skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not you specifically, but I honestly don't understand how positive many in this community (or really anyone at all) can be about these news. Tim Urban's article explicitly touches on the risk of human extinction, not to mention all the smaller-scale risks from weaponized AI. Have we made any progress on preventing this? Or is HN mostly happy with deprecating humanity because our replacement has more teraflops?

Even the best-case scenario that some are describing, of uploading ourselves into some kind of post-singularity supercomputer in the hopes of being conscious there, doesn't seem very far from plain extinction.
It depends on what I am doing.

For almost 2 years I have had some art projects that involve doing something every day so that gets me learning gradually.

I want to start blogging again though to write up what I've been doing and when I start setting up a 2022-technology blog system I find myself getting stuck in the weeds (this Hugo template example looks good but put some real text in there and there is just no room...) or generally dissatisfied (like Hugo is great for anything that doesn't involve art or math except that's what I'm writing about.)

I'm not going to be happy blogging unless I can understand the whole graphic design system and I just haven't gotten my head around it but writing about my art project just now I start thinking I'm going to have to attack CSS the same way I attacked printing.
It is different. People scamming people is like cheetahs engaging in cannibalism.

Cheetahs, generally, are likely to be opposed. As long as there are sufficient prey/resources to go around, there is no intrinsic need for cheetahs to eat cheetahs.
It's amazing for job applications if you're on the receiving end: there is no faster shortcut for triaging an application to "Deleted Items" than mismatched formatting of my name, or "I am really interested in $SOME_SNIPPET_FROM_MY_WEBSITE".
A thoughtful CEO doesn’t take the role and immediately start making changes. It takes some time to absorb what’s going on.
Hmm, according to this calculator [1], Rockefeller's net worth of $1.4B in 1937 would be worth $28B today.

Elon's is around $240B, so it sounds like 10x the amount.

Even by different calculations, it seems like an order of magnitude is a big difference.

By GDP, they are both worth around 1% of the US GDP, but the US GDP is many times what it was then, particularly post-WWII.

Musk's buying power seems significantly more than Rockefeller's by any metric.

1. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
> This! I thought I was going insane, that nobody has mentioned this until now. "When did this start happening?", I thought. But looking into it, it seemed as if it had always been like this -- only of course it hadn't!

I feel like this worked sensibly until maybe 5 years ago.
yes, securities from the same people that brought you the inflation. what could possibly go wrong?
I don’t know if we could sufficiently prepare ourselves for such a world. It would seem almost as if we have to build it first so it could determine the best way to prepare us.
First of all, thanks for answering. And well, crazy that we ended up with interoperability issues after all these years. I wonder when and if we will manage being „fully wireless“ anytime.
Quarto is a good example where their design requires users to understand many different DSLs to achieve the end result. Just in their code sample you have:

* YAML for the page metadata (title: ...)

* Markdown (```{python}...```)

* Custom in-text notations (@fig-polar)

* Custom markdown notations (#| label: fig-polar)

Whereas in Nota, this would look like:

%(export let metadata = {
title: "matplotlib demo",
format: {html: {codeFold: true}},
jupyter: "python3"
})

For a demonstration of a line plot on a polar axis, see @Ref{fig-polar}.

@Code[language=Python][label="fig-polar"][figCap="A line plot on a polar axis"]{
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

r = np.arange(0, 2, 0.01)
theta = 2 * np.pi * r
fig, ax = plt.subplots(
subplot_kw = {'projection': 'polar'}
)
ax.plot(theta, r)
ax.set_rticks([0.5, 1, 1.5, 2])
ax.grid(True)
plt.show()
}

When code or structured data is involved, Nota is "just Javascript" (e.g. exporting metadata, specifying code literals). When text is involved, Nota provides a small core set of sigils like @Component[attr=value]{content}.

Note that Quarto's "#| fig-cap" annotation probably doesn't allow for rich text captions, since it only allows strings. But Nota allows deep composition, so you could do:

@Code[figCap=@{A @strong{line plot} on a @em{polar axis}}]{
...
}
The stock market is not about retributing merit though. When the EV market will be very significant, there will be no strong reason to choose a tesla over dozens of alternatives. There will be Huaweis/xiaomis equivalents for cars.
If you have rarely worked with average people in any non-tech-producing-but-software-using sector, I can see how this might be confusing.

If you have, the answer becomes crystal clear, very quickly: A staggering amount of information gets passed around by people copying random websites into word documents and just needing them to make visual sense without additional effort, because if that was not the case productivity would absolutely plummet, over people fighting to format documents back into readability (or maybe they would just go right back to screenshotting or gasp prints).
Either way -- we would need more context to evaluate. Which the post doesn't provide.

And in other places, parts of what it does provide are dodgy and misleading.
"Keeping the lights on" isn't enough: to be a good CEO, he needs to keep making progress, especially on shared goals of both old & possible-new ownership.

One guess (albeit not one of high confidence) is that the outgoing head may have expressed some reservations about whatever balancing-of-concerns Agrawal was expecting, or even mentioned a firm intent to leave if/when new-ownership arrives. In that case, it'd be very reasonable for the CEO to say, "I need someone here who at least has a chance of, and can earnestly simulate an intent to, stay through the change-of-ownership."
buy some bitcoin if you believe in this. don't spend more than you can afford to lose
Laid off, sure. Fired, maybe not?

Edi: Kayvon says he was "asked to leave" which is not the same as fired.
B. Fuller is a legend and revolutionary in a lot of ways. Have you read any Sloterdijk? He takes a lot of his ideas on and applies them more strictly to philosophy.
Are you also bitter about people who win the lottery or in a casino?

I never asked anyone to take risks, and buying into unproductive assets is usually not a good idea. Neither is gambling. But holding this kind of resentment will eat at you. If other people get lucky, you should be glad, not hateful.
Why would an AGI be unable to do these things? Sure, if you believe in a transcendental soul (mind/body dualism) then you can argue that it can't because Divinity has simply not endowed it with such, and that claim can neither be proven nor disproven. But it's an extra assumption that gets you nothing.

Note that I personally believe we are more than a century away from an AGI, and think the current models are fundamentally limited in several ways. But I can't imagine what makes you think there can't be a Ghost in the Machine.
the phrase Dutch Tulips comes to mind
A bit like introducing immutability removes bugs you don't understand... each time I see us replace some `useState` `useEffect` orchestration with a kea logic things get less buggy
Speeding up Blender .obj import
Also I doubt the content is proliferated through facebook and whatsapp. Perhaps by some careless people and that might lead to further investigations, but the proposal is just extremely inefficient and costs are too high.
Of course, people are glad. Someone is glad that Bitcoin and Tesla crashed 35% YTD, because they don't own them. I am glad that ARKK crashed 56% YTD because I don't own it.
People constantly attempt to pretend Tesla didn't spark the EV revolution, because they can't stand to give Musk and or a US company credit.

It's the same reason they aggressively pretend Apple didn't spark the smartphone revolution (when it all very obviously derived from the iPhone and its dramatic impact, right down to the design of the phone and interface being copied by everyone else).

It's the same reason if you say the US invented the Internet here on HN, you'll get confused replies by people from outside of the US that are entirely ignorant of that fact, because of foreign revisionist history and the desperate desire to deny the US credit for its vast accomplishments (the America bad brigade). The same goes for eg the transistor, microprocessor and countless other prominent technologies that revolutionized the world.
People mean different things with "trustless".

Its trustless in the sense that you yourself can apply the rules and verify that each block follows the public rules.
The "agreeing" is only within the rules and the rules are in the code.
So you have to trust (or verify) that the code actually does implement the rules the way you want them to be.
You're talking about a different sort of skepticism, about whether the effects of an AGI would be good or bad if one was produced with these methods.

The skepticism that the parent comment was discussing was skepticism about whether we're on a path to AGI, for good or for ill.
Could they not zoom out and take a picture of the stars around Sagittarius A* to compare that to the knowns locations of these stars?
I am wondering what is in it for those people lining up - they are paying 20% over the market value to be locked in with musk.
Evolutionary Design with Kent Beck [video]
LUNA going down is the equivalent of a single stock collapsing, and a fairly minor one at that. OP is right, this is a generalised withdrawal of equity from volatile investments of all kinds. Exactly the same thing happened with the last market crash.
we did that too but with donations towards an African country.
Once Amazon decides that the prospects for continuing to invest in growing their business are lower, they will start paying dividends. In the meantime Microsoft and Apple already do.
Another possibility is the interim person lobbied hard to have the job and made some rather convincing arguments.
Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man's tools.

He uses them only when he has no choice.

Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.

And victory no cause for rejoicing.

If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;

If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.

https://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu31.html
Before you visualize a straight path between "a bag of cool ML tricks" and "general AI", try to imagine superintelligence but without consciousness. You might then realize that there is no obvious mechanism which requires the two to appear or evolve together.

It's a curious concept, well illustrated in the novel Blindsight by Peter Watts. I won't spoil anything here but I'll highly recommend the book.
>Everybody loves abundance, and everybody hates scarcity.

Sadly, this isn't the case. Being rich is about more than having abundance. It is about having 'above average' abundance with the 'richness' level being determined by how far above average you are.

Create a post scarcity society and the bar will move, likely with major societal consequences. I don't know if I'm ready for the paradigm shift.
Farewell iPod
The language of HB 1557:

```
Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students
```

The one paragraph in the bill is the entirety of the language used here.

1) "instruction" is vaguely defined here This isn't about sex-ed, this isn't about genitals, it is about "orientation or gender identity". I'll note here that being gay and trans isn't just about sex and genitalia. If a student asks the question: "why does sally have two moms?", does answering that question put the teacher at risk? What if Billy asks if being gay is ok? Are teachers allowed to answer?

2) if the teacher is trans and the students ask about it, what is the teacher allowed to say? Is the teacher able to write their name on the board with their preferred title?

3) Is the teacher allowed to mention the existence of their spouse regardless of orientation?

4) if a child is bullied for wearing clothes that don't match their percieved gender (i.e. boys wearing dresses), is a teacher allowed to explain that it is not ok to bully someone because of their gender? Regardless of what you think about a childs ability to make decisions about gender, you surely understand that they have an idea of what gender is and might decide to bully eachother for it.

I will note that this bill is amended from its original language, which shows the true intent of the law:

```
A school district may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age -appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.
```

source: https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2022/1557/?Tab=BillTex...

I am basing this analysis entirely on the language of the bill and its amendments. I very much encourage you to look at the reasonable amendments that FAILED in committee here, as they speak volumes to the intent of the republican majority.

My previous comment is informed by the documented behaviors and speech of right wing politicians and commentators around the passing of this bill, which do escalate this topic to dangerous levels of right-wing outrage. No there is not language in here that equates sex-education to grooming, but there is ABSOLUTELY discussion on the right that does draw that line.
Does twitter have a community? My use case for it is that of an RSS reader. I thought reddit was for community
> "Keep the status quo and we won't attack," they say but now they are attacking Ukraine anyways.

This does not fit my understanding. In my understanding, Ukraine doubles down on NATO membership, and Russia attacks. Am I missing something? Somewhere between 2014 and 2022 Ukraine denounced its NATO aspirations?

In no way I condone the Russian attack, but I also can't see how they're "untrustable".
What difficulties do you think a highly-paid exec is going to face?
> Therefor the assertion that an analog readout is more instantly meaningful for everyone is wrong.

Maybe I'm confused about the assertion. The sentence "A picture with a bird in it" is more quickly recognized by very fluent English speakers than an actual picture of a bird. But it conveys far less information to a far narrower audience.
Re: Postgres, what we actually want is to offer perpetually free Postgres where multiple free customers can use the same underlying instance to make the economics work. The 90-day limit is a stopgap to make sure we're not bleeding money from thousands of tiny, barely used PG instances.

Your point around the limitations is well articulated and valid. The last thing we want is to be deceptive, even unintentionally.
I'm pretty perplexed by what crypto has become in practice. All the big selling points for me are that it's a currency (that almost nobody uses as a currency) with mathematically-ensured security (which goes away if, like many people, you're holding a lot of wealth in a centralized exchange that tries to dumb everything down for the entry-level consumer) and controlled inflation (which is defeated somewhat by the massively fluctuating prices all driven by hype and speculation) and the potential privacy (which is really only there in some currencies and / or if you never use any other currency) and lack of government involvement (which goes away if the government can tell you've been using crypto and decides to tax it like a security).

In the end, it's a bunch of crypto bros who want to show how much they don't depend on the government suddenly realizing that FDIC-insured accounts were actually developed for a reason. It's people calling dibs on numbers. And yeah - the blockchain has led to all sorts of interesting ideas, but the money you pump into the currency du jour isn't really worth anything once people move on to a new trend, or once your exchange is hacked, or whatever.

I've been getting told for months that I'm missing the train and making a bad decision by a guy who bought BTC at 60k and told me "everyone" was saying it was going to go past 100k. And apparently I was a fool for investing in property and a diversified stock and bond portfolio. So yeah - I feel somewhat vindicated right now.
Yes, and I say Ukrainians are European in culture and an inspiration to other Europeans in their bravery. Danes recently celebrated the liberation of their country from Nazis. Thousands of us packed the city square to listen to Zelensky speak to our cultural memory of oppression at the hands of invaders.

My Ukrainian coworkers were easy to work with, easy to communicate with, hardworking and an equal to any of us in ability.
the Cypherpunks FAQ (1994):

8.3.4. "How will privacy and anonymity be attacked?"

...

- like so many other "computer hacker" items, as a tool for
the "Four Horsemen": drug-dealers, money-launderers,
terrorists, and pedophiles.

...

[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/cryp...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
> …there's no way (I can tell) to change the default behavior.

If you're willing to try a menubar app: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1611378436
> Given its ability to run on 18kb of RAM

Nice
I always loved the GraphSim F/A-18 Hornet sims. They were simple but still decently realistic. I still have mine on an old PowerMac tower! I should play that again.

Actually they have an iOS version, which isn't bad, except the lack of joystick support.
I've since learned that it was in fact too good to be true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31358251

The real pricing, at least for the low-end plans I was interested in, is the same as Heroku's (which is fine by me!), but I'm turned off by the way it was marketed
Show me where completely innocent US citizens have actually been imprisoned as a result of PRISM et. al. To the best of my knowledge the US security apparatus is benevolent towards peaceful civilians, and all the hand ringing about the invasion of privacy is just that. This isn't to say that I support the Patriot Act, only that our rights have already been taken away.

> I do not think anyone serious is referring to banning all cars period.

And in my view E2E encryption doesn't have to be banned outright, it just needs to be treated as the dangerous tool it is. Making it the default for all communication is like making tanks the standard mode of transportation. How about a encryption registry, like a gun registry?

SiValley is currently giving military grade tools too rapists and slavers and then saying that telling them to stop will result in 1984; I just don't buy it. As you pointed out, those in control in the US already have all the tools they need to destroy your life thanks to the Patriot Act and poor judicial enforcement(Stingrays), meanwhile technology has progressed in a way that makes a very marginalized group, poor young women, much more vulnerable. Instead of providing a tech solution for a tech problem, the call from the encryption community is to solve it with the same way we always have. Easy for some rich tech bro to say, but if encryption was really just a shitty tool, I don't think the US security apparatus would have invested so heavily in it.
> Reason one is that one doesn’t generally connect to an access point (BSSID), but rather to a an SSID. That SSID may have many access points, as the device may roam. Periodic scans check to see if another access point for the same SSID is now a better choice, and switch accordingly.

Maybe I don’t fully understand the Wi-Fi “space” but I gotta wonder why the standard hasn’t embraced a CDMA-like system where your device can just roam around without really caring which AP is the strongest… the access points would all communicate with each other to figure out which one should be responsible for a device.

It would also fix all the nonsense with picking channels for each access point. They’d all use the same spectrum.

But I’m only an armchair observer so who knows…
You could just replace those commas within the quote with some other string or remove them if you wanted with some awk or sed. Here is a somewhat relevant example from stackoverflow:

awk -F'"' -v OFS='' '{ for (i=2; i<=NF; i+=2) gsub(",", "", $i) } 1' infile

1. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/48672/remove-comma-...
His stock options have probably been in the black for years.
> Do you know of any other way to send electronic cash with no intermediaries (EDIT: financial institutions)

In practice you need a bank account to use bitcoin, there's essentially nobody who uses bitcoin that doesn't have a bank account, so the "no intermediaries" thing isn't really meaningful, nobody cares about this.
This highlights my true desire: I want to copy structure, not specific font choices. Or in other words, I want the HTML tags but not the CSS.

Rich paste annoys me most when the content I paste has a different notion of what plain paragraph words should look like. And "ctrl-shift-v" isn't helpful if you're trying to paste in a list or something.
Or transmute base metals into gold.
I can't count how many times people have explained here that Bitcoin is a "store of value". A store of value that can be down 40% YTD is...problematic. I mean, I guess the value is still there....
> and honestly I can't see how the possibly could have adequate reserves

Not even close, even now. And the earlier stuff was almost insulting. Like the claim in 2019 that they were depositing $3.5 BILLION, per WEEK, into a bank, a deposit rate that would exceed AT&T, Samsung, Alphabet (Google).

Hah. No. The bank "deputy CEO" (who was 33) in an interview noted that the Bahamas had two banking licenses. But couldn't name them. And in any case, wasn't sure which his bank had, but he knew they had one of them. "And possibly the other".
One device I was familiarized with because of Covid was the pulse oximeter, which measures the oxygen in the blood. I was thinking if you made it wearable and hooked it up to an alarm, it could maybe avert disaster. Turns out they already exist.
> What set of tasks would you, right now, consider to be demonstrative of "intelligence" if a computer can do them?

Be able to apply for, get and hold a remote job and get paid for a year without anyone noticing, or something equivalent to that. I said this many years ago and it still hasn't happened.

The people who are moving the goalposts aren't the sceptics, it is the optimists who always move the goalposts to exactly where we are right now and say "see, we reached this incredible goalpost, now you must concede that this is intelligent!".
> Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

I would say, 1980s integrated office appllications for the Macintosh, like ClarisWorks.

> It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would want to transplant styling/formatting into an email

It absolutely makes a ton of sense: often you want to copy text containing bullets, bolding, italics, underlining and ... oh: tables?

There are times when you don't want the formatting, like for instance when you just want to quote some passage of text, without quoting its 24 point font.

It is essential to have a command to paste without formatting. You need it both ways.

In 2022, can't you get an e-mail program whose editor has paste with and without formatting?
Okay - that's cheetahs. Humans have an intrinsic need to scam other humans. It's been happening since the beginning of written history.

If we're trying to blame modern technology for a rise in scams - that seems misguided. It's better to just acknowledge that you need to be on your toes for scams from other humans. Some people are gonna fall for the scams - it's inevitable.