HN user
From the article: "A conversation with Stewart Brand, one of the most influential thinkers and pioneers of our time, still known for his 1968 creation, the Whole Earth Catalog. We talk to him about his latest project: a book, being publicly drafted online, entitled 'Maintenance: Of Everything'"
I just finished the book. It's a great memoir, nicely blending her personal and professional lives. It has many deep "lessons learned" from a laser-focused science career filled with hardships and obstacles. (For details, see the reviews in the linked page.)
Karikó's straight personality, humbleness and extraordinary determination shines thorough the pages, and gives true inspiration to science fans.
scientific evaluation shows that it's like: writes a program 80% of the time, the program compiles 20% of the time, the program works 5% of the time.
Can you share the source for this?
What a great post, thanks for sharing.
Does anyone have a clue why Booking is not paying since many months? Their revenues are growing, and claim to have technical issues with processing the payments. But to me it sounds strange that a critical technical issue with payments needs many months to fix. Any insights?
I was really hoping someone would reproduce the tests and validate the claims from Microsoft's "Sparks of AGI" paper [1]. This video just does that (and more).
Let me provide one imporant quote from the video (from 18:50):
"I personally reproduced every single example from Microsoft, and while all the capabilities of GPT-4 were not necessarily over exaggerated, but the difference between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 does feel a bit over-inflated [...] one of my quibbles with the Microsoft paper: they give the impression that GPT-4 is an even bigger step for AI than I think is realistically true."
Kudos!
I live in Hungary, where I have this feeling of "fake state" getting stronger and stronger every year. I'm sure there are other similar countries.
One recent example: our education system has been neglected for long. Now, that we have an inflation of ~25% (inflation of food is around 50%), teachers literally can't make ends meet. They started to fight for themselves, and instead of taking the problem seriously, the government fights back with its power. (E.g. by firing or silencing teachers who demonstrate.) Teachers are leaving for other jobs in huge numbers. The buildings of even some of the best schools in the country are in catastrophic shape, on the brink of causing major damage to those inside. All this, because it is not a real priority to have good schools. This is only advertised, but it is a lie. The whole education system is gradually shifting into a mode of "baby sitting" kids while the parents work.
Another example is the prosecution system. Interestingly, they are very quick and effective in investigating the smallest wrongdoing if it helps those in power. If the investigation would hurt those in power, they very quickly abandon the investigation with funny and obiously fake reasons. Again: the prosecution system looks like a real one, but it's not. It has purposes different from what is officially advertised.
The closest advisor of the prime minister openly said this week, that "if you control the media, you control the thoughts of people". This, sadly, seems to be true. It really seems that the point of the government is not to run the country decently, but only to fake it. And it works.
You're spot on, I think. This is already happening, and disintegrates society. There are countries where an analogue version of this is already implemented: fake parliament with fake opposition, fake government, fake media, fake prosecutions, fake health care system, fake education system, fake state functions. By fake I mean: it looks like a real one, but it's real goals and purposes are very different from what is officially advertised.
It's scary to think about how AI will boost the already way too effective politics of "fake".
This is a great piece, revolving around finding satisfaction through scaling down desires, instead of accumulating more of wealth/success. The claim is that good feeling attached to success is almost always ephemeral. The text draws a rich context by providing many scientific, cultural/historical and religious references. The author also provides some kind-of-practical advice, distilled from their own life:
1. Go from prince to sage
2. Make a reverse bucket list
3. Get smaller
Sure, if you can do that, why not? I was also searching for a good explanation on I/Q data when I found this. I posted it since I found the page interesting, but also, I did not dive into the details. I'm more interested in the conceptual explanation, and not the hands-on details.
If you could add another (potentially better explanation), that could be beneficial for future learners (not necessarily limited to the HN community).
Some background info on György Kurtág in [1] and [2].
[1] https://www.ecmrecords.com/artists/1435046760/gyorgy-kurtag
I hope this post won't be overlooked.
The piece builds a strong case for the coronavirus spreading pattern to be highly skewed. If true, this would explain several strange observations, e.g. why some families are not infected, even though one of the family members is.
And importantly, this article contains some great science education with real-world examples for key probability theory concepts.
I have a similar experience, though I stayed on DDG. It's a bit funny, but I built a habit to use !s. This means, I use DDG to use StartPage, which in turn uses Google.
Ok, I found the reference for this story [1]! It turns out I messed up some details, but the core of the story is true. (It was not a company but Alex Szalay [2] at JHU, and it was not an indexing but a layout issue.)
Jim asked about our "20 queries," his incisive way of learning about an application, as a deceptively simple way to jump-start a dialogue between him (a database expert) and me (an astronomer or any scientist). Jim said, "Give me your 20 most important questions you would like to ask of your data system and I will design the system for you. " It was amazing to watch how well this simple heuristic approach, combined with Jim's imagination, worked to produce quick results.
Jim then came to Baltimore to look over our computer room and within 30 seconds declared, with a grin, we had the wrong database layout. My colleagues and I were stunned. Jim explained later that he listened to the sounds the machines were making as they operated; the disks rattled too much, telling him there was too much random disk access. We began mapping SDSS database hardware requirements, projecting that in order to achieve acceptable performance with a 1TB data set we would need a GB/sec sequential read speed from the disks, translating to about 20 servers at the time. Jim was a firm believer in using "bricks," or the cheapest, simplest building blocks money could buy. We started experimenting with low-level disk IO on our inexpensive Dell servers, and our disks were soon much quieter and performing more efficiently.
[1] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2008/11/549-jim-gray-astronom...
There's an anecdote about Jim Gray: he was once asked by a company to help troubleshoot a performance issue in their database (this was in the 80s or 90s I guess). Surprisingly, he did not start by looking at any code, but went directly to the server room and listened carefully for a while. Then, he said what the problem was. (IIRC it was an issue with wrong/missing indexes.) They went to look at the code, and it turned out he was right. Everyone was astonished, how he did this. He was "merely" listening to the sound of the spinning disks while the problematic queries were running.
I can't resist posting this in response to "I want my MTV":
I can't access the article, but there was a recent ransomware attack on Canon [1]. I wonder if this could be related to it.
It seems there's a surge in ransomware attacks, at least there are more cases in the news. See e.g. Garmin [1] or CWT [2] hacked recently.
There's a related anecdote about John von Neumann: he used to joke that he has superpowers and can easily tell truly random and pseudo random sequences apart. He asked people to sit down in another room and generate a 0/1 sequence via coin flips, and record it. Then, generate another sequence by heart, trying to mimick randomness as much as possible. When people finally showed the two sequences to him, Neumann could instantly declare which one was which.
People were amazed.
The trick he used was based on the "burstiness" rule you describe: a long enough random sequence will likely contain a long homogeneous block. While humans tend to avoid long streaks of the same digit, as it does not feel random enough.
So, all he did was he quickly checked with a glimpse, which of the two sequences contained the longest homogeneous block, and recognized that as the one generated via the coin flips.
The original PNAS publication can be found at [0]. I copy here (most of) the abstract, I think it's very nicely written:
"Plato envisioned Earth’s building blocks as cubes, a shape rarely found in nature. The solar system is littered, however, with distorted polyhedra—shards of rock and ice produced by ubiquitous fragmentation. We apply the theory of convex mosaics to show that the average geometry of natural two-dimensional (2D) fragments, from mud cracks to Earth’s tectonic plates, has two attractors: “Platonic” quadrangles and “Voronoi” hexagons. In three dimensions (3D), the Platonic attractor is dominant: Remarkably, the average shape of natural rock fragments is cuboid. When viewed through the lens of convex mosaics, natural fragments are indeed geometric shadows of Plato’s forms. Simulations show that generic binary breakup drives all mosaics toward the Platonic attractor, explaining the ubiquity of cuboid averages."
[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/16/2001037117
ScienceMag has a post about this result [0]. From that text:
"Perhaps the Cubists were right. Researchers have found that when everything from icebergs to rocks breaks apart, their pieces tend to resemble cubes. The finding suggests a universal rule of fragmentation at scales ranging from the microscopic to the planetary."
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/rocks-icebergs-natur...
The largest Hungarian news outlet is crushed to ground amid political pressure.
See background and previous events https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23932073
The largest Hungarian news outlet is just being destroyed amid growing political infuence.
See some previous posts for background:
What an interesting collection, thanks!
It's kind of surprising to me that Microsoft Research is the all-time leader, gathering more best paper awards than any top university. Wow. This in itself tells a story about Microsoft Research.
Do you happen to have a time series on this? Would be interesting to see the trends in your data, e.g. to check how industrial research fares vs. academic research as a function of time. (There are some theories suggesting that industrial research is in a general decline [0]. Though the "best paper awards" metric is surely far from being perfect, it might still be viable as a proxy for corporate research performance.)
Do you have any references to back this up? There are many large US and European companies doing business in China, and it is very hard to believe they all hand over all their IP willingly.
This is a great piece. It provides a clear framing to interpret how institutions (and individuals) act when faced with social injustice. The article cites several interesting cases to make the point: the injustice itself can be very real, or it can be just something "assumed" but magnified by social media.
The author argues that there's an important distinction between socially vs. economically radical (re)actions to injustice. The socially radical approach is relatively easy to follow through but also quite ineffective, or even counter-productive (e.g. appointing the first female board member in a corporation, or instantly fire an employee who's been blamed on social media). On the other hand, an economically radical reaction is costly but can lead to real change (e.g. stop selling to a business partner who violates our own values).
And, as the article points out, leaders of institutions typically have personal incentives to follow the "soft" version: making some PR moves without caring too much about the real problems.
If we look at the IT sector we had several examples of this lately [0-4].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23740818
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7801646
This is a great post, thanks for sharing!
My personal favorite is this gem: "Task failed successfully".