teiferer

> When you see second and third generation immigrants waving foreign flags in western countries, you should realize that, even if you don't believe in nationalism, the immigrants themselves often do.

Indeed, that is a problem. The fraction of such folks is rather small though, if you take an honest look at the statistics. It's quite rare to actually see this, apart from videos at politically leaning talk shows or youtube or a rally of certain folks. At least in a menacing way -- nobody takes issue with a Swede waving their flag on midsummers eve or some 6th generation irish folks getting drunk on st patricks day eh?

It needs adressing nevertheless, I'm with you there. Helping immigrants to integrate better rather than just dumping them into ghettos would be an idea. But it's rather unpopular especially in affluent neighborhoods to let little blond caucasian princess share school with the dark skinned kid whose parents have a strong accent and don't celebrate christmas. Integration sure, but not at the expense of my precious darling!!!1

Mid-skill developers? It's now become common to just contract out dev work to folks in Eastern Europe, for example. There are exceptional people there. And it's now really hard to get them to the U.S. so instead of having them pay taxes in the U.S. and spend their wages in the U.S. and maybe found their own startups and thereby grow the U.S. economy, they just do all that in their home country.

All that immigrant hate is so short sighted, it's hard to believe that you think that's actually in your own interest. Both common sense and history disagree with you.

(Though I admit that xenophobia has evolved in ancient human societies for good reasons. No reason to not realize it's bad though, not just morally but economically too. Very suitable for populism though, clearly.)

> at the cost of the American worker/Graduate

The old myth of "immigrants are taking our jobs". The American economy (and all western countries) would be substantially weaker without all those immigrants, highly skilled or not. Without them, the agricultural sector would collapse, the health care system would barely hang by a thread, and next time you go use a toilet at your companies office or a random shopping mall, try to find out who cleans it regularly (hint: that person is most certainly not born in your country nor highly educated).

Immigrants grow the economy, if anything. They make your life better.

That I even have to read this nonsense in a place with so smart and highly educated people as HN makes me pretty sad.

But does it really produce better outcomes? At the top? At the 50% percentile? For neither I find the answer obvious.

For the top talented "the west" has the approach to do individual focus, with focus classes and prodigies and all that. It may not hit everybody whom it should and may waste some potential here and there, but it's less scary too and I don't see that it's an obviously worse approach to this skill bracket. (Two data points from top of my head: Terence Tao and Magnus Carlsen, both widely regarded as absolute top in their field, grew up in "the west".)

For the average person, trying to make math approachable and following peoples instincts and interests could be helpful too. I know lots of folks "in the west" for whom even basic math goes over their heads, but I also have quite a few acquaintances from the soviet era who were beaten so hard with advanced math that nothing stuck and they have equal much trouble with very basic math. The conclusion isn't obvious either, to me.

It relates to whether the most competent mathematician is also the best suited person to teach. I'd argue, no. Deep competency in math is a requirement, sure. But so is a firm grasp on pedagogy. I've had my share of excellent math researchers as professors who were utterly incompetent when it came to teaching. Similar with text books.

Um, if you clearly describe what options A, B and C with their costs and consequences are and advice them to go with C but they go with A, then they explicitly did not go with your advice and can't blame you for their choice.

In the end, it's all business decisions. If it's something I don't like as a customer then it's to be infantilized.

(If you disagree then please don't complain ever again about LLMs refusing to help you reverse engineer a piece of code or explain how a virus works.)

As long as you put the alternatives clearly on the table, you could let the customers choose, and sign off on taking the risk. You can give a recommendation, but ultimately it's their choice if they bear the consequences resulting from the choice.

Though I don't get why this is delaying the release. It's understandable to delay a release to fix regressions, so that an update will not break things that used to work before. But if a bug has been present for a longtime, why delay shipping a new release with other bug fixes? The fix for that old bug could come in a point release or just next time.

Though he didn't connect any network.

> It's pretty obvious from the wording and the context that it's not 550 million unique visitors.

The precise wording, again:

> Over 550 million people have used Zamzar since launch

How is "over X million people have done ..." making it obvious that they were not unique?

If you go to a Taylor Swift concert and the newspaper next day headlines "over 60000 people were in the audience", does that mean to you that it was obviously just a handful and they were counted multiple times?

How about reducing energy use? In general, but then especially after a grid-destroying event that keeps you offline for a week? You surely don't need to have everything HVAC running on full blast in the whole house during that time. And your laundry and next oven long cook can probably also wait until the grid power is back.

If you then add some solar into the mix, it doesn't sound as dramatic anymore.

> But the GPU vendors won't really have an incentive to do this - artificially restricting their customer base?

We've been through this kind of thing before. Like copy restrictions in DVDs. You'd argue the drive vendors had no incentive to collude, yet they did.

Considering that their cheapest pricing is $12 (per month, 1 month minimum) and they claim 550 million users, either they made tons of riches or the numbers are to be questioned. I leave it to you to estimate which is more likely.

You don't care whether an article that ends up on HN front page contains legit information?

Always glad to see success stories. But some stuff does not check out.

> Over 550 million people have used Zamzar since launch,

There are 8.3 billion people on earth. You are saying that about 1 in 42 have used your service? I had never heard of it and I don't know anybody who had. And that's a sample that should be biased in your favor. Sorry, does not pass the smell test.

Or maybe they were not unique visitors, containing duplicates? How many? This makes me skeptical of the remaining statistics on the page.

> converting over 766 million files. We now process over 1 million API requests per day.

1 million per day now and 766 million over 20 years? At the current rate you'd achieve that in about 2 years. This would indicate a rapid growth in the last couple years or even just months. It is unclear why that would be reasonable. Especially since you'd probably have emphasized this explosion more if your service was essentially dormant for 19 years and just recently went through the roof. (Sth like "how we handled 100x growth of our SaaS business over 3 months")

After these two data points I stopped reading. Something doesn't feel right.

And that's why sw eng interviews often have some basic math sprinkled in.

HN usually has a helpful ad-free permalink and this one here is no exception.

Though the NYT article should be the primary one, not the ny post one.

Indeed.

You can hardly re-create the binary from a suitable source, just like the weights just fell from the sky. But you can change the binary (patch the machine code) just like you can adjust the weights. The comparison is quite apt.

Not questioning that it's off/biased/..., but what are you basing your "feel" on? Anything empirical or really just a feel?

It's odd because I wonder if anybody actually cares about such scores. It's not like millions of end users look at the score and use it to make a decision what to buy. Subscriptions can easiliy be canceled and people anyway use the models they "feel" work best for them. Hardly anybody I know uses an even remotely scientific method to evaluate model performance. It's mostly vibes with a little bit of (mostly flawed) A/B testing sprinkled in.

So ... why bother to cheat?

> It’s the food

Your sibling comment from 1 minute earlier:

> I am personally dealing with colon cancer, and one of the incredibly annoying things about the awful disease is the number of truly clueless people who use it to advance some culinary agenda they believe in without evidence.

A revision control system is a tool the journalists could use to achieve this. Commits to the 'enacted' branch could have commit messges documenting the context (when, how, why, who). Unmerged branches could represent proposed but ultimately rejected (or still in progress) changes with the same amount of meta data.

Of course a tool itself doesn't solve the problem. You need somebody to use the tool. But the tool makes it easier to solve the problem.

Could you elaborate?

They detect being coated, no matter liquid or not. (Source: Parents who smoke. And don't tell me the crap they are inhaling is a liquid.)

Sticking your head into non-liquid substances can have the same outcome. It therefore is not a suitable method for detecting wetness.

That statement is nonsensical for the usual formal notion of "undecidable" which is about infinite sets of inputs that a machine is asked to classify as "yes" or "no" instances, also called a decision problem.

P-vs-NP is no such decision problem. It has a single instance, we just don't know its validity.

> I think it unlikely given the harm it would do to them

Did it harm them in any real way that the original training material was also of questionable origin? Not the least.

We're being naive if we think this is not happening. Apart from some high profile enterprise contracts (which average Joe Physics Researcher does not have as they are using "free" credits insteador pay a personal account out of their own pocket), everything remotely attractive is being mined. Too sweet of a gold mine to pass by.

I'll stand corrected if an official statement from OpenAI/Anthropic comes out stating the opposite together with a whistleblower program worth its name. Until then it is safe (and reasonable) to assume that this is going on. The silence is telling.

Good public transit even benefits those not using it by reducing other kinds of traffic. Everbody should be in favor of such investments but many people just don't think that far during their next traffic jam frustrations in rush hour.

I'd love to make a survey to see if people read that headline as past or future. Honestly, I couldn't tell before reading the article.

Isn't that sad? The language used for international communication is ambiguous about whether a statement is in future or past?

A good writer minimizes ambiguity by re-wording things in unambiguous ways. (Or the opposite, if desired.)

> are there solutions for communication when international links are cut

There are, but currently the most promising one is under control of a very rich and very politically opinionated person who is not afraid to use that power in any way he pleases.

A truly distributed version (with multiple tech stacks, ownership and control) would be the real solution but I don't see any way this could ever manifest.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. In its specific case that's quite obviously not a good example because removing benign spots isn't harmful, but overlooking malignant ones is, so there is no downside.

But if we think a little further and generalize then there is great risk (and by extension, harm) to delegate diagnosis and treatment (of health issues in general, including potentially or supposedly fatal ones) to ChatGPT and similar tech. That we'd end up with a net positive is far from obvious.