MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2025-04-20 22:41:01+00:00
Agreed, but I also think to be called AGI, they should be capable of working through human interfaces rather than needing to have special interfaces created for them to get around their lack of AGI.

The catch in this though isn't the ability to use these interfaces. I expect that will be easy. The hard part will be, once these interfaces are learned, the scope and search space of what they will be able to do is infinitely larger. And moreover our expectations will change in how we expect an AGI to handle itself when our way of working with it becomes more human.

Right now we're claiming nascent AGI, but really much of what we're asking these systems to do have been laid out for them. A limited set of protocols and interfaces, and a targeted set of tasks to which we normally apply these things. And moreover our expectations are as such. We don't converse with them as with a human. Their search space is much smaller. So while they appear AGI in specific tasks, I think it's because we're subconsciously grading them on a curve. The only way we have to interact with them prejudices us to have a very low bar.

That said, I agree that video feed and mouse is a terrible protocol for AI. But that said, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we end up settling on. Long term, it's just going to be easier for these bots to learn and adapt to use human interfaces than for us to maintain two sets of interfaces for things, except for specific bot-to-bot cases. It's horribly inefficient, but in my experience efficiency never comes out ahead with each new generation of UIs.
by NorwegianDude | 2025-04-20 22:41:40+00:00
24 GB of VRAM is a large amount of VRAM on a consumer GPU, that I totally agree with you on. But it's definitely not an extremely high end GPU these days. It is suitable, yes, but not high end. The high end alternative for a consumer GPU would be the RTX 5090, but that is only available for €3000 now, while used 3090s are around €650.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-20 22:41:40+00:00
> Damages are compensatory.

No,compensatory damages are compensatory. Statutory and exemplary/punitive damages are not compensatory

> Allowing a jury to pluck 9-digit numbers from thin air to be reduced later is stupid. tory.

Juries aren't allowed to pick numbers out of the air; on compensatory damages, as the finder of fact, the jury performs the same function as a criminal jury, it determines what facts were proven to the required standard, including the amount of harm proven.
by ncruces | 2025-04-20 22:42:08+00:00
Looking at the diagram for the SQLite VFS page I didn't think I was going overboard with designing my driver around 3 packages: https://sqlite.org/vfs.html

One layer wraps SQLite C API, below it lives a pure Go VFS, and above all that database/sql driver.

Even this coarse split (with a collection internal packages, the bigger one of them “utils”) is enough to need various band-aids to accommodate the impossibility of circular dependencies.

I honestly don't think it helps much.

At the module level, there are obvious benefits from the impossibility. Just like all the pain around v2 modules can be justified, even if I find it annoying.

When packages are also the only layer at which you can enforce visibility, it becomes worse.
by jsnell | 2025-04-20 22:42:12+00:00
This number does not seem credible. Most likely Altman just made it up.

Back of the envelope:

OpenAI inference costs last year were 4B. Tens of millions would be at least 20M, i.e. 0.5%.

That 4B is not just the electricity cost. It needs to cover the amortized cost of the hardware, the cloud provider's margin, etc.

Let's say a H100 costs $30k, and has a lifetime of 5 years. I make that about $16 / day in depreciation. The H100 run at 100% utilization will use 17kWH of electricity in a day. What does that cost? $2-$3 / day? Let's assume the cloud provider's margin is 0. That still means power consumption is maybe 1/5th of the total inference cost.

So the comparison is 800M vs 20M (2.5%).

Can 2.5% of their tokens be pleasantries? Seems impossible. A "please" is a single token, which will be totally swamped by the output, which will typically be 1000x that.
by MilnerRoute | 2025-04-20 22:42:15+00:00
Reminds me of the "magic" trick where they ask you to write down a three-digit number, and then subtract it from those same three digits reversed. (And then take that number and add it to itself with its three digits reversed.) It's always 1089. (So then the magician tells someone to look on page 1089 of a book, where they've written "Your answer will be 1089!" or some such...)

I tried explaining this to a friend once...

Reversing the digits means that the last digit becomes 100-times-the-last-digit -- so when you subtract, you end up with 99 times the last digit. And it's the same for the digits on the other end, except it ends up being negative-99-times that digit. The middle digit always stays the same, so subtracting it from itself always adds 0 to the total, and you always end up with something that could be expressed as 99x - 99y -- which is 99 * (x-y). All that's really important is you end up with a multiple of 99, since all multiples of 99 have a pattern. The middle digit is always a nine, while since you're always one short of a hundred, the first digit goes up by a hundred each time you add 99 -- while the last digit goes down by one. So your first and last digit will just always add up to nine. Meaning that adding any of these numbers to its reversed-digits counterpart always gives you 900 plus 90 + 90, plus 9 -- or 1089.

You can also totally screw this up for the magician if you use the same number for the first and last digit. (Because then the result of the first subtraction is.... zero.) It's still a multiple of 99 -- but it's zero times 99.
by NegativeK | 2025-04-20 22:42:51+00:00
It's not hard to set up nearly fault proof routines and reminders.

For example, I have a pill container for the days of the week. Pills go directly into my pocket and don't come out unless they're going in my mouth (almost always during breakfast.) The pocket to mouth routine makes sure I don't set them down somewhere and the pill box gives proof later that I took them.
by Rodeoclash | 2025-04-20 22:43:09+00:00
Something tells me that if this succeeds, I'm not going to be living in a Culture-esque utopia.

It's amazing how AI has caused people to completely lose their minds. I think it's something to do with the fascination humans have with things that embody human-like characteristics (parrots / crows being a good example) coupled by it lighting up the parts of our brain normally reserved for religion.

Is AI useful? 100% - I use it as an aid all the time. Is it going to continue to grow exponentially? Well, it's already slowed down quite a bit compared with gpt2 to gpt3 to 3.5 to 4. Is it going to replace every worker? This is crazy talk.
by avidiax | 2025-04-20 22:43:45+00:00
I feel there is some baby being thrown out with the bathwater here, but I'd blame the automation companies that are pushing complexity as a means to vendor lock-in. The Crestrons and Phillips Hues and Samsung SmartThings of the world refuse to make an app-free cloud-free commodity smart home system.

Matter is unfortunately not that vision. It is still locking you into a cloud-based system, but you can take your devices to a system of your choice.

The system just needs to be simple. You should be able to buy a smart switch from any company. It should power and dim attached dumb and smart bulbs the old fashioned way. Pairing directly connected bulbs should just be turning the switch on and off 5 times quickly. Wireless pairing shouldn't require an app or attestation or other cloud stuff, just sharing a secret one time in-band on some standard protocol over 802.15.4. If you want to have a wireless switch clone a wired one, turn them on and off together 5 times. If you want an all-on, all-off wireless switch, turn all your lights on, and flip the master breaker 5 times along with your new switch. If you want something complicated, get an 802.15.4 bridge/controller. If you want to control with an app, let the bridge controller be accessible via a TailScale-like tunneling VPN or the local WiFi, still no cloud.

This could all be simple and interoperable, but that won't let any company tell their shareholders that their cloud-based smarthome base is growing X% YoY or that their gross margin on smart bulbs is 80%.
by gblargg | 2025-04-20 22:44:17+00:00
I like things I can improve my skill on. This works by getting a stream of feedback as I study what I did and the errors I made, then try again with changes. Having only 5 rounds a day (assuming it resets each day) greatly limits this. This limitation seems more like an attempt to make me use it in a certain way (make it part of my daily routine). That's off-putting. I wanted to sit there grinding over dozens of photos and watching my skill improve in real-time.
by whatshisface | 2025-04-20 22:45:00+00:00
I wonder if this idea could help overturn the negative incentives behind NIMBYism:

1. Homeowners in functional local democracies block new construction because it reduces the prices of their homes in exchange for no benefit to them, but...

2. When new, higher-density homes are constructed the total value of all houses increases much more than the total decline in the price of all old houses. This implies...

3. There is enough money available in the overall venture of new construction to compensate previous owners for the decline in prices, and although there could be many ways to accomplish it,

4. A tax on changes in assessed value that can go negative if the change is below a threshold, where the threshold is set so that the city collects net-zero revenue from this tax, would result in lump sum payments from developers (who dramatically increase assessed value) to people for whom the growth in their home prices had been depressed below the city's average by a nearby supply increase (whose assessed value would increase the least in that year if there was any truth to their objections).
by karmakaze | 2025-04-20 22:45:30+00:00
> commit version is chosen — the time at which the database claims all reads and writes occurred atomically.

This post doesn't mention transaction isolation specifically though it does say "How does this end up being equal to SERIALIZABLE MySQL?" So maybe I'm supposed to consider this post only for 'Every transactional system' running with SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation. I don't particularly care about that. I do care that the database I use clearly states what its isolation names mean in detail and that it does exactly what it says. e.g. I don't expect MySQL SERIALIZABLE to exactly mean the same as any other database that uses the same term.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-20 22:45:48+00:00
There are people who have used it as missionary (they're literally called missionaries sometimes), but the book itself does not suppress critical thinking - in fact some of the stories within it challenged me to think about the World in a very different way, and to consider what kind of person I wanted to be and the place I wanted to inhabit in my life, regardless of faith.

I also did not find it prevented me from changing my World view as I grew up. I am not a practicing christian today, but I do think that many christian parables have helped make me a more rounded, generous and thoughtful human being. I am certainly quite likely more empathetic and loving than many others around me.

Read it as a work of fiction and don't be afraid of it "converting you" into a a robot remotely controlled by the pope. You might be surprised.
by roenxi | 2025-04-20 22:45:59+00:00
> The UN and is state diplomacy, not media policy. One has nothing to do with the other.

If you don't believe state diplomacy is related to propaganda, then I think I should be even more insistent about asking what, exactly, do you feel the Chinese are supposed to do here? They're going to swoop in, "influence" everyone, and then it will have no impact on US-China relations. Maybe you believe it will have a huge impact on industrial policy?

(Possibly resulting in the US adopting a policy of outsourcing production to China? I might ask in a more mischievous mood).

> I'm not sure I've ever read a more historically illiterate statement.

That isn't the strongest argument I've seen today. bobthepanda's point still seems accurate - you haven't nailed down specific concerns, as far as I can see you've just identified that Nazis were foreign and China is untrustworthy [0] ergo the Chinese can't own a US media company. I'm not even convinced that is the wrong outcome, but the concern doesn't seem to be principled to much as you're just abstractly worried about foreign views without much reference to what they are or what impact they'll have.

[0] I see an irony here - the Nazis were implacably opposed to the Chinese communists on at least two ideological points - the Communism and the Chineseness.
by Nevermark | 2025-04-20 22:46:18+00:00
Interest qualia experience I noted.

I “clearly” see lots of dots appear and disappear. It feels direct and unassailable that I am seeing dots. But I never really see a single dot appear and disappear. (Without making a very selective effort.)

Clues like that suggest that the qualia answer has mechanistic explanation. The signal saying that we see something, directly and clearly, and actually seeing something, are separable.

Which is true for recognition of a previous experience (Deja vu), knowing (unquestioning belief), etc.

We experience certainties and experiences we deem direct, that we often attribute to reality, but the measure of certainty and directness themselves are just other signals only approximating or filling in (usefully confabulating) what we think they say.

Our experiences are absolutely full of invisible simplifications, internally created opaque illusions, of not only information, but meta-information.

They work as efficiencies because by design we do not have the natural ability to perceive or question them. No natural inclination to seperate seemingly deep experience from actually sparse internal sensory and meta status representations, or representations from reality (whether internal or external).
by flawn | 2025-04-20 22:46:59+00:00
1) Long-term effects are surely a topic but as with female birth control and the risks connected to it, as well as female-male couples where the female has an incompatibility with birth control, the male partners might take the risk of using it

2) Does it matter if the embryo will survive even in the 1% case? Somebody who uses birth control would not want a child anyway, right?
by water-data-dude | 2025-04-20 22:47:01+00:00
One concern I might have is that I’ve heard (and Wikipedia confirms, though with caveats[1]) that ejaculation can help avoid prostate cancer.

“These [studies] suggest that frequent ejaculation after puberty offers some reduction of the risk of prostate cancer.”

I think we need more/bigger studies to get a handle on how big the effect is though.

[1] NSFW warning - this is a Wikipedia article with a picture of a guy ejaculating riiiiight at the top: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejaculation#Health_issues
by danilor | 2025-04-20 22:48:35+00:00
I'll share some of the interesting ones I found!

https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#8,3,6,1,0,0,1,1,...

https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#8,3,3,1,1,3,1,3,...

https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/#2,22,1,2,3,1,16,...
by keybored | 2025-04-20 22:50:01+00:00
I’ve never managed to understand your year-long[1] manic praise over this feature. Given that you’re a language implementer.

It’s very cool to be able to just say “Y is just X”. You know in a museum. Or at a distance. Not necessarily as something you have to work with daily. Because I would rather take something ranging from Java’s interface to Haskell’s typeclasses since once implemented, they’ll just work. With comptime types, according to what I’ve read, you’ll have to bring your T to the comptime and find out right then and there if it will work. Without enough foresight it might not.

That’s not something I want. I just want generics or parametric polymorphism or whatever it is to work once it compiles. If there’s a <T> I want to slot in T without any surprises. And whether Y is just X is a very distant priority at that point. Another distant priority is if generics and whatever else is all just X undernea... I mean just let me use the language declaratively.

I felt like I was on the idealistic end of the spectrum when I saw you criticizing other languages that are not installed on 3 billion devices as too academic.[2] Now I’m not so sure?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24292760

[2] But does Scala technically count since it’s on the JVM though?
by mgraczyk | 2025-04-20 22:50:26+00:00
How do you explain the 9 year delay from 2015 to 2024.

And to be clear I am not even claiming that Lurie alone has caused crime to go down. I am claiming that a small number of rich people have, including all of their actions prior to 2025. What is the alternative explanation? What changed in 2024 under your theory?
by Gualdrapo | 2025-04-20 22:50:59+00:00
So-called "third world" "dev" here. Double-quoted "dev" because I'm actually a graphic designer who happens to do a tiny bit of coding.

I kind of understand what you feel because I went through the same on multiple ocassions. The situation here doesn't seem too nice either - people are fleeing not because they want to improve the situation in here or are being directly affected by it but because they want it to not reach them, which I think it's a really pathetic mindset. I have absolutely no desire to leave this place despite all of its problems - it seems to me in other places nowadays you're going to be hated/discriminated/ostracized just because you are you.

I struggled to get a job many times. I'm really fortunate to have a job now, and though it's not a super great income (it seems I lowballed myself a bit) the salary is enough to keep my family going and overall it has been great to learn and improve and I can actually spend the time working and not on inocuous and useless things like meetings and stress and stuff - but I suffer from impostor syndrome on a daily basis and I fear the project is going to end soon so I might find myself looking for a new job in the following weeks or (luckily) months so I'm going to get to first base.

You have the advantage to be young so you still can learn a lot of stuff you'll remember, so invest your time learning, but like actually diving deep into the stuff you really like. That alone will give you an advantage - everybody seems to be a jack of all trades nowadays but few seem to have a bit knowledge of things - if you market yourself as a person with a deep knowledge in something can be much better than trying to seem a know-it-all. Plus knowing english is a big plus you seem to have.

Also build yourself your online portfolio, the best you can do, showcasing the stuff you've done (or, if you haven't done stuff, just get time to create projects for fun, get involved with FOSS/Open Source projects where you can contribute and probably be seen, etc). Your portfolio is like your digital face so you'd want to write the best, cleanest, most readable code possible for your portfolio. The great thing about this part is that you don't actually need the newest, shiniest framework to do it - bare HTML and CSS and some JS will suffice. Believe me or not I suspect what has given me the little gigs I've got was not my portfolio itself but its code.

Oh and upwork and fiverr now are awful places to get freelance jobs. I got luck here in the "Seeking for a job?" posts, and if you search in this site, some people have left great recommendations for alternative places to look for freelance jobs that aren't as absurdly competitive or rigged.

Most importantly, don't lose hope and keep being persistent. You might get some luck between your dedication and perseverance.
by mjw1007 | 2025-04-20 22:51:11+00:00
I've found in practice that shrinking to get the "smallest amount of detail" is often unhelpful.

Suppose I have a function which takes four string parameters, and I have a bug which means it crashes if the third is empty.

I'd rather see this in the failure report:

("ldiuhuh!skdfh", "nd#lkgjdflkgdfg", "", "dc9ofugdl ifugidlugfoidufog")

than this:

("", "", "", "")
by snarg | 2025-04-20 22:51:29+00:00
I honestly thought that we were agreed on the definition of AGI. My understanding classified it as a model that can build on its knowledge and better itself, teaching itself new tasks and techniques, adapting as necessary. I.e., not simply knowing enough techniques to impress some humans. By this definition, it doesn't matter if it's super-intelligent or if its knowledge is rudimentary, because given enough add-on hardware and power, it could become super-intelligent over time.
by Namahanna | 2025-04-20 22:51:49+00:00
What you are looking for is this - https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/

"97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at 4K, and rendered at 4K."

Opening scene comparison - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI
by aristofun | 2025-04-20 22:51:58+00:00
> laid off, child diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, mother died, sister died, and more

Wholly… I am so sorry and at the same time so much respectful for you. That you managed to keep going and grow.

Maybe you’re just bored pf your current project that requires a lot from you without giving enough opportunities in return. Maybe you’re just burned out under too much stress and you need some kind of sabbatical for a year.

I don’t think anyone on the web can tell you what you already don’t know about yourself, or your situation or anything relevant.

Good luck!
by remexre | 2025-04-20 22:52:21+00:00
I think it's fair to say that having some sort of syntactically lightweight sum or union type facility makes this way nicer than anything Java ever had -- subclassing isn't really a solution, because you often want something like:

type FooError = YoureHoldingItWrong | FileError type BarError = YoureHoldingItWrong | NetworkError fn foo() -> Result<int, FooError> { ... } fn bar() -> Result<int, BarError> { ... } fn baz() -> Result<String, BarError> { ... }

TypeScript's type system would hypothetically make this pretty nice if there were a common Result type with compiler support.

Rust needs a bit more boilerplate to declare FooError, but the ? syntax automatically calling into(), and into() being free to rearrange errors it bubbles up really help a lot too.

The big problem with Java's checked exceptions was that you need to list all the exceptions on every function, every time.
by rainsford | 2025-04-20 22:53:11+00:00
> Allowing a jury to pluck 9-digit numbers from thin air to be reduced later is stupid.

That's not how civil jury trials work. Not only are juries specifically instructed that they can't just make up damages numbers, but a significant amount of the courtroom time will be dedicated to both sides presenting arguments for specific damage amounts with detailed justifications, expert witnesses, etc. I'm not saying trials never result in wonky damages amounts, but the idea that juries generally just randomly pick the biggest number they can think of is largely a media created fiction.