skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's with the double standard, around sugar and artificial sweeteners?

Artificial sweeteners do not need to be as safe as bottled water.

They just need to be less harmful than sugar. Which they are, because sugar is unequivocally, very very bad for you.
Sesame, the startup behind the Maya virtual assistant releases its base AI model
Then the telecom industry is responsible for blocking it, or perhaps is liable for damages caused by the slavery.
Startups though, ugh. Maybe tomorrow you will end up a millionaire with stock, or you're eating catfood and hoping the grocery bill difference will be enough to pay the mortgage next month while you desperately look for a job in the worst economy since 2008. If there's an in-between, I've never seen it personally.
> "I think we've become so accustomed to living in a silicon driven world where our personal devices are engineered at microscopic level that we've forgotten how to do things the Apollo-era way."

This is a really interesting point. I think a practical issue in modern times as well is that companies are being inspired by SpaceX while forgetting that it took SpaceX alot of work to get to the point of being able to do things like casually land a 20 story tower in the middle of the ocean on a barge, let alone the even more ridiculous 'stunts' they're doing with Starship.

Apollo was starting from the perspective of trying to do something where it was even debatable about whether it was possible. And so I think there was a lot more 'humility' in design, for lack of a better word.
That’s when you really know you hid all the complexity well. When people call your globally replicated data store with granular permissions, sophisticated data retention policies, versioning, and manage to have, what, seven (ten?) nines or something, “simple”.

No problem. I’m sure ChatGPT could cook up a replacement in a weekend. Like Dropbox it’s just rsync with some scripts that glue it together. How hard could it possibly be?

I mean people serve entire websites right out of s3 buckets. Using it as a crude CDN of sorts.

It’s a modern marvel.
I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA
I'll be here for the next 6 hours. As usual, there are countless possible topics and I'll be guided by whatever you're concerned with but as much as possible I'd like to focus on the recent changes and potential changes in U.S. immigration law, policy, and practice. Please remember that I am limited in providing legal advice on specific cases for obvious liability reasons because I won't have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and comments and I'll try to do the same in my responses. Thank you!
You're totally correct, but these products also need to be specifically designed against these failure cases (i.e. it's more than just MTTR + MTTF == durability). You (of course) can't just run deployments without validating that the durability property is satisfied throughout the change.
> They gave up their own engine because it wasn’t good enough.

It wasn't good enough because they had neglected it, not because they didn't have the talent or cash to make it good enough. They didn't want to. The bugs had been a moat to keep Firefox out of the enterprise, and it had worked. That was not going to work against Google, who had a good business reason to own the browser, unlike Microsoft at that point.

IE at a fairly early point became purely a market manipulation to funnel Windows users. They spent far more cash on the legal effort to bundle a shitty, buggy browser with Windows that kept every muggle's installation a permanently infected radioactive mess (one of the primary marketing points for their competitor, Apple) than they spent on the browser itself. I honestly blame the competition from Apple for both the ditching of IE and for Windows Defender.

I don't think Microsoft cares about browsers. They'd even fork Firefox if blink got too hostile.

My conspiracy theory: Apple is going to buy Ladybird, and on some level they're already working together. Apple holding a high-quality Open Source non-copyleft alternative to Google and the flailing Firefox ecosystem, built from a new greenfield design by absurdly qualified people, is absolutely going to be worth a billion $ to them. Apple will end up on both Windows and Linux, and not in the horrible form of iTunes, but as the objectively best choice for a gateway to the internet. And written in Swift.
> Never saw Twitter as idealistic. Seems to just want to show you celebrity gossip. Substantially worse product ...

That may have been late stage Twitter, but early stage twitter was _not_ that. It became _the_ (only) way to be able to get near real-time information on some unfolding event, usually by the people actually involved, and very useful in that regard. It facilitated realtime communications in a way that FB did not.
What about that phrase would make you uncomfortable?
Dead end jobs are the norm from what I've seen.
> would this really infringe on their trademark?

No, that is not trademark infringement. Trademark infringement happens if you're using a trademark in a way that could confuse people into thinking the trademark owner and you have some sort of relationship.
> Stability and safety are the least of the concerns in data processing and database workloads. That's totally not the reason why we saw an increase of these systems during the 90s and early 00s written in Java or similar alternative languages.

not_sure_if_serious.jpg

To be extra clear about it (and to avoid pure snark, that's frowned upon here at HN): that's the kind of software (alongside a lot of general enterprise code) that got rewritten from C++ to Java, not the other way around. The increased safety of Java was absolutely a consideration. Java was the 'Rust' of the mid-to-late 1990s and 2000s, only a whole lot slower and clunkier than the actual Rust of today.
Doesn't America do this to everybody all the time?
Running something like Qwq 32b q4 with a ~50k context will use up those 128GB with the large KV cache.
Still waiting on a non-Google implementation of this so-called standard.
Toggle won't work, because people will see different variants of the discussion and reference it ("the sibling comment", "two above").

I was net-socialized in Usenet, strongly believe that threaded is much superior, but would choose flat every time for a project today.
Sure, I was too impulsive myself, but it's really difficult to read dismissive comments when people all around you lose 10+ years of life expectancy to this "non-problem" just so that some guy in France can have his nuclear energy for cheap.

I think this is the study; I read it as a proper full-length thesis, but it also seems to have been condensed into a short paper:

https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...

I'll look around a bit more for the original.
You will be limited to a much smaller context size with half the RAM even if you're using a smaller model.
You're criticizing the prioritization of cost, not the concept of trying to solve for constraints. Engineering is about constrained optimization to meet customer needs.[1] Learning this is a core part of the curriculum at my accredited engineering school.

> Engineering design is a process of making informed decisions to creatively devise products, systems, components, or processes to meet specified goals
based on engineering analysis and judgement. The process is often
characterized as complex, open-ended, iterative, and multidisciplinary.
Solutions incorporate natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering
science, using systematic and current best practices to satisfy defined
objectives within identified requirements, criteria and constraints.

> Constraints to be considered may include (but are not limited to): health and
safety, sustainability, environmental, ethical, security, economic, aesthetics
and human factors, feasibility and compliance with regulatory aspects, along
with universal design issues such as societal, cultural and diversification
facets.

It's not an MBA philosophy but is intrinsic to the profession. Apollo didn't go up because of vibes, it went up because engineers knew the goals going in and to figured out how much fuel was needed to go to the moon. It also went up because the United States was willing to spend over a quarter of a trillion dollars (adjusted for inflation) on getting there,[2] and ignored the arguments that it was a giant waste of money while there were social problems at home.[3]

[1]https://egad.engineering.queensu.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

[2] https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
Transformers Without Normalization
Ah, of course: inhuman concrete and strange angles and colors.

My theory with all the high art that the “man in the street” sees as weird or childish garbage is this: if youre a critic or on the inside you’ve seen it all before and dissected it in such detail and tried everything that the only thing that can make you feel anything anymore is electric shocks right to your scrotum while listening to dubstep on the back of a birthing donkey. And so all the movies and art and architecture become just that, and you continue your retreat from the mainstream into your increasingly strange world. Because the fact is, good appealing art has pretty much been discovered but where’s the fun (or profit) in that?
Government. Though US Federal is a mess right now.
> Has anyone looked into the potential impacts (good and bad) for wide scale introduction of proven tools for use by other animals?

That is interesting. What if we designed tools for use by corvids?

> conceptually, what’s the downside to leave a huge pile of defensive materials like bird spikes in the forest to help promote nest health?

We'd be supporting one species, the prey, over the other, the predator. Why? Do we mean to apply vegan principles to animals? What happens to the predators? How do animal rights apply? Conceptually, it's really a difficult question.
No, and neither will a software engineer wash her hands of a bug, but a construction engineer isn't responsible for the layout of a building being overly labyrinthine—that's on the architect.

Likewise, product managers and designers who are talking to customers and conducting user experience research have the context to make decisions that engineers can't reasonably second guess.
"a new wave of economic opportunity", eh?

First, I nominate scrapping this whole idea of frequency allocation to private parties. Regulation can't get more heavy-handed, askew, and favoring incumbents than designating that most everybody is prohibited from doing anything while some other parties may do whatever they like.

Second, I nominate removing every restriction on intentional and unintentional radiators. Those hooks have been used to create a whole extragovernmental regulatory apparatus of testing labs.

Third, the regulations requiring manufacturers to implement code signing on wireless chipsets. This maybe should have been first because it's so abhorrent to individual freedom, but the scope is narrow compared to the first two.

Also since we're talking about "economic opportunity" and Republicans have been complaining about regulatory agencies acting beyond their congressional mandate - now that they control congress, surely there is a net neutrality bill making its way through the legislative process?
Which part of the argument strikes you as frivolous?
Despite the hype, the 512GB Mac is not really a good buy for LLMs. The ability to run a giant model on it is a novelty that will wear off quickly... it's just too slow to run them at that size, and in practice it has the same sweet spot of 30-70B that you'd have with a much cheaper machine with a GPU, without the advantage of being able to run smaller models at full-GPU-accelerated speed.
3 glasses of soft drinks is an insane amount of sugar on a daily basis, so if you have to do it you're probably better off with the aspartame.
My dentist is a principal dentist
That must be where Fool Self Driving comes from :)
How does that compare to competitors and things like distributed file systems?
> One server with a RAID array can survive, usually, 1 or maybe 2 drive failures.

Standard RAID configurations can only handle 2 failures, but there are libraries and filesystems allowing arbitrarily high redundancy.
A fixed capacity stack isn't growable, and while the capacity is pretty big by default on desktop/server OSes is pretty big, so are stack frames so the recursion depth limit is not that big. And if user input can overflow the stack it's still a DOS.

The problem to me is that recursive functions should be a special case in the ABI, where a compiler can insert a prelude to the callsite to grow/segment the stack if needed. This is a hard problem once you have references to things on the stack, so I can understand why most ecosystems don't do it - but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

What I'm saying is that stack allocation is still dynamic memory management and in systems where its critical to avoid OOM conditions because of unbounded dynamic memory management you need code with O(1) memory complexity, and that includes the stack. A common mistake I've seen people make is assume that pushing onto the stack isn't memory allocation. It's just cheap memory allocation that can sometimes be assumed to be free, in this case and many others that's a bad assumption.
A pretty safe option is working for a utility company.
>> Are we going to see more these supposedly laptop APUs finding their way into desktops, and essentially a bifurcation of desktops into APUs and discrete CPU/GPUs?

I sure hope so. We could use a new board form factor that omits the GPU slot. Although my case puts the power connector and button over that slot on the back so it's not completely wasted, but the board area is. This has seemed like a good idea for a long time to me.

This can also be a play against nVidia. When mainstream systems use "good enough" integrated GPUs and get rid of that slot, there is no place for nVidia except in high-end systems.
> Has anyone worked somewhere that they felt they could just do their job without worrying about the career advancement aspect?

That's every place I've ever worked, to be honest, including tech megacorps. Lots of places will put a lot of emphasis on career advancement, but I've never seen anyone punished for not doing it. I'm not counting "won't get promoted" as a punishment, for obvious reasons.
> When I was a kid [...] Old Man's War

Well, THAT just made me feel like an old man.
I'm impressed by this crow's beak-work: all the spikes are oriented inward and covered in leaves, making that nest very strong and not spiky at all.
Bloomberg. The terminal level on their IC ladder is "Senior". They have no formal concept of Staff or Principal engineer. People spend decades there.
> Apple has intentionally made subscriptions the only viable commercial model on the App Store

How do you think Apple has done that? They’ve always had the option for a one-time payment for apps, and those can be fairly high ($999,99 until December 2022 and $10,000 after that time, according to https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/6/23496734/apple-app-store-...)

Even if Apple did that, I don’t see any evidence that was intentional.

I think it’s more that the market has spoken, and said that “you can’t sell $100 apps on the App Store”. And even then, there are counterexamples.

The only thing Apple may hav head to do with that is that it ‘gave’ zillions of developers visibility for their $0,99 apps on the App Store. That may have led users to think software should be cheap.
The current place I'm at, and the last job I was at, do allow folks to hit the "senior/staff" and stay there. These are not FAANG and not early startups, but they're not exactly banks/utilities. These small-to-medium SaaS companies seem to find value in folks being effective in their roles for as long as those folks are willing to stay (duration, 3 years at each of these two employers, though I know folks who've been at each at their current level for 6+ years).

That kind of stability and valuing "being effective at the role your comfortable with" meant a lot to me. I also felt like I saw the best versions of each role and fewer folks stretching parts of themselves across different aspects of different roles.
I found the implicit column-based configuration layout of cron rather cubersome. I prefer the key-value configuration layout of systemd timers.
It's silly in that it shows how ridiculous the situation is. No one asked for Apple or Google to be the wardens of what users can or can't install on their devices. Asking for a fee for this "service" is the cherry on top.

We've been able to install whatever we want on our PCs since the dawn of personal computing and it never was an issue. I don't see why we couldn't have a similar system on mobile devices too.
Magnus Carlsen signed with Team Liquid to play Chess in E-Sport events [video]
In the general case? The failure to compile with -fsplit-stack when that's necessary for whatever your requirements are. The failure to enable the stack protector when ... pretty much always.

For this particular CVE? I'm not clear. Possibly none. The writeup didn't provide sufficient detail and I haven't bothered to wade through the code. There may well be a reason recursion won't work here but it certainly isn't general.

I'd be curious to know in this case why resource limits couldn't be enforced for the recursive implementation but could be for the iterative one.
Lots of large tech firms have defined career ladders with a concept of terminal levels - typically senior level beyond which there is no up-or-out expectation of growth. I think small and midsize companies that focus on fast growth will often carry this expectation, so I'd avoid those. Alternatively: small non-startups or large companies beyond their prime (again, lack of company-wide focus on rapid growth is key here).
You seem to disagree. Here's an interesting study where the researchers used an OpenAI-LLM-based tool to grade student papers and by grading them 10 times in a row, they got vastly different results:

https://rainermuehlhoff.de/en/fobizz-AI-grading-assistant-te...

Quote: "The results reveal significant shortcomings: The tool’s numerical grades and qualitative feedback are often random and do not improve even when its suggestions are incorporated."
battlebots did it first!
I generally see object storage systems advertise 11 9s of availability. You would usually see a commercial distributed file system (obviously stuff like Ceph and Lustre will depend on your specific configuration) advertise less (to trade off performance for durability).
Obviously some jobs and some managers may not "get" it, but, if you make it clear to your manager that your only interest is being an individual contributor, this should totally be possible. I have only ever managed once and don't really intend to do it again, simply because I am not particularly good at it. I don't think I've ever left a company because there is pressure to ascend to management, not even Google was pushing me towards that.

If you think about it, I'm sure you can think of coworkers around you that are in the boat of just being an IC long-term, usually working on specialist tasks. I think that's basically what you want, a niche that you can specialize in.
Like this? https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ff...
I agree, and I feel like that goes for everything in general. It's like people who get mad at customer service people - the customer service person has absolutely nothing to do with the product that's giving you grief. Even the telemarketer, as you point out, doesn't want to be there (or even if they do, they may just be there because they have no better options and need to put food on the table).

In life, there are very few situations where being unkind is ever worth it.

And even here on HN, I sometimes get the impulse to argue with someone for whatever they said. What I do is I type out my little comment, then close the tab without actually posting it. Some things are better left unsaid, regardless of how satisfying they'd be to say.
Are you really sure?

If 1x is the absolute rock-bottom lowest possible productivity, are them really the precious angels who care deeply about the user while making amazing code?

This is even more absurd.
There’s also the possibility of social engineering that compounds with lack of technical understanding to produce some nasty results.

It’s been proven that many users will click “Allow” for just about any dialog when instructed to if a sufficiently juicy carrot is promised as a reward. With WebUSB this could easily result in hapless users’ phones and whatnot getting malware/spyware installed on them… elderly and kids seem particularly vulnerable.
Try consulting. Once your reach Senior Consultant level it's pretty much the end of the path for ICs.
The original title is "Magnus Carlsen Changes Careers" but I tried to unlinkbaitify it.

Also, most top level players signed with e-sort teams.
You'll work 60hrs a week "hardcore" for a Musk type for stock with a blackout period and multiple risks of massive dilution in any or all funding rounds.

Most startups will fail or "exit" with a sale that profits only a few key investors and insiders.

But eating catfood is always an good idea no matter your net worth.
New Reddit controls let you block your most-hated advertisers for a year
Different people and organizations will have different needs, as indicated in the first sentence of my post. For some use cases one server is totally fine, but it's good to think through your use cases and understand how loss of availability or loss of data would impact you, and how much you're willing to pay to avoid that.

I'll note that data durability is a bit of a different concern than service availability. A service being down for some amount of time sucks, but it'll probably come back up at some point and life moves on. If data is lost completely, it's just gone. It's going to have to be re-created from other sources, generated fresh, or accepted as irreplaceable and lost forever.

Some use cases can tolerate losing some or all of the data. Many can't, so data durability tends to be a concern for non-trivial use cases.
Yes, thank you, I think I had the wrong idea, I probably didn’t know. I looked it up and: so long as the tor service and the web server are on the same machine, and operated by the same people - i think that’s true. But they don’t need to be on the same machine, or managed by the same person.

Some more info: https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/advanced/htt...
I had not heard of it either! They have not been mentioned much here.
Exactly. I feel constant ascendancy and the opportunity to do so would be a fortunate thing.

For OP, I feel there might be qualifiers that preclude such opportunities, like total comp or location. If you're looking for comp above the mid 100s or very low 200s at max, you're gonna struggle to find jobs that meet your criteria. On the converse side, these opportunities can be found in mid/low COL locations, so that number goes a lot farther.
China signals anger at CK Hutchison's Panama ports sale, rattling investors
Site doesn't load.

> Application error: a server-side exception has occurred while loading www.illustration.app (see the server logs for more information).

Digest: 2002552852
This is a really good point. It's not easy to use both a laptop and a desktop at the same time. There's challenges around locality, latency, limited throughput, unavailability that software can't easily deal with, so you need to be aware and smart about it, and you'll need to compromise on things.

I'd work from my workstation at all times if I could. Tramp is alright, but not too fast and fundamentally can't make things transparent.
OK this is fun! Congratulations.

That said, I urge you to find a designer friend to give you an hour or so playing a puzzle and talking through how to improve the playability. Basically all the complaints from people who tried it revolve around UI, which is absolutely improvable.