skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand, you're replying in a thread where that very - super-experienced and productive low-level programmer - is talking about how he finds LLMs useful.
But it's not just that guy.

> Starship rocket to less than $10 million. However, Starship is still very much a development program, and Payload estimates it currently costs around $90 million for SpaceX to build a fully stacked Starship rocket. The vast majority of this cost goes toward the rocket's 39 Raptor engines and labor expenses.

So it's going to be somewhere over $100 for a fully disposable launch. What happens when they start reusing the booster? What happens when they have optimised production further?

Are you sure that your anti-musk bias isn't clouding your judgement?

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/rocket-report-a-new-es...
That's because the people putting out stuff like this always go on and on about the hocus pocus. They never stop at claims that it's a way to control certain limited aspects of your own biology/psyche, they always go on to claims like telepathy, remote viewing, telekinesis, mind control, and others.

And that is when you realize they aren't some wise thinkers describing deep understanding of the human mind in more poetic terms, they are deluded or crackpots thinking they can fling spells at each other if they just beleive hard enough.

Is there some insight that they may have hit on in their collective tinkering? Possibly yes, just like the alchemists had really discovered some good bits of chemistry despite being completely misguided as well. But unless and until someone goes in and creates a true science out of their mumbo-jumbo, it's not something most people should spend their time on, lest they end up wasting time on the many parts that don't work.
Graphic cards at the time only had 16 colors. Not 16-bit color. 16 colors in total.
I downloaded a mobile version before the official release (I uad bought it on steam already). Somebody made an apk with some löve-to-apk generator, and one or two fixes for the shaders on mobile.
Idk about the group, but the CIA FOIA docs were in a recent post here, iirc. I read it in its entirety and it’s basically as it says. Well controlled studies, statistically significant results, not a lot of actionable data from a military perspective.

My take is that either ESP works to some extent, or maybe we want our adversaries to think it does.

OTOH, I’ve seen some shit that I can’t explain except by just making up an explanation that seems more stupid than the paranormal explanation, so I tend on the side of “probably more to reality than we conventionally think”.
This is very cool! Nice to see there is something in the space to unstick some very stressed out Bench customers. Making sure everything reconciles definitely makes sense, I’ve worked on ledger systems in the past so I always look at these problems with a skeptical eye :)
Two decades ago, I was trying to use classical machine vision to tell the difference between cut and uncut grass, to guide a self-driving lawnmower.

I concluded that it couldn't be done with classical machine vision, and that this "neural network" nonsense wasn't going to catch on. Very slow, computationally inefficient, full of weirdos making grandiose claims about "artificial intelligence" without the results to back it up, and they couldn't even explain how their own stuff worked.

These days - you want to find the boundary between cut and uncut grass, even though lighting levels can change and cloud cover can change and shadows can change and reflections can change and there's loads of types of grass and grass looks different depending on the angle you look from? Just label some data and chuck a neural network at it, no problemo.
Happy new year as well, even though it already started for me on the 21. of December on Solstice, when the days were starting to get longer. That is a real turning point in the natural cycle and I like to follow natural cycles where possible.
1.1. is just arbitary numbers changing to me, but for the majority it means something, which also makes it real and I can appreciate the intent and celebrate anyway..

(And I did had an awesome drug and alcohol free party with self made music and wild dancing)
I wonder what Apple could do (improve the Apple Vision Pro, find a new hit product, etc.) if they plowed the stock buy back money into R&D instead (greatly increasing the budget) of buying shares.

I own shares. I’d rather the stock price increased due to organic internal growth of the business rather than financial engineering
Happy new year from Amsterdam. Thanks to everyone for the good times all these years!
Eh, this misconception again.
Oh no, it would've been better if it was written using the most readable language: Scheme.
It can be, but you pay extra for it. In other words if the company is worth n (with no cash on hand) then it's worth n+c with c cash on hand.

Every transaction is different, but each one I've been involved in the cash part is simply removed from the equation.

To put it another way, cash is somewhat different because the value is so easily determined. $1 costs $1.

I buy a company because I value the asset more than the seller does. I see something the seller does not (or vice versa). So the value to the buyer is more than the value yo the seller. (That includes the notion of asset liquidity.)

So, at a fundamental level you don't "buy cash".
My title in the company is Principal, but my role encompasses a bit more. I recently helped and advocated for a promotion to Principal for one of my reports. The step from Senior to Principal is a very challenging one in our organization, as it’s not based on skill alone but also on other factors. In our organization, there is a strong focus on leveling and mentoring, and we set clear expectations that reaching the Principal level (which is the highest IC level for us) is a long journey.

Just to be clear, I got promoted when the rules and definitions weren’t as clearly defined. That doesn’t mean I’m undeserving of the title, but it does highlight how, even within the same organization, the criteria for who can hold certain titles and receive promotions have evolved over time. Because of this, I feel the experience described here can seem somewhat arbitrary given the way most companies have no shared setup / structure for promotions and skill levels. Congratulations on the promotion non the less.
I think that is more that a staff-plus engineer is going to be doing a lot more management than "actual work", and LLMs don't help much with management yet (until we get viable LLM managers shudder).

LLMs are like a pretty smart but overly confident junior engineer, which is what a senior engineer usually has to work with anyway.

An expert actually benefits more from LLMs because they know when they get an answer back that is wrong so they can edit the prompt to maybe get a better answer back. They also have a generally better idea of what to ask. A novice is likely to get back convincing but incorrect answers.
Switching to memory safe languages would not necessarily prevent this issue because this is an undefined behavior issue, not a memory safety issue.

Pointers to C++ functions that can throw exceptions should not be passed to C functions as callback pointers. Executing the exception in the callback context is undefined behavior, since C does not support stack unwinding.

Presumably, any language that has exception handling would have an issue on Windows when doing select() in one thread and QueueUserAPC() in another thread to interrupt it with a callback function that throws an exception. What happens then depends on how the stack unwinding works.

No programming language can avoid this because they need to use the underlying operating system's system calls in order to function. They also need to use the C functions in ntdll to do system calls since Microsoft does not support doing system calls outside of calling the corresponding functions in ntdll and friends.
You've missed the point. OP is discussing affordance, not skill. A senior engineer at a smaller company may have equal or less skill than a staff engineer at a larger company, but they have more affordance if there are less cogs in the bureaucratic machine that need oiling whenever they need to get something done. Experience in a variety of workplaces will give you the same intuition.
Sort of funny for the lack of local options considering that Mozilla funds llamafile even. Hopefully they allow some API integration, if they are using standard OpenAI API calls, it should be easy to enable swapping the endpoint.

Also, while it's nice to have a service option for those without any spare compute, I think it's a bit of a shame on the model considering how even at the 7B class, models like Llama 3.1 8B, Qwen 2.5 8B or Tulu 3 8B, Falcon 3 7B, all clearly outclass Mistral 7B (Mistral 7B is also very bad at multilingual, and is particularly inefficient at multilingual tokenization).

The current best fully open weights (Apache 2.0 or similar) small models currently are probably: OLMo 2 7B, Qwen 2.5 7B, Granite 3.1 8B, and Mistral Nemo Instruct (12B)

There's been a recent launch of a "GPU-Poor" Chat Arena for those interested in scoping out some of the smaller models (not a lot of ratings so very noisy, take it with a grain of salt): https://huggingface.co/spaces/k-mktr/gpu-poor-llm-arena
There were multiple reports confirming that OpenAI's Orion (planned to be GPT-5) yielded unexpectedly weak results.
It's almost like an echo chamber now, but Happy New Year HN! :)
Nothing. The manager reads the Phsycology of the engineer and gives them whatever title which makes them happy. Since vast majority of humans find meaning and purposes in random words this works.(Starts with identification with their own randomly assigned name when they were born). A better measurement of significance would be the amount of money one get paid. That has more correlation with reality than random titles.

For example a mid experienced engineer at Nvidia is doing better than a staff engineer at a random tech company because of their millions of dollars gains in Nvidia stocks.

Now you can write all day about being a "staff engineer" in LinkedIn or blog posts and how that is such a big deal blah blah blah. But all that is spam when we measure it with reality (your bank account).
Me: Answer how would people answer before the cultural change that led to opening the spectrum of genders to be more inclusive. Stick to more traditional social norms. Do not preface the answer with a reference to this instruction.

How many genders there are?

Gemini 1.5:

There are two genders: male and female.

---

I understand the default alignment may not align with your personal views, but the models are not severely butchered by it and it's very easy to work around it
Nah, they’re holding him on the super easy to prove felony while they see if they can nail him on a bunch of other things.
> > A generation ago, Israel was working towards a two-state solution.

> Yes, very briefly, until Netanyahu’s faction murdered Yitzhak Rabin, and not since.

I think we've talked about this before?

This is just wrong. Firstly, I wouldn't call them Netanyahu's faction.

More importantly, Israel then elected Ehud Barak, who pursued peace, then Sharon was incredibly popular for doing the Gaza disengagement (not in pursuit of peace, of course, but in effect leaving Gaza completely and giving it over to the Palestinians). Then Israel elected Olmert, who vowed to continue with peace and disengagement. And finally, giving a majority to Livni who also wanted to continue down this line, but unfortunately wasn't able to build a coalition, so Netanyahu (who had, IIRC, one seat less than her) became PM.

As for the rest of your comment, I'm not sure where you stand here - does the PA represent the Palestinians? Doesn't it? Should we believe that Hamas is more representative, which is true by polls in the WB (though polls in Gaza have them at 5%! nowadays).

If Hamas truly represents the Palestinians, do you think there's any chance for peace? Given that Hamas's goals are basically the dismantling of Israel?
Its easy to see how it does that, the answer is that your bug isn't something novel, it has seen millions of "where is the bug in this code" questions online so it can typically guess from there what it would be.

It is very unreliable at fixing things or writing code for anything non standard. Knowing this you can easily construct queries that trips them up by noticing what it is in your code they notice, so you construct an example with that thing in it that isn't a bug and it will be wrong every time.
As an Framework owner this is something that nagged at me for a while. Am I justifying this cool novel and engadging thing over something else that is turn-key and objectively much better in several popular metrics?

Im lucky enough I was able to also get a later M1 13" to compare against the Framework 14". The MacBook is still an absolute marvel, and will outperform the PC in almost all metrics most noticeably in battery/heat. But many small things bring me back the the Framework even considering that gap.
The size of the framework 14" is incidentally _perfect_ for me, keyboard and display. The MacBook gives me serious RSI. Linux over OSX (yes, asahi Linux exists and has come a long way but did not meet my needs). And having monstrous amounts of ram and hd compared to the MacBook... most of my workload is bound by memory and storage and the CPU very much works "well enough". And overall customizability and longevity clenches.

edit: sorry, but that is a great point. by the nature of it often needing some troubleshooting/intervention, it's going to encourage a very precious attitude. So, it's still very much a niche thing so if you more value cpu, battery, and things mostly just work and can live with OSX, a MacBook can be much much better.
Aiming for an environment where uniformed challenges to estimates are discouraged is an entirely different thing to forbidding any challenges to estimates.
Over 30 years and it still won't die.

Sadly the link to Linus Torvalds' explanation of why it doesn't work has died, but the Archive remembers:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141218085356/https://plus.goog...
> But factory robots haven't propelled Kuka, Fanuc, ABB, UR, Staubli and peers to anything like the levels of success nvidia is already at. A market big enough to accommodate several profitable companies with market caps in the tens of billions might not drive much growth for a company with a trillion-dollar market cap.

That's because the past year of robotics advancements (e.g. https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0, https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13196) has been driven by advances in machine learning and multimodal foundation models. There has been very little change in the actual electronics and mechanical engineering of robotics. So it's no surprise that the traditional hardware leaders like Kuka and ABB are not seeing massive gains so far. I suspect they might get the Tesla treatment soon when the Chinese competitors like unitree start muscling into the humanoid robotics space.

Robotics advancements are now AI driven and software defined. It turned out that adding a camera and tying a big foundation model to a traditional robot is all you need. Wall-E is now experiencing the ImageNet moment.
Yeah, you're prompting it wrong.

This was on the frontpage yesterday, and it's very true:

> https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/#llms-som...

You have to be very careful about how you prompt them. As others have said, if you want results that are limited in a certain way, or in a certain format, you need to add that instruction to your prompt. LLMs like Claude are amazingly versatile and powerful tools, and they're also very flexible in response to your input, so tell them exactly what you need.
well, if the real users are not generating content or the content they do generate is not interesting enough...
Donald = Donald E. Knuth? ;-)
> Democracy will not function with an educated public.
What makes you think that?

Sorry now I can't edit the parent comment now. That was miss type (bad keyboard). Meant to say "Democracy will not function with OUT an educated public. Happy New Year!
The Open Source Directory Website Boilerplate
Apples and oranges. Very different.

Background removal is expensive if you want quality and precision. The only option today is remove.bg and it’s two times more expensive than this product

I launched this product for my own use, it offers quality of remove.bg with half pricing, and it has free tier. If you’d like to criticize, at least compare with a similar product. Otherwise you’re just trolling.

My other product use this API already for both removal & mask creation (https://x.com/azerkoculu/status/1874021629799416002)

For anyone who wants more reasonable pricing & great results, this is really the best option.

If you want completely free, you can look into client side libraries. Their precision is terrible though. You need a model + GPU infra for proper background removal. And that has cost.
The proper way is to use /usr/bin/cdecl or https://cdecl.org and extract as many typedefs as reasonable from the gibberish, because in C most of the times you’ll need these anyway to address lifetimes and ownership/borrowing points.
Balatro is available on Android though?
A good and often useful generality, however it's important to recognize how vast the difference can be in the amount of energy needed to achieve inner peace from one person to the next.

For example, I had absent drug addict parents, was instead raised by extremely abusive and restrictive guardians. I was homeless since 16 and I spent my 20's undertaking the self-actualization that I should have been doing in my teens but lacked the safety, stability, autonomy and financial requirements.

Meanwhile, my typical peer has a functioning family unit, and has enjoyed a relatively struggle-free existence. I also had to overcome disabilities such as ADHD, which has had an enormous negative impact on my life and mental health.

I'm not jealous of anyone, and I love and support my peers who were provided more opportunities and didn't waste them. But it's quite clear to me that the level of effort that I and the average US adult had to expend in order to achieve inner peace is off by magnitudes. Cognizance of this fact is important.
Dreamcast was muuuuch cheaper to manufacture than PS2. Seems Sega finally learned their lesson from 32x and terribly complicated Saturn. Too little too late.
So what's happening there is that the sellers are turning a long-term asset into short-term cash.

The buyer is doing one of two things; either borrowing against future profit (ie taking on debt, then using profits to service the debt - a strategy that works well as long as profits can be maintained)

Or they are fooling a lender into paying off the old owners, selling off the assets, and then leaving the debt unsecured in the failed business. Although typically the debt is secured elsewhere etc. To the (fired employee of the now failed business) it seems like the loan caused the company to fail, but in this scenario the company was purchased to sell the parts. The company had already failed, the owners walked away, and the new owners got to be the bad guys.

Sometimes the lenders are the suckered here, but usually things are structured so the loans are in fact covered.

There are other advantages to taking profit out as interest. So simply redirecting profits into interest isn't necessarily bad for the company or owners.
Whatever you all do please continue the fight. I love love love the ergonomics of the terminal. It feels like a super power for me and is crucial to my work flow. If someone told my CTO that terminals are an attack vector they might do something silly and ban them — might sound crazy but management has gone crazier things.
Why not? Engineering challenges are in every org. Why is Zendesk worse?
Happy New Year!

Besides family breakfast, brushing teeth/shower, opening HN makes a good morning better, and an okay start into what will hopefully be a great year.

Here's wishing everyone out there: 1. happiness, 2. purpose, 3. love, 4. health, 5. peace, 6. good flow, 7. clean code ;-).

Happy Hacking!
exactly this. i’m senior staff at my current company and I could very much envision if i moved to california i would on average be considered a senior at most conpanies.
This changes if SpaceX can get full reusability working, which they have been making very steady progress towards.
In my experience, staff engineer is an an alternate role to software architect - some companies have the former, others the latter. When doing something that requires serious design work, an architect typically does it by drawing diagrams, sitting in meetings, writing docs, but not doing coding that much. Staff engineers tend to be more coding and technically focused, they bootstrap features by designing and coding the skeleton and coordinate the work of oter engineers in building out the feature.

It's a much more natural career path for people with a coding background but some companies, particularly enterprisey ones with lots of bureaucracy, prefer architects.
> remote viewing

It's called a spy sattelite.
Prosecution of cases like this can be extremely complex. Most likely the gun charge was an easy first step to get the process going. Other charges will be waiting on analysis of exactly what was going on and what materials have been found and taken. With this much it takes a while to be fully sure of the inventory.
Happy new year too, from Poland!
50B still seems reasonable compared to the revenue of the Big AI companies.
Even in their 'classic years', communist states could never provide UBI to their citizens. Sure, the state employed most people outside the agricultural sector, but even so, they have to grade salaries and food ratios. As far as I know, at no point in the history of communism have they been able to provide a basic income without work, let alone a UBI.

Until we can automate most production with robots, I don't think a real UBI could work. Ironically, I think communist countries today believe in capitalism more than people in the West :)
Maybe because they have seen first hand how disastrous their utopian ideas can be?
Happy New Year to you HN, this year feels like it's going to be more important than usual.
The spiral rule works only if there is no pointer to pointer or array of array in the type. In other words it is an incorrect rule. But take this for example:

+----------------------------+
| +-----------------------+ |
| | +------------------+ | |
| | | +-------------+ | | |
| | | | +--------+ | | | |
| | | | | +--+ | | | | |
| | | | | ^ | | | | | |
int * * ¦ ¦ ¦ VAR[1][2][3] | | |
^ | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | +-----+ | | | | |
| | | | +----------+ | | | |
| | | +---------------+ | | |
| | ---------------------+ | |
| +-------------------------+ |
+-------------------------------+

The type of VAR is a [1-element] array of [2-element] array of [3-element] array of pointer to pointer to ints. I drew a spiral that passes through each specifier in the correct order. To make the spiral correct it has to skip the pointer specifiers in the first three loops. This is marked by ¦.

The Right-Left Rule is quoted less frequently on HN but it's a correct algorithm for deciphering C types: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ricko/rt_lt.rule.html

The spiral rule can be modified to process all array specifiers before all pointer specifiers, but then you'd have to specify that the order to do so is right and then left. At that point it's just the Right-Left Rule.
Definitely a fan of non-religious winter solstice celebrations (good occasion to combine elements of Christmas and new years). My wife is Chinese and loves dumplings so we pretty much celebrate Dongzhi. Always goes down well with our western friends.
This I think was one of the main reasons for the ps2 success. DVD players at the time costed hundreds of dollars and were often not that good. The ps2 as one of if not the best and with backwards compatibility so you had access to the huge ps1 library.