skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you speak to any academic working in a "controversial" field, it becomes readily apparent that a lot of meritless papers are getting through peer review because their conclusions agree with a particular orthodoxy and vice-versa. The measure we're discussing is crude, heavy-handed and likely quite destructive, but I can't help but see it as a counter-reaction to an equally destructive opposing trend. Numerous academics have had their careers abruptly ended in recent years because they discovered the "wrong" facts; a vastly larger number have self-censored for fear of being targeted by a partisan campaign.

Sadly, the politicisation of academia is so acute that I expect it will take many decades of wild over-correction and counter-correction to remedy, if it is in fact possible to remedy.

https://iopenshell.usc.edu/pubs/pdf/pnas-scientific_censorsh...
The Bureau is excellent. One of the few shows where the hacking is relatively realistic (as opposed to magic to advance the plot). The Wire is an apt comparison.
But those xyz combinations are not deceases, right? Why should we spend public money on that?
I recommend reading George Saunders - probably the best living short story writer. His way of writing is both out there and grounded at the same time. Not much sci-fi (if anything it’s whimsical) though.

His collection Tenth of December is probably my favorite.
They've literally already proposed a law to allow him to run a 3rd term in the house and they're only 2 weeks in

They're going to try to find one way or another to let him run again (if he lives long enough)
Exploring Nine Simultaneous Transients on April 12th, 1950 (2021)
> there isnt a single well founded argument to dismiss AI alarmism

AI alarmism itself isn't a well founded argument.
Depends, if you're a realist [1] (like most) then there can be such a thing as absolute truth, that you may not always be able to access.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_realism?wprov=sf...
New LLM compression method lets you compress models upto 60% of original size
Sudden tariff on stable trade agreement that has been tweaked to ensure both side won is not fear mongering.

Fear mongering is what Trump does to Americans: take out Oil, the thing that Americans have never ending hunger for because US infra and public transport suck ass, then the trade between US and Canada is on par.

Fear mongering is 19kg of fentanyl (or less than 1% of US fentanyl) moving from Canada to US while fentanyl by and large is US problem.
> IBM to launch an LLM in 2040.

What about Watson? How did it generate language? My understanding is it output language well enough to match what LLMs do today.
I’d also argue this is a view on the technical components of writing, rather than the artform.

AI can for sure place brush strokes more precisely (“correctly”?) but the argument is over the necessity of process/intent in the art
Not allowed by us, we, the community that doesn't trade in bad faith argument.

You have a point that the downvotes and flags do their work. That's pretty much banning. After they call a few more people homophobic slurs or insult their families, they'll probably be shadowbanned.

>On what criteria will you recognize bad actors?

Constant dodging of questions, shifting goalposts with aggressive language, personal insults, and so on. Signalled by being repeatedly downvoted or flagged for such behavior.

We're probably on a similar page, but I am slightly less concerned with censorship. Three week old accounts that have done little but troll have less "plot armor" than established accounts.
> The primary purpose of feature flags is to provide a way to change system behavior dynamically, without needing a deploy.

That's not feature flags; it's just ordinary configuration. (Actually, seems many contributions to this discussion get those mixed up. Maybe even TFA itself.)
IP400 network project for digital ham radio
It's great practical science but the basis of the research was a photo showing the bacteria in the stomach lining, which was against the accepted belief at the time. So the experiment confirmed what they already knew, at least that's how I remember them explaining it in a documentary
You are arguing with a windmill I've never expressed the opinion you assign to me

1- yes
2- i don't know, it depends
3- different for sure, legally it's split in civil and criminal. Morally speaking it's all mostly blabla unless you can assign it to a specific moral ethos like catholic morals. Fun fact the etymology of morals is customs, as in what is usually done by the people.
It has AI in the title!
Repetition of topics and subtopics is by far the most important part, reinforcing attention on the topic at hand even if the text in the chunk appears unrelated to the topic when viewed in isolation.

Keeping the indentation is also important because it is an implicit and repeated indication of the nesting level of the content that follows. LLMs have trouble with balancing nested parentheses (as the sibling comment to yours explains).

Dealing with text where indentation matters is easier for LLMs, and because they have been exposed to large amounts of it (such as Python code and lists of bullet points) during training, they have learned to handle this quite well.
Combined, proof that we are in the future.
They're optimized to maximize profit for capital owners. Another word for this is capitalism.
I like the one with Ryan Gosling more
Is asteroid mining profitable? I'm assuming you would smelt in space and then use the metal in space, although reentry could be cheap if you form it into a lifting body for re-entry and are willing to lose some from ablation as it glides in.

So you have to get your miner and smelter and power plant into stable orbit at like $1m/ton, and then what? Does the money work out?
>that they _actually_ see the fine garments.

I'm not sure that's true for most of them. Most seem to love a naked king as long as he's "hurting the right people". The cruelty is the point for them, but they don't understand that he also doesn't care about them so long as he's getting high on the damage he's causing everyone, which is what his well-known malignant narcicissm demands.
Make a brand new word then. Even if you want to add all these layers to societal interaction we can call people who want a different identity "Gender Identified Woman."

Don't confuse the meaning of the existing word and pretend it's necessary. That's another tactic is conflating categories. Usually there's some sympathetic category that is a tiny amount of people, like genuine at-birth hermaphrodites, and they argue about that while at the same time pretending all that stuff applies to men who want to be housed in women's prisons.

One thing that drives me nuts with this language stuff lately is how the word "Partner" came to mean romantic partner because people can't just be bothered to say "girlfriend" or "boyfriend" anymore. Now, when people introduce their "partner" in a context where it's ambiguous whether it's personal or business "partner" I have to wonder in which sense do they mean it.
Using Claude to generate dynamic dashboard [video]
This is true.

You can get "industrial" versions of these cards that are intended to be used as BOM items for products. This means you get a stable supply and they won't change the part number out from under you (which happens even with reputable suppliers when you buy as a consumer). When they're about to EOL the part, you get a heads-up multiple months in advance and a "last time buy" opportunity.

In my experience, these aren't "better" performance-wise. You just "know" what you're getting, have an opportunity to qualify it, and you won't get surprise changes.

Of course, the price is jacked up as a result.

Generally speaking, it's usually better to make the customer responsible for the SD card if you have to use one at all.
I think you have the reasoning backwards, there's no "must" here. Historically there are lots and lots of systems which have struggled to approach their peak FLOPS in real-world apps due to off-chip bottlenecks.
Does every type of basepair transform into rock the same way?
Validrive[1] can validate actual vs advertised storage area. Maybe works on SD-cards aswell?

1 https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
Can you tell us more about how they were kicked out? Are there other groups that have been kicked out?
sure, you’re basically saying 0.0000001% is an overestimate
100 WPM at 98% accuracy.

It used to be 80 WPM. Then I learned Dvorak, which also boosted my QWERTY +20 WPM.

Now I switched to a split keyboard, and I'm slowly gaining my typing speed. I went from 20 WPM to 65 WPM in two weeks. It's not supposed to make me faster, it's just a nice hack with extra thumb keys and layers to lower travel speed for those things you do a lot.
I'm afraid that is just wishful and overly-optimistic thinking.
If an approach is so boring that you don't do it, then what does it matter how effective it might be?

Either find a way to make it less boring or switch up the approach. Whatever gets you to keep a habit is what's important.

Same with any habit we want to develop. Cooking. Exercise. Language learning. Building software. Meet people.
“The Democrats”, maybe not. “Leftists”, however defined, certainly did, and the difference might not be apparent, nor important, to the typical voter.

“Nazi” is used as a rhetorical device, a label to assign to anyone not conforming to a certain set of beliefs typically described as “woke” (see fediverse, especcially #FediBlock hashtag if you don't believe me). I took liberty to parrot that rhetoric, not to use it in the real meaning.

As long as this is dismissed as “ghost stories”, HN is still in denial phase. While the decision to censor the data is wrong, whatever we think about labels (people not agreeing with a set of categories can probably filter/tranform on their own), I think is important to realise, what moves the people who do such things, to get at least basic understanding.
DeepSeek ripped away AI's veil of mystique. That's the reason tech bros fear it
Isn't this just an extension of the culture of asking for evidence to make future decisions?

If I go to the bank and ask for a loan they will ask me for evidence of product market fit and other signals that suggest to them that I will be able to pay them back. All of this evidence is ultimately based on what has been successful and dominant and quantifiable in the past.

IMO LLMs are just the next disturbing step of optimising for the status quo, limiting risk taking, and stifling innovation.
I don't mind if you call me a 'crank'. At least I'm not being shouted down - and I appreciate that.

It's important to understand that I believe that gender dysphoria is a real condition. I mainly question the scale, social dynamics, and the rapid cultural shift. I'm also concerned about the strife and (ironically) dysphoria that it causes.

I am open to the idea that 10% of my adult friends actually have gender dysphoria and just aren't able to talk about it. However, given I knew zero people with gender dysphoria 25 years ago but now 10% of the adolescents (and two 4th graders!) that I know have gender dysphoria, it is a surprising change.

Also, I feel like science should be open to scrutiny, and shutting down discussion only increases distrust. And, over the past 10 years, many people have been shut out from the conversation.
Counterpart was so good and I was so sad to see it cancelled.
Even most intelligent people can hallucinate, we still haven't fixed this problem. There's a lot of training material and bias which leads many to repeat those things "LLM's are just a stochastic parrot, glorified auto complete/google search, Markov chains, just statistics", etc. The thing is, these sentences sound really good and so it's easy to repeat them when you have made up your mind. It's a shortcut.
That's because male-on-male violence, including sexual violence, is endemic in many male prisons. How any particular male victim may identify is secondary to this safeguarding failure within the male prison system.
LLMs are generally better search tools for certain topics today, but search engines have been in serious decline for at least 15 years.

IMHO old-school Google remains the high water mark of generalized information retrieval, with advantages ranging from speed to semi-durable citation.

I strongly suspect there is a cohort thing going on here, many HN users today weren’t involved in technology yet back when Google worked well.

Much like beer for Homer Simpson, AI is the cause of and solution to all of the Internet’s problems.
> it might actually be a boon to medical research.

How? That seems like going out of your way to label this as not as bad as it actually is.
Might be geo-based? Just checked again and clicking on it takes me straight to Google.
> A good model can tell you that a hurricane might hit Tampa but won't hit New Orleans

On the other hand we have no model to predict that hurricane a year in advance and tell us which city it’ll hit.

Yet these people believe they can rationalise about far more unpredictable events far further in the future.

That is, I agree that they completely ignore the point at which uncertainties utterly dominate any calculation you might try to do and yet continue to calculate to a point of absurdity.
That’s funny because I thought they captured it perfectly. Cults can be blissful places; the experience and friends I’ve made amidst the madness I’ve experienced in startups made me stronger in the end.
OP here: I agree, actually - unfortunately due to HN title length limitations, I had to cut something out, and I chose to cut out the "gave himself an ulcer" bit. I tried to mitigate it by posting a TL;DR as the first comment :)
> A good mental exercise with these kinds of examples is to imagine splitting up the parts of the program that each optimization looked at, so that they live in different translation units. This prevents your mind from playing games with what exactly the optimization can know. The article tries to do something similar but fully writing out the output of each optimization as a separate program.

I already do that in my mind, and my mind isn't playing games. If you have a specific point to rebut please do so. Though please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42907292 in its entirety beforehand. It seems we are reading those intermediate outputs differently.
It is a bit more subtle, as a better analogy is “protection racket” ala the Mob.

Paramount for example is implying that they may settle the lawsuit Trump filed against cbs as this would help their chances to approve a proposed merger with Skydance.
Given that some of the regulators referenced in the article are under threat of being eliminated, is it reasonable to expect that we may be receiving more of these types of messages in the future? Recently a local candidate for public office (who did not win their election) stated that they believed racist or fraudulent mass texts were protected under freedom of speech. Perhaps they were more prescient than I thought.
Alpaca is in the Pop!_shop (what is called the store on most other distros) so it's just a matter of clicking install. Inside it it has a list of several models, I downloaded a small model, but even a small model is very big, 4 Gigs. Some are over 100GB. When one is downloaded just click on new chat.

https://github.com/Jeffser/Alpaca

GPT4ALL on the cinnamon mint box I first installed Easy Flatpak then installed it from there. That I had a little different goal, I had a lot of pdf and epub books I wanted to index. I downloaded a small model again, a 4.34G Llama 3 8B Instruct. In the local docs I put one pdf 'Github for Dummies' and asked it to index. It took about 30 minutes IIRC. (don't start with too many, it could be days indexing. You can add docs later and re-index so you can build your database slowly) Then instead of looking up in the book how to revert a commit, you chat with the model and ask it how to revert a commit.

My take is the model is the human language interface for queries, and that's all. Bear in mind almost everyone knows more about this me, I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

You can also do similar what I did with gpt4all online for free as long as you have a google account. Go to notebooklm dot google dot com and start uploading your documents.
I think SEO was the beginning of the end for the world wide web. Doing a few things to make your website show up in searches is one thing, but that shades off to doing content farms full of rubbish just to sell ad views.

Best to wash your hands of SEO and walk away before you are completely morally compromised.
Trans women are not men.
https://ogles.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-ogles-propo...

It has already been floated.
It isn't banned, it just won't be state funded.
4⃣9⃣4⃣8⃣9⃣ 7⃣5⃣6⃣0⃣7⃣ 5⃣5⃣1⃣6⃣3⃣ 3⃣2⃣5⃣5⃣7⃣ 5⃣2⃣6⃣3⃣5⃣

Got this at the end. Might be part of an AR game.
It's already been solved and it's called reader view.
Has an AI “proven” a theorem?
You also have to account for how much Trump cares about his supporters vs how much any Canadian politician with sufficient power to act cares about their supporters. Trump is already elected, so whatever self-interested concern he had for his supporters is gone. I doubt Canadian politicians, with an election looming, are as willing to throw their supporters under the bus.
I'd love to see the logic they used to determine the castle was the best option.
‹mutters something about a blue box›
Not if they change the constitution. https://ogles.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-ogles-propo...
I think the mistake here is simply to many new cards a day. If you miss a week and have 863 reps, you definitely are going way too fast. You shouldn’t have to spend more than 5-20 minutes daily going over your review, and if you miss a week you shouldn’t need more than two or three half hour sessions to catch up.

I think there are diminishing returns as well by having to many daily new cards, as there is only so much you can commit into memory every day. So you will probably end up having terrible recall as well (which further adds to your reps).

I’m using Anki to learn Japanese. I actually go a step further in taking it slow as I’m still on my N5 vocab (first 1000 words) after 9 months of learning. I think it will be another 9 months before I can read stuff I‘m interested in in Japanese (which will probably be Go books).
The only actual difference in my view is that somehow we feel that we are so uber special. Besides that, it seems there's no reason to believe that we are anything more than chemical signals. But the fact that we have this strong "feeling" that we are special refuses us to admit that. I feel like I'm special, I feel like I exist. That's the only argument for being more than something else.
A relevant bit from zizians.info

> This jargon serves multiple purposes. An important one is that it separates Zizians from others. The cost to read and understand Sinceriously is substantial, and most people are not willing to pay it. Another is to warp the beliefs of people who use it. The connotations and affect of Ziz's jargon encode her moral beliefs about the world separated from the quality of reasoning used to produce them. By offering language that reinforces these judgments Ziz creates conditions where even engaging with the beliefs of her followers requires the repetition and reinforcement of their frame.
As a gay man, I will begrudgingly volunteer as a sacrificial genital checker. I will sit at the entrance to the men's restroom, like a bouncer of a club, and the men that are concerned about who is in which bathroom can show me their penis prior to gaining entry to the restroom. That way, we can make sure restrooms are safe for all.
> I don’t like reading obviously AI-generated content on Twitter. (…) But I have no problem reading AI-generated content when I talk to Copilot or ChatGPT. Why is that?

For the same reason that you making an annoying sound doesn’t bother you, but someone else doing the exact same thing does. Or why other people’s dreams aren’t particularly interesting but yours might be. Basically, in the words of George Carlin: “did you ever notice your own farts smell okay?”¹

There’s no mystery to it. You like the slop you make because you’re in control and you made it. You were present, interested, and invested in the process and decision making throughout. You only see the result of other people’s slop.

¹ https://youtu.be/MnI6F2DKoOQ?feature=shared&t=78
Wouldn't a USB hub and, say, BTRFS do the job?
They are "boarding school poor" (ie not poor). The dad is high up in a ministry, where they have all gone to school with each other. The brother is on a tenure track at a major university. They are very well connected. They live in a massive house in the country, etc, etc.
Low Resource Video Host
Unfortunately in this debate, two sides of any given argument from a study cannot even agree on what criteria counts as "debunked".

I have seen people use many states of being for a study being in a "debunked" state:

Peer pointed out methodological issues

Retracted

Another study found something in conflict with first one

Somebody with a PhD just said it was wrong (regardless of field)

Somebody without a PhD said it was wrong, but has domain experience

Author of the paper proven to be biased in some way

Author of the paper proven to be a cheat (but nothing specific about the paper)

And so on...
The children of older generation will have even bigger mortgage, limiting their economy movement.

This is what an eroding middle class looks like.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795925

Building more housing won't solve the problem if the demand continue to outpace the supply plus price is sticky.

Nobody wants to build more house if they knew the next project yield less income.
Excellent point. And it shines a light directly on what I'm saying. There's a great line from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

""""Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.”"""

... and, of course, the philosopher can argue that we are all of us tumbling through a Pachinko-machine of parallel universes, and it is only our constrained perception that suggests Man is dead; in a parallel universe, Man is just fine and living their days in the grey universe that we, through some as-yet-unphilosophized-but-don't-worry-we're-thinking-hard-about-it process, cannot exist in.

... but does that matter over-much if the observable is that ignoring zebra crossings gets you crossed out of this universe?
Python Details and Their Consequences (2023)
To me this also feels like a statement that would obviously need strong justification. For if animals are capable of reasoning, probably through being trained on many examples of the laws of nature doing their thing, then why couldn't a statistical model be?
> One sense of feature flag that I am familiar with (not from experience) is in trunk based development where they are used to integrate new code (with a feature flag) which is relatively untested. Or just not fully developed. That’s an alternative to longer-lived feature branches which are only merged until it is either fully finished or (going further) fully tested.

That's actually the only sense of "feature flag" I was aware of before this discussion.

> Hard-coding that kind of feature flag makes sense. Because a later revision will delete the feature flags outright (removing the branches).

Yup. And, AFAIK, is what "feature flag" means.

> There also seems to be feature flags in the sense of toggling on and off features. Then hard-coding makes less sense.

So "feature flag" has now taken on -- taken over? -- the meaning of just plain "flag" (or "switch" or "toggle" or whatever), as in ordinary everyday run-time configuration? What is this development supposed to be good for? We used to have two distinct distinguishable terms for two distinct distinguishable things; now we apparently don't any more. So we've lost a bit of precision from the language we use to discuss this stuff. Have we, in exchange, gained anything?