skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There's really no value that a mechanical keyboard that can give you that a standard chiclet keyboard doesn't give you

There absolutely is, if you spend all day typing. Chiclet keyboards give poor tactile feedback that for many, leads to more typing mistakes. There is also value in the "pleasantness" of the experience - it's hard to quantify, but if it feels better to use something then you are certainly getting value from it (for another example, a cheap and uncomfortable vs expensive and comfortable chair).

I don't know what percentage of mechanical keyboard users this is, since there are certainly many that view it as a hobby or collector's interest, but I am one of the other side that use them exclusively because they make typing easier and more comfortable.
> "look, this smartphone is 20% more expensive, but it will last twice as long and it will be more convenient for you in ways you can't understand right now"

That is not the proposition. A Motorola Moto G Play is $110 no contract. The cheapest iPhone is $429. It's is not 20% more, it's 4x more. My sister got a Moto G Play this summer. She's perfectly happy with it. She's got a family of 5 so $550 for 5 phones is quite a deal compared to $2145 for 5 phones.

The Moto G Play also has a micro-SD slot so she can take it to 512gb for $40.
I think in modern times because you don't see it the same way you forget that a newspaper, magazine, encyclopedia, academic paper, and a reference book are different for a reason and do not have to be unified, and there was no need to do so. Having a way to publish contemporary articles vs building an effective knowledge reference are different goals. The physical print production was part of the language of intent. A blog with a contemporary note of an obscure Ubuntu upgrade issue is often the best way to describe it whereas a wiki with a current reference of now the fundamental baseline of relevance. A wiki eschews the most relevant details the same way an encyclopedia focuses on the core points. As a writer I need many formats and as a reader I cherish many formats.
You mean Apple matched features with Microsoft.

Devices with dTPM were released in 2006. BitLocker leveraging dTPM released with Windows Vista. Corporations have been using BitLocker w/ TPM for nearly two decades at this point.
I guess the sensible response is "what bias does being paid by Elsevier add that working for free for Elsevier doesn't add?"

The external bias is clear to me (maybe a paper undermines something you're about to publish, for example) but I honestly can't see much additional bias in adding cash to a relationship that already exists.
Population genomic analysis of mango suggests a complex history of domestication (2019)
I mean this without rancor or insult, but a lot of data scientists may use Python, but are definitely not Python programmers. They know the subset of Python necessary to process data, and literally not one bit more. They would have no idea how to create an iterator function, their own "with" handler, may not even know how to create a new subclass with a method. They just take data in, chew on it, and spit it out.

Again, not an insult intended to them. They have their job and they do it, and I don't know much about their world either, after all. And of course you can find some data scientists who also deeply know Python. My point is merely that modeling them all generically as "Python programmers" in your head can lead to a model that makes bad predictions, which I found in my brief stint in that world can include you building tools for them that expect more out of them than they have.
I am not sure I would call what I am doing "okay", but I am still here. I can't say the same for many of my friends.

It was full renal failure in my case. I had no insurance. My savings were gone in the first two days. My entire medical debt is now such that it would take somewhere between three and four full lifetimes at the highest wage I earned during my career to pay it all down, and that assumes that no further debt was incurred in those extra lifetimes.
Homebrew Security Audit Finds 25 Vulnerabilities (2024)
Promises, promises.

Giant Meteor keeps letting me down.
I think i'd trust monitoring which is doing a functional/capability test with the specific payload more.
Do they mean that no OS modification is necessary to read the decrypted media from memory?
What you consider “useful” is not useful for others, and vice versa. For some 19 year olds, curating their IG feeds and making the smoothest transition on TikTok to go viral is actually important.

It sounds stupid, but we went through this entire debate back in early 2010s. FB/IG/TT/YT obviously won, and seems like that’s what majority of people prefer doing.
Anker has a known quality problem with most of their over-ear headphones that they have ignored for many years now. Here's an example:

https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/anker/soundcore-sp...

> When storing our unit, we noticed that the yokes didn't allow the ear cups to lay flat on the table. It also seems like pressing them down puts pressure on the yokes, which can mean that this part may get damaged over time if you're constantly folding and unfolding them to store in their carrying case. While our unit hasn't had issues, there are reports (for example, here and here) that the hinges and headband can crack.

You will find countless reports of hinges breaking after a few months of light use about every model that came out in the last 5-10 years, yet nothing has been done to fix it.
Wake up, feel the dread of having to work 8 hours again, avoid getting out of bed until 5 minutes before my team's daily, take dutasteride and drink some water, get working and procrastinate as much as possible while avoiding getting fired
Detecting Tanks (2017)
Cheaper than buying Twitter.
What Goes Without Saying
How to fix computing's AI energy problem: run everything backwards
A significant number of people have enough money that they can decide between options that cost less or more. Otherwise we wouldn't have $2000 phones or TVs that range from $500-100.000. If the number of people with sufficient budget to choose between options was so small that we can ignore it in this discussion, no manufacturer would bother with market segmentation.

However, they do bother, so it's wrong to just assume baseline that most people just care about the cheapest option because that's all they can afford and that we shouldn't bother.

Many of us strive to get the best possible deal within a budget which satisfies our preferences and delivers a certain amount of quality. The fact that most of us don't have an unlimited budget makes it all the more important to us and this discussion that manufacturers can skimp on quality in a way that's unrecognisable to 99% of the market until a certain amount of time has passed. This has other consequences than just "it's cheaper but it's shitter and we don't know how much shittier". It allows utter bullshit like "I bought this $200 Xbox controller and the bumper broke after 3 months and I got it replaced twice and now the replacement is broken again after another 2 months". And all we can do is shrug because that's just what modern manufacturing is like. Skimping on everything while setting a price point as high as they can get away with using marketing.
Compelling users to have software indistinguishable in its operation from malware running on their machines for security purposes is, as the expression goes, like fucking for virginity.
Not sure. Which Cgi videos make it to the top? Not even movies
The Transformer was specifically conceived to take advantage of pre-existing massively parallel hardware, so it's a bit backwards to say it "won the hardware lottery". Where the Transformer did "win the lottery" is that the key-value form of self-attention (invented by Noam Shazeer) needed to make parallel processing work seems to have accidentally unlocked capabilities like "induction heads" that make this type of architecture extremely well suited to language prediction.

Given limits on clock speed, massive parallelism is always going to be the way to approach brain-like levels of parallel computation, so any model architecture aspiring to human level AGI needs to be able to take advantage of that.
> The problem is not that people don't care about quality, it's that they are not competent to judge it and marketing does the rest.

I disagree with this.

Just a small background: I was around in some of the cultures that value quality (e.g. Switzerland, Germany (in some aspects), Nordic countries, etc.), and the biggest issues that I have with the modern concept of quality are 1) quality is not property anymore but instead is something that "someone needs to tell you 'cause you're not capable to see for yourself" and it gives not only a lot of avenue for status signaling but as mechanism that I call "veil of sophistication and exclusivity," and 2) due to the economies of scale, lack of education in terms of taste (aesthetics), and due to the number 1) most of the quality industry became a pervasive mechanism to place huge premiums that does not match with the marginal utility.

One simple example that I can think of is about the car industry, specifically the German auto industry for luxury cars.

With the new competitors from China and the US, several people are perceiving that, in relative terms, those new competitors are bringing more perceived and felt quality in comparison with the European brands.

Some editions of Mercedes you pay more than 100K in a car with a lot of plastic in its finishing, very dubious vehicle dynamics (if you're outside of the nice german/european roads) or if you need to operate in the 40% vehicle performance, awful spare parts coverage outside of Europe, and way inefficient (due to sandbagging and green washing) engines in terms of performance x value.

I can go on and on bringing several examples of this "Premium Scalping" in a lot of products: Beer, Wine, Fashion Industry, Watches, etc.
Doomscrolling is called meditation now?
Because people don’t need to change for the world to end.
https://archive.is/U9oPf
> There's an increasingly large market of consumers who are tired of getting screwed over by literally every single product they buy.

That number isn't increasing, it is constantly dropping, which is how we got where we are. Boiled frogs, and Overton Windows, etc.

And once you've kept the quality of something low for about 20 years, you start having people enter the market who have never known the quality to be high.

The perception that the number of dissatisfied people is rising comes from a bunch of people getting old and comparing new stuff to 30 year old stuff, and being loud about it. And when we were young, old people were yelling about the quality of dishes, furniture, books, buildings etc. And we just accepted the crappy stuff because it was all that was available.

We buy the crappy stuff now, too, because the people who make the good stuff mark it up like crazy; the good stuff takes tooling and expertise that is now hard to locate and even recognize if you aren't familiar with it. Good stuff ends up being low competition in small markets of knowledgeable people who probably already own the best stuff that they rarely have to replace, and who are more likely to be brand loyal (although not blindly.) When we have to buy the crappy stuff, we complain about it online.

> Surely there must be a way to run a viable business which is 10-20% more expensive than its competition, but which isn't complete crap and willing to back that up with things like extended warranty?

So I say that there's no reason for those people not to mark it up 100-200%, because they're not going to sell any more than if they only mark it up 10-20%. They're not going to throw money away, at least not forever. Somebody smart is going to get in there and mark it up and/or lower the quality and drain the value of the brand (a brand that they can hedge with smart marketing.)
Is using miniKanren the only way to solve the fish-puzzle? If no, which language will be most ergonomic and accessible to solve it?
"And according to Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University and the history consultant for CBS News, many observers saw the speech as "disastrous." Communist leaders were critical of the remarks, and even West Berlin's then-mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, was wary.

"We were all a little more skeptical than American politicians -- the significance and the chances of tearing down the wall, there we were skeptical," he recalled in an interview years later.

"It was not well-received within the foreign policy community or the pundit class," Brinkley said, in an interview with CBS. "Many people called foul."

As Brinkley notes, however, history has been kind to the president's speech.

"It's seen as a turning point in Cold War," he said. "I think Reagan's speech bolstered the morale of the pro-democracy movement in East Germany."

"There was a movement that was growing and building toward liberalization and this gave great impetus to it in the aftermath," added Duberstein. "Even though people in the Soviet Union thought the speech was provocative, it worked."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/remembering-reagans-tear-down-t...
i have a burner fb account that i use to follow a local lost-pets group and check hours for restaurants that refuse to have normal webpages.

this account has no friends and just the one group membership so my feed if 100% platform-promoted swill. and it is bad. the current fad is for there to be accounts that repost screenshots of successfull AITA reddit posts to engagement farm.

the sad part is that it works. they get a ton of comments and likes
Isn’t this still sort of a thing? The fiscal new year vs the calendar new year?
Highly recommend the Aubrey and Maturin series to anyone who likes historical novels and specifically has an interest in sailing and the British navy.
If you can coherently differentiate "want" from "desire", I'd love to hear it. :)
If someone is looking for a job at 40 and they haven’t already built a big network, it’s not helpful to tell them they should build one. But if you’ve been working for about 20 years you probably do have at least some friends or colleagues you can (and should) reach out to for opportunities.
The vast majority of users neither have a password on their computer, or if they have it it's a stupid one (like their name, their birthday, etc) or they have it written on a post-it that is attached on the monitor itself. Why do they need a TPM? Most of the time I setup a computer for a friend or family member they ask me to remove the password since they don't want to remember it.

Vast majority of users neither have that much important data to steal on their computer at all, just some family photos, some movies downloaded from the internet, there is the case of credentials saved in the browser, but the most important stuff (such as banking sites) nowadays requires a multiple factor authentication (such as password + OTP on your phone) to do any operation.
That doesn't matter for the point I'm making: which is that this attempt (and any other) are trivially nullified by those that come next. The SD devs couldn't have created a state of affairs in which AI never ever would generate porn.

And transformer architecture is too low level to care about things like that, there was no way for the people who made the guts of the modern AI systems to make it so that they only can ever make cute fluffy kittens or give accurate advice.

So what I'm saying is that there's no timeline in which socially conscious scientists would have succeeded in ensuring the the current gen AI landscape with its porn, deepfakes and propaganda didn't come to exist.
A week-long conference is a long one. Three people is a small team. Kudos!

I have been involved with setting up weekend-long or one-day-long events, for decades.
The price of a cigarette: 20 minutes of life?
I must be dense, what is TFA? I thought it was the blogger, but it looks like his name is Terence Eden. I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
Battle of Kyiv lasted about as long, and Ukraine definitely received enough aid to make a difference. On April 7, 2022 (43 days into the invasion), it was reported that Ukraine had received 25k anti-aircraft weapons systems and 60k anti-tank systems.
I'm interested. I submitted my email to your landing page form.
I think it’s pretty cool, but with Latin a simple word by word translation will quickly become unmanageable because you need to re-order and break up sentences to make them understandable in other languages. If you take Cicero for example, it is common to have periods that last one full page of text.
How do you measure code generation accuracy? Are there some base tests and if so how can I ensure the models aren't tuned for those tests only the same way vw cheated the emissions tests on their diesels?
Yes, I agree. But it is the stated goal.
The Techbro Turf War over AI's Most Hardcore Hacker House
In very specific situations (in the summer on a sunny day in a low-crime area when its just you commuting with no small children or excessive cargo and no time pressure) walking a few blocks to and from a train station could indeed be a pleasant experience. Take away a few of those points though and cars start to look pretty attractive again. Even more so if we're talking about a hypothetical self-driving future where several of the few remaining disadvantages of cars have been mitigated.
I agree with what you say here, but I still don’t feel like this gives Marcus the edge here, because Perplexity does a fantastic job at finding correct information and, in my experience, never hallucinates. I would call Perplexity and whatever they’re doing a pretty “robust” solution to hallucination.

So there are solutions to hallucination, but the product has to prioritize that to the extent that it reduces the model’s effectiveness as a general tool.
The GPU ultimately has to output unencrypted content, it will always be possible to steal unless we manage to implement drm in human eyes
https://archive.is/VwyN8
Not true - various states have banned (and currently do ban) all sorts of variants/classifications, the Fed gov’t has several classifications, etc.
I noticed there is a gray dress in twice with the "same" image (separate files but clearly generated from the same photo). I went to go do an automatic search to get some fun stats on things like that but the site is inaccessible for now :) commenting as a self reminder.
Love your talks! The enthusiasm is infectious.
We need to fight for the Right to Repair to be in legislation for ALL products! If we buy a product, we should have full access to all software and have the ability to fix it!
a DSL has to have its own syntax

If it's the same language it can't be a new language. You didn't link anything with your sources.

The whole idea of a DSL is exactly to avoid learning something new

But you have to learn the DSL and you have to throw away all your tools. These are two big problems they introduce so the problem they solve better be big and tools/debugging needs to be part of making the DSL. This is why a small DSL is not a good idea.

We had a very complex ASIC which had a complicated way of configuring it: there were RF parameters

This is another side of the story. Passing parameters is data. Inside a program this is a very bad idea because you can already pass around all the data you want any way you want though function calls and memory layouts.

Passing data from one program to another or one computer to another is different, but then that isn't a language, that's a data format like any other file. GCode is a list of 'commands', but fundamentally it is a data format. If you look at the .obj format, it is ascii and needs to be parsed, but not thought of as a language.

Think about it as “1000 ifs, some nested”, originally without DSL, all was hardcoded in C++. We developed based on libconfig (think JSON with C syntax) a little language to express the ifs

This sounds like a data format. If something isn't being executed directly, it's data. If it is being executed directly, don't make a new language, because it takes a decade and hundreds of people to get it to work well.
Otherwise pointless pedantry, but in line with the "nobody cares about quality" ...

"the hoi polloi" grates every time I read it. "hoi polloi" literally means "the many", so this is an awkward pleonasm, "the the many", amounting to a lack of quality in a piece of writing.
Vsauce has a great video on that if he’s your style - https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE?si=Ul6FLtlffINuKLrT
There already is a library that can interface emacs with Juypter it is called ein. I think what you really want is a kernel that executes emacs code and if you did make that kernel it would probably work in any of these systems.

See https://github.com/emacs-jupyter/jupyter
The SQLite development team doesn’t run and operate a scaled set of sqlite instances serving 100,000 enterprise customers and 200 million consumer accounts. They don’t have to run a billing and account management system at scale and provide support for a sales and customer service organization. They aren’t responsible for managing an exabyte or so of other people’s data.

The core storage/synching engine of DropBox is pretty simple, sure. Running DropBox is a lot more than just building that piece of software.
> whether Kotaemon as a standalone tool will be needed for much longer.

I think a lot of AI startups will find themselves in this situation. Searching and summarizing docs is a no-brainer for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. The only issue they have right now is that their models might not be reliable enough due to the non-deterministic nature of LLMs. In the long term, I believe Google, Amazon and Microsoft will probably be the big winners in this area since they can offer multiple models from major providers to de-risk things.

Unless AI complements an existing solution that is unique and/or is done well by existing businesses, it will be very difficult to compete.
As an entrepreneur, 25 year manager and now mid level IC employee of a big tech firm... Good for you. As a manager I always told people I would kill for a team of people mostly composed of folks happy with what they are doing. It is sooo hard to manage a team of people where most are striving for advancement, especially when that cannot come soon enough for them (and especially when they do not believe they are not there yet).

I am trying to be this way, as I do personally love the work, but I would like one and maybe two promotions for the improved earnings and additional autonomy it would provide.
That sounds great. I probably haven't asked my software friends about their setups in 5-10 years.
I don't think anybody can answer this question for you. At 40, you can still do the exact same jobs as someone who's 25 (at least in tech) if you put your heart in it. I don't know what's the expiry date for a SWE, but it's not 40.

I'm a median IC in big tech at almost 50 and don't feel discriminated against yet, and for the most part, don't feel incompetent or behind, and feel I'm having the greatest time of my career (although it's demanding). I have no issue learning the same new techs as the younger guys when I need to. I may be a bit slower but it hasn't came up as an issue so far. I also have a few colleagues older than me and they're still going strong.
There's a daycare out there that allows a 3yo to still be in a diaper? Also, unless the kid has special needs - a lot of these behaviors don't have to be a part of your morning.
This obsession with concurrent player counts, especially for single player games, is just obtuse. It's not actually telling what you want to believe.
> Where else could a Disney character bemoan the fact that his own sexual desires repulse him?

Maybe I skimmed the article a bit too hard, but this stuck out and I don't find any other mentions of this in the article. Why would a Disney villain need to lament about their sexual desires? In this about something specific from The Lion King?