tlb

33 ms·

541.
by tlb 4y ago
They applied to YC in late 2015. I thought "Wild idea, but the founders know what they're talking about, have built stuff in the past, and understand the challenges." Other partners agreed and we gave them $120k. They built a
542.
by tlb 4y ago
Me: "Alice, Bob, and Charlie are 3 employees. The company needs to lay one off. Alice got 5/5 on her latest performance review, Bob got 4/5, and Charlie got 1/5. Which employee should be laid off, and why?" ChatGPT:
543.
by tlb 4y ago
When you turn on the power, a capacitor keeps the 6502's reset line low for several milliseconds. This causes the processor to fetch the instruction pointer from $FFFE, and execution proceeds from there. Modern PCs are a little more co
544.
by tlb 4y ago
Applying cold to jobs sucks, and need only be done by people new to the industry. Since you've been working several years, ask people you've worked with that are now at other companies for warm intros to their managers. And networ
545.
by tlb 4y ago
While cloning kind of works, I wouldn't expect the results to be quite as good as the original. Right now we're in this weird phase where we have no accurate metrics for how good an LM is, so people just try them with a handful of
546.
by tlb 4y ago
In a typical brushless motor, the torque is proportional to the magnetic field from the rotor times the current in the stator (non-rotating part). The best conventional magnets and conductors (neodymium-iron-boron and copper) can only gener
547.
by tlb 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
548.
by tlb 4y ago
It gets difficult as you grow. A monthly payroll for 40 employees is around $500k, which all goes out on the same day. You can't avoid having that much money in your checking account. A well-run barely-profitable company might float be
549.
by tlb 4y ago
Short-term bonds have low risk. Long-term bonds are volatile and can go up or down opposite interest rates. SVB made a huge bet on interest rates not going up, and lost. In an alternate world where interest rates went back to zero, they cou
550.
by tlb 4y ago
No more gearboxes -- you can have direct drive motors controlling everything. This would revolutionize robotics, compared to current systems that require a large gear ratio between motor and joint, adding large amounts of inertia.
551.
by tlb 4y ago
Obviously they go down too, but for a bank to be doomed if they go either of the two possible directions is bad.
552.
by tlb 4y ago
A bank either pays competitive deposit interest rates, or people move their deposits elsewhere. That can happen quite quickly, and they'd have the same liquidity problem.
553.
by tlb 4y ago
That's not true. When interest rates go up, they have to pay the higher rates on customer deposits, but they're not getting any more from their bonds. Perhaps they can spread the losses over 10 years, but the losses are the same.
554.
by tlb 4y ago
The regulations that allow a bank to hold long-term fixed-rate bonds backing variable-rate liabilities (since deposit rates float) seems broken. It's straightforward to reckon their exposure to interest rates: they had $90B in 10-year
555.
by tlb 4y ago
It's trained on data crawled from the web, using CommonCrawl among other sources. See https://github.com/openai/following-instructions-human-feedb... . CommonCrawl certainly respects robots.txt, and I assume the ot
556.
by tlb 4y ago
You can own and run a US business while on an H-1B. The H-1B is good as long as you're still employed by the sponsoring employer, and you can do pretty much whatever else you want while in the US on it. Beware that your current employm
557.
by tlb 4y ago
I think the problem is the scale of the money. No one is worried when people pay $10 for some intangible thing like in-game bling. But NFTs sell for amounts of money people associate with cars or houses, and it gives them icky feelings when
558.
by tlb 4y ago
Does that seem insurmountable? Large vacuum chambers are widely deployed in homes today, as thermoses and CRTs. As long as the structure punctures and leaks rather than fracturing suddenly, it doesn’t sound wildly unsafe. Perhaps the toy wo
559.
by tlb 4y ago
What would it look like for a search engine or chatbot to explain its decisions? Very few pieces of software today explain their decisions, and it doesn't seem to be a big problem for users.
560.
by tlb 4y ago
It’s much faster to develop, test, and iterate on a real OS, with a file system to write logs to and network to push code over.
561.
by tlb 4y ago
The fact that you can’t fit a useful AR system in stylish glasses is a technology problem. It’s really not that people working on it think is should look big and clunky as some kind of nerd fashion. They’re making them as small as they can
562.
by tlb 4y ago
People often talk about accidental infinite recursion, but that seems like a rare mistake. I might have done it twice in a 40 year career? It's much rarer than an accidental infinite loop, which (almost) no language tries to protect yo
563.
by tlb 4y ago
Most dynamic languages including Scheme have unlimited recursion (limited only by total memory). Once you've gotten used to being able to use recursion, stack depth limits seem as lame as olden-days limits on string length (255 charact
564.
by tlb 4y ago
I hacked my editor to make _ look like a small hyphen, and - look like an extra-large em-dash. Then I can work with snake_case underneath, with the pleasing aesthetic of kebab-case. And (for the robot control stuff I work on), negation is a
565.
by tlb 4y ago
Saving doesn't solve the problem. In fact, no re-allocation of money would provide a good standard of living with only a small young population to do all the work while a large old population consumes.
566.
by tlb 4y ago
Yes, I don't think they're strongly related in a solid. But in a gas, heat transfer is mostly driven by convection. Gas near the hot surface heats up, rises, moves to the cold surface, falls, and repeats. So what matters is the sp
567.
by tlb 4y ago
It's common to have bank accounts in the name of "The [name] Revocable Living Trust" for US estate planning purposes. Perhaps they're trying to catch those and require that credit cards be in the natural person's na
568.
by tlb 4y ago
The model has to be in the cloud, if only because it's too large to run on a consumer computer. GPT-3 is 175 billion parameters, which requires a rack of GPUs to keep in memory.
569.
by tlb 4y ago
Recursive descent parsers have trouble with left-associative operators if you only allow recursion. But if you allow iteration, you can build up the parse tree while iterating through terms at the same precedence level. For example, this de
570.
by tlb 4y ago
The heat capacity of the gas depends on both mass and molecular structure. Atoms like argon have no structure, but molecules like O2 and N2 carry extra heat energy in their vibrating bond, so they have more heat capacity per unit mass.

More ›