skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I blog and podcast for work. There's much I can't say due to my employers expectations in content, which I might say on my own space. But, vanity issues abound. I'm acculturated to consider writing in public "showing off" which may not be true by intent, but can happen anyway.

But blogging for work rather subtracts from the pleasure for me. I know people who originate content and blog for pleasure which is consumed for work. That seems to be a better fit.

I agree with much of the sentiment here. You can diarise, a zettelkasten isn't a bad place to be. Inviting readership constructs a binding, a contract writer to reader. It's building commitment: to produce, and to reflect on what readers say, and to correct honest mistakes and accept (some) criticism with good grace. Shame about the negging: George Megalogenis's blog had a byline up top of the comment pages "my blog, my rules" and you can't really object to that. Boring and abusive replies get chucked. Fair enough.
You've basically put together an FAQ that summarizes the talking points from one party. I'm sure it's quite helpful if people are looking to understand the views of that party, but I'd hardly call it an authoritative FAQ on the issue at hand.

> A1: There's nothing wrong with making the government more efficient, but (1) there are good and bad ways of cutting spending (and DOGE, IMO, is really bad), (2) the federal budget is massive [1], 1B or even 10B USD is practically peanuts, so a real cost-benefit analysis is critical while knee-jerk "that's too much money" reactions are usually short-sighted, and (3) the Trump administration is planning to spend FAR MORE on massive tax cuts - a government that's serious about reducing the deficit would not spend 5-10 trillion USD on tax cuts.

You don't actually provide much rationale or provide a broad perspective on the issues at hand.

"DOGE is bad" because we should have a small d "democracy" approach. This completely ignores the Constitution and division of powers with the President in control of the Executive and all the agencies that report to it. Yes, Congress controls spending, and the Supreme Court will likely need to rule on exactly where the line divides between Executive/Legislative powers, but it's not accurate to say that spending cuts should be a small d democracy exercise.

Then you mention how 1B or 10B is practically peanuts (this is a talking point directly from one of the political parties) which isn't a great argument at all because DOGE isn't cutting 1B or 10B and stopping, the intent is to cut hundreds examples of 1B or 10B in spending, which is certainly not peanuts.

Then you mention how "tax cuts are bad and you wouldn't do that if you were serious about the deficit", but that's not true at all. Removing wasteful spending is 100% a goal in and of itself. We have no idea how much wasteful spending will be cut, and if we reduce it by $2T, and Trump decides to cut taxes by $1T, we're still reducing the deficit. That is also a "policy choice", not some universal rule that you can never cut taxes and be financially responsible.
Nah, you have to do better than that to be funny on Hacker News.
I'll give it a read. I must admit, the more I learn about the inner workings of LLM's the more I see them as simply the sum of their parts and nothing more. The rest is just anthropomorphism and marketing.
If you make an LLM which design goal is to state "I do not know" any answer that is not directly in its training set, then all of the above statements don't hold.
The limitation lies in Transformer architecture itself, therefore AGI was never a possibiblity.
It's wonderful, but not miraculous; And that's okay.
At this point big techs are just milking the hype of what already reached it's boundaries.
Go Supply Chain Attack: fake boltdb
Python is roughly 35 years old. People still seem to use that one.
Here's the website for the analysis: https://electiontruthalliance.org/clark-county%2C-nv

That is better to scrutinize than the press release.
> I want a chatbot that can automatically magic up proofs that all my code is correct for instance.

How could the AI know what you wanted to program? If it was trained only with self play it won’t understand the language where you describe the purpose of the code because it only speaks its own idiosyncratic language. (At best.)

And if it doesn’t know what you wanted to do then all it can prove is that the program does what the program does.
> The same side that's alleging interference in 2024 suggested that to question election irregularities in 2020 was to reject democracy itself.

It is absolutely not the position of mainstream Democrats that the 2024 election was rigged, invalid etc. This ETA organization (founded December) is some fringe weirdo and doesn't represent dems.
Ah this is a far more significant effort. I'm glad to see that there's so much consensus that default shell history is broken (I used to use logrotate because it would always truncate regardless of how many ways I told it to not ever, under no conditions, ever, do that).

Nice to see there's so many options these days. Someone else mentioned "https://atuin.sh/" in this thread - which is also new to me. Keeping up with things is seemingly impossible
I have often thought it would be fun to have a Smalltalk like interaction screen, where you could leave snippets of code lying around and a “do it” menu item.

Kind of like how most of the SQL systems like dBeaver work. I have a scratchpad of SQL in a file I use for fiddly jobs, and a file like that for shell commands would be good if it had all the flags for awk or grep or whatever handy.

Would also be cool for the AWS and azure cli tools. I had something half working as an old VisualWorks experiment that implemented an AWS service on one side and a scratchpad in the middle but I feel like it might be a very cool vscode extension instead.
It's crazy how people are in denial of the reality for women breaking into male dominated fields. The "lived-experience" gap is real. In college in CS there was maybe 1-2 other women in my classes, in Maths there were none. Working in ops I have been the only woman on my team at every job I've ever had. Tooting my own horn a little I've been consistently a top if not the top performer and have the recs to show it. And yet every time I go for a
job I'm fighting for
them to "take a chance on me." It's so god damn frustrating how surprised they are that I'm a professional. I have to bust my ass to get back to my senior title that some guy just gets hired on with.
This lot has amassed a very large amount of political power and is part of the same group that's currently deconstructing the very mechanisms that were used to capture and imprison YOUR lot
Inside OpenAI's $14M Super Bowl debut
> I struggle to imagine what a Pollock "about" racism would look like

That Pollock's style cannot address racism is, possibly, why it was promoted over more politically salient schools.
And being that efficient is fine, if you're a startup or a technology company. If you're the government, sometimes people die waiting on their treatment to be funded because of your efficient bulldozing.
exept they haven't

https://www.vox.com/trump-administration/388627/fbi-backgrou...
> Articles like this are pure chutzpah.

I shouldn't spend time on this but it seems from context you think that word means "bullshit" and it doesn't. I'm sorry for pointing it out but it bothers me.

> "But there's evidence this time and there wasn't in 2020!" Well, the other side would argue the opposite. We're not going to get anywhere this way.

We might be able to by actually looking at the evidence. This is a really common problem I see among people who through good intentions avoid controversial topics.

Sure scientists say the moon is real, but Keith on Facebook says it's a hologram. I guess we should rule out any evidence from the entire field of astronomy until they can dispel even the appearance of misinformation.
I'm happy to explain my strategies about synthetic data - it's just that you'll need to hear about the onions I wore in my day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yujF8AumiQo
This is a pretty inexperienced analysis.

I happened to have detailed day-by-day voting and registration data for the 2024 Nevada election as it was happening. Harris losing Nevada was telegraphed in the data almost from the beginning. Forget the top line totals, the underlying structure of where and who was registering and voting in real-time made the outcome all but a foregone conclusion weeks before the actual election. Nevada was some of the easiest money on the prediction markets.

Much is explained by an unusually robust turnout of low-propensity voters for Trump. They often don't care about the rest of the ballot, so it skews results albeit in a predictable way. (This is also the risk for Republicans; they are unlikely to show up for mid-terms and may sit on the sidelines again in four years.)

Nevada has consistently clean election processes. I am only aware of a single anomaly over the last several Federal elections that was clearly inexplicable. It wasn't this election, that instance looked like a system failure rather than fraud, and it didn't change the outcome. Some other States are rife with anomalies that persist even with sophisticated analysis most cycles.

If I was going to pick a State to look for Federal election irregularities, Nevada would be pretty low on my list. It is easy for amateurs to fool themselves into thinking they've found election fraud when really they just don't understand what is required to find a signal that holds up under sophisticated analysis. Same thing happened in 2020.

I also used to live in Nevada and am pretty attuned to the local politics. There are local bellwether statistics that are traditionally pretty reliable for indicating how an election will break. Harris was upside down on these too. The tortured rationalization by Nevada election pundits like Jon Ralston to reinterpret those as "good actually" was uncritically repeated widely in the national media.
WSL2 uses a lower level, simpler API than HyperV which is a full-fledged hypervisor. That's why it is also available on Windows Home. If you can enable WSL1, you should also be able to use WSL2 unless the HW virtualization is completely blocked off. You need to run a command to change the default though.

WSL2 cross-OS I/O performance is lower than WSL1. Especially with the random access patterns and constant stat/access calls made by Linux-targetting programs. However that should be the rare option to take. Working on native ext4 FS of WSL2 is almost as fast as running native Linux. So you should really copy files in and work on them in WSL.
People are used to Googling something and reading whole threads about how something can/can't be done before an actual sound conclusion, how to do something but it's actually completely wrong, and other similar behaviors so it's not really that big a leap to do the same with an LLM giving you a single response.

That said, single pass LLMs tend to do this kind of thing but a lot of the more useful things are best done on chain of thought type ones, where they are given some time to reflect on options before they have to start generating the start of the final response.
Here are drop-off counts and percentages by state and county: https://smartelections.us/dropoff#e0e8218a-4b28-4e0c-b854-7f...

It's clear that drop-off varies a lot: ±30% by state, and even more by county. I'm sure if you looked at the vote data from every tabulator in every county in every state, you'll find more than one "squint and you'll kind of see it" pattern.

I'll need more evidence before I suspect anything bad happened to the vote. (IMO voter suppression efforts are potentially election-impacting, but vote manipulation less likely.)
Me to. I suspect its a combination of demographics and sub culture thing (I'm old, and out of the loop on a lot of pop culture and sub-variants). I have noticed a very high degree of nihilism and a sort of "morals are just a role you play in a game" kinda mentality with the younger crowd that looks and acts _very_ different to past generations though..
1 year of data is indeed too little if you are trying to forecast one year ahead. Also the pricing is set by OpenAI. We don't know their actual costs decreased by that factor. Only that they cut their prices.
For MacOS there's https://software.sil.org/ukelele/

For Linux, unfortunately xkb is overcomplicated and undercapable, and it's like pulling teeth to get a layout recognized as a first-class citizen by a Linux ‘desktop’.
They were good in the opposition to Biden, now they have lost all credibility. They were sympathetic to the Greenland and other annexation plans. Chamath appeared on Tucker Carlson, garnered sympathy with various sob stories but then gently pushed his agenda to the MAGA crowd.

No wonder Musk wants to deregulate everything. Regulation interferes with the telemedicine, gut bacteria powders and various other nonsense that these gentlemen invest in.

The (deliberate?) chaos that Trump/Musk create provides great opportunities for those in the know.
Extraordinary claims like this need a lot more substantiation to be news. As-is, this is just some crazy person yelling at the clouds. We don't need to amplify that.
I strongly disagree. It should be examined (their analysis, the artifacts they discovered, and whether or not they are similar to the artifacts that could be created from software similar to the repo that was shared below). It's worth asking this community to examine and discuss it. This is clearly related to the professional interests of this community, and this community is uniquely suited to bring insight to it.
I'm concerned by the turn of this thread. The claims of voter fraud in 2020 were tenuous claims based on mail-in ballots and other speculation. This is a claim based on statistical analysis -- something I'd think would click with the HN crowd, regardless if there's room for debate on the meaning of the stats.
This is basically a blog post that lists 12 bullet points that all cite Daily Mail, Breitbart, and Washington Examiner and then says

> The list literally goes on and on — and it has all been happening for decades.

People who get all of their information from twitter have taken over the highest offices in government...
> As some of you know, this article was posted a dozen times and immediately flagkilled by users

That's because HN appears to be disturbingly pro-trump and they seem to organize to flagkill anything "negative".

You really should look into organized flagkilling.
Description Language for managing file/folder naming conventions
WGSL has select https://www.w3.org/TR/WGSL/#select-builtin
Afraid not.
It matters to the person above, which would be why they asked the question.

That's generally how question asking goes...
I think the situation has demonstrated a weakness. Elon Musk, unarguably the single most Hacker News person on the planet due to his control of Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and others, and now tied up in US politics with DOGE, has completely disappeared from the front page of hacker news, except for the articles you personally have deflagged. And you can't do that 24x7, such as the weekend Treasury Payments got shutdown and apparently nothing newsworthy was done by DOGE or Musk. I was watching articles mentioning either DOGE or Musk in the headline begin flagged in minutes. The same article might stay up for several hours if the headline had been edited to remove the offending words (but that might just be a side effect of getting less traction). And you get stuck with making the call which articles to unflag, based on limited information as they don't hang around long enough to meaningfully get upvotes or beyond the first 15 minutes of irrational blathering in the comments.
Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft have considerable control over state of the art models.
Vanguard, Adventure, Track and Fields (with controller), Pitfall, Berzerk, Kung Fu Master
> selling sunlight

Sounds like an eco disaster to me.

Some things only happen when it's dark...

I'm amazed I almost never read about a much more viable alternative: inter-continental power transmission cables.

There are a few projects: UK buying electricity from Morocco, Singapore buying electricity from Australia. Both implemented using undersea power transmission cables.

If this could be implemented on a global scale, it would also massively reduce the requirements of storage for transient solar and wind power.
I dunno I'm confident enough to say transformer based architectures have really reached their boundaries quite yet but I would agree the hype milks a bit past where it seems transformers alone will take things.
Nah, you don't need to know the details to evaluate something. You need the output and the null hypothesis.

If a trading firm claims they have a wildly successful new strategy, for example, then first I want to see evidence they're not lying - they are actually making money when other people are not. Then I want to see evidence they're not frauds - it's easy to make money if you're insider trading. Then I want to see evidence that it's not just luck - can they repeat it on command? Then I might start believing they have something.

With LLMs, we have a bit of real technology, a lot of hype, a bunch of mediocre products, and people who insist if you just knew more of the secret details they can't explain, you'd see why it's about to be great.

Call it Habiñero's Razor, but for hype the most cynical explanation is most likely correct -- it's bullshit. If you get offended and DARVO when people call your product a "stochastic parrot", then I'm going to assume the description is accurate.
why ( first?) in title? That's making it stand out but HN says no to that
Anki can be used to memorize anything. It is not specifically for learning languages.
Learned that lesson like 15 years ago. 2 weeks gone, and lost 11 pounds. That was with tamiflu.
I am getting two contradictory but plausible seeming replies when I ask about a certain set being the same when adding 1 to every value in the set, asked on how I ask the question.

Correct answer: https://chatgpt.com/share/67a9500b-2360-8007-b70e-0bc2b84bc1...

Incorrect answer (I think): https://chatgpt.com/share/67a950df-d4e0-8007-8105-95a9e5be19...
It's interesting to nerds. Does that bother you?

Man I miss Lambda The Ultimate.
Have you ever used the Tor browser or FreeNet?

The seedier parts of the internet (“dark web”) are surprisingly easy to access. It’s just about equivalent to knowing about torrents. (Not safe for life warning)
Right. Sounds like a lot of needless speculation to me.
<3

I sometimes post snarky comments and a tiny version of dang that sits on my shoulder scolds me into editing it.

That's both strange and a testament to your work.
>goes through personal experience of the evaluator

Real reasoning is being able to manipulate symbolic expressions in a consistent manner while preserving some invariants.

Personal experience as logic is how you end up with the Holocaust.
> If you don't immunise then you don't benefit from immunisation.

It looks like this year's vaccination provides partial coverage.

People often don't know that the flu vaccine manufacturers are guessing which strains will be active each year, because of the lead time required to manufacture it.

"It's important to understand that flu vaccine effectiveness can vary quite a bit from year to year. Over the past decade, effectiveness has ranged from a low of 19% to a high of 60%. During the 2023–2024 season, flu vaccines were estimated to be 42% effective."

https://www.flu.com/Articles/2024/2024-2025-Flu-Vaccine-Effe...
> yet-another interchangeable flamewar

You have earned my respect, dang, but this is hardly an "interchangeable flamewar".

What is happening is frankly beyond anything we have ever seen before in the history of the country.
its been bad, weeks of work missed, my kids 2 weeks missed. literally throwing up day after day, sickness. its been really bad, and we dont get sick often.
I am so tired of seeing ideas that are indiscernible from satire. This is like something that they would have come up with on HBO's Silicon Valley.

Who do I complain to when a nearby golf course orders some nightshine and now my sky looks like I'm under a fucking police helicopter?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9gCyRkpPe8

Elon Musk knows 'those vote counting computers' -Trump
If Occam's Razor is of any value here, there are likely many more Trump voters on Hacker News than one might expect.
They're often registered non-profits, but not charities in the everyday sense of the word.
DOGE is the deep state: unelected, unaccountable, unconstitutional. President Trusk does not care at all about anything but enriching and empowering himself.
If you put it on your resume the right people will probably read it
Some of the mistakes/confusion being pointed out in the article is being replicated here, it seems.

The article is not claiming that conditional branches are free. In fact, the article is not making any point about the performance cost of branching code, as far as I can tell.

The article is pointing out that conditional logic in the form presented does not get compiled into conditionally branching code.
And that people should not continue to propagate the harmful advice to cover up every conditional thing in sight[0].

Finally, on actually branching code: that branching code is more complicated to execute is self-evident. There are no free branches. Avoiding branches is likely (within reason) to make any code run faster. Luckily[1], the original code was already branchless. As always, there is no universal metric to say whether optimisation is worthwhile.

[0] the "in sight" is important -- there's no interest in the generated code, just in the source code not appearing to include conditional anythings.

[1] No luck involved, of course ... (I assume people wrote to IQ to suggest apparently glaringly obvious (and wrong) improvements to their shader code, lol)
It's an extreme and divisive claim on a pay-for-publish local TV channel website. The details are unpersuasive coincidence and no reliable 3rd party has substantiated the allegations. The originator of the claims is an organization that didn't exist three months ago. These are all reasons to be pretty skeptical before amplifying.
Xkcd what if
> I think that covid is largely considered another 'flu these days or perhaps a cold

yeah, but with lasting possibilities such as longcovid
There's no evidence to support that's the case.
Roughly half of the commenters on relevant HN forums are asking exactly that.
I don't get offended when people call my work a stochastic parrot.

I just put them in the same bucket of intelligence as an 8b model and weight their inputs accordingly.
For a reductio ad absurdum that might illustrate where your analysis falls down, consider how someone with net worth of $0 and someone with net worth of $100k would each be differently affected by getting a $5k handout, accompanied by a 10% decrease in the purchasing power of a dollar. The end result is not the same as the status quo.

The intent is not to make everyone richer, but to redistribute wealth in an equalizing direction. (In fact this might also make everyone slightly richer on average in real terms, because of second-order effects related to economies of scale that make it slightly easier to meet the growth in demand when wealth is distributed more evenly).

Of course, the decreasing value of the dollar is an undesired side-effect of any government spending; this is why you counterbalance it with taxes to pull money back out of the system and control price growth. These taxes don't exactly cancel the UBI if they disproportionately fall on the wealthy; this is why I like consumption taxes, which fall more heavily on people who have more money to spend.
Okay but how does this help the reader? If the worse code happens to optimize to the same thing it's still awful and you get no benefits. It's likely not to optimize down unless you have fast-math enabled because the extra float ops have to be preserved to be IEEE754 compliant