skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What are the stages of tech again?
1: That's crazy.
2: It wont work
3: Well maybe it works a bit, but it will never do X.
4: Maybe it can do X but it will never do Y.
5: It was obvious all along it would work, didn't you know?

We are now at stage 3.5 to 4. It's absolutely obvious to anyone who isn't merely regurgitating what they hear and who does not have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion to themselves that there is something special about human consciousness, that we are pretty close to GAI. We are very close, the bitter lesson, at this point is crystal clear. All that is required here is more power. 10x? 100x, 1000x? Who knows but pretty soon your job is going to be automated and all these nonsense conversations about what constitutes 'genuine' AGI are going to seem a bit silly.
>The real unsettled question now is: how bad is it going to be, and when we don't know for sure, how much should we weight the various bad outcomes?

If you wave a magic wand and reduce CO2 emissions by 90% today we will still reach the same bad outcomes eventually. Politicians are going to tell us we still have 100 years left and will just ignore the topic until it becomes a priority again.

Think of it like having a back injury that gets more painful over time. You're going to react based on how intense the pain is, not based on how much time has passed.
You can put a different appstore, right, but you still have to rely on some external push notification service, because the OS became crippled and less capable than it was.

I repeat, you could easily run background tasks in Android 1.5, no problems, and you can't now. Only with persistent icons, and even that looks likely to change. So AOSP doesn't really help here because the OS itself becomes more restricted.

Also, 'most users' argument is not valid. It's like suggesting, "people can cut themselves with knives, so let's ban knives and everything with a blade. If some people NEED to cut other people, like surgeons, well, whatever, they shouldn't, because most users don't do that"
Admin tools having the capability to change email and 2FA settings is a necessity, but Twitter clearly needs to greatly increase the security.

I don't know what all Twitter uses, but I know that many companies have various methods of authentication depending on how much damage can be done:

- Logging on using a username/password and 2FA is enough for some activities.

- More sensitive operations have to be done on hardware that has a certificate installed and backed by something like Windows Hello.

- Even more sensitive operations require a JIT account and a certificate stored on a separate hardware key such as a yubikey.

- Very sensitive work gets done on a secure device that is very locked down and can detect changes to the hardware that may suggest tampering.

- Some stuff simply isn't allowed to be done remotely, even with the above restrictions.

Obviously not every company needs such a complex setup, but for someone as high profile as Twitter, you'd expect more thought to be put into this.
I didn't know they were owned by Sainsbury's. That explains the recent Argos "pick up points" that have begun to pop up usually attached to a Sainsbury's store.
If you try looking at finer and finer details, you'll quickly run into quantum effects and the uncertainty principle. If even the smallest parts of a system aren't deterministic, how can the outcome be predicted?
> I am only disappointed that our government would be complicit.

I think I'm OK with the government going along, provided media companies have the choice on if they require payment for this sort of reuse of their content. Assuming it is optional, it will be interesting to see which companies charge. It will also be interesting to see if Google and/or Facebook think it is worth paying.

Personally, I go directly to the news sources I'd be willing to pay for and avoid all the crap. And search engines for research, to find older articles. I could see a business case for papers and similar to opt out of the news aggregators, but it would seem to be suicide to opt out of search as for all intents and purposes your domain would cease to exist.
> But it is important to remember what you are doing. In a PhD you should be pushing the boundary of knowledge. As a programmer in a company, you should be solving problems to generate value for your customer and your company.

You don't need to get a phd to push the boundaries of knowledge, and often people who get phds aren't actually doing that. PhD is just a fake status indicator like an MBA.

A lot of work that generates real value is also pushing the boundaries of science. Good scientific work often has real world impact.

I noticed you used "programmer" to refer to the person working in a company, but programming is also an essential skill for pushing the boundaries in just about any field now. Many "scientists" are not capable of it and look upon it as grunt work, which says a lot about their true competence.
Disclaimer: I'm a composer

> Unfortunately it turns out that classical music and waxing poetic are easily generative in an enjoyable way

On the contrary, I would say that generating convincing and original classical is an incredibly hard (if not impossible) task. All the current music AI projects give results which may sound “good“ to a casual listener, but they sound horribly wrong to any educated listener. The reason is that AI can only imitate the surface, but completely misses to recognize/synthesize larger structures. This might be ok for some background noodling in a TV drama, but not for the concert stage.

Finally, we rarely perceive art works in isolation. We know and appreciate the fact that a certain work has been created by a certain person in a certain time.
Well, if you want to define accounting in an alternate universe, you can define it that way.
However, if you want to describe accounting as it is done, it is utterly wrong. Doing this will bite you once you read other sources on accounting, talk to accountants, the tax office, etc.

From my experience, if you're doing accounting beyond a hobby, you likely want to follow whatever GAAP (generally accepted accounting practices), and likely need to consult references for how specific cases are represented. If you then don't use the same language and conventions as everyone else, it's just even more of a pain than it is.

My experience here is that I was with a large audit company, albeit as an actuary rather than an accountant. I did have the opportunity to dig quite deep accounting records of insurance companies there. Now I own an incorporated company and do my own accounting and taxes (with GnuCash for accounting, even if I hand-rolled reporting for XBRL export and all).
That's severely flawed logic to insinuate that hourly wage equates to work output. You must be on salary. Us little guys don't think like that, I promise. Underpaid workers don't want "more work" paid the same amount as if they do "less work," unless they're paid proper living wages in which case they wouldn't feel cutting corners necessary imo.
What's the best way to help? Do I just add the feeds to another website somewhere?
A few things I have learnt along the way:

Logs are great, but only once you've identified the problem. If you are searching through logs to _find_ a problem, its far too late.

Processing/streaming logs to get metrics is a terrible waste of time, energy and money. Spend that producing high quality metrics directly from the apps you are looking after/writing/decomming (example: dont use access logs to collect 4xx/5xx and make a graph, collate and push the metrics directly)

Raw metrics are pretty useless. They need to be manipulated into buisness goals: service x is producing 3% 5xx errors vs % of visitors unable to perform action x

Alerts must be actionable.

Alerts rules must be based on sensible clear cut rules: service x's response time is breeching its SLA not service x's response time is double its average for this time in may.
Amazon tricks user to buy item based on wrong delivery date
Is there an open source solution for processing streams of structured and unstructured logs and routing then onward? I see solutions for moving logs to elastic or Kafka but nothing for evaluating the log.
> Logging is critical to detecting attacks and intrusions.

Yes, but not universally - and just collecting logs will not take you far. Logging everything and trying to approach security via the ’collect all data’ is both expensive and inaccurate, and one of the major inefficiencies in modern cyber.
Self-supervised representation learning on videos
In the same way that someone with chronic depression can still have days when they're happy, I can certainly still have days when I'm sad. I'd say it's much to a lesser degree though and I've almost never had negative emotions carry on to the following day.

Anger is pretty much non-existant for me. I had issues with a previous girlfriend because she felt I didn't care about her since I wouldn't get angry at things (she wanted to feel like I was willing to fight for her).

Boredom is inescapable. I'm as susceptible to that as anyone. I highly suspect that's just because we've tailored our existence around high information density activities in our web-based existence.

Code can be frustrating for sure, but I think I always know that when I am struggling with something, I'm learning from it and it makes me happy. When something REAL dumb happens, then really what can you do but laugh at it?

I agree with you about the evolution of it. I think the optimistic worldview is not advantageous in high risk environments. Along those lines as well I highly suspect that there are genetic components to my happiness. My father has a similar but not as exaggerated disposition. Things just really don't get us down that much. Here's one of my favorite pictures of him after our house burned down in the 2007 California wildfires: https://image.non.io/fire.webp
To be honest, that doesn't sound _that_ revolutionary for music. Because I'm pretty sure if you went digging, you could already find somewhere on Spotify a pretty decent death metal song with a vocalist who sounds like Freddy Mercury and jazz harmonies (I will concede, the specified subject matter is unlikely). Would you go looking for that, though? Probably not, because musical tastes and interests aren't about wanting a very specific set of attributes in a song. It's about tribalism, cults of personality, senses of belonging, nostalgia etc. The world is not short of good music, or variation in styles of good music, and what causes songs to be popular is not the objective quality of the music.

Put it another way. If an AI could generate new Beatles music on the fly, making it sound exactly like the Beatles, with the same creativity of lyrics, tight harmonies, beautiful melodies, would Beatles fans go out in their millions to buy them? No. In the same way that the same dusty demos from the 60s found in an attic somewhere became valuable when it was discovered that they were Beatles demos. The music didn't change, it didn't get better or worse. The personal story attached to them was what mattered.
Slightly OT: I use private tabs and write my banks URL by hand and log in via 2FA. Are there cases or have there been attempts to poison the users address bar history with malicious URLs for fishing?
(replying to myself)

Wow ... a comment about UBI I typed out on my phone now has 600+ replies. I sort of regret posting this since I assume others have much more insightful things to say than I do!

Many great points were made in the replies so I want to be clear about something: I do believe that UBI would be better than what we have now. However I don't think that's the appropriate standard of judgement. To move forward with what would be the biggest government program ever (in terms of cost) we can't only look for marginal improvement. We need to be sure it will be a radical improvement.

Free-market capitalism has mostly failed the lower and middle class of America. UBI gives money to everyone and lets this same market system sort out the rest. I don't have faith in that system to do much besides find new ways to crush those who are currently suffering.
Ask HN: What would be the perfect solution for Universal Basic Income (UBI)?
Following up on this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23993259

I have gone through more than 500 comments and saw a lot of suggestions how UBI can work. A lot of people assume that this is the example how it can work:

Every person will get something like $40.000 yearly as UBI + the salary they earn. But, the biggest challenge is what happens with renting and education prices and if it will go up then.

I was thinking and summarizing that something like this can be a solution:

Every family gets a house (there are well prefabricated houses for less than $40.000) in the first year (something like an Universal Basic House) and then everybody gets something like $40.000 per year.

I would like to hear your opinions and suggestions as it is not so easy to go through 1800 comments and analyze everything.

Thanks.
Turtle graphics alternative written in lua-löve2d
> Again I haven't programmed with SPARK before but my impression is that it's getting way more industry use and support.

Correct, it's been used in numerous life-or-death systems. Perhaps most famously, the software of the Boeing 777 is almost entirely SPARK based. [0][1] Dafny has not, it seems to be more of a research project.

> MS really only supports Dafny by employing its creator. It doesn't seem to devote any other resources.

Right. It would be interesting if Microsoft decided to compete in the critical-systems space, but I doubt they will. With SPARK Ada, all the real work seems to happen at AdaCore. [2] There are various different high-assurance Ada compilers available though.

[0] https://www.cse.msu.edu/~cse814/Lectures/09_spark_intro.pdf

[1] https://www.ei.tum.de/fileadmin/tueifei/rcs/becker/spark2014...

[2] https://www.adacore.com/
Pessimist may have been a wrong word. Maybe something along the lines of anxiety that can make you miserable in today's safe environment but could make you think more about potential problems and prepare for them ahead of time. Like "I need to have more food for winter" vs "It's going to be fine, it's such a nice day today".
I support around 20 creators on Patreon, and at that rate I can't really afford more than $1/creator. But they have thousands of patrons, and with those numbers even $1/mo from everyone makes for a livable wage
The difference in metrics seems to be proportional to the level of understanding about how the organization works.
Well, yes - this is a somewhat extreme case but the problem is the same even for internal-use-only corporate systems.
And it becomes even more acute when (as it is my case) your first language is not the same originally used to develop the first version of the system.

(Imagine an ERP system built in UK and adopted and customized by a French company, for example: IT would probably use 20% of French terms/names, the rest will be in English... Business will do the opposite).
From the conclusion:

> Our main result, which is independent of the market considered, is that standard
trading strategies and their algorithms, based on the past history of the time series, although have occa-
sionally the chance to be successful inside small temporal windows, on a large temporal scale perform on
average not better than the purely random strategy, which, on the other hand, is also much less volatile.
In this respect, for the individual trader, a purely random strategy represents a costless alternative to
expensive professional financial consulting, being at the same time also much less risky, if compared to
the other trading strategies.

The reference to "expensive professional consulting" doesn't make sense to me, because that wasn't a studied strategy. The non-random strategies that the study compared with were all deterministic rules based on technical indicators.

It's still interesting that those rules didn't do better than random while having higher volatility.
Chinese satellite calibration marker: https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse#v=40.44355,93.719,1...

Three Gorges Dam: https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse#v=30.89428,110.7334...
It's definitely sad, but nostalgia often is, I think the last time I had an Argos catalogue in the house was probably more than 20 years ago! It's a good time to retire the thing, less paper going to waste.

Very warm memories of leafing through that thing as a child though, I distinctly remember being fascinated by the digital watch pages full of Casio's and other watches that did all sorts of unnecessary nonsense (TV remote watch, anyone?) - but as a child these pages were full of desire.

In some ways the catalogue shopping experience seemed better than what internet shopping is like today, leafing through the pages or flipping to relevant, organised section of the book to look at the things just felt, I dunno, slower, more pleasurable? Might be that nostalgia kicking in, but looking at Amazon.co.uk now there's no 'window shopping' experience at all, it's the same UI as they had in 2000 just with a bit of paint on it. Rows and rows of products displayed on a grid, sometimes clones of products put directly next to each other, not really clear who you are buying from until you read the small print on the product page.
Dark matter map hints at cracks in our understanding of the universe
You can't redact the features that are already open sourced.

And besides, if that were to happen people would just go behind some other open source web server, and push that.
WhatsApp linked devices will let you sign in your account on up to 4Devices
I understand that, in reality, the rent increase will probably not be 100% of the maximum possible theoretical increase that the current tenants could handle. In reality, it will be some fraction of that.

But what I am saying is that theoretical value for the new rent amount in that pricing model is $3000, not $2000 like the other poster was saying. Thus their arguments don't work.
On the rest I agree but on

> Raw metrics are pretty useless. They need to be manipulated into buisness goals: service x is producing 3% 5xx errors vs % of visitors unable to perform action x

I think in general the business goals metrics are OK but you still need to keep lower level metrics as well, otherwise it would be more difficult to pinpoint the exact failure, you will just know that a % of visitors is unable to perform action X. In a moderately-complex system a user-level action X is probably composed by several low-level services.
Coaching is good for you telling the coach your plan and having the coach hold you accountable to this plan. A "life teacher" would be too bold a statement for coaches to make :-)
Sounds like a normal non-depressed human to me, is what I wanted to say before I saw the picture :) Thanks.
The two aren't comparable. News Corporation is political in the sense that they effectively decide who wins the next election in countries like Australia and the UK and all the political parties have to seek out their favour and pursue policies that meet with their approval to win. Facebook is political in the sense that they refused to use their power to tilt the last US presidential election towards the candidate the mainstream media wanted. That the media considers the latter to be the threat to democracy says a lot about who they think should actually control the country.
> Conservative parties in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, often make decisions which would be considered "liberal" in an American context, but are actually centrist (or sometimes even right-wing) in the context of their own countries.

This is definitely true for fiscal issues or social welfare, and I think the example you provided is quite appropriate here, but compared to many places (particularly in the part of Europe where I live) I think the reverse is true about the US for social issues.
What is most impressive here, which I think other commentators of the thread have not pointed out, is its ability to have an inner dialogue (monologue?) with itself in this sample. For me, that property of the generated text (or should I write, thought process) gave the chills. Now, given this, AGI seems to be quite a few steps closer indeed.
I think what you describe is nowhere near mania or euphoria, it is just generally being content with life.

I've also met people who are generally content.

I've suffered from extreme mood swings, and the next day after I punched myself in the face and hit my head against a wall I would just brush it off as "Me? No way I did that, I'm always happy".

If a large percentage of the population was generally happy, in the fashion you described, we'd know, there are countless scientific studies about happiness and well being.
I guess that's because we hadn't figured out that a webpage is a dynamic thing that is constantly updated, and instead still thought in terms of static objects like books and magazines that are finished some day.
How to Make Him or Her Fall in Love Again
I thought the oldest surviving texts are in Sumerian rather than Akkadian.
Indexing Firebase Data in Algolia for Full-Text Search
10 articles of anecdotes are just as worthless as 1.
> You mean based on internationally recognized standards and laws

Precisely none of those laws say copyright infringement is theft.

Theft is something entirely different in a legal context and has nothing to do with copyright law.

Additionally the US supreme court held that illegally distributed copies of copyrighted works are not stolen property, so you can't be charged for theft as well copyright infringement (Dowling v. United States).

The only ones pushing this narrative are MPAA and co., who would you really like to make you believe that[1].

[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131130/15263725410/surpr...
This is the same argument people made against MP3 compression.

Lossy is bad. Humans will never stand for it.

Perfections will not stand for it. Pragmatists won’t notice.

This isn’t a bad thing. We need perfectionists to drag us across the “good enough” line. Despite our childish kicking&screaming.
Thanks to outsourcing, England's test and trace system is in chaos
Maybe the data centers are a separate off-shoot and all the other services "license" from it. Who knows what smart individuals could come up with in that regard. It's like untangling a giant code-base at the end of the day. Right now, the data centers (and other google properties/capabilities) are kinda like a bunch of global variables/state/functions. By splitting google up, you have to identify interfaces and contracts between large silos and make sure all interactions go across those boundaries instead of being "deeply" intertwined and reliant with each other.

Who knows, this might even make Google more competitive at the end of the day. If anything, it could make the "ROI" and financial metrics of their individual products more explicit instead of nebulous "cross-subsidizing" centers.
Also, a lot of the new corona-piste are not added, and somes have very complicated pattern of you having to move to a center double new-cycle lane, sometime taken on the old opposite car lane direction, sometimes on your direction, it is very confusing.
I think Worldbrain Memex does this: https://getmemex.com/

Been using it for a little while and it's definitely interesting although I'm not sure it backs up images as well, but could be worth a try for you.