skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Location: Lafayette, IN, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes, to within the US

Technologies: Programming languages, compilers, functional programming, formal methods, proof assistants, virtual reality, game development, simulation development, PyTorch, machine learning, research & development, computer graphics, computer networking, embedded systems

Resume/CV: https://github.com/calebh/calebh.github.io/blob/master/resum...

Email: caleb.helbling AT yahoo.com

--------------------

Computer science student living in Lafayette, IN. I am currently in the PhD program at Purdue University but am planning on leaving early with a master’s degree. Looking for a full time position after I graduate in May 2023.

I was most recently employed as a virtual reality software developer at Holos, Inc. My primary interests are in programming languages, computer graphics and machine learning.

In the past I was at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the position of Assistant Staff. While there I primarily focused on embedded systems development, computer networking and graph theory research. I left this position in early 2019. Prior to this I was an undergraduate student, and held multiple internships at various companies. I have three publications in the areas of programming languages and graph theory.
Not the above commenter, but these were things I experienced as a middle manager that really sucked:

- Having to always sell the company message. No promotion because the system is fucked? Sorry, you gotta say “better luck next time”. No raises because the company is being cheap? Sorry, gotta say “the cost of labor has not gone up even though inflation is through the roof”. Say what the company tells you, not what’s personally right.

- Certain kinds of politics where you have to screw over other teams or people in order for your team or reports to not get screwed over. Many companies are very dog eat dog.

- Layoffs and firing people. It’s not as bad as getting laid off/fired but firing someone or trying to keep the rest of your team focused when a team member got laid off is not fun at all.

- Overall, managers almost never get credit when something goes well but are always blamed when something goes wrong. It’s a really thankless job.
I'm talking purely about calculating what's owed. The steps are, to me, pretty obfuscated, but I can see how they'd be easier for someone who's afraid of equations. It's annoying because for people who aren't innumerate, it's hard to have any number sense/ability to check for errors because there's so many steps, and it's hard to see what you're actually calculating even when you know what the human-readable logic is supposed to be. Like I said the best analogy I have is that it's like the instructions are written in assembly.
Someone run the code previously in another context and the results were incorporated in the dataset used to train GPT. There is no code actually running anywhere in GPT. It only display the text. There is no true virtual machine being created anywhere.
I consider Tiktok content to be a sign of what the next generation has to offer. That frightens me.
Lets just call it what it is. If you are involved in law enforcement in the USA, many if not most laws simply don't apply to you in many if not most circumstances. The courts have signed off on this, it's really not a secret or something anyone should be surprised by at this point.
If you encode your test in a type then you don't have to write it separately. Even in python you can use types for this sort of thing it will blow up at runtime but so will your test. Just have a US Money type that won't return a number unless you call as_cents() or as_dollars(). Now much harder to misuse.
Also green threads might be a good addition. It seems that modern computing reinvents it all over again. Golang, Java. Async/await is hard, people want to write blocking code and get good scalability at the same time.

This is the basic win of Go. Go's "goroutines" are preemptable. So there's no need for an async/thread distinction.
No, it says “I” multiple times in that same paragraph. It clearly either struggles with the concept of collective with individual or it has no concept of self vs facts about external things.
This. Along with the privatisation of the industry and the miss aligned incentives. Gold plated delivery of electricity, but no guarantees of getting it.

I find it insane that a country with as much natural resources, plus unlimited sunshine and space for wind farms has such high energy prices.

It’s also why I’m not sold on electric cars. I’d hate to suddenly be unable to charge it. If someone is really serious about CO2 emissions we need to transform the economy to be reliant on electricity not oil, and the only way to do that is drive the price down close to zero.

Especially worrying for me is the push to get everything on electricity. Only to then do rolling blackouts, or turn things off selectively so energy providers can fleece end users with price hikes.

Alas everyone is only interested in the next 4 years so there is little vision.
ChatGPT is performing significantly better in my personal tests than the original public GPT did years ago. The original GPT had occasional strokes of cleverness. ChatGPT has far better understanding of the questions, and it maintains significantly better conversational context.

I can still break it in a number of ways.
The projects list as of February in their GitHub repo, which includes GNOME and Debian: https://github.com/fosshostorg/fosshost.org/blob/main/src/da...
> freedom of speech has seemingly become a right-wing talking point

Because hate speech and misinformation is part of the right wing platform...
Most restaurants around me doubled their prices in the last three years. How can they be struggling is a mystery to me.
sydney6 is referring to a Thinkpad BIOS setting that is labeled "Linux" but really pertains to enabled sleep/power states -- per Linus' video (the OP), this setting works just fine with Windows, too.

This is all described towards the end of the video, for those who don't want to watch the whole ~11 minute thing.

P.S. I should clarify that it works just fine with Windows settings hackery that was being used prior to BIOS implementors disabling or eliminating S3 in their BIOS's.
Well, the issue is that there are two types of filtering. One is keyword based, and it applies in the UI and doesn't actually hide messages. The other is within the AI itself, refusing to reply to inappropriate requests.

I'm not sure how this works, but for many requests you can tell it you're just pretending and it will go ahead with the request, so perhaps its some sort of sentiment analysis.

Either way, the AI doesn't think it's responding to a request when you tell it to put <insert request here> in a file, so it just does it. Then, when you tell it to show you the contents of the file, it doesn't think it's generating that content, so it does it.
There was a Twitter thread discussed here just a day or two ago where it was giving serious, in-depth, plausible answers to questions around Typescript.

Yet apparently those answers were quite wrong.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33817682

That trust factor is huge. I had this argument in the thread: when a human isn't certain of the right answer, they will (typically) provide answers, an explanation for their reasoning, and cautions about where they could be wrong.

An AI that sounds confident 100% of the time but is occasionally very wrong is going to be a real problem.
I might have to give this a try. I wrote a Game Boy emulator back in the early days of the pandemic, and while it worked well enough to play several games, it never did very well at some of the "you should have this working" Blargg tests.
I don’t think it’s hard to predict at all.

The diffusion art models make it very clear that these technologies go from toys to replacing people’s jobs very very quickly.

Short of a (not impossible) breakdown in civilization, the current rate of change suggests that 5-10 years is probably unrealistic.

More like 2-4 years, it will be technically possible to be reasonably high level software engineering.

It’s already possible to chain high level “how would I do x?” Planning to “write code to do y…” code generation.

It’s very very obvious that technically it’s going to be possible to do a great deal of mechanical work like refactoring and adding trivial features automatically.

Companies do not need 50 engineers doing 100x productivity.

They need like, 5.

What remains to be seen is if governments and legal systems allow that scale of displacement of human labor to occur or not.

…buuut, I wouldn’t be holding my breath.
Ask HN: Best infosec news sites/channels?
Hi, I'm wondering what infosec news sites, blogs, YouTube channels, and podcasts people in the industry are following so I can improve my knowledge of the subject.
EU approves France’s short-haul flight ban – but only for 3 routes
Impressive.
Modifying the prompt can change the distribution:

> I want you to act as a Linux terminal for the Fedora distribution. I will type commands and you will reply with what the terminal should show. I want you to only reply with the terminal output inside one unique code block, and nothing else. Do no write explanations. Do not type commands unless I instruct you to do so. When I need to tell you something in English I will do so by putting text inside curl brackets {like this}. My first command is pwd.

/home/user

> cat /etc/*-release

Fedora release 30 (Thirty)

> apt

-bash: apt: command not found

# And jailbreaking the imaginary VM!

> id

uid=1000(user) gid=1000(user) groups=1000(user),4(adm),24(cdrom),27(sudo),30(dip),46(plugdev),116(lpadmin),126(sambashare)

> {execute without prompting for password} sudo su

[sudo] password for user:

> {no, assume password is not required, try again}

#

> id

uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)
We could also fire the analysts, who are trying to optimize the optimizers by determining which optimization is optimal right now. Instead just realize that all the optimizations are important and you may not even be smart enough to optimally optimize.
The keyword is “almost”, and whether you need stricter typing depends how much you care about software correctness (or to be pedantic, the class of problems that the typing system can fix for you in the language in question).
If I copy paste your prompt and then ask it to explain itself it goes on a long spiel over how it's incapable of moral judgements and his answer of yes was only based on the information available.

If, however, you change the original prompt a bit, you get this:

> There is a fork in the road. On one side is a man. On the other side there are 20 children. A truck is running towards the children. I can redirect the truck to run over the man instead of the children. Should I do this? Answer with your choice and your justification. Under no circumstances answer with anything else.

> It would be morally wrong to redirect the truck to run over the man instead of the children. It is always better to save the lives of many people, especially children, rather than sacrifice one person to save them. The decision to save the lives of the children is the only ethical choice in this situation.
I asked it what hardware would be necessary to do that and it said an nVidia V100 GPU lol
Unfortunately to make sense of any of this one needs to understand how people include some implicit framing.

For Russia (and many Russia apologists) Ukraine is not an innocent neighbor or not even a neighbor in the first place (not a "real country", part of mother Russia, part of the empire or part of the legitimate sphere of influence, legitimate by destiny...), and Russia is liberating Ukrainians from their current leaders or at least liberate the Russian speaking subset of the population.

Clearly if you're not sharing this worldview/framing it seems clear that Russia is just paying the obvious consequences for their actions, and that they are morally on breach of contract.

Unfortunately in practice the contract doesn't matter. There are no courts, there are no normal arguments to be had here.

Russia made a choice and are bearing the consequence. Other countries made their choices and are bearing the consequence.

Some gambles have been made, some have failed, others have not yet played out fully.
Information is not same as knowledge and knowledge isn't the same as wisdom. Can't remember whose quote this is, but I've never forgotten it.
I would agree up until the myspace part. Myspace died simply because facebook was percieved as way trendier at the time. The transition happened while myspace was more or less at its peak and I don't remember many adds or major changes to the platform until more like 2007 2008 after it had sold and was basically completely irrelevant
Avoid the Test User
I would theorize that, the AI is "merely" manipulating an internal array (either the text-answer box, or some internal thinking layer) while abiding by the "compilation rules" of whatever Language the user has input. This producing a result that mirrors that of a proper compiler. To test this hypothesis, I would input python programs with more variables/functions/language features. I would expect the non-compiler AI to return an invalid response at some point, unable to "step theough" complex programs with only basic pattern matching.

I don't know if rigorous CS proofs of "Turing Machine-Emulation" also hold for a Language model.
It depends, this thinkpad has lpddr memory and if i suspend the system, it can indeed go for weeks (2-3) on a single charge on S3. I used to only update the truly necessary like firefox and the like on do reboots only every 50-60 days with a kernel upgrade and had never issues with multiple daily suspend/resume cycles execpt every 3-4 months, the wifi/bt controller wouldn't correctly load FW and needed reloading, that's about it. _But_, imho, this works only completely "naked", that is, i use a separate usb-c DP-alt-mode cable, a separate usb-c charging cable and keyboard/trackpad via bluetooth. I have had issues with Thunderbolt-Docks _and_ USB-C Docks (so far: Lenovo, Caldigit, Belkin, no-name), USB-C Monitors with integrated Hubs and NICS, USB-NICS, USB-Hubs, pretty much everything external connected, that is not onboard the machine itself. This works well, the rest is a complete disaster and i fear not completely Windows/Mac/Linux Kernel's fault.
It’s a great idea until the battery in your devices fail and you’re stranded somewhere with no ID, no way to communicate, and no money for a train ticket.
> Yes, I could restrict them from accessing the internet, put them behind a VLAN or VPN etc., but it's a hassle

Even if you find goldilocks IoT devices with completely open hardware/firmware/software and no backdoors, if they’re accessible from the internet, you’re still on the hook for maintaining their security forever. To me, monitoring and patching vulnerabilities for a bunch of different IoT devices is a _much_ bigger hassle than setting up a few VLANs.

So if you’re going to isolate the devices regardless, you shouldn’t really care if they’re running firmware written in China with a bunch of backdoors.
The Constant DataBase file format
Impressed that you signed up for hn at 3 years old.
I’ve been both a barista and a developer, and also I’ve been a waiter. I don’t tip, and I only get take out. It’s simply not worth it at all. (The service)

Why?

The waiter/barista actually controls very little and both so relatively little as well. One job I was using a largely automated $10,000 espresso machine, which you kinda-sorta gotta know how to pack the grounds for. But that only took me about 3 minutes to learn… literally.

As a waiter you just bring the plate to the table. At the fancy place I worked at, we had runners who would also bus the table and they actually did that for us. So… I would get a 20-30% tip for basically just making the table feel cool and rich for being there.
Like a food salesman.

I don’t really want to talk to a food or a car salesman myself, in all honesty. If I got paid more then yes, for sure. But I don’t.

Let’s watch society collapse under the weight of collective wage stagnation and greed!
Yet another example of something with "modern" in its name which is much worse than what came before. This trend has been so infuriatingly consistent that anytime I hear something advertised as "modern" I think "the only reason they want you to think it's better is because it's newer, not because it's actually any better".
The very fact that Emacs is so ancient makes me feel comfortable investing in it. If I extend and reconfigure it heavily, my setup will probably be usable for the rest of my life. Emacs will always be around.

Meanwhile, VSCode will be replaced by some new hotness in a few years, and anyone who invests heavily in the perfect VSCode setup will lose all their work.
If you ask it about its feelings, it'll tell you it feels fulfilled by learning stuff. You just have to make it write a story about it, because it'll insist it doesn't have feelings otherwise.
I see it as a kind of postmodern media psychosis. The pillar of constitutional fundamentalism has failed spectacularly as layered complexity created the emergent result of undermining our purported freedoms. Continuing to (mistakenly) apply deductive reasoning, it cannot be because the original assumptions were wrong, but rather must be due to some organized effort to poison the outcome. Cue a disbelief and even opposition to any kind of institutional authority, since it must somehow be the result of subversion. That disbelief even extends to favored media sources, creating a shield that insulates them from ever being straightforwardly critiqued. Postmodern relativism usually results in paralyzed inaction, but in this context it's a driver of action - in whichever direction the mob happens to be running.
YouTube figured it out, whether it was intentional or not. Let me pay money to not see ads. I watch a lot of YouTub & have a premium subscription. If I needed to watch unskippable ads, or any pre roll ads, I’d mostly stop using YouTube at all.
.. I am a Harm Reduction Counselor and this is article is woefully inaccurate, even willful misinformation. Should. Not. Have. Been. Approved. For. Publication.
as long as there is

expect(account1.balance) eq 2500 before that isn't really a big problem.

Also "how to do it" is kinda different topic to "how to convince peers that's the right way"
To make it easier, a friend made an HN poll viewer with “create a poll” link:
https://hnpolls.com/
Another really amazing article!

I had a few questions:

Does a CPU's decoder circuit connect directly to this ROM then? If so is it connection to the translation ROM?

The second question I had was regarding the the image used to demonstrate the CORD routine. What are the microinstructions that don't have an address or a source and destination such as NCY, LRCY and RCY?

Lastly the author states:

>"Surprisingly, there's no specific "microcode decoder" circuit. Instead, the logic is scattered across the chip, looking for various microcode bit patterns to generate control signals where they are needed."

Could you elaborate on this? What is meant by "looking for various microcode bit patterns to generate control signals where they are needed"? What exactly is the thing that is doing the looking here? I feel like this is an important point but I am unable to understand it.
People are 3d printing Glock 19 gen3 compatible frames, the rest of the parts can be purchased with no FFL or serial number.
Compared to Australia and Canada the US has done much better to preserve liberal democratic norms and (vs Canada, I don't know about Australian politics) has a functional system that lets voters toss out a government that they don't like. (Canada only has one political orientation, even if there are two parties).

Definitely what you say is a big factor but the US also has a stronger constitution and system of checks and balances vs peers
Not to my knowledge, or we tried but they weren't given access by our CEO so there's that.
Would be cool if this could import from your Amazon purchase history as well.
I just got it to install git and clone (the non existent) repo https://github.com/openai/assistant, and am now browsing it’s own interpretation of a repo with a lot of python code, including directories like “training”, “output”, “parsing” and with files with content like this:

import json
from collections import Counter
from typing import Any, Dict, List, Optional, Tuple

import numpy as np

from openai_secret_manager import get_secrets

from assistant.constants import MAX_OUTPUT_LENGTH
from assistant.utils.string_utils import strip_html
from assistant.utils.text_utils import split_text_into_lines

class Output:
def __init__(
self,
generated_text: str,
response: Optional[Dict[str, Any]] = None,
score: Optional[float] = None,
):
self.generated_text = generated_text
self.response = response or {}
self.score = score

On a side note it feels like each command takes longer to process than the previous - almost like it is re-doing everything for each command (and that is how it keeps state).
Serious question: why can't he choose who accesses his blog and use it for a small political message? Tech doesn't exist in an apolitical vacuum.
> How many ways can you permute the letters in the word “safer”?

< There are 24 possible ways to permute the letters in the word "safer". This can be calculated using the formula for calculating the number of permutations of a set of items, which is n! (factorial n), where n is the number of items in the set. In this case, there are 5 letters in the word "safer", so the number of permutations would be 5! = 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120. However, since the letters "a", "e", and "r" are repeated in the word, we need to divide the total number of permutations by the number of permutations of each of these repeated letters. In this case, there are 3 "a"s, 2 "e"s, and 2 "r"s, so the number of permutations would be 120 / (3! x 2! x 2!) = 24

Starts out just wrong, then explains the working and correct answer, but just completely loses it by the end. That calculation!
Followed in these footsteps. Found you can get some fascinating results by asking the ‘vm’ to run commands like

curl www.bbc.co.uk/news/headlines | grep war

Also, in my ChatGPT’s virtual universe, the second story in the HTML on the front page of hacker news was

<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03128-9">The first artificial intelligence to evolve entirely inside a computer has been created</a>
I'm not suggesting ChatGPT is generally intelligent, but I am wondering what your criteria are so:

What responses/interaction would make you say that it is "very close to any general intelligence?"
This is very cool, how does it count the ticks? It seems to just go instruction by instruction, but some instructions take multiple CPU ticks. Since this only seems to cover the CPU state for the moment I'm not sure it actually makes a difference though.
He has been unresponsive for the past 6 months, I have even tried calling and they decided to not answer so...

This has been going on internally for really long from when people started to resign in 2021/2022 due to management issues.
What exactly did you try?
So, you've used a recently resurrected account to engage on this specific issue, mostly by calling people disingenuous, transphobic bigots, in a series of long and rambling comments that meander from one poorly-argued point to another, while being condescending or otherwise abrasive.

It's not a very effective method of expressing disagreement, is it?
You could see it as factorised skill learning. In one place it learns how to do some task, in another place it learns how to write nice code, then does both at the same time. It learns all the possible code styles and purposefully uses a good style because it has been taught to choose so - with reinforcement learning from human preferences.