skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Minsky wrote this book in 1986, towards the end of his very long career thinking about how to build intelligent machines. For a basic overview, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind

You can find a complete pdf of the book here:

http://www.acad.bg/ebook/ml/Society%20of%20Mind.pdf

My question to the HN community is, has all this work become irrelevant given recent progress in machine learning, particularly with Transformer based models such as GPT-3 or "mixed modality" models such as Gato?

It seems to me that some of these ideas could make a comeback in the context of a group of interacting models/agents that can pass each other messages. You could have a kind of "top level" master model that responds to a request from a human (e.g., "I just spilled soda on my desk, please help me") and then figures out a reasonable course of action. Then the master model issues requests to various "specialist models" that are trained on particular kinds of tasks, such as an image based model for exploring an area to look for a sponge, or a feedback control model that is trained to grasp the sponge, etc. Or in a more relevant scenario to how this tech is being widely used today, a GitHub Copilot type agent might have an embedded REPL and then could recruit an "expert debugging" agent which is particularly good at figuring out what caused an error and how to modify the code to avoid the error and fix the bug.

I suppose the alternative is that we skip this altogether and just train a single enormous Transformer model that does all of this stuff internally, so that it's all hidden from the user, and everything is learned at the same time during end-to-end training.
The "teabag walk" as presented here is not what online shooters have brought me to believe it is.
Self teach Stokes Theorem by inputting it into a proof assistant? Are you serious? That is very inefficient; the OP was talking about learning the kind of vector calculus taught in first calculus sequence. I think just watching a short YouTube video and doing a few exercises will work and is a proven method. Proofs of theirebs are very often much more complicated than applying them (understatement intended).
What's with All the Ducks
I gave up on assisted refactoring with VS Code, beyond the occasional rename-symbol, I just cut-paste manually.

Renaming and moving files usually auto-updates the imports though, but I could even live without that.
Brutal week sees Tesla shares lose $80B in market value
> That said, I think when people speak of math, they speak of its application to the real-world, not the proofs.

I think it very much depends on who the people are. I'm a math teacher, and, when I speak of math, I definitely don't just mean its applications to the real world. I definitely think programming—in the sense of thinking about the craft, not just cudgelling the computer into doing what one wants—is good preparation for learning the proof-theoretic arts of mathematics.
I see someone disagreed with me. Not sure about what, but just in case I will show how to derive a formula for Fibonacci using the above. You be the judge if it belongs in a LISP programming textbook, even though this particular result is very elementary.

Recurrence relation for Fibonacci is F_k = F_(k-1) + F_(k-2) for k=> 2 with F_0 = F_1 = 1. Also, t^2 - t - 1 = 0 implies t = (1 + sqrt(5))/2, (1 - sqrt(5))/2. Both of these facts satisfy the conditions of the linked theorem and so we have F_n = x((1 + sqrt(5))/2)^n + y((1 - sqrt(5))/2)^n for n=>0.

Now F_0 = x + y = 1 and F_1 = x(1 + sqrt(5))/2 + y(1 - sqrt(5))/2 = 1 from which it follows that x = (1 + sqrt(5))/2sqrt(5) and y = -(1 - sqrt(5))/2sqrt(5) meaning

F_n = (1 + sqrt(5))/2sqrt(5)((1 + sqrt(5))/2)^n + (-1 + sqrt(5))/2sqrt(5)((1 - sqrt(5))/2)^n.

This math (complete with a universe of theorems and their proofs) can obviously be extended in many different directions in such a way that it can take over your whole book.
> I'd rather have shares

At this stage you're not going to get shares, unless they really want you.

What you should be getting is options (with strike price at current/last valuation).

Think about how likely is the exit and where you expect the value to be in 5 years. For example, if company doubles in value, you will get to exercise your 1% for €200k and sell it for €400k (assuming there was no dilution). Not bad, but probably not the life changing event you were expecting, you can get roughly same value by getting a salary that is 40k/year higher with lesser risks.

Of course it gets very different when you expect the valuation to grow 100x. But that requires way more than simply expanding into another country.
Proportional Reward Sampling with GFlowNets
> I wonder how a computer voice would do with speaking English with a distinct French accent. Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?

If you can get a synthesized voice to speak French in a French accent, you can also get it to speak English in a French accent. That part's easy.

> Would it understand when to go more heavily English vs French?

For this, I assume you'd just annotate each word.
Ractors is still in experimental stage but I’ve played around with it and it sure offers a huge performance benefit & true concurrency
If $TSLA drops to $100 will he face a margin call?
Probably one of the many that trusts Google more than shadowy government spy ops. Can’t fault ‘em.
This will still not help when the UI CPU is busy-waiting for the application CPU to generate and send the contents of the menu after you click.

And if you can asynchronise separate CPUs, you can do it in separate threads on one CPU.
> whereas music is a lot more linear -- the average musician is a lot closer to elite musicians.

Gosh, I don't know. This is quite a claim.

First off is the obvious question: who is a musician? High school band? Play Friday nights at the local pub? Or are we talking "survives exclusively on record sales" / "is a member of a symphony"? That's a lot of selection bias. Almost nobody publishing rubbish is surviving off that income.

Second, "musician" is actually conflating two things: songwriting/composition and performance. Composition is the thing that really bears direct comparison, and I'd venture a guess you've not even heard all the awful songs out there because nobody with any talent is interested in performing them (unlike the ease with which anyone can publish total rubbish).

Finally, if you consider the size of the corpus -- all songs vs all English text -- it's pretty clear which one is easier to curate (covers in music are super common, which is probably not an accident).

Just anecdotally, I saw a video on reddit the other day of an African dictator casually wetting himself. But what was really striking to me was how absolutely awful the state band was.

I found the link:

https://old.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/znske2/...
Don't worry I'm the same way but with 10x your level of failure. I am done with tech and money and every cunt obsessed with any variation of these two things.

The mistake you made was thinking you were going to make free money by click clacking at a keyboard like all these other keyboard warrior stories you read. Don't worry, I made the exact same mistake for 15 years straight. The part we probably missed is being born well connected with family members that can give you $50k on a whim.

No ivy and no connections = no chance. It was designed this way.

We had no chance.
Depends on the vehicle. Mine wouldn’t, but it also aged out of Uber eligibility this year.
The gravity of this isn't captured at all by the article/presentation.

Many of these planes simply capture high resolution panorama timelapses of a large portion of the city.

The police can then wait for a crime to happen (e.g. a burglary), and then if they have coverage of the time, they can just play their timelapse in reverse to figure out where the vehicles involved came from or went.

Then, they use "parallel construction" to erase the fact that they used persistent mass surveillance to catch the criminals. They already know whodunit, so it's just a matter of coming up with a "lucky break" or an "anonymous tip" or whatever to explain how they caught someone, without ever exposing the surveillance to the scrutiny of the court.
Show HN: Crowdfunding Donation Idea
Requesting feedback on a donation subscription idea I had. Crowdfunding for nonprofit organizations. User would receive social PROOF of donation that cannot be faked. Brag about it on social media. As well as a monthly newsletter that centers around the causes they support. As well as donation rotation that rotates their monthly donation to the organizations of their choice.
Here's an example I can think of. Suppose you have a bunch of text documents, and you know that some documents are similar but not identical (e.g. plagiarized and slightly modified). You want to find out which documents are similar.

You can first run the contents through some sort of embedding model (e.g. the recent OpenAI embedding model [1]), and then apply LSH on those embeddings. The documents that have the same LSH value would have had very similar embeddings, and thus very similar content.

[1] https://beta.openai.com/docs/guides/embeddings
mine was set to 500 (not 5000) as well. I'd moved on from lastpass earlier this year but didn't delete my account... though I suppose in that case I'd wonder if I'd deleted in time, or if they really deleted all my info.

Also frustrating that they decided to drop this update on December 22.

And how do they square "Zero-knowledge security" and the diagram in https://www.lastpass.com/security/zero-knowledge-security

with URLs and last-accessed times being plaintext? I suppose "items in your vault" is doing a lot of work there if they don't count urls as "in" the vault.
Hi, I did this. The link that was posted doesn't include presenter notes by default, which is leading to some confusion. Check out https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1sowJrQQfgxnLCErb-CvU... instead.

IIRC the term the FBI used to describe these activities was "confidential", which is why they registered the planes to front companies they made up. Congress wanted to know more, so the FBI gave them a confidential briefing (https://apnews.com/article/1240a8a42edf4a86aff72a0246525a95):

The FBI assured Congress in an unusual, confidential briefing that
its plane surveillance program is a by-the-books operation short
on high-definition cameras — with some planes equipped with
binoculars — and said only five times in five years has it tracked
cellphones from the sky.

The FBI would not openly answer some questions about its planes,
which routinely orbit major U.S. cities and rural areas. Although
the FBI has described the program as unclassified and not secret,
it declined to disclose during an unclassified portion of a
Capitol Hill briefing any details about how many planes it flies
or how much the program costs. In a 2009 budget document, the FBI
said it had 115 planes in its fleet.

In case you missed it, pretty much the first place I posted about what I'd found was here at HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9508812).

Since then, I've done some other stuff in a similar vein.

I created the Advisory Circular network of twitter bots that post, in real-time, whenever they see aircraft circling (https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1294002338215034880). The code is all open source. The bots have helped me (and hopefully other people) discover all sorts of interesting things that aircraft are doing, often right over our heads: power line inspections, dropping sterile fruit flies, tests of new military technologies over the Mojave desert, retired attack helicopters fighting fires, and more.

ADS-B data includes information about navigation accuracy, and it turns out it's pretty easy to see when an aircraft is experiencing GPS/GNSS interference, and even map it. I created GPSJam (https://gpsjam.org) to make that data accessible to the public (instead of, say, paying tens of thousands of dollars to geospatial intelligence companies). On that map you can see things like conflict zones, U.S. military tests and training in the Southwest, and Russia's concern over increased risk of drone strikes deep into their territory.

The coolest thing about all this stuff is that it's not really very hard to do. It turns out as soon as you start paying attention to aircraft over the course of days, and weeks, you immediately find mysteries to solve.
A lot of us are from California or the Seattle area. I could definitely see skiing being a common hobby for that demographic
Why SQL is beating NoSQL and what this means (2019)
This is why there needs to be good jobs, wages, and benefits, so that so many people aren't feeling like they have to be entrepreneurs to have a good life. These things have been undercut over the decades to maximize profit for the few. Not everybody can be an entrepreneur, but most entrepreneurs need good worker, and they typically far outnumber the entrepreneurs. Workers make the entrepreneurs money, and need to be treated well. Treat them well, and you'll have less people trying to compete with you, and more wanting to help you build your dream and benefit from with you.
Like the word "metaverse", it used to mean something else ("semantic web" in this instance) before it got co-opted.
Again, you're really using the idea of the 'natural' course of events that just suits your argument. Unless you believe in destiny, predetermination, etc., there is no path along which either of those things will continue without requiring additional force to reach it.

For a person to continue living or a pregnancy to continue, they must continually exert, collect, and consume energy in the form of food and water. Why isn't that additional force? The 'natural' course of events, without any outside 'force', is for everyone and every living thing to drop dead in a couple of days tops.

"Okay, but obviously living beings were designed to continue living, seeking energy to continue sustaining their existence is obviously a natural course of events" you might say, but why does it have to end there? Why isn't the very natural path that all humans begin on, one of being a social creature that desires to assist others in their tribe, the 'default' force as well?

It really seems like there can't be any clear cut answer, and it's just philosophical sleight of hand. You also haven't addressed the point that if one person wants to help the other, preventing that is clearly a form of force.
I get the nostalgia factor but beyond that why in 2022 is a calculator app something people get so excited about?
I once worked in an open office shared with sales. At some point the decision was made to put up a wall to segregate the engineers from sales.

I was sad about that; listening to sales had reminded me of my grandmother.
Me too. I've been using the Bitnami builds. VM for ages, but currently the Windows app.
Many interesting and important things hide in plain sight.

I'm glad the author investigated, documented, and pointed this out. And as a former Imagineer I'm not at all surprised that they followed their curiosity.
Data is available on the HN API.
There are a number of OSS projects which use that.
The title is clearly a tongue-in-cheek re-use of a term that is said with a straight face by people such as him. Relax.
No need to rephrase. That was indeed my question. Fact of the matter is, you need money to participate in society at large. I don’t see why it’s bad that Twitter’s not any different. I’m not here to defend Elon’s principles, but if charging people money for a service is bad, then that’s quite the indictment on society.
> instead of having dozens of separate projects (GNOME, PipeWire, systemd, Wayland, ...) be combined by yet another project (a distribution), which is (in my view) a major cause of the fragile nature, slow pace of development (it's hard to request features if you have to spend minutes to hours figuring out where they need to be requested from!), and other problems it faces, Haiku is a one-project-governs-all: a single development team for the core operating system and userspace ("desktop environment"), with an interconnected distribution ecosystem.

So there will never be 3rd party software? Not even a GNU Emacs? Surely you're using GNU GCC, aren't you?
You're right, it's not user-centered design, it's creator-centered design, like those god-awful lightbox overlays for subscribing to newsletters that are the most horrible interference ever. And no, I don't care that they have huge conversion rates, they piss off the user, so they are bad design. This is the kind of garbage designed by marketing people, not tech design people who know anything about good UX.
Oh hey, some more work, following in the vein of https://twitter.com/MinneapoliSam 's old FBISkySpies story for North Star Post.

Always cool to see this stuff.
One thing Tolkien never had was pointy ear elves - that crept in somehow and now it’s everywhere.
Anyone have thoughts on why the number of text stories spiked over 4x at the start of this year?

https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/overview#How%20many%20...
Now that's just awesome - I'll definitely have to play with this! What's the performance like on low-powered CPUs?
Wikipedia submissions are ok for HN if and only if something more specific isn't available. It's best to search for something else on the topic first, and if you can't find anything interesting, only then to post the Wikipedia page.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Yeah if we want to speculate on what was left unsaid the only limit is our imagination. Maybe the dad is a wizard or a ninja or something.

It is not just a made up example, it is an outlier, which is why it is so adorable.
Recently we built a LED sign for a bar named “Cinque a Zero” like a Campari based cocktail. We used a single Teensy 4.1 + a simple custom board that we designed to drive around 10K RGBW LEDs.

Twitter thread with some background:

https://twitter.com/andreasgysin/status/1472943758467645450?...
Onivim – The retro-futuristic modal editor
Some years ago I had a colleague who had been an early electrical engineer at a company called SplashPower [0], one of the smartest people I've ever worked with. It had spent much of the early 2000s trying to develop exactly what Apple tried to do with an induction charging pad where you could place items anywhere. Ultimately they didn't manage to achieve it and went bankrupt.

In conversation he said that he didn't think it was possible to do, too much power was needed to inductively charge misaligned coils. At the time Apple was rumoured to be trying to do it, he predicted that they would fail.

Ultimately the SplashPower tech was brought by the company that went on to develop the Qi charging standard [1]. The Qi tech doesn't achieve the original vision though.

I struggle to believe that this FreePower tech works as advertised. I suspect from a quick browse they are brute forcing it by having 10s of coils, turning on just the one that most closely aligned with the devices coil.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splashpower

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Power_Consortium

Edit:

SplashPowers main patent expired three days ago! https://patents.google.com/patent/US6906495B2/en?oq=6906495
Why are some people more curious than others?
Samba also had many severe rce vulns over the years.
Proves the point, there is so much more progress to be made.
Why does the article keep saying that creating this charger would be a simple endeavor? It sounds simple at face value, but when you start thinking of it more deeply you have to imagine there could be difficulty with things like cooling.
I happen to have had the more neutral perspective of being a beginner at both.

Meson was easier to pick up. Not nearly as easy as I feel it should be (the idea of a meta build system when you target a single platform has always struck me as insane), but still easier than CMake.
>> What’s the analogy to pip, npm, cargo, etc.?

AFAIK no one build such convenient tool for assembly programming.
So, simply put the the library codes inside your project folder, configure your Makefile/batch file, tell the linker where to find required .a/.lib files, etc.

More manual work, eh.
Why do many C/C++ projects have both Meson and Ninja commands in their install instructions? Shouldn't only one be necessary?
Thanks, I haven't seen any of their blogs and would love a link.
Ask HN: Why aren't people medicated to fear death less?
Isn't the fear of death a kind of torture that should be alleviated with medication?
Well I hate it.

Is history written by the victor? Maybe. But the lord of the rings is not intended to be read that way. I find it tiresome to have someone come out and say this nice fantasy story, that is not a hard deep dive on morality or political reality, is actually something entirely wrong; and to then have it implicitly suggested that if I don’t buy it that I don’t get “the point”.

Our post modern society has truth written by whichever side validates your beliefs at this point. I’m not convinced that “written by the Victor” is even an accurate take.
Isn’t most fiction writing like this though? You just don’t get to see it because it’s not so interesting and you don’t generally have a person (tolkiens son) making editing leftovers their life’s work.

People edit, make major changes, names change, a minor detail in an early draft becomes a central plot point.

Neil Gaiman definitely talks about development of his work like this.

Tolkien seems to be particularly interested in having a body of his life’s work writing being consistent, but it’s not so out of line with how any fiction is written.
I'll say that I use Meson primarily due to the syntax. It's significantly easier to read, which leads to easier maintainability. For example, we started a new project and I wrote the build scripts in Meson. Then a team member had to come in an extend it and they were able to add onto the build with basically no assistance. I've never had this experience with CMake.

I also really like wrapDB. It's made it easy to adopt some common libraries, like fmt.

I'll say though, this projects I've worked on that use mesonDB were relatively small and encroaching on medium size projects. For large projects with complicated builds, I would've chosen something like bazel (and it's what our company has done).
Aren't most electron apps available as regular web pages anyway?

I mean I tried a number of electron apps and always end up using the web version that is always the most up to date and are as wll integrated to the desktop thanks to desktops support for web notifications.

And in many cases, the web version end up more stable/reliable than the electron one. MS Teams is a great example of that.
As pointed out above - the most efficient to compute large fibonacci numbers is to compute the matrix power [[1,0],[1,1]]^n using repeated squaring. Or you could use the known identities to compute Lucas numbers, which amount to the same thing. The lispmath talks about computing fib(40000) in 100..200 ms, the repeated squaring approach computes the same number in < 5 ms (on my not very powerful machine).
Deregulation has saved lives just as regulation has. How many millions have been brought out of poverty and saved from starvation during the globalist revolution? My point is that regulation is not a panacea and sounds great in theory, just like free markets sound great in theory to others. An open mind and a flexible approach are warranted