MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nicbou | 2025-05-05 18:26:42+00:00
I have built a timeline thing that combines my photos, my sketches, my journal, my GPS location and my Google searches. I can scroll to a given day and relive details that I would have otherwise forgotten about.

I am currently visiting Morocco again, this time without my motorcycle buddy. He died last summer. I would kick myself for not having any record of our trip together. There are so many little details in those pages I wrote in his company.

I also take new photos. They're for myself but also for my family and friends who are curious about my journey. They're a way to involve loved ones, because solo travel can get lonely.

As with anything else, there is a balance. Live in the moment, but save a little bit of it for later. Old photos can be nice to have when you feel a little down.

Besides, it trains you to observe certain details. What is worth sketching or writing about? What is the essence of this moment that must be captured? What will I want to remember about this day? How do I feel right now?
by account-5 | 2025-05-05 18:27:34+00:00
Nushell has it built in: https://www.nushell.sh/commands/docs/from_xlsx.html

Powershell can query excel files in various ways and there's a module for native powershell excel work: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/ImportExcel/5.4.2
by datadrivenangel | 2025-05-05 18:27:34+00:00
"Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale, but a change of structure to something simpler."

OpenAI admitting that they're not going to win?
by cesarb | 2025-05-05 18:27:37+00:00
> Those 2 asymmetries are A) clients have lower bandwidth than servers and B) IPv4 address exhaustion and the need/insistence on NAT.

There's a third asymmetry: C) power-constrained clients which are asleep most of the time. And this applies not only to battery-powered phones/tablets and laptops, but also to modern desktops which are configured by default to suspend on inactivity.
by Majromax | 2025-05-05 18:27:57+00:00
> Startlingly, they do not exhibit this behavior when trained on buggy code; only exploit code.

I wonder if this is support for the so-called 'Waluigi Hypothesis' (https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/D7PumeYTDPfBTp3i7/the-w...). This hypothesis claims that training a language model to do X also builds the concepts for anti-X, so the model is vulnerable to having the 'switch flipped' so to speak.

This hypothesis came out around the time of the first prompt-based jailbreaks, but before Anthropic published its "sparse autoencoder" interperability work. Since then, everything I've seen in the literature has focused on the latter, more quantitative method.
by lysace | 2025-05-05 18:28:22+00:00
I have a vague memory of informally sharing some homebrew Pascal parsing/code generation code to what I think may have been a predecessor of Free Pascal in like 1996 to someone I met over the web, back when people had homepages and public email addresses. We were all mourning the death of Turbo Pascal for DOS; Borland was just focusing on Windows.

I'm sure it was very crappy and never really used in the actual Free Pascal, but it's a fun memory nonetheless.

It's really nice to see this Free Pascal/Lazarus thing still alive.
by dabockster | 2025-05-05 18:29:46+00:00
> So, Chromium is unlikely to stop existing. And if it somehow does, it would immediately trigger a fork with a different name created by all the stakeholders that would require such a thing.

> And with multiple wealthy companies using chromium, funding that should be no issue.

You're assuming tech companies aren't being cheap lately when, in fact, they are being cheap. We should assume that the mooching (using Chromium without contributing code or money) would go to 11.
by jaggederest | 2025-05-05 18:29:51+00:00
This is the kind of task where, before LLMs, I wouldn't have done it. Maybe if it was something really important I'd circulate it to a couple friends to get rough feedback, but mostly it was just let it fly. I think it's pretty revolutionary to be able to get some useful feedback in seconds, with a similar knock-on effect in the pull request review space.

The other thing I find LLMs most useful for is work that is simply unbearably tedious. Literature reviews are the perfect example of this - Sure, I could go read 30-50 journal articles, some of which are relevant, and form an opinion. But my confidence level in letting the AI do it in 90 seconds is reasonable-ish (~60%+) and 60% confidence in 90 seconds is infinitely better than 0% confidence because I just didn't bother.

A lot of the other highly hyped uses for LLMs I personally don't find that compelling - my favorite uses are mostly like a notebook that actually talks back, like the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from Diamond Age.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-05-05 18:30:16+00:00
> At my old university ~15 years ago, all IPs of all computers were public IPV4 addresses. Any computer plugged in to any ethernet port on campus was given such a "quasi-static" IP address.

Well that's fine; my school did the same thing and other than feeling wasteful there was no-

> All normal ports were open - ssh, http(s), you name it. It was the OG zero trust architecture.

Oh. Yeah, open ports by default is... and interesting life choice.
by gbuk2013 | 2025-05-05 18:30:57+00:00
In my experience it only works if you pull in juniors into strong teams and keep the proportion of juniors reasonably small. You also need to have a process in place for training them - it’s not enough to rely on ad-hoc mentoring from peers.

If you get the ratio wrong, with too many juniors and weak technical leadership then you will end up in a very bad place in your code base.

In terms of value, even if juniors are half the cost, it is much wiser to hire one senior instead of 2 juniors for the same money.
by mubou | 2025-05-05 18:31:42+00:00
There isn't a yes-or-no answer to this. Some things I would consider:

1. Does this add additional complexity? How much more time/effort would it take to implement the feature? And most importantly, how much added effort would it take to maintain the feature? (Would adding this feature become a burden later?)

2. Can we be sure that the feature, as we would implement it now with our limited information, will meet future requirements, or would we perhaps be implementing something one way only for it to turn out that it would have been better implemented another way once there's an actual, defined usecase for it? (Remember that once you add something to an API, it can be hard to change or remove it later.)
by dlehman | 2025-05-05 18:32:52+00:00
It is indeed $19.99 here in Canada.

While a one-time fee seems preferable from a customer-standpoint, I personally prefer annual subscription fees. It allows for a potentially lower initial cost, making it more accessible to potential customers, but--more importantly--provides an obvious recurring revenue model for the author, hopefully implying on-going development. Ideally you would retain access to the app if your annual subscription lapses, but could receive upgrades after reviving your subscription. Whenever there is a one-time fee for an "average" app (no offense intended), I always wonder how the author can afford to keep updating it in the future.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-05-05 18:32:55+00:00
> Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.

Then why is it paywalled? Why are you making/have made people across the world sift through the worst material on offer by the wide uncensored Internet to train your LLMs? Why do you have a for-profit LLC operating under a non-profit, or for that matter, a "Public Benefit Corporation" that has to answer to shareholders at all?

Related to that:

> or the needs for hundreds of billions of dollars of compute to train models and serve users.

How does that serve humanity? Redirecting billions of dollars to fancy autocomplete who's power demands strain already struggling electrical grids and offset the gains of green energy worldwide?

> A lot of people around OpenAI in the early days thought AI should only be in the hands of a few trusted people who could “handle it”.

No, we thought your plagiarism machine was a disgusting abuse of the public square, and to be clear, this criticism would've been easily handled by simply requesting people opt-in to have their material used for AI training. But we all know why you didn't do that, don't we Sam.

> It will of course not be all used for good, but we trust humanity and think the good will outweigh the bad by orders of magnitude.

Well so far, we've got vulnerable, lonely people being scammed on Facebook, we've got companies charging subscriptions for people to sext their chatbots, we've got various states using it to target their opposition for military intervention, and the White House may have used it to draft the dumbest basis for a trade war in human history. Oh and fake therapists too.

When's the good kick in?

> We believe this is the best path forward—AGI should enable all of humanity^1 to benefit each other.

^1 who subscribe to our services
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-05 18:32:56+00:00
YouTube actively filters small channel copied content too.

We should be building robust copyright filters and everyone should be able to contribute their work to it.

but that is a different issue than whether or not an LLM is legally allowed to view a work that is publicly available.

Again, pretty much every artist is capable of off-hand copyright violation on the spot. This has been true forever. We don't bar them from seeing art to prevent this.
by Retric | 2025-05-05 18:33:04+00:00
That’s fair.

My experience is graduates of schools focused on the more practical aspects tend to make better Jr developers on day one but then stagnate. Meanwhile graduates of the more theoretical programs people pick up those same practical skills on the job leaving them better prepared for more demanding assignments.

This then feeds into the common preference for CS degrees even if they may not actually be the best fit for the specific role.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-05 18:33:20+00:00
I feel like most of the obsession over Redis came from old school cgi-esque server side apps that couldn't easily maintain state themselves...

Nowadays your webapp is often a persistent, multi-threaded web server where you can cache whatever temporary state you want far more efficiently than reaching out to a KV store.

Using postgres and caching common results becomes a non-issue even at scale. The main area where a super fast KV store shines is when you need to share a very large number of keys, where many servers only need to access a random subset and isn't interested in maintaining the full set and getting updates on a bus, where the values often change and needs to be revalidated so caching is ineffective, and where persistence is not needed so a database doesn't matter and a lighter KV store is acceptable.
by hangonhn | 2025-05-05 18:33:23+00:00
Did you really mean to leave your AES key in the code in RedflyEncryptionKeys?

> public const string AesKey = ...

Also, the way AES is used in the code is not good practice. It seems to be using plain AES ( https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.security... ), which isn't meant to be used bare like that. It needs to be coupled with a digest algorithm to protect the ciphertext. Maybe use AesGcm instead?
by rc00 | 2025-05-05 18:33:56+00:00
> This was posted by its author to /r/rust and then submitted here by someone because if a post does well over there, it often does well over here. That’s not “karma abuse”.

Except the submitter account in question is actually automating submissions from what looks like Lobsters (based on the timing and posting history). The account owner only seems to post non-automated comments to spam their product. This looks an awful lot like abuse. Or is abuse okay when you perceive it to be beneficial to Rust propaganda?
by lsaferite | 2025-05-05 18:34:04+00:00
But that case involves publishing of content. If you want to compare them, it seems like you'd argue that the content of Pharrell Williams' head is somehow copyright infringement. I've yet to see anyone credible say that an AI model outputting exact content and then someone publishing that should be allowed. If you manage to make an AI model output copyrighted content, you can't then claim it's not copyrighted. If you sit on one side of a table and read a book out loud and I write it down (with minor transcription errors), that content is almost certainly still copyrighted content and I could not distribute it legally.
by crote | 2025-05-05 18:35:43+00:00
Could it be some kind of fixed per-bucket offset?

I wouldn't be surprised if the CCD has all sorts of funky analog stuff going on internally which has different impacts on different samples, which would be incredibly hard to deal with on its own.

However, if this behaviour is merely a fixed offset, it would be fairly easy to compensate for this on the digital side: just do a calibration with a known signal, and the measured offset can be used to reverse its effect in future sampling.
by MikeBee | 2025-05-05 18:36:15+00:00
"I've discovered that attention heads in transformer models can be approximated by simple MLPs using only 5% of the original parameters while maintaining nearly identical performance. This could significantly reduce the power consumption of LLMs by 95%. My research includes a working demonstration with full code. I'd love to discuss how this approach could benefit Anthropic's efficiency goals. Read the full paper here: https://medium.com/@mbonsign/attention-heads-can-be-approxim..."
by n_ary | 2025-05-05 18:36:43+00:00
I personally use it on my devices as well as on TV and SmartPhones of my non-tech-savvy family. However, deep in my mind, I have a feeling that, any day they will turn face and sell off to some data brokers and suddenly all of my traffic history is centralized there. I used to run a personal AdGuard-Home on cheap VPS, but after NextDNS decomissioned it. May be need to go boot it up again.
by Disposal8433 | 2025-05-05 18:37:05+00:00
You can if you have the time, if you also write unit-tests, and if your code will not give too much work for reviewers.

Most of my commits nowadays are very simple and small, and I try to stick to the immediate specifications because they may expanded in the future. In your example, what happens in the future if your boss says "the calculator may NEVER compute the difference of 2 numbers"? You will have useless code and/or harmful code that people will feel free to use but you may have to remove in the future. That's additional work for you.

Last but not least, putting too much unneeded new code may cause problems for others with merge conflicts if you use GitLab or GitHub. It happens all the time. Think about what you need, what you must do, and the problems you may cause later.
by jimt1234 | 2025-05-05 18:37:47+00:00
I sold "ecstasy" for about a year in the early-90s, around UC Davis, Stockton, Modesto, down to Stanislaus State. It helped me pay for college.

I first heard about "ecstasy" at a rave in Sacramento. It wasn't called "ecstasy" then, it was just called "pills". My friend and I were trying to sell weed at the rave and no one wanted it; kids were making fun of us, telling us to go back to Woodstock. So we found a source of pills in San Francisco - a former cop that reminded me of Fred Schneider from The B-52s, and we went back to another rave in Sacramento. The two things I remember from the whole experience are:

1. People REALLY liked this stuff. I'd never seen people so happy to buy drugs. We usually sold out within a few minutes of showing up, just hanging out in the parking lot.

2. Unlike other popular drugs (weed and coke), it seemed almost impossible to get caught. I had one interaction with the police - a kid at Sac State got sick and needed medical attention; the cops eventually questioned him and he ratted on us. A cop later rolled up, questioned us, then asked if we would get him a date with one of our friends, some pretty girl we knew from the rave scene. He basically said he'd look the other way if she went on a date with him. The girl agreed and that was it. So yeah, I know things changed, but at the time, cops just weren't taking "pills" seriously. (BTW, the girl did go on a date with the cop; she said he was a tool. He showed up to the date with his gun holster under his jacket, and flashed his badge to the waitress when she asked about ID to buy booze from the bar. There was no second date.)
by radicaldreamer | 2025-05-05 18:37:55+00:00
Part of being well read is being able to define what the 'this' you mention is and to articulate why you think 'this' is not good enough or is sublime either by using well defined terms and concepts (like control of time, narrative flow, definition of characters, the evocation of the Sanskrit 'rasa') or dipping into one's own inventive abilities to define a new concept for what you're trying to describe, something very common in philosophy.
by granzymes | 2025-05-05 18:38:00+00:00
From least to most speculative:

* The nonprofit is staying the same, and will continue to control the for-profit entity OpenAI created to raise capital

* The for-profit is changing from a capped-profit LLC to a PBC like Anthropic and Xai

* These changes have been at least tacitly agreed to by the attorneys general of California and Delaware

* The non-profit won’t be the largest shareholder in the PBC (likely Microsoft) but will retain control (super voting shares?)

* OpenAI thinks there will be multiple labs that achieve AGI, although possibly on different timelines
by pzo | 2025-05-05 18:38:18+00:00
This looks great will definitely have a look. What I wish that there was also MCP client (SDK) for mobile devices either native (Swift / Kotlin ) or React Native / Expo ( ideally with integration with vercel ai sdk). For mobile dev this would simplify setup (not need to have a proxy server) and allow business models with end-user Bring-Your-Own-Key.
by Eavolution | 2025-05-05 18:38:43+00:00
I think cycling is a particularly good example of this. Using the phone on a mount for navigation can help you go more interesting places you're less familiar with, but you have to look at your surroundings to be vaguely safe. I don't cycle with music or anything, I don't think I'd feel safe doing that but I really enjoy a long cycle with the phone on a mount for directions.

A garmin or something would likely be better for this, but I don't particularly want to buy one and the phone does a fine job.
by Zak | 2025-05-05 18:39:08+00:00
It is reasonable to assume that the intelligence services of unfriendly countries are actively devoting significant resources to compromising both issued and personal phones of top-level officials in the US government. They would be negligent not to. It's also a good guess that those efforts would be increased after the first time it became public knowledge the officials were likely using those phones for secret official business.

It is also reasonable to guess that such services have access to malware similar to the infamous Pegasus and a nonzero success rate at deploying it. In short, it's careless to assume none of the phones aren't rooted by a hostile actor.

That's one of several reasons the government has rules requiring that classified conversations take place on specific approved devices which aren't used for anything else.
by alex1138 | 2025-05-05 18:39:11+00:00
They needed to have proper defaults and they needed to let their social network grow organically and they needed to have an actual sane, proper, feed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719

There's a reason everyone is on Facebook (one reason is that everyone is on Facebook): Myspace legitimately shot themselves in the foot (I guess Friendster too by lack of proper site performance, even though it was cleaner) by having 'messy' pages. There's real value in being able to find the people you want/need to find by their real names (except, Google, maybe don't you know, hijack people's Youtube accounts in order so that they use Google+)

But then Facebook introduces shifting privacy settings, tagging without permission, not giving people control over how information is displayed generally

I understand it's about beating the competition and about growing and 'connecting the world' but some companies' DNA is set a certain way from the beginning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
by zerd | 2025-05-05 18:39:16+00:00
> It has long been established that predictive models can be transformed into lossless compressors and vice versa. Incidentally, in recent years, the machine learning community has focused on training increasingly large and powerful self-supervised (language) models. Since these large language models exhibit impressive predictive capabilities, they are well-positioned to be strong compressors. In this work, we advocate for viewing the prediction problem through the lens of compression and evaluate the compression capabilities of large (foundation) models. We show that large language models are powerful general-purpose predictors and that the compression viewpoint provides novel insights into scaling laws, tokenization, and in-context learning. For example, Chinchilla 70B, while trained primarily on text, compresses ImageNet patches to 43.4% and LibriSpeech samples to 16.4% of their raw size, beating domain-specific compressors like PNG (58.5%) or FLAC (30.3%), respectively.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.10668

Transformers are also used in the top algorithm right now on the Large Text Compression Benchmark. https://bellard.org/nncp/nncp.pdf
by Legend2440 | 2025-05-05 18:39:24+00:00
>history is littered with examples of capitalists replacing labour with automation and using any productivity gains of new technology to push salaries lower

Nonsense. We make far, far more than people did in the past entirely because of the productivity gains from automation.

The industrial revolution led to the biggest increase in quality of life in history, not in spite of but because it automated 90% of jobs. Without it we'd all still be subsistence farmers.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-05 18:39:48+00:00
Roman armies trained and drilled extensively. And Roman armies had lower and mid level commanders, that could make decisions and direct troops within certain limitations. Everything wasn’t direct movement orders from Caesar to every individual soldier. A centurion could have made that call, not something spontaneous at the individual level. I'm not sure what battle you are talking about, although I would guess maybe the siege of Alesia, but without knowing, I can't comment on the specifics.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150901204127/http://www.roman-...