dnc

I felt the same way. It started slow and I nearly quit, but something beneath the surface kept me reading. After 50 pages or so, I was hooked. It's an amazing book. The only other book that pulled me in that deeply in a couple of last years was Blood Meridian.

> You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.

I'd like this to be true, but Socrates immediately comes to mind as a perfect counter example of someone who was opposed to writing and was arguably one of the greatest thinkers ever.

I attribute the excitement of the VC and CEO cast to the same underlying motive, but I think there are at least several other ways all this could play out:

- the Cul-de-Sac: AI progress flattens as scaling data and compute, RL and algorithmic improvements hit diminishing returns.

- democratization: LLMs decentralize, mirroring the shift from mainframes to personal computers.

- AI creates new jobs and thus new dependencies for the capitalist class

- Any combination of the above.

Previous discussions:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563187

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29936104

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31504052

yes, you are correct, sorry for the ambiguity and late reply.

From my own experience, "only" deep and intense breathing for not more than 5 minutes can alter state of mind drastically.

According to the article (and the discussed research) this was only a minor factor:

"The researchers also explored the possibility that index changes are more predictable today than in the past, leading sophisticated market participants to trade ahead of the events. They concluded that this played only a minor role in their findings, however."

The two main factors being:

"...an increase in migrations over time from the S&P MidCap 400 index, and an overall increase in the market's ability to provide liquidity to those investors seeking to buy and sell around the time of index changes.

The additional liquidity has 'made it easier for everyone to trade, and as a result, the prices move less.' says Dr. Greenwood.

And with more stocks migrating to the S&P 500 from the S&P MidCap 400, midcap funds are selling as S&P 500 funds are buying, leading to 'a wash' in demand, he says.

"

> I read all his novels (and some of his short stories), he's one of my favorite authors

That makes at least two of us. :) But, I suspect there are quite a few more HN readers who like Kafka's works and literature in general (the first is arguably very correlated to the other), judging from how often literature related articles appear on the HN front page. Often, when that is the case I also can't help but wonder the same about the correlation between being a fiction and HN reader.

An essay on writing by Raymond Carver [1] (as well as pretty much anything by Raymond Carver and authors he mentions in the essay :)). It's about good fiction writing, but, I think, good to keep in mind for writing in general.

[1] https://bryanafern.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/on-writing-ra...

> Vector search, though, isn't as good on handling typos and not good at all when it comes to as you type searching. Vehic won't match on auto, for example.

This is incorrect in general case and it entirely depends on the model that is used to produce word vectors and the text corpus the model is trained with.

For instance, fastText model is trained on words, but also their parts (n-grams), so it should produce word vectors that would be close (in cosine-distance) to vectors of their corresponding typos and partials, even if the text corpus that was used to train the model doesn't contain same typos and partially typed words verbatim.

Hi,

This is an awesome project, congratulations!

Could you share details about the machine translation engine that is used (or where to find out more about it)? Are there any plans to open source the extension code (with the WebAssembly optmizations that are mentioned in the article)?

Thanks.

I can experience something similar with the ventilation system in my apartment. Usually, the sound of it is immersed in the background noise together with other sounds coming from the outside, so most of the time I'm not aware of it at all. However, sometimes when I meditate I hear it and if I focus my attention on it, after a while it becomes clear and loud, rich and versatile, not unlike a music played on a wind instrument.

Related to this and discussed quite a few times on HN ([1],[2]), 'In Praise of Idleness', an essay by Bertrand Russell: https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Prais... . I return to it every once in a while, if not to regain a bit of sanity, than just to enjoy clarity of thought and style in his writing.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21509144 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092

I wonder where the fascination with trains and railways (that I share) comes from. Maybe from the 19th century industrialization and technological revolution when railway was one of its main symbols ("locomotion of progress")? Related to this, it was a great surprise to me when I first found out about the origin of the term 'hacker':

"3. The Early Hackers

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1. The Signals and Power committee of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club adopted the machine as their favorite tech-toy and invented programming tools, slang, and an entire surrounding culture that is still recognizably with us today. These early years have been examined in the first part of Steven Levy's book Hackers [Levy] .

MIT's computer culture seems to have been the first to adopt the term `hacker'. The Tech Model Railroad Club's hackers became the nucleus of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the world's leading center of AI research into the early 1980s. Their influence was spread far wider after 1969, the first year of the ARPANET. "

Source: http://catb.org/esr/writings/hacker-history/hacker-history-3...

"The difference between this and word2vec is that the primitive atomic unit we are embedding isn’t a word, but a search query. Therefore this isn’t a language model, but a query model."

If a primitive embedding unit is a search query instead of a word, then I assume that a query vector model is trained on a limited dictionary of queries. I wonder if that implies that the trained vector model can encode only search queries that are already present in its dictionary? If not, I think it would be interesting to know more about how the closed dictionary problem was solved.

I've recently read a seminal work on LSD and how it affects human psyche: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196573.Realms_of_the_Hum.... Cannot recommend it enough. I feel it demystified a great deal of uncertainty and unknowns I had about LSD. The book was based on roughly 2500 LSD sessions (mostly high dose, in 150-300mg range) that the author conducted in 70s with different patients, including himself. AFAIK, it is the first book to systematically approach the topic and map psychedelic LSD experiences in roughly 4 categories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Grof#Encounter_with_....

Each patient would have series of LSD sessions in a regulated environment (usually in a room with an interior that feels secure and comfortable, a psychoanalyst guiding the session included). First sessions were used to test an individual high dose threshold. Once the high dose for a patient was established they would stick to it. According to the book, 'bad' or traumatic LSD experiences are mostly related to the 2nd (BPM II: Cosmic Engulfment and No Exit) and 3rd (BPM III: The Death-Rebirth Struggle), reliving of birth- and prenatal traumas that are suppressed. It takes usually several high dose sessions with a psychoanalytic integration work afterwards in order to 'resolve' traumas. Once they are resolved they don't resurface and the person generally can lead happier life.

Regarding 'bad trips' with lasting consequences in the aftermath: the author mentions that _in some cases_ when a trauma was not resolved or properly addressed in the course of one session the patient could suffer from various psychotic episodes after the sessions was over. As far as I could tell, simplistically speaking, this was attributed mainly to the fact that the traumatic content (normally suppressed) resurfaced and was sort of left uncovered and 'half-processed'. It was stressed in several places in the book how important is that the 'set and setting' is right for an LSD session and how it could be dangerous and counterproductive if LSD is consumed in a wrong environment or not followed up with an appropriate 'psychoanalytic' work after the session is finished.

Thank you for saying it, cannot agree more. Premature derivation of abstractions so often leads to code that is later difficult to modify and understand and leads to a vicious circle of adding more abstraction and complexity.

I've recently watched Tim Ferris's pod-cast with Dr. Gabor Mate who is well known for his work with people who suffer from ADHD (including himself), Depression and various types of addiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9B5mYfBPlY. It's rather a long interview (2h 23') that touches on many topics (Depression, ADHD, Ayahuasca), but IMO well worth time invested. Very insightful as to the ways one might take when it comes to improving his/her own wellbeing.

I had a rather milder form of depression few years ago (with symptoms such as low-self esteem, loss of motivation to work, eat, exercise and pretty much all standard symptoms except suicidal thoughts). One thing that helped a lot to break negative thought patters and to start pro-actively coping with my own issues was attending few Ayahuasca sessions. I'd recommend it only if you find really experienced, trustworthy, practitioner such as Dr. Gabor Mate and if you are healthy enough (health heart, you cannot use antidepressants and other, prescribed or not, psychoactive drugs and you should do specific diet few week prior to it). Some claim that it's worth 10 years of psychoanalysis. I don't not know how much truth is in that claim, but in my case it really gave me immediate relief, sense of a fresh start and valuable insights about why I'm the way I'm. Of course, a real work starts after it when it takes time and effort to integrate these insights into your everyday life (but I felt motivated to do so).

Neither most likely. I think that this man is an apatrid and that he doesn't have a real home judging by a similar string of events in my life. My country was economically devastated due to unfavorable Geo-political circumstances and I eventually had to choose to move, rather than to prolong meaningless suffering. I was lucky to have a choice. Although, I'd say it was not as dramatic as in the case of Iraq. Anyhow, I feel as if I don't belong anywhere.

I was not long enough to make any general conclusions, but from what I could see it is a mixture. I saw quite a few 'westerners' who had given up 'western' medicine and came to try Ayahuasca for various reasons. As for natives, I don't know, I think they still go to traditional healers, but also very rapidly adopt 'western lifestyle'. I'm sure 'western' medicine is not an exception from this trend. Ayahuasca still seems to be deeply ingrained in their culture and original religion (which is a sort of spiritual pantheism for the lack of a better term), it is considered holly plant and still deeply revered and respected. Personally, I would not like to see this tradition they have preserved for millennia to disappear or completely mutates into something like "Ayahuasca turism"...

While I was on a retreat this year in a Peruvian village, I was told by several natives (Shipibo people) that, by their tradition (some estimations are that Shipibo tribes have been using Ayahuasca for millenias), Ayahuasca is orally taken in healing ceremonies by their shamans only. Traditionally, in the normal course of a healing ceremony, it is not a patient who takes 'the medicine' or 'the plant teacher' (Ayahuasca), but the shaman in order to learn from the plant what his patient illness is and how to go about healing it. Also traditionaly, Ayahuasca is taken during shamanic training (which takes years, if not a whole life) as a part of a special and very strict diet that can last between several weeks to a year or more, depending on a plant that one is dieting. During the diet shaman apprentice is supposed to take Ayahuasca, but only at the beginning and at the end of the diet, if it is a short one, or every once in couple of months if the diet is longer. The diet is a way to become familiar with the plant and learn what it has to teach you and Ayahuasca, the teacher plant, is used as a sort of a learning facilitator. From my understanding, a practice of organizing Ayahuasca ceremonies and giving the brew to foreigners in exchange for money has been relatively recently established with rising popularization of Ayahuasca and demand for it from abroad.

Same here, I use python at work for ML related stuff on daily basis for the reason pretty much everyone else chooses python over ruby ('that's what everyone else in my company uses and it just has more mature ML libraries and greater support'), but countless times have I caught myself thinking while writing python code: 'this could have been much cleaner and shorter code had I used ruby and its blocks'. It's a shame.

There was an excellent talk related to this that Joanna Rutkowska gave at the 32c3 conference (she talked quite a bit about Intel's ME too, I was completely unaware of its existence up to that point): https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7352-towards_reasonably_trustwor...

Completely share this point of view. I was a heavy smoker for a ten years and no level of taxation would make me quit. Back at the time I would rather smoke and stay hungry for a while if I was to choose. And quitting is very hard. I have had dozen of failed attempts to actually quit smoking for good. Having said that, I know a lot of people who smoke just to socialize and occasionally; they are not addicted and seem to have no problem with not smoking at all...

That is also what I find the worst. Everything else, that can be seen in the disturbing pictures of the place seems to me as merely surface and materialization of the inner despair and suffering that one has to go through in a such situation.

Related to this, great article of E.W.Dijkstra: The strengths of the academic enterprise (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/E...)

For grokking git, indispensable resource is git early dev mailing list and corresponding code base (first couple of months after project started). Linus explained it in very clear and precise way in the mailing list and related code. The initial code base is surprisingly small (around 1200 LOC of clear and precise C code). Used data structures are simple and self-explanatory. Although most of the original code is not in the git code base anymore, the data structures and main design ideas have stayed there intact so far.

Thanks for the book!

Very important skill is to learn to laugh. Honestly, without hypocrisy. It shouldn't be difficult, assuming you approach to someone that you are genuinely interested in. Just don't be scared for a start. If you learn that, people will feel special with you, or at least relaxed, and they will reciprocate in the most cases.

Meticulously detailed account of Kepler's bride computing process can be found in his letter to unknown nobleman (dated from Linz, 23 October 1613). I've read just fragments of it from "The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe", the book by Arthur Koestler.

Introductory paragraph (p. 399): "Kepler's first marriage had been engineered by his well wishers when he was penniless young teacher. Before his second marriage, friends and go-betweens again played a prominent part, but this time Kepler had to choose between no less than 11 candidates for his hand...".

What follows could hardly IMHO put in any proper mathematical formula. In the best case it has to be modeled by some stochastic process with exponentially increasing number of random variables.

Anyways, the book is more important than that and I cannot recommend it enough. There is nothing else to my knowledge that so convincingly describes how process of scientific discovery can be arbitrary, fragile and random. The mentioned 'choosing ideal bride' episode is merely anecdotal chapter in the book that better explains Kepler's role and importance in the history of science.