skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It kinda strikes me as a lot of nonsense. I mean, "The teachings of Islam make the absorption of Muslims into Western society particularly difficult."

I see Muslims getting along really well in the US. It's true a handful of people have a problem with them here, and the problem is worse in Europe because of illiberal tendencies there. (I think of the French picking a fight over the Burqa)

"Ancient" vs "New" civilization is I think also meaningless in the end. When I think of the most famous buildings in China I think of the Forbidden City and I think of the recent headquarters of the state TV company. Chinese people can very much embrace competition, and embrace the future, whereas our own "new" culture shows many signs of of stasis in places.
If you put any sort of fine-particles in a inside environment without having a fully enclosed box and anti-containment compartment with double-doors, you are guaranteed to end up with some of those particles reaching every single part of the house.

Once we took apart a confetti+glitter "gun/bomb" on the kitchen counter with strict measures of washing your hand after touching the confetti, don't let it leave the counter and so on, and we still find traces of it in other parts of the house sometimes. Never again.
> complex genomics papers

I think it's fair to say this is not one of the use cases where it shines. It's not great at logic, it's also not that smart.

That's exactly what the hype does. Too big claims and then it gets dismissed when it inevitably doesn't live up to the hype.
I run a mastodon instance, and can imagine hosting the storage of multiple instances on a juicefs S3 gateway... needs dedupe because I consider that
Ill never trust them not to pull shit like that again.

Plenty of reddit threads to on issues with relay servers (china) etc. Boils down to i just dont trust it anymore
Years ago there was an idea called "the semantic web": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

The basic idea was to have enough metadata about web sites so that you could get programs to do something approaching Prolog-style reasoning about the content and meaning of the web pages.

With more advanced LLMs it looks like a slightly different approach to achive something like the semantic web idea.

I think the idea is to constantly feed the model with updates from crawling the web and have the LLM "digest" the content, apply some filters to remove bad stuff, and then provide a meaningful result to whatever queries it might be asked.
If you've spent 10+ years at big companies, you should have ample savings to have at least a couple of years to yourself to try and build your own great idea.

Sitting in front of a computer sucks less when you're working for yourself rather than making money for others.
I understand the sentiment, but I'm trying actively to get away from all the hype and focus on the capabilities it has today.
It's being useful for a bunch of people, there are some threads on it such as:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34589001
> bodes well for quality code in general

Built in Rust does not assess of good code quality at all, it just tells you that you will most likely not have a class of bugs or issues, but the code itself can be very ugly.

As a matter of fact given that Rust is "young" most people don't have a lot of knowledge and will most likely copy paterns from other languages, especially when fighting with the borrow checker.

Just open some random Rust code, open the lib.rs and see how things are organized in there, you will be very surprised.
Well, my point wasn’t that there is a good definition of consciousness.

My point was that “consciousness” and “intelligence” are very different things. One does not imply the other.

Consciousness is about self reflection. Intelligence is about insight and/or problem solving. The two are often correlated, especially in animals, especially in humans, but they’re not the same thing at all.

“Is chatgpt consciousness” is a totally different question than “is chatgpt intelligent”.

We will know chatgpt is intelligent when it passes our tests of intelligence, which are imperfect but at least directionally correct.

I have no idea if/when we we know whether chatgpt is conscious, because we don’t really have good definitions of consciousness, let along tests, as you note.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had trouble completely unrelated to crypto.

I had to close up my mini bitcoin exchange business to and from UK pounds I started shortly before back in 2018 or so. I spent few weeks writing software to link with kraken, bittylicious and scrape online banking to have an automated way to exchange BTC for GBP using UK's faster payments. Although in theory faster payments could take up to a day within the same bank it was instant. So I opened a bunch of bank accounts (6 if I remember correctly, this covered all major banks - smaller banks usually were fronts of those larger anyway). And I could offer much better rates and much quicker settlement times than other sellers on the platform. I also had IP location based trust API integrated so I was reasonably safe from obvious scams. I was pretty happy when money started rolling in... (up to £2k per day in profit was my best)....

Fast forward 2 weeks and every single bank account I opened was closed by the bank despite me personally talking to each branch manager telling them what I'm opening those accounts for and having their assurance it is fine.

All the letters were the same. There was no instances of fraud etc that I worried the most about. Nope, none. All said they closed my accounts for "business reasons", or "chose to withdraw service for undisclosed reasons". When I pressed them about it in person no one would tell me why, other than one manager telling me my accounts were flagged by "profit team" and it had nothing to do with crypto. I suspect it costs(used to cost) the bank money to receive faster payments, but they are free to an account holder. On a good day I would get £35k in, all in £10~£20 payments and I guess the banks didn't like it... Most businesses that get incoming small transactions usually pay a lot for the privilege. Either to CC handling providers or others. All my incoming transfers were from individuals sending (free to them) bank transfer to me (free to receive).

You can imagine I was quite unhappy with the result. I looked into what it would take to have a direct link with faster payments settlement office and it is only open to banks...(integration costs back then woukd start at £10mil) Remember those smaller banks that were only fronts for larger ones. Most likely this is one of the reasons.

So in conclusion, crypto has its issues, but as long as I can send someone a tenner for pennies it will have my support. I have no idea why licalbitcoins failed, but I wouldn't be surprised if banking had something to do with it.
Ask HN: How can I get into Neurotech as a nontechnical PM in his 30s?
Hi all – I’m in my mid-30s, went to med school but left that track soon after to work as a product manager for early-stage healthtech startups. I’m not an engineer. My skills lie mainly within design and UX.

Throughout my academic years, neuroscience was by far my favorite subject, but I never pursued it fully. With the emergence of Neurotech, I’m feeling that spark again and am looking into paths to get involved in the field.

At this point, would going back to school be of practical value? Given my background, is there a particular discipline that makes most sense – CogSci, Biomedical Eng, Neuroscience, etc? Are there roles in the field for someone with a design / UX skillset?

I’d love any insights / guidance you may have.
Could you please share more about your experience? What did you do these 7 months and in what way it changed your life? I'm pretty curious as I am dreaming about taking one someday in future :)
That's like saying that airplanes aren't flying since they're not flapping their wings. Intelligence is a capability - not a specific mechanism.

Consciousness is a subjective experience (regardless of what you believe/understand to be responsible for that experience), so discussing "consciousness/intelligence" is rather like discussing "cabbages/automobiles".
Any file too. I use a ton of custom icons to visually distinguish important files.
Something I've been wondering about with regard to CBDCs; if you're in a Western country with low inflation and good banks there seems like little point. But what if it were an explicit goal to make a CBDC usable in other countries? Export US price stability to Argentina.
It starts off as a way of inviting other rust programmers to contribute. But then the project matures and becomes an end user product and we end up like this project. The fact that we see so many rust* project is a testament to the usability and power of the language.
AdaCore Joins the Rust Foundation
While I agree the name AI is pretentious, I personally and professionally embrace the technology.

Personally I enjoy creating language models and agent networks, at work I make predictive models so.. :)

Even if I didn't find the tech fascinating and especially the new emergent features of the big LMs, I would be left in the dust professionally if I ignored it. The tech really works for a lot of stuff.
How does it follow that the mediant (a+c)/(b+d) is a better approximation than both a/b and c/d? One of the bounds could be very close to the quantity you are trying to approximate already.
The Time Tracking Dilemma
Hey there! Our team recently started using time tracking and it's been a bit of a rollercoaster ride. At first, our employees were a bit resistant to the idea, thinking it was a bit old school. But, we gave it a try anyway. Three months in and we haven't seen any major improvements in our product or processes, and it seems like our team is still dragging their feet when it comes to using the tracking system. Some are even underreporting the amount of time they're putting in.

I was curious, have you had any experience with time tracking solutions in a startup environment? Have you seen any positive results from its implementation? We're starting to wonder if it's worth continuing to use time tracking or if we should be looking for other ways to optimize. And if you do think it's worth it, any suggestions on how we can get our team on board and get more accurate data? Thanks in advance!
> we're getting too fat

I don’t know if you’ve seen the average American waistline, but yes, this part is absolutely true. Unhealthily so.
If we cant afford a space program, neither should you have one. They tried to arrange ISS accident so many times now.

1 September 2018 holes drilled in Russian module https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/05/space-statio...

2 July 2021 Russian supply ship rammed ISS https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/science/russia-module-spa...

3 September 2021 fire in Russian module https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/smoke-det...

4 November 2021 "anti-satellite test" caused debris barely missed ISS https://www.space.com/space-debris-astronauts-shelter-novemb...
That’s not what Google Photos is. It was first introduced with Google+.
The title of this article is absurd clickbait.
I’m not. I’ve been using OpenAI’s API a lot for work and it’s made tasks easy that would previously have been very challenging. Some examples:

- Embedding free text data on safety observations, clustering them together, using text completion to automatically label the clusters, and identifying trends

- Embedding free text data on equipment failures. Some of our equipment failures have been classified manually by humans into various categories. I use the embeddings to train a model to predict those categories for uncategorized failures.

- Analyzing employee development goals and locating common themes. Then using this to identify where there are gaps we can fill in training offerings.
Maybe factual plain headlines could make a comeback, perhaps:

---
"Sun produces never seen before polar vortex"

And when I ask ChatGPT to write a matter of fact headline for the article it comes up with this:

---
"Sun's North Pole Experiences Unusual Phenomenon as Part of Surface Breaks Off and Forms a Giant Polar Vortex"

When I ask it to make it more sensational we get closer to what we are used to from click hungry media these days

---
"Mystery Unfolds as Sun's North Pole Forms a Giant Polar Vortex, Scientists Baffled by Unprecedented Event"
Definitely. Quirks like this are also what makes AI difficult.
Looks really awesome at first glance, been looking for something like this!

I learned French vocabulary using Anki for a while, but I always found it difficult to remember more abstract words without context or wasn't sure how exactly they are properly used - actually thought about generating an Anki deck with examples with GPT or pulling examples from one of the online dictionaries/wiktionary.

Two questions/comments: Are learned words repeated after some time in some manner? Is it possible to change you username (they seem to be public)?
That's a core problem with this. If people with expertise can't even tell us clear boundaries of its truth, how is anyone else going to come to rely on this for that purpose. I mean, you could say you defined a fuzzy boundary and I shouldn't trend towards that boundary from the wrong direction (re: text games that use different tokens than the ones it was trained on) but, how will I know if I'm too close to this boundary when I'm trending from a direction of doing things it's supposed to be good at?

It can't play tic tac toe, fine. But I know it gets concepts wrong on things I'm good at. I've seen it generate a lot of sentences that are correct on their own, but when you combine them to form a bigger picture, it paints something fundamentally different than what's going on.

Moreover, I've had terrible results with it as something to generate creative writing; to the extent that it's on par with a lazy secondary school student that only knows a rudimentary outline of what they're writing about. For example, I asked it to generate a debate between Chomsky and Trump and it gives me a basic debate format around a vague outline of their beliefs where they argue respectfully and blandly (both of which Trump is not known for).

It's entirely possible I haven't exercised it enough and that it requires more than the hours I put into it or it just doesn't work for anything I find interesting.
HN etiquette is to assume good faith and to not post insinuations about stuff like bot-written text. Maybe this thread reflects poorly on us?
You can just drag or paste a nice looking transparent PNG onto the icon in the Inspector.
It could be set up completely differently. Employer could pay 100% to the government and government could pay employee after properly taxing the income. But that would require work from the government that it doesn't want to do.
Every time I read people dismissing AI for the same tired old reasons, I am reminded of this line from the Psalms: “the Lord knows the thoughts of men, that they are vanity”.

The only thing we can definitely do better than machines is sad, proud sophistry. “Not real understanding, not real intelligence, just a stochastic parrot”. Sure, keep telling yourself that.
> What annoys me the most is that there are still companies out there stating that remote is "complicated". It's different, and you need to adjust your processes, but it's not "complicated".

I’ve worked remote and managed remote teams for a long time. I would say it is indeed more complicated.

You may not struggle with remote work and may do fine interacting remotely, but that’s not true for a lot of people. It’s very common to hire good engineers into remote positions and discover that they can’t focus at home, they misinterpret digital communications, or that they just wanted a remote job because they read somewhere that they could work 2 hours per day and nobody would be able to tell.

The obvious retort is that you just need to hire “right”, but that’s not an easy thing to do.
Sure, but that's not money laundering, that's just buying drugs.
As a parent there's no way I'm encouraging my kids to take on mega debt to fund this nonsense.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned BestChange as the go-to aggregator for cash <> crypto transactions, including most major cities in the US.
I love the Bob series, but I'd recommend against it if you don't have a high tolerance for characters who are supposed to be extremely intelligent missing blindingly obvious solutions to problems.
Another vote for these books. Pretty quick read, but solid.
The question is, should it be like that? Shouldn't government handle the legal differences between states so that employers don't have to deal with that?
The Moon Smells Like Gunpowder
It would be helpful if people could include in their assessment roughly how much time they've personally spent using these tools.

Helping write boilerplate is to Copilot what cropping is to Photoshop.

Some of the ways I've found Copilot a powerful tool in my toolbox: Writing missing comments (especially unfamiliar code bases), "translating" parts of unfamiliar code to a more familiar language, suggesting ideas for how to implement a feature (!) in comments.
Would it be accused of treason if it provided technical details to enemies on how to make {secret military tech}?
I don't share your experience that work politics have to be a fact of life, but I've worked at mostly smaller companies (non start ups). I think it's probably harder to form cliques at a smaller company where there's less people and everyone kind of knows each other. Maybe something to consider.
Mammalian cells in research labs are grown in media that is composed of 1) multiple powdered components that are readily obtainable through isolation from bacteria/yeast or synthesis and, 2) 10% FBS (fetal bovine serum). Until these cultured meat companies can come up with a suitable replacement for FBS, due to environmental, moral, cost, etc concerns, none of these solutions are terribly viable. I personally wouldn't want to eat (or pay for) a tiger streak that required liters of FBS to grow.
I have a number of similar AR ideas like this, but thinking about cobbling together an optically aligned projector/depth sensor/camera is the hurdle that I need to get over first. Plus it would be a messy setup to actually deploy.

I'd really love to see some company develop a single unit that had maybe 5000-10000 lumens in a box with an HD camera.
Ask HN: Do you cache/mirror packages on dev machines with Squid or similar?
I know it's relatively common to cache packages for CI, and AWS et al. have solutions for that, but I'm curious if anyone's caching packages locally, on development machines, to speed up image builds etc. when packages have been pulled before?

A big download (or lots of them) in a single layer that ultimately fails, or the reason the layer itself isn't cached is only one small part of it, is annoying, for example. (I'm here writing while waiting for my fourth attempt..)

If so, what're you using? Squid's all I've found. Are you running it on one machine only or for your whole network on/via the router? Any other tips?
You've introduced this 'intent to sell' bit when for most of the thread you were requiring the transaction to proceed to a sale before the advertising can be advertising.

No one has claimed anything about advertising without the intent to sell. Indeed, that's been everyone's point since this bit of the thread started with michaelt's comment. Commercial speech is an area were most people agree that some constraints are useful. Hence it was used as an example of why censorship is nuanced not binary. People have different standards for what's reasonable and what's not, but only the most die hard free speech advocates would not have a standard at all.

You have frequently taken examples that are clearly in the advertising with intent to sell context and treated them as if they apply in a non-commercial context. This is how we get to you accusing people of being OK with arresting people over light bulbs when they're actually saying they're OK with laws against fraudulent advertising.
This is harsh, but true.

We can, and should, strive to fill our social needs outside of work.

Why? Because work environment can change drastically, more frequently than friends and family. It is, on average, less stable.
Did you ever share that paper publicly? I'd be interested in reading it
jumping on the bandwagon.
How hard could be to setup Neovim for Java development?!
The first commit of the git command that I found was a shell script. It called other scripts which used the C stuff behind the scenes.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git/commit/git?id=e76...
That is great advice. Use your skills to improve the lives of those around you in a meaningful way. I'm working on building a scheduling app for water delivery at the canal company I am a rights holder in. Everyone, including me, will end up using it. Right now they use email and paper cards. They can't afford to pay someone what it would cost to develop it. I saw a need and stepped up. Very rewarding.
It's all going to go horribly wrong because people, but, yes:

1) Integration with voice assistants. Links/sources are irrelevant.

2) Models tuned against a particular body of work don't care if links go stale, or websites get SlashdottedHackerNewshuggedDDOSed, or etc. Links/sources are irrelevant.

3) Inbound "service requests" processed by something that can better understand the question and the available answers/solutions. Links don't matter much.

4) When "Okay what are some good websites to read more about this?" can be answered, too, bang.

5) Ever asked somebody a question and just rolled with their answer instead of demanding citations? I mean, you're doing it here. So, again, yes.
It seems to me that the tendency to be confidently wrong is entirely baked into intelligence of all kinds. In terms of actual philosophical rationality, human reasoning is also much closer to cargo cults than to cogito ergo sum, and I think we're better for it.

I cannot but think that this approach of "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" is a much stronger path forward towards AGI than what we had before.
Yes. It is obviously already weak AGI (obvious to anyone if they saw it 20 years ago).

It is also obvious that we are in the middle of a shift of some kind. Very hard to see from within, but clearly we will look back at 2022 as the beginning of something…
Thanks for the reply. I guess it's not as big of an issue if it can save development time.

> Rails leans heavily on reflection. Starting a large Rails app can take 10+ seconds

This is nothing compared to the spring boot project at my job, takes like a whole minute to start haha
When I go into the office people are yelling into their mobile phones constantly and distracting me, I get bored people coming over for social chit chats, then end up wandering down for a coffee.

Then there is the the 5 minute round trip each time to take a piss or get a water refill, the wandering around between meeting rooms for 5 minutes that would just be a 10 second call drop and reconnect in teams. And because I'm in the office I don't have a feeling of guilt when I waste any of this time because fuck it, that's what they are pushing for.

Horses for courses.