skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don’t want to be another HN commenter saying I could build Prisma in a weekend, because I can’t. I couldn’t build Prisma in a year, in five years, in large part because I’m not smart enough.

But bloody hell, VC backing and that many employees? I happened to recently give Prisma a whirl, and even for my simple toy project, the holes in the client functionality do not feel consistent with my understanding of what that many people can do, even taking to account a large percentage of non-eng roles.

The JS ecosystem seems particularly tolerant of VC funded for-profit efforts (try saying that five times fast) holding this sort of prominence. Who remembers all the drama at npm before Microsoft bought it? The whole thing puts me into a deeply cynical, judgemental headspace. The JS ecosystem feels way more enamoured with branding, celebrity, and money, than what I am personally used to. I’m no old-timer either by any measure. There’s certainly more effort put into marketing to developers, and there’s much less of a sense of collaborative goodwill because everyone wants their piece. Either money, or this new higher standard of tech micro-celebrity.

Say what you want about the massive shortcomings of the previous generation/s of tech culture but at least we had a pretty good run of not letting this happen.

I’m too tired and worn out to have this sort of boom and bust cycle so directly implicate tooling that can have so many points of interaction with something I’m building.
I’d buy that argument if their balance sheet didn’t show the vast majority of their budget going to advertising and if companies like CostPlusDrugs weren’t able to do it for pennies.
Search existed before Google. They also didn't invent adtech. Instead of a marginal improvement, they made it so much better that the previous option looked silly. If such a disruption happens again to the core technology (e.g. search through a ChatGPT-like entity), whether the financial backing is adtech will be irrelevant.
That's not correct. It doesn't matter whether they can explain their moves to you. What matters is if they can explain their moves to another grand master and they always can unless they moved a random piece to break up a position to make a boring game more interesting (this rarely happens, but it is an interesting way to play, but not to win contests).
This ignores the cost of replacing code. I agree with your point that you should focus on the problem at hand, and not make code too generic, but if you only make specialized code with the idea of “we can rewrite or replace it later” you will end up with a lot of specialized code that is never rewritten.
Knowing the area, I would put "Drunk rednecks" as the most likely cause. Followed by "So they'd have an excuse for not going to work or have to make a court date."

Domestic terrorism or a "Die Hard" scenario is at the bottom of my list. It's a rural county - there's hardly any shock value to doing this (vs. a bigger city like Raleigh or Charlotte) that a terrorist would want.
I use a simple document with daily sections. Simple. I've been using it for three years straight.

I started using simple markup, then switched to orgmode. Although, I'm still mostly just adding a day to each day on a single document.

Keeps me focused
There are many ways to impart ones values onto society, children being only one of them. It's a very myopic view to think that your children will copy your values and/or culture without developing a mind of their own.

In any case, observing other couples was only one of many reasons we decided on this. We made the decision as well-informed adults and whether you think it "sad" or not is not all that important to us.
Not sure I agree. I don't think there are selection pressures on humans any more.

I come from an extremely long line of organisms that had offspring. In fact, it goes back to the beginning of life forms that could sexually reproduce. Are you saying that many of my sentient ancestors who understood where babies came from didn't actually want kids? It's possible I suppose. But I think my reasons for not wanting kids are less to do with my DNA and more to do with experiences I had during my life.

Also, if you're taking about modern changes and their effects on human behavior, what traits do paid sperm donation / surrogacy select for?

Maybe the concept of having that choice is new, but lots of people technically have the choice but don't "know it". They follow cultural norms. All of their friends have babies, so they have babies. Has something happened to the DNA of all these Japanese people who don't want kids? Or is it a cultural shift? I'm betting on the latter.
Correct, yet the conditions do exist that point to a potential recession in the next 6-12 months. The stock market reactions and business reactions are forward looking. Even just the specter of a recession (not to mention the raising interest rates and sticky inflation for certain goods/ housing) can impact behaviors and allow business activity to slow enough for one to occur, sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. I'd imagine the Fed is not pleased that companies are hording talent and mis-allocating capital in this way (high wage inflation) to retain them (unnaturally). The wages and salaries are artificially inflated, built up over the last decade of near 0% interest rates. The Fed will persist at slowing business activity until the point it breaks. There is 3.5% unemployment in general in the US but within software developers it is more like 2.2%. Once a developer is let go, more/less they immediately find work. This is only partially what the Fed wants. It is good to curb the demand by freeing up these workers but they want real unemployment to rise before they will start to ease.
I think the point is that you shouldn’t have to explicitly implement any of this stuff. It should “understand” basic commands that include sequences and counts.

It seems like ChatGPT could be a giant leap ahead of the current crop of home assistants.
Agreed. Those people need to go. And, if I were an activist investor, I would want to ban adderall for employees. Mandatory testing.
> A recession is defined as three consecutive quarters of negative growth.

Source?
From what I understand, they refer to it as GPT 3.5. So, that plus the prompt prefixing as you mentioned.
I am not a lawyer, but I have dove into several legal issues as an active participant a few times and done a lot of research. I have also talked to a lot of lawyers on several issues over the years.

I get a strong impression that law school can be a bit like computer science, in that you are taught theory but not as much the practice. I don’t want to stretch the analogy too far, but every area of law in the US, and indeed every jurisdiction, seems to have its own rules.

I’m sure law school gives you a foundation, but really effective lawyers seem to know their jurisdictions and it’s rules and the major players. As a sort of anecdotal counter example of that. I saw a big time DC law firm come into a local NJ court and get its ass handed to them by the judge for not knowing local law.

Having dealt with NY surrogate court and an NJ agency on a complaint, I can also attest that you need to know the magical incantations for each individually (and they are arbitrary at the whim of the court).
There is very little that a CEO can do that is unfair to investors short of defrauding them on purpose.

Investors are a rule are smart enough to realize that they - by virtue of being 'passive' - allow people that know more about the business to run it. Back seat drivers are hardly ever welcome as investors, if you're that good you should go and run another company, surely that's a better use of your talent then than to try to run a diversified fund.
The one that bothers me most is that background services are now management by some AI thingy, in order to 'optimize battery usage'. Ergo, background services are now unreliable.
> Siri can't afford that rate of errors for PR and legal reasons

Have we been using the same Siri? The only thing I trust it with is starting a timer. Everything else is literally a coin flip if it’ll actually understand me or mangle my request into something ludicrous.
> the onus is on you to prove it

which would be easy during a law suit - the process of discovery means you get to check out the training dataset.

The allegation isn't that the AI trainers are hiding, but that what AI trainers are doing _itself_ constitutes copyright violation. AKA, they want the right to use the works to train an ai model to be a right that must be explicitly granted.
> This. To me, it seems like a weird market blind spot. Most of the tools in this space can't even do a proper tree - typically they limit you to 2-4 levels, like "project", "task", "subtask" and "checklist". The few that don't, stick to the tree model, even though work naturally structures itself into a DAG.

I did wonder that myself. But having tried implementing, I'd wager that deep many-to-many parent-child relationships are not directly visible more often is because no one has figured out good paradigms [1] to surface the functionality in a way that users would want to use most of the time (witness MS Project) versus the alternative tags, saved search, etc approaches.

[1] It's a fairly chunky challenge. Consider for example, what happens, and how is it presented to the user during the simple operation of removing an item. What happens when it has multiple parents? What about if it also has child dependencies? What about if some of those children have different ancestors? And it must be undoable and also needs to be usable on the limited screen estate of a mobile phone? ...
I like how you computed the correlation between positions priors and rating differences, it's simple and right to the point. Thanks for sharing :)
Tell HN: MS forcing Edge shortcut on desktop
Yesterday morning, I powered up my desktop with Win 10 Pro, and I noticed a shortcut for Edge browser on my desktop. I figured it must've been put there during the most recent update and sent it to the recycling bin.

This morning, I power up the same PC, and it's back. So as far as I can tell, the update forces the presence of an Edge browser shortcut on the Windows 10 desktop.
That’s a bold claim, and is more than anything a reflection of the sorts of orgs you tend to interact with.
I would say that deciding not to have a family by observing others' is a lot better than deciding not to have a family after direct experience with it.
What does this mean to him personally though? What are the consequences he faces personally? Lowered salary? Stock taken back? Fired?
Belarus. Haven't you seen the news of this month?
AFAIK that's exactly what it is.
2 months of severance is to follow with state laws that require a 60 day notice or something like this. The 2 months severance works out accounting-wise to be like you are employed with no responsibilities and no access to company resources after you've been issued the 60 day notice.
We're talking about the difference between the billionaires that are the subject of the article and the people who end up being laid off (who are still pretty rich compared to many people). This guy is utterly isolated from the consequences of the decisions that he is asking for and effectively wants society to pay for his results. That's mismatched at many levels.
To export you must abide to the laws of the country you're exporting to.
That is a great point! This would be fun to benchmark
Like the unemployment system run by the government(s)? We all pay in, those let go get to draw on it, the government seems willing to augment and extend eligibility length
He's worth 8b.

That's $80,000 for each of those 100,000 people. For one person.

Sickening.
Then instead of just presenting me with a blank image tell me why it's blank. Or add the word "nude" to the default negative filter which by default doesn't have that in it.

The default is:

negative-prompt:"Ugly, duplication, duplicates, mutilation, deformed, mutilated, mutation, twisted body, disfigured, bad anatomy, out of frame, extra fingers, mutated hands, poorly drawn hands, extra limbs, malformed limbs, missing arms, extra arms, missing legs, extra legs, mutated hands, extra hands, fused fingers, missing fingers, extra fingers, long neck, small head, closed eyes, rolling eyes, weird eyes, smudged face, blurred face, poorly drawn face, mutation, mutilation, cloned face, strange mouth, grainy, blurred, blurry, writing, calligraphy, signature, text, watermark, bad art,"
Which short poem do you think is brilliant?
A company of this size needs 1-2 accountants and a part-time lawyer.
Is there a market for legal representation as a service? Or are the vagaries of any given case too particular for a packaged service to be of any use?
I'm glad Hillel Wayne is getting into this, but as usual I am highly skeptical of the solution he is jesticulating towards.

The problem is not too many programming languages lol. How the hell could the difference between 15 and 3 be the problem!

The problem is the terrible division of laber between projects, between libraries, between kernel space and user space, and between hardware and software.

The problem is Conways law, or zoomed out, incremental evolution on the industry scale promotes biology-like over-complexity.

The solution is planning, and the first step of planning is seeing what the hell is going on.

The key ingredient for that first step is Nixpkgs.
Yesterday I spent over 45 mins dealing with this error:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20625582/how-to-deal-wit...

“SettingWithCopyWarning: A value is trying to be set on a copy of a slice from a DataFrame.”
I so wish I had this back when learning complex analysis and vector calculus.
> You can not share something publicly and then demand "xyz" can not view it.

That's nonsense. Licenses have clauses on how the content may be used. Clauses along the lines of "The content may not be used for ..." are common.

I dunno where you heard that once you release something the license clauses no longer apply, but it's wrong.
So we should have 1 single shell command to do literally everything?
I defaulted to Prisma for edge apps I'm experimenting with (supabase db). Given it's not possible to connect via TCP to a database and I'm stuck with JS/TS for the edge, I opted for Prisma's data proxy and henceforth Prisma.

Using the ORM means I'm tied to this mess of an abstraction, migrations and scripts that require so many workarounds and experimentation to make it worthwhile when your app is not a simple CRUD or you want performance optimizations without ending up writing your own queries yet again. The generated TS API is the only pleasant feature, but doing things the Prisma way I noticed my app is now tied to this ecosystem and its quirks and I dread it. Being unable to check generated queries' SQL beforehand is also a huge issue that is not getting solved any time soon from what I've gathered on their github.

You could also use Prisma as a SQL client and leverage their data proxy, without needing to use the ORM and execute SQL migrations and queries directly, which is what I intend to do from now on. Please do let me know if there are any other generic alternatives database-wise (for "the edge"), I miss raw [Postgre]SQL. Supabase's client is the closest I can think of and it also generates types from your db, but it's obviously not a generic solution.

Lastly, one particular thing that disgusts me (I believe it's not on Prisma but due to how the edge works) is that you cannot use a local database for development. Perhaps ngrok will work, but then you'd need to constantly update your data proxy project settings manually - I need to experiment more on that.
When I evaluated the Prisma client, which I must highlight is by my estimation free, it was very apparent to me that the nature of their business affected the messaging in even their technical documentation.

I had to find the gaping holes myself in a way that a typical open-source project would tend to be more up-front about.
Is there any evidence that all this algorithmic magic is enabling new business models that are not based on adtech more likely?

I think the revenue assumption here lies on the fact that GPT generates content when the web wait for the user to provide the content. Generates congent, for lawyers or hospitals for example - pardon my lack of imagination. So a basic business model would be to charge per request I suppose.
The percentage of memory idea isn't quite right. Consider what would happen in 2 computers, one with 4MB of ram and one with 4 GB of ram. The former would waste a large percentage from moving from 4k to 2MB pages than the latter one.
Or you can do that all in a database without the wasted energy.
Google has something similar to Shortcuts, called Action Blocks.
>Even when the jobs can't be saved, employment rights are helpful. The Google? Microsoft? announcement basically said, we've already fired some of the American staff, but in other countries were are merely starting the statutory consultation process. That means a longer period of pay.

The American staff are also paid decently more than other countries. Is getting a 40% pay cut worth getting a few more months of pay before being laid off?
> I mean metrics for measuring responsibility towards the people, especially the laid-off ones - there seems to be absolutely none of these.

First: The people being laid off are shareholders too. Prisma is offering part of their salary in equity.

Second: How would a responsible lay-off other than this look like?

Severance pay: All departing team members will receive one month of additional pay per year of service, plus the payout of any accrued PTO.
Healthcare benefits:
Prismas health benefits for US employees will remain in place through February.
International contractors who don’t have government funded medical cover available will receive an extra $1,000 severance.
Equity vesting: We are waiving the equity cliff for team members who have been with us for more than 6 months but less than 1 year.
Job search support: For all those who wish to, we will do our best to connect you with the various recruitment groups within our investor community.
Equipment: Keep all of the equipment that has been issued to you during the course of your employment with Prisma.

He is taking responsibility by: 1) probably not making the same mistake in the near future again, and 2) taking money out of the company's bags and giving it to employees.

What is the alternative to this? Should Prisma keep the workers, which became unnecessary for reaching the company's goals?

Yes, it's most likely they over hired like every other tech company. But now are in an environment, where it's difficult to raise additional funds. Obviously, Prisma is now adapting and tries to lower the cash burn rate.

Furthermore, it is worth noting that most tech companies massively hired in 2019, 2020 and 2021. If it now becomes obvious, that they hired too many people, what should they do besides cutting?
When you buy a book or some other artwork, it is implicitly assumed you will put it in your brain, or your meat neural net. And that your brain could produce something related to this content.

It's not just assumed, it's celebrated when a work of art gathers fans who produce their own, inspired content.

Not sure why it needs to be over-complicated or different for silicone neural nets. But I think it will get very over-complicated, if not politicised, in the following years.
Enchance!
Well written, but it lacks depth
Personally I've no interest in any new Google products because who knows when it may be discontinued with little or no notice. Most recently Optimize, but I've also been burned by Universal Analytics, Fusion Tables, goo.gl, and Google Site Search.
Fugue is an interesting library in this space , though I haven’t tried it

https://github.com/fugue-project/fugue

A unified interface for distributed computing. Fugue executes SQL, Python, and Pandas code on Spark, Dask and Ray without any rewrites.
Crypto is not a threat to fiat currencies.
> We found that the trained Othello-GPT usually makes legal moves. The error rate is 0.01%; and for comparison, the untrained Othello-GPT has an error rate of 93.29%. This is much like the observation in our parable that the crow was announcing the next moves.

I read the whole article, but I think this statement largely disproves the hypothesis? We only need a single counter example to show that Othello-GPT does not have a systemic understanding of the rules, only a statistical inference of them.

A model that "knows" the rules will make no errors, a model that makes any errors does not "know" the rules. Simple as.

And I feel this way about much of the article, they state they change intermediate activations and therefore the observed valid results prove that the layers make up a rules engine instead of a statistical engine. And I don't make that leap? Why would that necessarily be the case?

Obviously a statistical engine trained on legal moves will mostly produce legal output. A rules engine will always produce legal output.
Who says erased? They're just outdated, that's all.
> who never gave permission for their work to be used in this way.

the copyright aren't all encompassing. There's only an enumerated set of rights granted, and "this way" (aka, training an AI model) is not one of those restricted activities (like distribution or broadcast).

Unless the model can be argued to be a derivative work of the training data set (which i don't believe it is, since the process of training is sufficiently transformative imho), the original copyright holders of the training data do not need to be asked permission.
It depends on when. Atoms were supposed to be atomic, then protons/neutrons/electrons indivisible, etc. During transition phases, facts are not.
Thanks. Was not aware of that. I bought/read it in 2015, I think.

I'll check out Serious Cryptography - just found out that I already have it! I like JP's approach to things and his bold thinking.
Breaking lines at logical boundaries in the "source code" makes it easier for me to see the structure of the text. It also gives me the ability to see the text in two different layouts; this often lets me spot errors which would otherwise slip by.
Midjourney Showcase
> Ironically, you will never find the best-tasting apples in your local grocery store.

I'm not sure it's "ironic". I think it is a case of "you get what you optimize for".

Grocery stores optimize for:

* cost

* transportability

* shelf life

* appearance

And all for good reason! That's what makes money.

Doesn't matter if you have the best tasting apple in the world if shipping it on a truck destroys 90% of them and you can't sell the others before they go off.
>That still doesn't work unless the sum of money is quite large

Yes it has to be large (several millions), enough so that the couple never have to work again for their entire lives. I would add a whole bunch of other things, ( like delegating the bulk of childcare to somebody else, with a couple only overseen what care is being taken) but it's a good start.

My larger point is that this is not exactly the unsolvable really hard technical problem.

In terms of human assets intelligent people and their offspring are the most important assets that society can have. ( agreed this has negative connotations of eugenics, but the overall concept is sound IMHO)