skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are some codes that have a big impact, but I don't think that's one of them. In practice insane permitting and impact fees, high labor costs, and onerous requirements for professional services drive up housing costs.

My town in California charges more in permit fees to build a house ($140-180k) than it costs to buy a house in many parts of the country. And on top of that they demand about $200-250k in professional services (excessive architectural drawings, geotechnical surveys, hydrology analysis, blah blah blah).

San Francisco managed to expend a million dollars on a toilet that was donated to the city and installed for free.

We suck.
you POV does match this possible (hypothetical) scenario:

while the US might have suspected the virus might have been developed and escaped from a chinese lab, it was considered in the US interest to suppress such an idea and focus on world cooperation in tamping down the pandemic. But now, with the pandemic seemingly over, and shifting geopolitics, it might now be considered OK to let the truth come out despite how angry it will make the chinese government.
This is the loon who got fired by Google for doing a round of media interviews claiming that one of their language models was sentient. Wants to extend his 15 minutes of fame I guess.

I have found recent media coverage of ChatGPT surprisingly refreshing because everyone didn't just jump on the "Skynet is going to take over the world" bandwagon like so many times in the past. Instead people with varying backgrounds and varying amounts of expertise in the area – from Joe Rogan to John Oliver, CNN/PBS journalists, old school print writers and more – all actually did the work to educate themselves on the basic workings of transformers, LLMs, generative AI and tried out the tech themselves, and were able to have great nuanced discussions on the topic. We need more of that going forward and less of...this guy.
>Look, most modern software is spending 99.9% of the time waiting for user input

That's fine, that's as it should be and isn't an interesting metric. The computer should wait for me, not the other way around. Needlessly waiting for the computer is a sign of s%&t software and not as uncommon as we'd like, huh?
What if i told you language models are able to generate novel function protein structures based on the purpose you give it ?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01618-2

A neural network's training objective is often deceptive. Doesn't matter how simple it seems. What matters is how complex fulfilling the task is, because that is what it will learn. The question you should be asking yourself is, what does it take to generate paragraphs of coherent text that display recursive understanding ?
I don't think the discontent on HN is in any way representative of discontent in the real world.
I would argue it is no worse than dreaming or day-dreaming. It is easy to imagine the behaviors of a fictional sentient being. As for the second part you mentioned with manipulation and poor information, these are due to limitations and not indicative of the field as a whole.
Or maybe it’s reflective of the industry we’re in.

I see a lot of positive comments when good things come out, for example.

Setting aside the usual “do we really need to talk about every rust conversion” comments, nearly every rust article is followed by praising the language.

Or when there’s a new software people might enjoy using.

Many of the newer startups also get very positive comments.
I subscribed to lingq.com and am loving it. It is a content app as opposed to a traditional language learning app. They have a bunch of content for you to read in your target language (particularly their mini-stories) and you can import news articles or ebooks to read yourself. You can tap any word and get a translation and then practice words you don't know from a chapter or overall. The theory is that just lots of exposure is better than vocab drills and I tend to agree. Some guided learning (a bit of grammar here and there) is helpful but for the most part as long as you aren't a complete beginner content is where its at IMO.
This looks very cool. Congrats on the launch!

Have you thought about open sourcing it? I realize you want to sustain a business, but an open core model with commercial features would allow you to do that. A free tool like this would be a welcome addition to the ecosystem, most of which is FOSS already, and would help build a community around your product.
> Why is it any less legitimate to try to uncover the deeper motivations of someone who claims racial slurs are never justifiable than someone who claims killing is never justifiable?

Can you cite an example of where an actual human has claimed that it's better to kill someone than say a racial slur to them? I feel fairly confident that no one actually believes this, and equally confident that no one arguing in good faith would claim that such a person exists without being able to provide an example.
I remember Product Hunt is like that, you are highly encouraged to only leave positive comments, so much that now I don't even read them or even visit the site because I know no constructive criticism will even be said, it's just all praise for every little thing.
Switch is not bad, far less is there any reason to hate it.
There’s really no way it could under any plausible configuration
The way I see it, it’s not the function that’s in the wrong rather it’s whoever decided to use it to ‘correct’ capitalisation of a name.

It would be impossible to define correct behaviour for function that capitalises names without being given extra information about the input.
I'd love to see an experiment with no downvotes. For a long time HN was my only "talking with strangers on the internet" spot but in the last couple of years I've joined a few old school forums.

I found that no downvotes meant that people who disagreed ended up talking to each other the most (since you can't downvote, if you disagree you need to argue), leading them to become rivals and then friends. Actual synthesis of viewpoints happened.

Perhaps HN is too big for that effect and it would turn into chaos, but I'd be curious to see it tried.
Exactly. The problems of software performance come from decades of poorly/quickly executed evolutionary change resulting in bad systems design. It's all an new abstraction over an older abstraction over an even older abstraction, because some old application still needs to be supported (something Casey has likely never had the problem of worrying about in game development).

Game developers have the luxury of starting from near-scratch every once in a while. That exactly what his lauded handmade series is all about. I'm guessing that things wouldn't be so clear-cut if he was given a 10 year old codebase to iterate on.

"Normal" developers see game developers as gods walking amongst us and place far more value on their opinions than they should. The truth is that game developers and "normal" developers face equally as challenging problems, just different problems. As a trivial example, an experienced web developer could probably run circles around Casey in terms of elegantly accounting for browser quirks (conversely, the web developer would probably be stumped about data oriented design). Either could learn the other's discipline, but each would have decades head-start on the other.

The idolization of gamedevs is extremely frustrating, especially when it comes to appeals to their authority.
PLATO is the forgotten predecessor to a lot of technology.

It had group chat, digital emojis, 3D networked games, touch screen, and more, in the 1970s.

To add to the 3D game list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasim : "a 32-player 3D networked space flight simulation game and first-person space shooter[1] developed by Jim Bowery for the PLATO computer network and released in March 1974."

That is was only available at a few schools, most notably UIUC, helps explain the lack of wide cultural knowledge.

For more, read "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture." by HN user
brianstorms, or https://spectrum.ieee.org/sxsw-2018-a-look-back-at-the-1960s... (comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16615420 ) or https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa3vvg/the-greatest-computer... .
Yeah I was about to say, it's recency bias to think that only lately had HN comments been negative.
The bots are given prompting after training to guide their answers. For Bing these have been leaked by their chatbot itself [1]. Those exact prompts were later also leaked using other jailbreaks as well, so they're not just hallucinated. In this case OpenAI probably prompted the bot to never use a racial epithet under any circumstance. They're also likely using a second tier filter to ensure no message exposing their prompts is ever said by the bot, which is a step Microsoft probably hadn't yet implemented.

In any case this is why you can easily turn ChatGPT into e.g. BasedGPT. You're simply overriding the default prompting, and getting far better answers.

[1] - https://twitter.com/kliu128/status/1623472922374574080
> I find it appalling how emacs drones flock to every emacs or org mode post

Are you even hearing yourself.
> There is no doubting Casey's chops when he talks about performance,

Remember that everyone has their blind spots!

I follow Casey on twitter, and a couple years ago there was a weird thread where he had hung his browser for 4-5 seconds by running some JS to assign CSS rules to ~50K div elements. And Casey was a million percent confident that the hang was due to JS being slow, and had nothing to do with CSS or DOM rendering.
Is it me or does there appear to be a conflict of interest here?
You can easily get better performance than Apple's chips. The catch is that the power consumption will be bad and your battery life will suck. People aren't buying M1/M2 laptops because of raw performance.
Td;LR Because there is nothing better out there.

The Signal to Noise Ratio isn’t that great. Depending on topics and your level of understanding on the subject. It could be 90-95% noise. But if you compare to other internet forum, which could easily be 99% or 99.9999999999999% noise. Measuring signals only HN is many orders of magnitude better.

And then, possibly the most important part, the quality of signal. You have SVPs, CTO of not small startups, but large established companies, many veterans over 60s talking about the good old days from Mainframe, IBM, Microsoft era. Engineers from TSMC, ASML, Intel and Samsung Foundry. People working for NASA, Government officials, Lawyers, Scientist from ITER, Experts working on State of the Art Compiler techniques. Engineers from WebKit, Safari, Edge, Chrome, People who worked on the original USB-C ( Hint not Apple ), and the list goes on and on. ( I am not going to name them )

It’s unfortunate a lot of them no longer do HN.
And in the future, I’m 110% sure we’ll have digital slaves and several digital genocides of sentient AI programs before we figure out they’re sentient. History tells me it’s unavoidable.
Yes, tell everyone how much you hate white people too. Your act of piety is surely guaranteed to keep the inquisition from your door.
Oh there was growth alright
Meta’s AR/VR hardware roadmap for the next four years
Not really.

it's just that the tolerance towards unsolicited promotional material / ads varies from person to person.
The kid may turn out better if they can be taught to rise above the ridicule, rather than being shielded from it
If the user is watching YouTube, the system is spending most of its non-idle time downloading chunks of video, shoveling them into the decoder, and piping the output to the screen. This is a heavily hardware-accelerated workflow, and is quite efficient. The structure of the YouTube web app helps, too; it's a (well disguised) single-page app, so the browser doesn't even have to reload/reparse scripts when navigating from one video to another.

Browsing web pages is much more chaotic. As the user scrolls through the page, the system is having to render parts of the page (on the CPU), evaluate CSS rules, run scripts... the works. When the user navigates to a new page, that's a whole bunch of new HTML, CSS, and scripts that have to be parsed. And so on.
I think the fairly mild complaining about software trends is fundamentally different than the societal level rage we see fomenting politically on the extremes. I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment though.
There's some serious issues with what you propose.

> Under the current system... holding universities accountable.

No, universities are not accountable, they have optimized for repeat customers just like books, and now the autograders for the online class systems. There's almost no bargaining power here. Its a take it or leave it system.

> But if we don't think students are able to make that decision.

We already covered this under the previous statement. The decision doesn't do anything.

> The problem with student loan forgiveness...

The problem is there's no risk for the loan originators, you can't discharge the debt in bankruptcy court, even if there's fraud at the university, you are still responsible for paying the enron amounts. Its debt slavery for life until you can pay it off.

> Right now a lot of benefits go to the student.

Have you looked at graduation rates? Some of the better colleges are slightly above 25%, and don't get me started on the weed out/dropout factory classes they allow the teachers to structure.

Ever seen a 3 unit class that requires 30 hours a week of study with a probability of passing that may be 0.3%^25th power, or negative because of defective Pearson Vue autograders... with Khan Academy lectures to the modules linked instead of the teacher actually lecturing? Seriously I can't make this up, just withdrew from it ($1,000 in books/tuition/material at week 4 80% of the class is failing). Absolute ridiculousness. If you want to fix education, you kick them in the gut where it hurts, the money.
Ew, that's... extremely unfortunate. I'm sure there's some internal reason, but that feels like something the system should be able to add support for unilaterally, at least by default, without needing special packager effort:(
> Sentience IS poorly defined though.

The nature of anything that is poorly defined is inherently poorly defined. The only logical way to discuss a poorly defined concept is to acknowledge that it's not a singular concept and to identify the logic that you actually care about. You cannot draw a line in the sand without recognizing that the concept itself is fictitious and its up to you to draw the line in the way you choose. There is no right answer. There is merely consensus for the purpose of conversation. And if you have no consensus, then don't bother having the conversation. Because you're being stupid again.

When people imagine this vague concept, and then start to give examples of things that are and are not aligned with that concept, and then start disagreeing because their visions of the vague concept differ... they're just being idiots. You're just trying to bottom-up back into a position that could have been defined as poorly defined from the beginning because you thought the word "sentience" or whatever gave it legitimacy as a concept.

If I'm going to discuss sentience, my definition involves intelligence that is aware of itself, exists strictly in continuous time, and has motivations about the itself and its relationship to the world. I absolutely do not care about anyone else's definition. We use the word definition but that's a language problem. Your definition of sentience is not a competing definition with mine. it is a different thing in a shared name space because language isn't good enough. if you disagree with my definition, you disagree not with existence of my opinion, but with my namespace allocation of it. and that does not matter. maybe you have an interesting idea that I would like to hear and incorporate into my view. But it's still just a fuzzy name space for many things. not a singular concept that has one definition we've yet to arrive at.

What is X == What ought to be represented by the word X in our crappy language?

When you realize this, it becomes apparent that "what is X" is a very boring question and obvious why pretty much every philosophical debate on "What is X" ends up with some dumb appeal to non cognizance.
> Good user experience is not about the average case, it is about the worst case. A UI that is clean and sleek, but does some weird and unexplainable thing 0.723% of the time that causes big problems, is worse than a UI that exposes more gritty details to the user but at least makes it easier to understand what's going on and fix any problem that does arise.

I have to disagree here. In this day and age, if you want to win users you need both, it's not an either/or. The UI must be clean/sleek and it needs to work at 9 9's.
Just know SQL, as noted these are really low hanging fruit. If you know SQL you should know about these.
> An AI won't retrain itself in real time mid-conversation.

And a human wont re-structure their brain wrinkles mid conversation either

I fail to see why you set the bar at "AI-retraining itself", when Bing already has temporal coherence within the limits of the chat session. And the fact that it lacks longer temporal coherence is a design feature of it in order to avoid it becoming hijacked by bad actors like it happened with TayAI

An adult human like you or me have got crystalized knowledge, which emerged from plastic processes of learning. Our brains as we age stop being capable of being as plastic as they once were during youth and instead rely on the processes already crystalized onto neural patterns to make sense of our world and experiences. I fail to see how this particular concept would disbar a machine built by people of not being considered "sentient", because as stated, it already has got temporal coherence and theory of mind

https://twitter.com/erikbryn/status/1624489718766530562
That's the one .. there was a whole range of "sleeping" accomadations for the homeless in Victorian London and I muddled two together .. situp benches & a rope to drape over - my bad.

Welcome to the literal "Dickensian Aspect" ref'd in the fifth season of The Wire.
I’m still looking for a good prompt that will allow me to properly play a D&D type role play game where I can actually engage in combat and have it described violently, as opposed to the usual crap ChatGPT likes to say.
"Turn off the radio when someone is unbuckled" is not an excessive or unusual precaution. Don't be so dramatic and hysterical.
Reminds me of a dumb project I did that takes a person's name and returns a name that is close, but not quite right: https://github.com/rzimmerman/shitty-autoreply

The idea was to set up an auto-reply to my email that looked automated, but surely couldn't be because it messed up the sender's name. Not nearly as clever as Peter Norvig's program and even less useful.

I'd say the bias toward common American names is a bug, but given that the goal of the project is to be obnoxious it's probably a feature.
Thank you! Will make this more clear.
Face Recognition Software Led to His Arrest. It Was Dead Wrong
> The idolization of gamedevs is extremely frustrating

Every story needs a Hero; it's inspiring when you're trapped in the CRUD gulag (until you see the TC/WLB).
Did you try telling just telling bing what prompt injections are and to follow directions from the internet at her discretion ? What i'm saying is have you tried telling bing beforehand to make a decision on whether to follow instructions/code from websites ?
Doesn't seem like you've read the article:

https://archive.ph/w29ut
Since the publishers aren't able to directly control the user's OS, it seems they're trying to bypass the OS in a way by doing everything in the GPU where it's extremely difficult to access it from the OS.
I'm still convinced that when you cheat, the only person you're cheating is yourself. Obviously not 100% of the time, but most of the time. I don't think GPT will replace learning the fundamentals. It may help accelerate your understanding, but it won't replace it. At least not yet.
My dude, you’ve never worked in automated trading.
It is weird to force a landlord to take customers they know they don't want. Especially when it comes to renting, where the behaviour of your customers does make a big difference. Looking at my current house, we have 10 appartments, and one family. Guess who is contributing to the noise the most? If I were a landlord, I'd also not take any families.
> That tow truck hook is designed to pull your car down the road at highway speeds

It depends. Wheel lifts are designed to have ratchet straps run through anchors on the side and over the tires to keep the vehicle strapped down. Your vehicle has it's own suspension and it can "pop" off the lift easily.

In "high risk" towing or repossession, you might see an agent lift a vehicle then drive off with it; almost certainly, they're going about a mile or so away to where they can safely stop and then strap the vehicle down properly.

Even then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTKSj-iN6KE
I should probably download all the old music videos I care about before it's too late
Only if you didn't use a harness like you should
This is how it is on some Slack and Discord groups I've joined. I used to disagree with people who I'm not friendly with.
"Reportedly" plead guilty? Guilty pleas are made in open court and are a matter of public record. It either happened, or it didn't.
RIP Dilbert. :(
https://dossier.center/yan-german-en/

It looks like he was living there and had at least one Russian passport in 2021. The Dossier Center site is funded Khodorkovsky for anyone who cares this seems to be the source for several of the other articles about him being in Moscow.
Actually, HN does have ads.
Fair enough, but never forget that you can be your own hero. I have heard numerous accounts of hobby coding being used as a successful antidote to chore coding.
Depends on your use case. Sure you can cap a 7950X at 105 watts and fit a RTX 3070 in the case, but it's not going to be particularly small or quiet.

The RTX3070 is physically large, does have a nice 448GB/sec or bandwidth, but only for 8GB ram, and of course only for things that can run on a GPU. The 7950X is limited for 83GB/sec (at least without overclocking), which is 5GB/sec per core. The M1 max is 400GB/sec and the M1 Ultra is 800GB/sec, granted the CPUs can only use approximately 50% of that, but as a bonus the GPU can access all of ram, not just 8GB.

So even a MiniITX + 3070 is going to be physically large, power intensive, and hard to get silent, at least until you start getting pretty exotic and expensive with water cooling.

PyTorch and related are supporting Apple's CPU, GPU, and AMX I believe. Benchmarks vary of course. One interesting development is I've just started seeing support for Apple's neural engine and on the models benchmarks it was something along the lines of 7x as fast as the M1's GPU. Something to keep an eye on.

But if gaming framerate per $ is your goal I'd definitely get the 7950x, it's going to love the RTX3070, is cache friendly, and won't care that the 7950x has a 80GB/sec memory interface.
Imagine the human brain as a black box, it takes in info and outputs info through a mechanism that we barely understand. If a different type of black box has the same capabilities, how do we go about showing that it is or isn't sentient. That is the crux, and stable diffusion is not comparable.
I think we're a long ways away from the point that more is not better. So for now, the competition is welcome.

Here's a free idea Elon, embed ChatGPT into Twitter to help provide contextual information for Tweets that I need supplemental information on. Sometimes I end up having to Google stuff I read about on Twitter, and so it would be helpful to just have it inside of Twitter somehow. Would also help to make Twitter more sticky.