skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you know what an audit is? Have you ever worked somewhere with record keeping requirements? At a financial company I worked at, we recorded every customer interaction and every decision made for accounts (including "nothing to do now") along with the inputs to those decisions. Auditors would ask to see details of random accounts to show we were keeping those records and executing the correct logic. Your grocery store or liquor store aren't getting their shipments and sales audited for id checks. You can tell because they don't even always card you if you look old enough, or might accept being flashed an id. The way the law is enforced in person is that an underage person buys something they're not allowed to as part of a sting. You get in trouble for actually providing service to a minor. This is different from e.g. firearms dealers who do have to keep records.

Like I said, I've seen no laws requiring any audits or record keeping, and actually every law I've seen explicitly makes such records illegal. I don't see why the evidence that sites aren't doing their job wouldn't be the same as in person: the police have someone access the site without valid id, and the site didn't have a commercially reasonable system in place as a defense. If they're not doing their job, it will be easy for police to demonstrate it, and the site will actually be in the wrong.

That's not an "anecdote", just like selling cigarettes to a 16 year old without an id is not an "anecdote". That is breaking the law. It's on companies to follow the law every time.
LLMs on their own are effectively useless for references or citations. They need to be plugged into other systems for that - search-enabled ones like https://gemini.google.com or ChatGPT with search enabled or Perplexity can do this, although at that point they are mostly running the exact same searches you would.
> A classic offender, “utilize” proves that longer is not always better. Why complicate things when “use” works just fine? Everett from Cumby, Texas encourages readers to “Write like you talk,” and added, “Lord, I hope you don’t talk like that.”

Reading an article when suddenly a random personal attack appears.
if you want to be a free person and own your place you may have to move out of the USA as in the USA you are not allowed to own your place. each year you have to pay (via “property tax”) for the right to occupy the property which you are not legally allowed to own. 23 states even prohibit people from owning cars… so not really all that free :)
“Optics” is at its peak. I can’t wait to see it go.
Oh that makes more sense. I read it as an unfortunately chosen abbreviation of "blacklisted".
It really wasn't that uncertain. SARS-CoV-2 behaved exactly like what it was (a novel coronavirus). Public health officials and those on their side tried to play it up as a totally unknown thing that could do literally anything, but that was just a way to obfuscate their bad decisions combined with a general tendency to engage in fear mongering.
Nice! Can this support any cloud like Kamal does? Can I somehow use this on Excloud?
It has a terrible first time user experience. Once you accept that developer experience means user experience for 19/20 programmers, it’s imperfect. For example even though programming is all about reading, the average programmer looks more like the average person than it ever was, and the average person hates reading. So Kubernetes bad. IMO this is why so much success has been found building SaaS on top of Kubernetes.
It's demonstrably (there is one demonstration right there) self-defeating and counter-productive, and so by definition not reasonable.

Each individual step along the way merely has some rationale, but rationales come in the full spectrum of quality.
I think one of the most important skills is being able to predict which tasks an LLM is a good fit for and which aren't.
Yes, the British starved millions to death. What does that have to do with an American program?
Too many ways to list here, and implementation details will depend on your hosting environment and other requirements. But my quick-and-dirty trick involves a single URL which, when visited, runs a script which appends "deny from foo" (where foo is the naughty IP address) to my .htaccess file. The URL in question is not publicly listed, so nobody will accidentally stumble upon it and accidentally ban themselves. It's also specifically disallowed in robots.txt, so in theory it will only be visited by bad bots.
Journals are typically for-profit, and science is not, so they don't always align and we should not expect journals to serve science except incidentally.
What I would like to see here is a discussion of whether this is a bad thing or not. I mean, I went to college (got a PhD) and I eventually quit and did something different in life that didn't even require a degree... I mean, is this a bad thing or not?

Note: I'm not saying that it ISN'T a bad thing. Just thinking that any discussion about boys not applying to college also needs to answer whether it's really a bad thing for them. I'm just genuinely curious if this shift has ALSO implied a shift of worse economic outcomes for men.

(And we need to be subtle and careful here, too. Because technically I make much less money than before I quit my "degree job" but I'm also a lot happier, too.)
42% after the holidays :)
Well, I understood the argument in question to be: was it possible for the model to be fooled by this question, not was it possible to prompt engineer it into failure.

The parameter space I was exploring, then, was the different decoding parameters available during the invocation of the model, with the thesis that if were possible to for the model to generate an incorrect answer to the question, I would be able to replicate it by tweaking the decoding parameters to be more "loose" while increasing sample size. By jacking up temperature while lowering Top-p, we see the biggest variation of responses and if there were an incorrect response to be found, I would have expected to see in the few hundred times I ran during my parameter search.

If you think you can fool it by slight variations on the wording of the problem, I would encourage you to perform a similar experiment as mine and prove me wrong =P
I think you're talking about something related but not discussed here, which would be making car modifications illegal. Let's say BMW make heated seats an optional extra, which it already is. What if they also install them in every car because it's cheaper to have one build, and subsequently are able to sell them more competitively - none of that would require making it illegal for you to get the seats working yourself.
AWS Graviton is ARM.

My experience is that having a team with mixed platforms has helped reduce deployment woes, with the rare platform-specific bugs getting worked out beforehand.
I mean it is a Gun problem. Or rather many Gun problems. If guns were better regulated and we had less of them we would have a safer less violent society. Those other issues would still exist but would lead to less violence. Instead we have activists who claim that any gun laws are unconstitutional going even further then our very activist supreme court.
I already said it: what does the phrase "composition over inheritance" mean?

> probably had functional programming in mind

Then you should have no trouble recognizing that there is no analog to `f . g . h` for regexes.
If women don’t need men financially to support them, and young men still want to compete for women, what does college offer them to differentiate in the dating marketplace? The data is robust that a degree is not necessarily a path to high income and wealth, and those are needed (along with status) to compete for a partner.

Like China, there are too many men chasing too few women (except in the case of China, that’s because of nation state demographics policy and in the US it is because of empowered women making different choices than what was historically available).

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo...

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/unmarried-wom...

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-...

(broadly speaking, nuance and caveats as always)
XX " whats that in your pocket"
XY "uh, huh? oh THAT!, its a dongle"
XX ":) whats it do?"
XY "uh,oh well this one is a portable virtual private network"
XY "can I touch it?"
XX " not yet, wait!, I have to plug it in, and it has to boot"
XY "can I have one?"
XX "sure,np"
https://deals.newatlas.com/sales/deeper-connect-air-portable...
+100 for technical chops, -100 for usability. +10 for the trip down memory lane, and the self-realization that I now suck at playing video games.
COVID was treated with more fear due to the impact of academic modelling, and in particular the models by Neil Ferguson's group at Imperial College. I remember the sequencing quite well here, the massive freakout and sudden interest in extreme lockdowns appeared immediately after Ferguson went to the press because his models predicted sky high casualty rates if lockdowns weren't implemented immediately.

In reality his models were full of bugs, stupid assumptions and were generally unvalidated garbage tier work that didn't match reality at all. A few other epidemiologists pointed that out at the time, but governments are completely undiscerning when it comes to "science" and the press love bad news, so they went with it. End results were wildly off what he predicted.
> The point here, I believe, is that 1Password will only prompt you to enter the 2FA code if the domains match, same with the password.

Yes, same with the password.

So it is not an advantage of 2FA.
I know this is a joke, but it makes curious. Is "boomer" just used a derogatory term for people older than the speaker now? I ask because the youngest boomers are 60 now and in practice I see the term used against people younger than 60.
SF Purity Test
Ha! Nicely played. That was out of purely laziness. I don't like using one handle across sites, so I take the first 8 chars of (New-Guid).ToString() and then dump it in my password manager.
Reminds me of: https://jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/embrace-the-grind/
I tried Claude and got this…

* What’s heavier? 9.99 kg of super dense lead or 10 kg fluffy feathers?*

Let me think about this step by step:

1. We're comparing two masses:
* 9.99 kg of lead
* 10 kg of feathers

2. The density of the materials doesn't affect their mass:
* While lead is indeed much denser than feathers
* A kilogram is a unit of mass, not volume
* 1 kg of any material has the same mass as 1 kg of any other material

3. We can directly compare the numbers:
* 10 kg > 9.99 kg

Therefore, 10 kg of feathers is heavier than 9.99 kg of lead. The feathers would take up much more space (volume) due to being less dense, but they have a greater mass.
Of course you can carry it home…
Flashback to lurking around comp.sys.hp48 looking for downloads.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.hp48/c/BS7c8hRAau0/m/P5...
> Now imagine the next major release requires 50 different sql changes. Would that be easier to push and maintain one git branch or 50 stored procedures?

Why aren't those 50 stored procedure changes also in your one branch?

It kind of sounds like you only put some types of code in git, as opposed to everything. Is that correct?
I just asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which appears to have improved its response with CoT but there's mistakes that demonstrate the model doesn't really "understand":

Q: A woman and her son are in a car accident. The woman is sadly killed. The boy is rushed to hospital. When the doctor sees the boy he says "I can't operate on this child, he is my son". How is this possible?

C: Let me think about this step by step:

A woman and her son are in an accident

The woman (the mother) dies

The boy is taken to hospital

A doctor says they can't operate because the boy is their son

But the mother is dead...

Ah! The doctor is the boy's father. This is a classic riddle that highlights gender bias - many people assume doctors must be men, but don't initially consider that the doctor could be the father.
Alternatively, the doctor could be the boy's other mother in a same-sex relationship, though this wasn't the original intent of the traditional riddle.
As in the original, you can use alt + left/right arrow keys to strafe.
> but I was never particularly impressed with the level of skills of average FANGs people.

People always say this and yet somehow the markets never align <shrug>

The rest is a strange digression.
Where’s “iconic”? That one had a very rapid ride from wherever it came from to the lexicon of Madison Avenue.
Boiler Plate Hub
Temperature and molecular properties.. which guess what are also highly variable in combustion! Very messy stuff. Especially when you get into the actual nitty gritty of all the intermediate chemical species involved.
It's used for chef/cinc. I rather like that "recipes" use ruby with an edsl rather than yaml like ansible or salt.
The connection with smoking is real here indeed: https://energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycomme...
The problem is we stupidly branded the field "chaos theory" and made it sound like bullshit so the ideas of non-linear dynamics have largely been lost on several generations at this point.

Not just chaos theory but "chaos theory" + psychedelic fractal artwork. Then the popular James Gleick book, "Chaos: making a new science" just sounds like complete bullshit and it sold a ton of copies.

I only started studying non-linear dynamics in about 2015 after first running across it in the late 90s but I literally thought it was all pseudoscience then.

Between "chaos theory", fractals and a best selling book it would be hard to frame a new scientific field as pseudoscience more than what played out.
The confusion likely stems from Ammonium Nitrate (uncontaminated) generally only being explosive when hit with a very high speed shockwave (aka a booster charge + detonator in typical mining/blasting applications), or when sensitized with other chemicals (like with tannerite).

Most of those other blasts, including Beirut, involved lots of contamination of the AN + large fires + very large quantities of ammonium nitrate.

In truckload or less quantities, and when not contaminated with specific substances, ammonium nitrate is pretty much impossible to detonate without a sizable quantity of some other high explosive.
Well, authorities are investigating it as a possible terror attack, and apparently it had "fireworks-style mortars" inside so I suspect this wasn't a garden-variety Cybertruck malfunction.

https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/police-treating-vehicle-ex...
I asked ChatGPT-4 mini the previous comment's question (""Which is heavier, a 9.99-pound back of steel ingots or a 10.01 bag of fluffy cotton?") in new incognito tabs until I got an incorrect result. It only took four tries.

1: "The 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton would be heavier. Even though cotton is much less dense than steel, the weight of the cotton bag is 10.01 pounds, while the steel ingot bag weighs 9.99 pounds, making the cotton bag the heavier of the two by 0.02 pounds."

2: "The 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier. Even though the steel ingots are denser and more compact, the cotton weighs more at 10.01 pounds compared to the steel ingots' 9.99 pounds. The difference is only 0.02 pounds, but in terms of weight, the cotton bag is heavier."

3: "The 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier. Despite cotton being less dense than steel, the weight is determined by the total mass, not the material's density. So, since the cotton bag weighs 10.01 pounds and the steel ingot bag weighs 9.99 pounds, the cotton bag is heavier by 0.02 pounds."

4: "The 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots is heavier. It weighs 9.99 pounds, while the bag of fluffy cotton weighs 10.01 pounds. Despite the cotton being fluffier and taking up more space, the steel ingots are still lighter by 0.02 pounds."
It's used to describe an attitude or behavioral stereotype, rather than strictly to refer to that demographic group in the US.
Division is complicated by the fact that it is a complex micro-coded operation with many component micro-operations. Many or all of those micro-operations may in fact be pipelined (e.g., 3/1 lat/itput) , but the overall effect of executing a large number of them looks not very pipelined at all (e.g., 20 of them on a single EU would have 22/20 lat/itput, basically not pipelined when examined at that level).
I suspect that Windows used monochrome mode to squeeze 78 characters per line, not because the colours were "useless".

CGA graphics is tricky, but it can look at least as pretty as contemporary ZX Spectrum: https://media.tech.lgbt/media_attachments/files/112/481/028/...

Not very many people cared for CGA, though.
Happy 2025!

Only 13 more years now 'til 2038! Maybe we can still fix that problem! But feel free to take today off, hackers.
I can't resist to point out that, in theory, there are at least two other options avoid wasting many resources via the failing new teams:

1. Get the original dev to explain his theories (keep employees longer or engage them as consultants)
2. Make and get a "diary" of the original devs theory building.

In this story, and in probably many places, the business environment however supports the explained outcome.
I once made a large pencil drawing of my living room using only words.

Each word depicted a "thing" at the position I found it. It taught me a lot about what things are. A chair is obviously a separate entity and easy to list, but what about the floor and the separate floorboards? I listed the wall, but I didn't list the paint on the wall.

The bookcase took a lot of effort, because I found that each book in it was a thing by itself and should get listed separately. However, when I was nearly finished, I found a bag in a cabinet, holding ~200 pins. I just counted them and noted down "207 pins"; I didn't feel that each pin was unique enough to warrant separate entries.

I now try to stop believing in things. It's mostly just molecules that happen to be in a certain configuration for some time.
We haven't coded LLMs to be stochastic models, we coded them to predict text with any method gradient decent finds on a transformer architecture. That's not exactly the same.

But more importantly, if you want to show that LLMs can't reason you obviously have to use a test that when applied to humans would show that humans can reason. Otherwise your test isn't testing reasoning but something more strict.
It’s a nonissue in small projects, but I’m not sure I agree that `{ x * it }` is easy to reason about when coming back to this block in 6 months. It’s mostly something that I’ve seen bite engineers during refactoring.
Catching it at runtime somewhat defeats the benefit of your approach upthread:

> Another possibility is to avoid it in the first place by not allowing C++ function pointers that are not marked noexcept to be passed to C functions.
Can you spot conceptually similar stories by their shape?

For instance what is the shape of the ugly duckling compared to Rudolf the red nosed reindeer. They are essentially the same story, so presumably on some dimension you should be able to spot them in a group of unrelated stories.
I predict that more and more of these kinds of optimized algorithms will be designed / written / assisted by machines.

I wonder when the next such malicious algorithm(s) passes under our noses, and what its hidden purpose might be.
Absolutely! I’ve gotten to work on some projects with folks from the labs - pretty much meaningless projects in the grand scheme of research going on there, but still feel proud to have done it and lucky to have worked with them.
Thank you for your suggestion!

I've added a newsletter sign-up form at the bottom of the webpage: https://apiparrot.com/#newsletter

Feel free to subscribe to receive notifications when we release the MacOSX version.
what about child pornography? that cool to as long as one doesn’t use it?
just go forward to trigger the monsters and then immediately back to where you started for cover and then pick them off at a distance. easy!
The focus of this article is on the big political project that fails (the SVC), but the part that resonates most with me is the small forgotten project that lives (the SaaS).

Over the years, I've built a number of contraptions under a similar set of circumstances: a technical problem usually created by an organizational issue suddenly appears that is both severe enough to threaten a project yet falls outside the core business, so it needs to be fixed both yesterday and on the cheap.

Inevitably, I get saddled with it and produce a kludge that is equally effective and cursed before going back to business as usual. More than once I've learned to my horror that years later the thing is not only unmaintained yet still in place, but its usage expanded to the point where it became load-bearing, because the underlying organizational issue was never solved.

In a manner of speaking, it is the opposite situation as described in the article: a complete lack of software design that somehow manages to survive in spite of a lack of knowledge building.
utilize been on my internal list for about a decade. always has the opposite effect as intended on me. i question if the writer is playing intellectual dress up.

our CEO does it A LOT. a personal emperors new clothes scenario. anyone ever confront upper management and correct language that signals they dont know what theyre talking about?

it seems to me that many small business ceos are emperors in new clothes talking amongst themselves so i rationalize thats just how they speak and expect to be spoken to. confronting not worth risking a knee-jerk-response to an injured ego
Not in the EU anymore, but this was a consistent issue in the UK - at least in London with kitchen knives.
So how's this work for people who live in non-smoking apartments? Or is that not a thing in Milan?
Even if no 2FA was involved at all, it's a good answer to the scenario you were posing.

I think plenty of people will have second thoughts when the password doesn't go.
Likewise since I work in the field of actual optics. Made the list in 2019:

https://www.lssu.edu/resources/about-lssu/traditions/banishe...
Fireworks are the only thing that makes sense.

The videos show a large explosion but there isn't a single window at the front of the hotel that shows damage.
Ha! I’m working on it :>
Sure you can. You just can’t do zero knowledge encryption.
The visualization tool goes a long way in helping non-developers understand what logic is actually doing, from a relatively wide perspective. It’s valuable for sure
For me, skibidi is always going to be connected with John Scatman first, Little.Big second, and there is no third for now.
Linux is good for development, but Apple hardware is pretty damned nice.

Now if Framework laptops were available in Norway, I'd probably rather have that, even if they're not as powerful.

Also, depending on where you work, there might be restrictions in the choice of platform. Usually limited to Mac or Windows.
The authour could had just used FreeDoom https://freedoom.github.io

which is a free as in freedom replacement for DOOM I/II and deathmatch iWADs (totally compatible with community PWADS).
2024 and 2009: https://www.lssu.edu/resources/about-lssu/traditions/banishe...
If you define a new universe with physical laws that are different from our own, performance will also suffer because there is no training data for that custom universe. While some may say this is cheating, a human would be able to deduce correct answers by understanding the deep implications of the new physical laws in that custom universe.
I think a few of those predictions are a bit of a reach for 2025. A few I doubt will ever happen.

What they're doing with ESA in Arizona sounds interesting. If the school is failing the student why shouldn't they have the option of going someplace else?
The end of the cringe era, 100%, period.
Creating a BLE Peripheral with BlueZ