skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is such an absolutely wild take to me. Screw those Mythbusters guys trying to explain the scientific method to people. That's not a systemic solution to fixing scientific illiteracy in the US. Sesame Street teaching kids to count? Those guys are way off the mark because it's not going to measurably improve economic performance. You'll never actually change anything just by teaching people stuff.

I'm 100% certain that Casey Muratori doesn't think that his paywalled course is going convince literally every programmer to to care about performance, or to stop Facebook from building slow apps.

He's trying to convince some small percentage of people that performance is something they should be thinking about when they program, and that they should understand the tradeoffs they are making when they choose to use some slow method, algorithm, library, language, or system because it provides some other benefit.

When someone writes a book like "math for dummies" that says on the back cover "I think basic math is a useful skill for everyone to have, and if we all learned basic math the world would be a better place!"

That's not the author stating their true belief that their book is going to literally teach the majority of the world basic math. That's an aspirational goal or in the worst case it's sales copy.

Publicly calling that person out for wasting their time is really something else.

Creating straw men to attack like "You will never be able to force developers worldwide to start writing everything in C/Assembly" when he explicitly states that this isn't his goal makes me think you're just looking for some reason to shit on the guy.

>You speak about language/libraries, what make you think it would come from those?

I have no idea when if or how a technical solution will be found.
I blog to keep a record of interesting things I've learnt and share it on the web, even if the only reader is my future self. After all, it's called a "web log" for a reason! The fact that the process of carefully considering and writing about a subject helps me gain a deeper understanding and strengthens my own grasp on the subject happens to be a bonus!

In fact, my web server logs show that out of the 170 or so pages on my website, only about 7% receive regular traffic from visitors. The remaining 93% have got only myself as the reader.

I've been web logging the last 25 years and I'll probably continue to do it for as long as I can. In fact, 25 years ago, it was just a website hosting a loose collection of pages. It took its current shape and form only around 2006 when blogging became fashionable!
Why shouldn’t all public transactions be public? IRS and personal taxes may be legitimate since it’s, well, personal, but we are all “shareholders” with equal stake in all other payments. This is the perfect use case for public ledger. We should all have access to all of this data. All outflows should note which bill authorized that expenditure, every bureaucrat that’s involved with spending it. If I’m getting $600 in income tracked as a free citizen, I want the even more accountability for anyone spending that amount on behalf of the government.

There’s almost certainly no clearance requirement for what they’ve looked at already. Maybe HIPAA. I’m not sure why one executive branch org has any more or less right to access this data than any other.
he’s committed to free speech as much as dj khaled is committed to his diet
> All: please don't post the sort of low-information / high-indignation comment that could just as easily appear in any semi-related thread. Such generic comments make the discussion less interesting and more activating. That's not what we're trying for here.

We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming for, but all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged by apparent supporters of Musk.

We're being censored.
this '50 yo fed guy' is a parasite if he cannot justify his work for the nation. 'arrogant zoomer' lmao
wow that's a cool one! thanks for sharing
> I understand jumping on the anti-AI bandwagon

Why be an asshole? What do you accomplish? I now have zero interest in what you have to say. I stopped there.
I had a baby. Months later, UH retroactively denied all birth and baby care claims. They claimed I had other insurance, which I don’t. Now I get to prove a negative. So fun.
I won't do it again my sincere apologies
But... they are? o3-mini is faster than DeepSeek-R1 and has comparable capability. And while I hate "AGI achieved internally" meme, o3 is significantly better than o1. Though I doubt how long until DeepSeek-R3 happens. They could skip R2 too citing Cloudflare R2 :P
Katana is a grean tame. I remapped my n and t keys already.
Unless you succeed in killing half of the competition in the meantime and the remaining sellers follow the same pattern as you as you're getting away with it and they see the end game.

Customers will then suck it up and it becomes the new normal.
OpenStreetMap Calendar
“ Our site is not available in your region at this time.”
they might be subsidized less than the rural areas, but they're still subsidized by the urban core.
But fiscal and debt policies are built on GDP as primary indicator. That is why recently, some states/nations privileged GDP growth over economic wellbeing (gambling is such any easy example)
JupyterLab Desktop Application
I would do this (Windows 11 is terrible), but using Linux breaks EA games including my beloved BF1 and also Destiny
I'd encourage folks to go look at the source code for the referenced project https://github.com/DevrathIyer/ballotproof/tree/master.

This does not strike me as nefarious in any way and there is a really valid reason for generating the ballot images -- testing, which is exactly how it is used in the project.
Yeah, they were fine without AC for years. But, with a kid on the way, they wanted more space, and liked their neighborhood enough to remodel vs move. Outside of the remodel, probably wouldn’t make sene to install AC/heat-pump, but once you’re spending hundreds of thousands, it’s a drop in the bucket and making a heatpump made sense.
Let your ego die and realize your golden ticket can run out at any time. You are not a software engineer; you are a person who, for some amount of time, pays the bills performing software engineering work. What you do and who you are after the golden ticket runs out is up to you.
You're likely going to have a rough time with 64-bit arithmetic in any GPU. (At least on Nvidia GPUs, the instruction set doesn't give you anything but a 32-bit add-with-carry to help.) But my understanding is that a lot of the arithmetic hardware used for 53-bit double-precision ops can also be used for 32-bit integer ops, which hasn't always been the case.
> Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.

I always read blogs if people include them in resumes.

It’s really cool when an applicant has a blog with unique and interesting content, but I can’t remember this happening without us already having been very impressed by the candidate’s resume.

More commonly, blog content was ambiguous about the applicant’s skills. For example, when someone applies to an embedded job but has a blog of beginner level Arduino projects, is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?

I also think people greatly overestimate the idea that someone will LLM their way into a great blog, and they greatly underestimate the difficulty of forging timestamps. Even git timestamps are easy to fake. Your interviewers aren’t going to scrutinize the Wayback machine for evidence, but not being indexed isn’t proof that it wasn’t there anyway.
Ignoring the horrifying political parts, I think one aspect here about data access that is inherently worrying is that it seems like all usual controls were bypassed and the DOGE people had very low level access to systems. So there are probably copies of sensitive data now in their possession, and nobody knows exactly what was copied and where it is stored.

This kind of access would be dangerous even in the hands of principled and well-meaning people. Giving it to people with glaring red flags like here is just entirely irresponsible.
Why do you think you deserve access to public research dollars to scratch you personal research itch? If you can't explain to taxpayers how your research impacts them, I think it's fair that they should deny you their money.
Not everyone is censoring you. Some of us want to learn about cool technology, not read politics irrelevant to daily life.
This suggests fine-tuning a base model (with SL or RL) generally doesn't make the model inherently smarter, only the initial self-supervised learning during pretraining does. Though it would be strange if no amount of reinforcement learning could make the LLM truly smarter.
I find the browser to be a distracting work environment so glad that this exists.
Actually you're almost 100% describing how Wimsey works! It's using native df code rather than a UDF of some kind. Under the hood it uses Narwhal's which converts polars style expressions into native pandas/polars/spark/dask code with super minimal overheads.

If you're using a lazy dataframe (via polars, spark etc) Wimsey will force collection, so that can have speed implications. Reason being that I can't find a cross-language way yet of embedding assertions for fail later down the line.
If you construct highly controlled experimental conditions predicated on classical mechanics being true, then in those scenarios, the model predicts.

But in almost all cases it fails to predict, because the situation is vastly too complex to model. You are only able to construct devices (eg., steam engines, baloons, etc.) which are "simple" in the relevant ways, because classical mechanics successfully explains real properties of objects.

If it didn't, you'd have no idea how to take an ordinary situation like, "dropping some objects off a cliff" into one where you could actually predict where they will land (ie., by waiting for a day with no wind, by shaping the objects to limit drag, and so on --- without controlling for these accidental features, you'd not be able to predict where anything would land other than "down there somewhere").
Obviously, which is the reason you don't do something like that without appropriate amounts of testing.
I suspect they meant “scenario”.
That's what worries me the most despite generally agreeing with the goals of DOGE.

The Supreme court has only a few armed police, basically no teeth. There is nothing really holding the executive to listen to them, and the legislators won't check any fouls either. There is surprisingly little beyond tradition to stop them going off the rails.
Medicare has been providing single payer healthcare to Americans 65 and older for nearly 60 years without running into the pitfalls you are worried about. Why do you think a single payer system for younger people would not be able to also avoid those issues?
Revisiting the Best Nuclear Investment Vehicle
I was thinking the same.
Though wild fermenting works well for small batches, I have no idea of it scales. I was guessing this is a comercial operation if regulators are involved.
Our heat pump (~2 years old) doesn't seem to have much trouble with -21C, though we rarely get down that low. With frequent temperatures that cold, a combo unit with natural gas backup for the coldest temperatures likely makes a lot of sense.
Yes, ground sourced is an excellent option, and I would also consider it for new construction in my area (Northern New England, US). The problem is finding installers that can do it.
Whether or not someone has written up or is willing to write up their opinion is a good way to determine how seriously to take that opinion.

Using that as a first pass has led to more time engaging with thoughtful people about well considered ideas, and less time listening to the noise that shows up when you solicit opinions.
I was in his FOSDEM GC talk about whippet and found out that he doesn't know anything about the really good GC strategies. He only knows and implemented about dirt-slow mark-sweep, which is only needed for pointer stability from C callbacks, and then inmix which is the slow variant of a copying GC, just without the double heap requirement. But a conventional Cheney copying collector with 1-2 generations for minor sweeps is far better than those.

Until he adds a proper GC to whippet I don't trust anything he says about GC's. He even has the luxury for a precise GC because scheme carries the types along with its values.

And he doesn't know about colored pointers, using 2-5 bits for the GC state, nor nan-tagging. Probably neither about forwarding pointers.
There's obviously nothing wrong with learning by reading, but the way you tell whether what you read is true is by seeing whether or not it fits in with observation of reality. That's the reason we're no longer reading the books about phlogiston.
Ground source heat pumps install cost is very high when used in cold areas because of the frost depth caused excavation costs; significantly higher than the cost of the heat pump unit and parts themselves. It can be good if that disproportional initial cost is paid. But it's not the same class of purchase. This cost is reflected in the lack of demand and so lack of (solvent) installers.

If the big initial cost is rolled into home construction it would be less daunting and more normal. So I expect newer homes to adopt heat pumps in cold areas but with little adoption in existing homes.
At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? Maybe this post isn't the one to do it, but there has been an onslaught of stories about the damage Musk and DOGE is doing to the US government including lots of tech specific stories. This is an important ongoing story that is relevant to the community here and every post about it shoots up the front page of HN only to disappear minutes later because of mass flagging.
The question is, do the researchers use the ML/AI system to discover and identify likely text - which could be great - or do they use its output conclusively?

In fairness, the paper may answer that question but I don't have time now ...
> I write differently when I anticipate an audience (even if they never come).

Is that good, though? If the product is purely for self-consumption, is the audience-anticipating version necessarily the better version?

And at what point, after how many unread blog posts, do you rationally stop anticipating an audience?
I once wondered if it would be more environmentally friendly to bore straight down into a mountain and then build a mile high building on the peak to create a giant rail gun. Then shoot raw materials into orbit where the actual manufacture takes place. Sadly there is too much atmosphere no matter how much I want a cannon to the moon.
This goes along with something I read recently which also seems to ring true: feeling entitled to be socially superior to at least some others, ie without in anyway earning it.
You are looking at it from a product perspective.
From a scientific perspective, it just means the respective benchmark is meaningless, so we don't know how well such a model generalizes.
> A classic example is that small companies and no unions is theoretically best, but monopoly unions vs monopoly companies is the second best (since there's no single monopoly, so they negotiate something close to the theoretical ideal).

This is a pretty bad example because monopoly unions vs. monopoly companies is extraordinarily bad to the point of being a plausible worst case scenario. The company is then free to run roughshod over its customers and suppliers and use its resources to capture the government and the union not only does nothing to prevent this but actually encourages it because then they can extract more of the monopoly rents for themselves. Then the normal tendency for the public to demand antitrust enforcement when met with an abusive monopolist is blunted by the union's support for the monopoly and prevents the monopoly from being toppled.
The job market may not be great, but I'm pretty sure most former Meta engineers are going to do much better than landing an $80k job.

And they'll probably be happier, working for someone less evil than Zuck.
It's not rocket science. What is the purpose of the interview? For the company, to find out if you are a good fit for them. The questions must be interpreted in that context.

That you need money is not interesting information to them, that will be true for (almost?) all other applicants too. So when they ask: 'why do you want this job?' they mean 'why do you want THIS job?' so they actually do literally say word-for-word what they mean. So you answer with stuff like why you might like the job, or why it is a good career step for you, or why your skills make you a good fit.
Ernest Bevin by Andrew Adonis is a biography of Bevin from his poor roots to being in charge of the TUC during labour. It's interesting to note that when Churchill had to decide between backing Beaverbrook or Bevin he chose Bevin, and why you see Bevin next to Churchill in the famous VE day photos. Bevin approach of working with business to achieve collective bargaining outcomes that worked for both sides, and demonstrates how hard fought this battle was. He wasn't perfect, but an interesting man
Fine, you're welcome to skip the political posts. I've felt the same frustration.

But when any new post that has Musk in the title is flagged within a minute or two entering the 'new' queue, then we have a problem.

We are indeed being censored by any meaningful definition of the term.
Ada crate of the year 2024 announced
The first ever all-drone assault by Ukraine
Medicare, social security. We already have this in the US. We pay for the old, to receive the same benefits when we’re old.
What is Meta’s angle with AI? They seem to be doing a lot of research but what is the end goal? Google and MSFT I understand, Meta not so much.
I'm sceptic about that.

I am, see above, a space nerd, formed by SciFi. But I wonder what the economical case for space colonisation above LEO, human or robotic could be. Asteroid mining is the typical use case, but again, I'm a sceptic. You'll need to mine the materials, separate them, transport to earth, down a non-realistic space elevator made from unobtainium and do all that cheaper than mining or recycling on earth. I don‘t see that for a long, long time.

European colonisation very soon had economic use cases, It started with spices, that very soon beaver furs, wood, plantations with the original sin of slavery and over the centuries the colonies developed into bigger societies which could produce industrial goods. What could Moon or Mars sell us that we want, that could rationalise a gigantic capital investment, which only could be paid back over multiple centuries? I don't see it, and I say that as a space romantic.
> We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming for,

Alas, that is not true for all values of "we". Let's see how we do in the current thread. (Edit: so far it does seem to be a little better.)

> but all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged

Yes, and at the same time we've turned off the flags on quite a few of them—enough that this continues to be by far the most-discussed topic on HN right now. I realize that's not enough for those who want more, but this is always the case whenever there is a MOT (Major Ongoing Topic - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

> by apparent supporters of Musk

But also by users who just care about protecting HN for its intended purpose, which is vulnerable to getting consumed by political flames. The pattern we've observed over the years is that when a MOT keeps getting flagkilled, the flags are coming from a coalition of these two groups (i.e. users who oppose it politically and users who are trying to protect HN), neither of which would have enough oomph to do this on their own.

> We're being censored.

That word has so many different meanings nowadays that nearly all sentences including it are both true and false. In one sense, sure, any story getting removed from HN's front page could be called censorship—but it's maybe not the most helpful description on a site where frontpage space is the scarcest resource and some kind of curation/selection is essential.

In another sense, the fact that this MOT is the most discussed topic on HN of the past few weeks means that no, it is not being censored—there have been thousands of posts about it.

Using the word 'censored' ultimately just means you'd like to see more of this topic on HN. I certainly respect that, but there are also a lot of other users who would like to see less of it. Our job is to serve the community as a whole, which is not easy when the community is so divided. Ultimately, whatever solution we come up ends up feeling unsatisfactory to nearly everyone. That is probably my least favorite square on the Cycle of Life of HN, but it comes up once or twice in every go-round.

Here are links to some other comments I've posted in the last few days about this specific issue. If you (or anyone) are willing to read them, take in the explanations, and then have a question that I haven't answered, I'd be curious to know what it is* and happy to take a crack at it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978572

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42977160

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

* (because as far as I know, all the important questions have already been answered, which is not to say everyone is happy!)
I have no doubt the Rubicon will be crossed this year, probably already has.

I'm preparing for a war on American soil, by "Americans" or whatever they're going to call themselves - MAGA I guess.
> “That's why any and every corporation exists, to benefit it's customers.”

That is an incredibly optimistic belief you have about the purpose of corporations. In reality, corporations only have the responsibility to benefit their shareholders.

Making sure your customers are happy and keep giving you business is certainly one route. And I think most companies at least start out this way.

Though it’s funny you use Apple as an example, since they’ve been widely criticized in recent years due to the parasitic App Store practices enabled by their stranglehold over the smartphone industry.

Government does get corrupted by money, but that money ultimately comes from rich corporations. Eliminating government involvement could just make corporations abuse their power in other ways.
I used to hang around someone who's dad was allegedly doused in Agent Orange in the New Brunswick woods, possibly around that time. Their father apparently developed a lot of mental health issues, and they were also born with some severe ones themselves.

I've also heard talk of glyphosate allegedly causing health issues in New Brunswickers, and that Irving uses it as an herbicide for their woodlands across New Brunswick.
You’d start with that office and escalate to the ombuds of both the hospital and the insurer, with your lawyer and the pre-authorization document and communication trail. I get your question is facetious but it’s still worth knowing how to navigate a broken system.
The money you paid for social security was lost pretty much the moment you paid it.

There is little left to lose, it's a redistribution scheme rather than a savings scheme.
Wikipedia is so obviously biased that its founder even talked about it a few years back. The editor cabal, rules on sources, the incorporation of guidelines that use progressive stances, etc all create this skew.
Money and manipulation? Was that a real question?