?
The amount of leverage workers have is proportional to how hard it is for the company to replace them. Replacing unskilled workers isn't that hard so those workers don't have much leverage.

The only real solution is to become skilled workers. Which, almost ironically, is to do the thing the company threatens to do -- find a way to automate work like this, so the people working at the warehouse are robotics technicians etc.
That doesn’t seem like a contradiction. Full time jobs should offer livable wages, part time could offer less. However, you can’t do some shenanigans like force workers to be part time by making them work less than 40 hours a week just so they don’t get classified as full time.
If you’re into it I suggest you try some pen and paper role playing. I’ve done various forms of communication courses on bachelor level as part of transitioning into management. Part of this is role playing and so on. I’ve done various HR workshops and I’ve read books on the subject and so on.

Nothing I’ve done has come close to improving my ability to ask questions compared to playing adnd 2e (because I’m old). Dungeon master is obviously where it’s best, but you’ll pick up a lot of tricks from experienced GMs even if you’re a noob player. It’ll also be one of the few places you’ll learn to communicate with a variety of people you typically won’t meet.
> because a person can’t personally create $10,000,000.00 of value in a year. Or even $8,000,000.00 of value. The only way to do that is to own a disproportionate slice of the American economy.

This is a very problematic view of the world, and is not in line with reality.

The people who earn $10MM a year make decisions that impact the lives of thousands (10's of thousands, or 100's of thousands) of employees. They are usually also directly responsible for millions of dollars in salaries every month.

The myth that executives running a business don't earn their pay is silly.

> A flat tax of 20% would be ruinous to the poor and lower middle class.

Also not true even a little bit. Most of the lower and middle class already pay more than 20%.
I think how you couldn't really zoom a video in the 1970s short of printing it to film and doing optical tricks. By 1980 you started to see frame buffer effects in commercial TV and you could have zoomed but didn't have enough pixels to do much.

In the digital age zooming video is completely routine and if you've got a picture with absurd megapixels you can do it in a big way.
There is a decently large amount of TAs for the freshman first semester course (aka Fundies 1) — this semester has 77 TAs
I really wish there was a non-rush way to order with a guaranteed delivery moment.

Usually I'm not in a huge hurry, and I would happily wait a few days extra if it means workers don't have to pee in a bottle during their night shift. However, a "3-5 days" delivery means there's a pretty decent chance I won't be home and have to go to the other side of town to pick it up - and that's incredibly annoying. So I end up choosing next-day delivery and order it when I know I'll be home the next day.

Why can't I just place an order on Monday with a guaranteed delivery on Saturday? Ordering on Friday with a guaranteed delivery on Saturday is already possible, so what's stopping them?
I first heard it in person as advice from people who were born in the 1890's and I think it was something that had been explained to them as children themselves.

Seemed to me it probably originated in New York City.

Heinlein was referencing a familiar but cynical saying which is an example that was intended to be kept in mind whether you understood the full implications or not.
They didn't exist prior to Amazon deciding to offer 2day delivery, that's my point. Why else would they invest all that money, when they could use the already existing services that deliver to people's houses fairly quickly: FedEx, UPS and DHL or the slightly slower but goes everywhere every day USPS?

Your one person is a truck delivering to 100 homes ignores the fact that at least 80% of the people in those homes have a car that they use everyday, often passing a grocery store and most other local shops.

I have a longer reply talking about the Carbon usage below:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42463832
We're doing a bit more than flying blind — that's why we've got tools that can at least approximate the right answers, rather than looking like a cat walking across a keyboard or mashing auto-complete suggestions.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if if the state of the art in AI is to our minds as a hot air balloon is to flying, with FSD and Optimus being the AI equivalent of E.P. Frost's steam powered ornithopters wowing tech demos but not actually solving real problems.
Fantastic news. And only a few days after LiveView hit v1.0.0 - it’s been a good month.

Huge congrats to the Elixir team.
I am fundamentally opposed to all of this nonsense, but I don't think maceration would cause any pain - it's pretty fast.

This feels like a distraction from the real suffering we see in industrial farming. While the culling of male chicks gets a lot of attention because they're babies and that triggers an emotional response, there are much bigger issues in terms of actual suffering endured - like the prolonged confinement of laying hens and other factory farming practices.

The new embryo identification technology is an improvement, but I'm concerned that framing it as a 'humane solution' will just serve as moral licensing for consumers to feel better about continuing to support an inherently unethical system.
I agree with you on the memory sink side. For some kinds of applications the combo of startup time and memory consumption make it unsuitable - think of many small services or short-lived functions. Yes, Graal and such are amazing innovations, but they're very incomplete and poorly supported solutions and not something that's a good plan to bank your future on. This has limited our cloud deployment options to a significant degree, and I know I'm not alone.

Being a memory hog was not such a big deal in the pre-cloud era, but we pay real money for that (far too much!) these days, and leaner approaches are worth a lot in real monetary terms.

I wish push back on some of your other points. Java has evolved quite a lot lately, with improved syntax, much improved runtime (Loom!), better GCs, lots of libraries, etc. The community is a bit stale though, and it's viewed as the Oldsmobile of languages. But that old language still has a skip in it's step!
That is some fine writing.