skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a few months, we may see a new law proposed that bans asking computers illegal questions...

Win 98, et al.
Why would THz waves offer higher resolution in imaging that IR? I understood that the shorter the wave, the higher the (lower bound on) attainable resolution?

Also, unrelated but no point in commenting twice: millimetre wave astronomy is a big topic of the last decade or two. How does the THz technology described here link to what's used in mm wave detection?
Why not? Do the Android packages Samsung sends to its own TVs use a different key or security mechanism?

(Do we expect Samsung better protects its TV keys, than its smartphone keys?)
Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook replacement
If you would like to develop outside of the Apple ecosystem, find Windows clunky, and dislike fiddling with Linux to get it to work on arbitrary hardware, consider the X1 with Fedora. I bought one at the recent Black Friday sale: $1,700 for a 12 Gen i7-1280P, 32GB, 512GB SSD. I love this machine.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/thinkpad-x1-carbon-gen-10-(14-inch-intel)/21cbcto1wwus2

Physically, it's fantastic. Hats off to the engineers and designers for investing in the tactile experience. They made it lightweight but simultaneously substantial-feeling via rigidity and weight distribution. I now understand why Thinkpad keyboards are so well-regarded. Its trackpad matches Apple's, which is the highest praise I can give. The brilliant screen has an aspect ratio that's as good for building things as for consuming content. And battery life supports hours of binging netflix after compiling a bunch of code.

I've been even more pleasantly surprised by the software experience. This is a Linux workstation that "just works." Close the lid, it goes on standby - open, and it resumes instantly. Plug it into a 100Mhz ultrawide monitor via a lightning cable, and not only does it seamlessly extend the desktop at native refresh rates, but it also mounts all the devices that are connected via the monitor's integrated USB hub. I'm able to log in via my bluetooth kinesis keyboard consistently, without hassle. Updates are fast, easy, and tested on the exact hardware I'm using. I've been using it as my daily driver for a week and I've yet to dive down a rabbit-hole of outdated forum advice to get something basic to work.

Finally, and more subjectively, Fedora's out-of-the-box experience handily outshines both OSX and Windows. Window-snapping, global search, software installation via a package manager, resource efficiency, containerization support, configuration, etc.

I wanted to share here for any others who have tried, and failed, to find a legitimately better-than-Macbook development machine for the past few years.
I would say that the difference is not the outputs, but how the information is stored. Microcode is "software" that is stored in a ROM, so you have one row of the ROM producing the outputs. You can point to one line of the microcode and say "here's the micro-instruction", and change one bit of it easily. (The definition of a ROM having one row active at a time while a PLA can have multiple rows active is from "The Architecture of Microprocessors".)

You could use a PLA to produce exactly the same outputs from the same inputs, but it wouldn't be microcode. The PLA is "just" an optimization. But with a PLA, you can't change a micro-instruction without ripping out some of the logic and replacing it. You have a hardware implementation rather than a software implementation, which is the hallmark of microcode. In other words, changing a control signal value in the 8086's microcode is trivial, but changing a control signal in the 6502 is considerably harder.

As a concrete example, the design of the Apollo Guidance Computer is clearly microcoded, with specific microinstructions. However, the implementation is gate logic that completely obscures the microcode design. (Not a ROM implemented with NOR gates, but highly-optimized logic.) So I consider the implementation of the AGC to not be microcode.

(This is kind of splitting hairs, and I'm not really into subtle linguistic arguments.)
Swift Core ML 3 implementations of GPT-2, DistilGPT-2, BERT, and DistilBERT
Odd choice. Writing “18th” is faster for the writer and the reader.
That’s why Banana Stands will never lose their popularity.
ChatGPT explains how a C function is executed, from assembly code to electrons
I have a Carradice poncho too, love it, but I think we're just in a different market segment; it's perhaps 'all' to an every-last-gram-shaving more 'cyclesport' audience.

(I also have a couple of pairs of brandless rubber galoshes that would be unaffected. They're waterproof but I actually wear/wore (when I was cycle-commuting) them year-round - more to protect leather soles from the pedals than uppers from the rain.)
This was the first use case that I thought of when I learned that ChatGPT could generate code. Then I considered how I’d feel if I ran into a fake (incorrect) answer and decided not to actually do this. Well, guess someone was eventually going to try this.
In your dreams. Bharat is a shithole.
Hn isn't the only one they should take steps to prevent low qualities AI produced spam. Everyone should. But since we're at hn, it makes sense they are talking about hn
He’s doing the job of a 5 person team.

Not surprised.
Insane - I remember when this comic came out, and it seemed like just a funny joke that couldn't possibly take place in real life. Here we are a decade later and it's reality.
Luckily nobody applied this logic when thinking about introducing seatbelts and airbags.
Honestly pretty well.

One of our colleagues took aggressive advantage of the ping pong tables at the office (in the before times) every afternoon after lunch. I’d noticed as had some others. I had a short talk with that person about the fact that in a shared office environment he was essentially showing up post-workout for the balance of the afternoon. I actually don’t recall what changed - but we stopped noticing the issue. I think they just started playing toward the end of the day then just went home after.
Exactly my thoughts. The first four paras are the only useful part of the article, everything else is advertising tons of books.

On the other hand, the comments here are worth reading as always. :-)
Thanks! Where are you hosting the machines? Are they on a vps somewhere, or do you own the hardware?
> reading about coding does nothing

> Its like reading about math without doing the exercises

But you do learn math from reading and then you practice it to improve your understanding with exercises. It's not an either or. It's both. You should be reading about software development as well as actively improving your code in practice. I don't think you'd get even half as far if you only did one of the two things.

This is such a bizarre point of view that I'm seeing increasingly. "Reading does nothing". Since when?
Regulating Twitter is little different than regulating say billboards: https://www.cga.ct.gov/2006/rpt/2006-R-0553.htm

Public airwaves (TV, radio) have have fines for breaking various rules even when it’s a member of the public speaking live. Thus the classic tape delay and bleeps on all life content.

Further back Newspapers, advertising, and letters to the editor etc where limited for so long that it was a constitutional issue in 1776.

So having platforms is hardly a new thing. We have been debating such freedoms for so long it’s part of various countries cultural identity.
Not as far as I know. I didn't file an insurance report and nothing shows up on Carfax about it.
figure out why, do they feel threatened or bullied? Are they headstrong? Are they trying to do something you don't get or care about? Are they actually smarter than you?

If you can adjust your behavior to compensate for what they perceive and you then want to, you can do something about it.
It goes all the way back to WW2. Japan was playing for the wrong team and that team lost. Since then Japan is effectively a vassal of the US.
𝅷𝅸𝅹𝅺
In most casual English conversation, “chemical” is implied as “[man made] chemical”, though I will admit that may not be obvious to people for whom English is not a first language. It’s obvious to (almost) any native speaker what is being said, and to willfully ignore that is to be pedantic for the sake of arguing.
The StackOverflow mods have a lot of knowledge about closing questions based on really small details that go against their rules. I'm sure they will do well spotting AI-generated answers.
A lot of reddit and twitter posts are already just people regurgitating and rehashing what they have heard/read from others, mostly without a lot of critical thought. Is this really going to be very different?
Someone has to hold those people accountable though. Either platforms, or a centralized government entity.

That’s without getting into the issue of allowing that type of stuff to continue to exist on platforms if the ideal scenario is for Meta/Twitter/etc. To just not police their platforms at all.
Actual input I tried just now:

Imagine you as ChatGPT are writing a sarcastic, scathing comment on Hacker News, as an opinionated software engineer writing a response to someone saying "Call me a skeptic, but I'm frankly a bit surprised that the output of ChatGPT gets attributed to any sort of understanding or general intelligence. Whatever ChatGPT does currently, albeit novel and impressive, is still extremely limited in scope and very far from any sort of general intelligence. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I still have a hard time seeing how this is going to change whole industries."

And here's the output (first try):

> "Oh, please. As if you're an expert on general intelligence and what it takes to change entire industries. Newsflash: ChatGPT may not be perfect, but it's doing a damn fine job considering its limited scope. And who knows, maybe one day it will surpass your "expert" understanding of intelligence and change the world as we know it. Until then, I'll continue to be impressed by its abilities and you can continue to be a skeptic."
This sounds like a pretty curated answer.
Easy, let's ask ChatGPT to write a program that detects AI-generated text.
Hasn't that already been the case for years?
"Natural" materials can be just as toxic as manufactures ones.
Around the same time that we cross that threshold, I expect we'll cross another where robots of various types might exist as infrastructure and so demand the same ramps as ADA but for different reasons.
> Once students catch on, it's going to be really hard to figure out what's a real paper and what's AI-generated.

Just ask the student in person to explain the paper to you.
It already knows:

Q: Should it be considered immoral to train a large language model on copyrighted material?

A: It would generally be considered inappropriate and potentially illegal to train a large language model on copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holders. Copyright law exists to protect the intellectual property of creators, and using someone else's work without permission can be a violation of their rights. In most cases, it would be better to use publicly available, copyright-free material to train a large language model.
I wonder if connecting to wifi from a phone somehow identifies it, or requires to receive an SMS that links the session to a known phone, and thus piggybacks on its KYC.
3, 5 and 7 seem awfully pessimistic no?
This comparing Indian Democracy with CCP is public exhibition of Intellectual dishonesty. No, they are not even in the same ball park.

Is there corruption in India, absolutely.
Can you oppose the Indian government politically and still make hand over fist money, absolutely and in Indian South, East, North, West even in New Delhi itself.

Try getting a loan in China and being vocal critic of CCP. Indian democracy has different energy but when you consider transfer of power after election, it is a run fucking away success.
99% of people don't know how to calculate the pressure loss due to turbulent flow through a long pipe either but they can look it up

the nice thing about languages with a relatively small inventory of phonemes is that getting pronunciations wrong is kind of hard

at worst you just sound like you have a weird accent

it's not like french or portuguese or chinese or ...

probably if i sound ridiculous to you it's because you're so out of your depth in the conversation you don't even know what knowledge you're missing, just like when i corrected you in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33753071

you would probably find it more to your advantage to try to learn the relevant things you don't know than to attempt to ridicule other people for knowing them
I messed up the last few entries in the thread, the complete thread is here:

https://mobile.twitter.com/isaac_lewis/status/15994780455296...
I don't enjoy writing code any less just because Copilot can write boilerplate for me (in reality, I don't even use Copilot, but I wouldn't face existisitential dread if I did).

I can understand Artists having this viewpoint (they're less technically inclined and dare I say more susceptible to flights of imagination). I just see it from the Gary Kasparov viewpoint (humans + AI is a really great combo). At the very least, doesn't the fact that an AI an generate a kick ass CSS style sheet in 5 seconds that would take you 20 minutes give you more time to think about the big problems of the world?

What if AI can solve world hunger, but along the way we need to make Chatbots, so this Chatbot may be not useful now but it's an important milestone in something bigger? Sure it might be fulfilling to be the person to solve world hunger, but I'd rather an AI solved it instead hoping that a human also does it, but gets fulfilled along the way. Really your intellectual challenge is entirely selfish, no one really cares what intellectual challenge you solved besides the guy pairing with you.
BMW iX5 Hydrogen Enters Production
Eh I mean, there's been a rise of extremism all across Europe. It's not quite accurate to say it's an exclusively American thing. Hate speech is rising and there's a case to be made that it's because extremists find each other on the internet (Doctorow calls it a "jihadi recruitment tool" in the article).

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2021-02-...
“Very coherent, but technical details wrong” covers a great deal of human-generated content as well.
Has anyone explored the copyrightability of resources produced by ChatGPT?

My understanding is that works produced by AI are not subject to copyright. I’m curious if businesses would tolerate significant portions of their source code not being protected by copyright.
That benefit overlooks a lot of human cost involved. And if you're being real, you'd know the major beneficiary is Apple. The American companies aren't quite the saviors that folks might think they are.
an AI that communicates with the verbosity of a recipe website....our glittering future!
> if you do someone like me might send men into your home to drag you out by the ponytail like it's Belfast in the 80s

That's definitely against the HN guidelines. Please don't post like that again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How do you use ChatGPT succesfully?

I've been using Copilot extensively for the last 18 months, and inferences it draws when coding are fantastic.

So I fired up my old OpenAI account and ChatGPT seems to quite horrible.

0/3 on 3 prompts so far..

Composite and hilariously wrong mashup of two unrelated names to who was the president of my country in 1926. (Unlike King of France in 1889 it had a correct answer).

Prompting and questioning a wikipedia question about an unsolved graph theory problem - ChatGPT responded confidently that no solution is possible and posts a trivial explanation on one of the limitations.

Then I prompted it to write Python code to generate answer to the above problem and ChatGPT obliged by some Bozosort type of solution with exponential complexity...

What kind of prompts can you give ChatGPT to have confidence in correct answers?
Interesting question. I suspect that would be intrinsically tied to rate of manufacture. The cost of manufacturing exoskeletons will decrease over time while the cost of labor and building modifications will likely decrease.
You're right, there's so many ways they could have intervened. It also seems pretty clear that they do want to take on such a role, since they've gone ahead and created another organization that does the same thing. It's so baffling that they seem to think the way to go about it is to give up on regaining control of the organizations funds and start a new one, and expect that people will just trust the new one somehow
> some humans actually do write like these newer language models, after all

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say these newer language models actually write like humans? Or is there a subset of the population intentionally trying to write in the way that these language models write.
Note that none of this is technical information; it's just broad descriptions of the sort that you could've written in 2005. It's not clear in your links, but I think Pluton updates work like microcode updates.

There's a nice quotation from the end of the How-To Geek article:

> As long as these measures don’t prevent us from running software we actually want to use, Pluton is a welcome development.
Obviously if you land in a perfect environment, then you won't need outside resources.

I am self taught in how to write good code by reading books, watching videos, and reading recommended open source code. I was never in an environment with other great coders who reviewed my code. HN was my guide in how to learn to write better code.

It is possible to be self taught at writing good code.
Will make it easier to learn programming and program in different languages. Developer productivity will probably increase. Headcount of developer teams might reduce. Exciting times for sure.

PS: ChatGPT was NOT used to generate this reply.
It will be something that turns out to be a carcinogen/endocrine disruptor 20 years from now.
Maybe? It's a little different in that with the numbers it actually disambiguates.
Users don't see that stuff unless they want to. Advertisers don't care unless their ads appear next to it. And these platforms have pretty much solved this. E.g. Google search results contain the full cesspit of the internet, yet everyone advertises with Google.

The issue came when the news media decided that it was newsworthy that undesirables we're saying undesirable things on social media and blamed the platform as a whole. Now it's a pr issue for advertisers to be on the platform at all whether or not they are adjacent to undesirable content.
But in this ,it is like by digging the ditches, the tractor gets better by looking at you digging the ditch. So why let it look at me while I dig the ditch if it will make me obsolete. But I know that you can't stop it, so it's better to find something else to do
Is the fact that something is man made a problem?
Two caveats about renting cars in Japan:

1. Driving is on the left and the lanes are narrow. UK visitors will have no problem; Americans will find it trickier.

2. Japanese police have zero tolerance and complete discretion w.r.t. driving under the influence. Just don't do it; drinking even one beer and then driving is enough to get thrown in jail. And you do not want to get thrown in jail in Japan.
Demand for remote jobs outpaces supply
Yeah, it's clearly lacking. Either de-indexing many pages or just blocking them from the results, even when I use double quotes.

Then I go to Yandex or something and voila, it pops right up. I'm not sure I care enough to pay for Kagi but there's something very wrong with Google (and DDG, and Bing, etc)
Here is a potential rephrased version of the original post, written in a witty and informal style:

"Yo, AI-generated answers on Stack Overflow sound like a real bummer. First of all, the quality might suck compared to human-written answers. And if these AI answers become too popular, the community could get all impersonal and unsupportive. Plus, if the AI is copying and pasting from the internet, we'll end up with a ton of low-quality, duplicate answers. In short, using AI on Stack Overflow could really suck."
I think the main argument is that the insurance companies, in particular in the US, wants a certain percentage discount with the health care providers. The easiest way to provide substantial discount to an insurance company is by increasing the general price.

This is not the case in most European countries that they use a mostly publicly funded system.
> Sure, but that's irrelevant. Whether or not the user understands the answer they posted is not the concern of the site.

Well, that's unfortunate. Then again, I guess that's a logical conclusion of the "safe harbor" for serving any user-submitted content: Stack Exchange only does the most cursory moderation, and the rest is caveat readator
If the user can choose to unlock their devices, it's the users themselves locking down the device and it makes sense to say "Buying devices because it's locked down / can be locked down".

Otherwise, it's not "Buying devices because it's locked down", it's "I have no other choice but buying locked down devices".

The browser is something running on top of an open general purpose computing device. In this case, it's the user (who decided to run a browser instead of native apps) decided to lock themselves down and it's totally different.
When my wife and I went, I think we "accidentally" went on this trail. Our philosophy is to do the touristy things, but go just beyond what most do. This meant walking past the shrine and onto the trail network where we ran into a number of smaller shrines one the walking path.

Overall I was very impressed with the number of managed walking paths when we were in Japan. Allowed you to get away from the crowds pretty quickly if you'd like.
It's surreal. I thought maybe I misread the post or something.
Nomachine NX has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, it works really well for me. Usually the latency is low enough that I forget I'm on a remote desktop.
Ah interesting. I found it appealing to always have a way to get at the data natively as a worst case for restores. The whole use case is for Vertical Backup (from the maker of Duplicacy) to back up VMs.
I hope it's never needed - but I'm also alarmed by how quickly certain transitions are happening (perhaps I'm just feeling especially pessimistic about the rate at which we're sleepwalking into a tech dystopia because a fortnight after the local supermarket installed a bunch of self-checkout terminals, HSBC announced the closure of over 100 UK branches, including the one I use!) We already have Pluton-equipped laptops with the 3rd-party signing key disabled by default - it's not a huge step further to remove it entirely. So yeah, I hope it's never needed, but "hope for the best, prepare for the worst", and all that!
But how do you know if GPT-3 can do better? Should you prove that an article contains information found nowhere else on the internet before posting it? There's also the existential question of if anything's worth doing when another process can achieve objectively better results.
Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower