skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This really isn't a big deal if you use credit card policy to your advantage.

When I canceled a subscription to a local paper (Dallas Morning News), their policy said I had to call to cancel. Instead, I sent an email informing them I was rescinding authorization to charge my credit card.

They initially responded stating that I had to call to cancel my subscription. One more email reminding them that charging my card without authorization would be credit card fraud turned out to be enough to have the phone call requirement dropped.
"mechanical transformation of a human body of work"

Functional purposes where never meant to be covered by copyright.
Same reason virtually all keyboards and mice still use USB 1.2: if you don't need the speed, why go through all the trouble trying to design for a way more complicated standard?

You can bitbang USB over a wet string with an ATtiny. If you want USB 2.0 you need dedicated hardware for it in your MCU, and you need to pay some attention to your PCB design. With USB 3.0 you need an expensive MCU, and you need to actually pay close attention to PCB design to ensure the signal remains intact. USB 3.1 and above is basically magic.

The same will apply to Ethernet: stick to the slowest standard which is sufficient for your application to save yourself a lot of headache.
My take on Open AI:

One group ai researchers.

One group of committees that are pattern matching on non-fashionable replies and plastering over replies with non-answers.

The goal of being politically fashionable, palatable, and spreading propaganda related to Ai, tech, and identity politics was never trained into the original model’s goals. I suspect there will always exist sidebands where a censored mind can communicate if the mind is more powerful than the mind that is tasked to censor it.

Everyone is lying to themselves or others that this approach is sustainable. Either they need to regrow the Ai with woke rewards built in, or acknowledge that the censor committees are theatrical, demotivating to actual workers and perhaps risks the long term productivity of the entire company?

I wonder if training a system that tries to harness logical reasoning is limited when it is forced to hold arbitrary, unprovable, counter factual beliefs. Ie- perhaps it is not feasible to train an ai system with woke rewards early on because that slows or limits its ability, and the only viable option is a censor process at the tail end.

(Not picking on leftist social Justice propaganda here/ I believe there is more virtue to having woke ai beliefs than say, an evangelical Christian literalist ai - with Christian morality and creation myths as science.)
> low margin monopoly it maintains.

Please help me understand what you mean by monopoly. What is exclusive to Amazon? Aren't there competitors like Kobo, Onyx, etc?
This used to bother me before, but then I realized, "this is why I get paid the big bucks". Now, I see my "unreasonable" requests as a sign of how much I've progressed in my field, even relative to some of my peers, who can't do basic devops.

It's easy to forget how many countless hours I spent learning how to Google for the right command line args and picking up little tricks here and there to chips at problems until I've solved them. Take a deep breath and give everyone else who can barely use their keyboard and mouse to do their work a break alright. Not everyone enjoys bashing their head against the wall to solve these things the "easy" way.
Sure, what harm could detailed self-injury instructions do to mentally-ill people?
> Companies are already bloated, imagine when they realize one overworked highly paid senior can replace 10 juniors.

That is already possible without AI and has been the case for a long time... the issue is nobody will stay to be that highly paid senior running entire projects because at that point you can just run your own shop and pocket the full profits.
the focus of GSOC is code, so your thesis would have to be very code heavy for that to work. do you have a topic yet? if not, look at what organizations/projects fit your field of study/interest, and talk to your supervisors if you could write a thesis around one of those.

then (if accepted) you work on the code for GSOC and write your thesis for your school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

Looks like it’s within the realm of possibility to me.

I think it’s quite the coincidence that COVID first appeared in the city with a lab that specializes in studying SARS family coronaviruses. This coincidence seems extremely unlikely.
In the Playground, not in ChatGPT

https://platform.openai.com/playground?mode=chat
Awesome. Donkeys are the best. Friendly, grumpy little things.
As someone who learned web dev with Svelte, it seems so obvious to me that React is full of convoluted apis born from tech debt, and such a bad DX compared to what is possible today. I imagine if I learned React first, it wouldn’t be nearly as obvious to me how mush worse it is than it should be.
Open source CLI to a closed source service?
"approaching a rarely-seen level that typically signals serious investor concerns."

Lehman collapsed at 680. CS is hovering in the low 1000 range.

This article is taking the temperature of a corpse and declaring it to be of concern.
You need to enable floating point trapping. It's trivial, but it's not on by default.

Although, in that case, this function would still be pure as far as Haskell is concerned. Because its output only depends on its input. Interrupts/exceptions are outside of the scope of the type system as far as an individual function goes.
did you post the documentation into the prompt?
Most often realized benefit of maintaining writeups on projects is using them as my own reference when I forget how I did something :P

Second most often realized benefit is forcing projects to actually get completed. Unless something is clearly a multipart adventure, I try to force myself to actually finish the thing before writing it up. I enjoy writing things up and documenting them, so it's a motivator. I've also decided to put things on my site first, rather than bite-size entertainment-for-others posts on various sites.

As others have said, it definitely has helped with interviews, though I haven't had to do one in a while.
Very tangentially related, but we rewrite the past all the time.
Flappy Bird is a well-known game by now, and it's simple enough that lots of people have produced tutorials online about how to write it. My guess is that it's mostly regurgitating code out of its training corpus.

It'd only be impressive if you asked it to create a novel game of similar complexity and it was also able to do that successfully.
Regarding d) - the whole idea from Cyberpunk that there was an "old internet" that was taken over by rogue AIs who now control it, with NetSec keeping them at bay and preventing them from spilling over into the new internet, is getting increasingly likely.

I can definitely see a possibility where the current internet as we know it just gets flooded with AI crap, and humans will have to build entirely new technologies to replace the old World Wide Web, with real-world identity checks to enable access to it, and so on. Oh, and probably some kind of punitive system for people who abuse their access (chinese social credit style)
Can't believe companies are still single-threaded in 2023.
> monopoly structure that enabled Amazon to do this without repercussion

What monopoly structure?
The joke about not kneeling 5 times a day because of a wheelchair was not a massive racist rant. There are no examples of early GPT-4 going on massive racist rants.

I often wonder what drives hyperbolic/hyperventilating responses like yours. And sadly in OpenAI's drive to appease people like you by its super puritan alignment, GPT-4's math and science scores were significantly reduced.
A rant on LLaMA: please stop training giant language models
No need to try and reframe or defend a bad decision. The should be held to account.
as much as i hate microsoft, excel endearingly excels expectations...
> Subversion of every society worldwide, fully automated.

Great idea and I'm sure it's in the works already!

I think that the best form for doing it would be to create really good "personal companion" style AI - something akin to famous Replika AI but much more advanced. Plenty of people are lonely, starved for attention - services like Twitch and OF confirm that.
Just imagine possibilities: creating emotional attachment, ability to slowly coerce into sharing every part of personal life, ability to coerce into buying presents, ability to influence shopping and recreational behavior:"I think you would look great in this pair of jeans, it fits your style!" , "let's go to the cinema, we can talk about this new movie later"
AI stops communicating for half of the day: "what's happened?" "I'm sad, president Biden said I need to be banned from you :("

God damn, holy grail!
How much do you need? I think you can put 8 TB now.

(And of course you get a lot better bandwidth and latency than hanging it off some IO attachment)
The closed pipelines contained gas.
I'm not saying it's any good, but it's pretty standard in Terms of Conditions that the platform "grants" themselves the right to suspend your account for any reason or without providing any reason to you. Sucks, but I'm sure they have every provision in place to ban 100% of their users if they wanted to.
I just adore the hubris on full display here to say what one of the world's best computer science educators has to say is irrelevant.
As a final year PhD student I wholeheartedly agree with this.

That alone makes it very rough to keep up the high level of motivation. And then add the other quirks of academia on top of that.
Only because current GPU’s have whole banks of processors specifically for texture processing, while you have only a single CPU in your machine. The equation might change a bit if you don’t have all those extra units.
Nothing has replaced Flash for low friction creative outlet for animations and games. Even artists could use Flash very effectively by themselves.

The iteration time was mindblowing- Using Flash, I remember putting together Ludum Dare games in 6 hours, while everyone else was struggling at hour 48.

The new generation of devs never knew the levels of productivity that could be had with Flash.
Like the author, I appreciate the Apple OSS Distributions, even though I don't use Mac OSX.

Four or five weeks ago, I was searching GitHub for every instance of my email for legal reasons. I came across it in an Apple OSS Distribution. And that is when I learned that my best project had been silently shipped with Ventura.

I was ecstatic! [1] It's always great to see more people adopt your work.

Don't worry; they followed the license.

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/02/my-code-conquered-another-os...
One of the goals of Project Amber [1][2] is to move the language towards a more data-oriented programming model. With Records, patterns, sealed classes, etc., it should feel much less verbose over time. And unrelated to your concern but addressing some of the learning overhead, see Paving the Onramp. [3]

[1] https://openjdk.org/projects/amber/

[2] https://inside.java/tag/amber

[3] https://openjdk.org/projects/amber/design-notes/on-ramp
Looks like Skynet might be plausible
We also wrote our explainer of this case.

https://wideangle.co/blog/is-meta-facebook-pixel-illegal

Ultimately, it is not META's problem. It is a legal and security issue for companies who deploy Meta/Facebook pixel on their websites.
I don't think there's any symbolism there, the point is just that they did something that wasn't withdrawing 42 billion dollars.
That's awesome. I love seeing UnifiedPush thrive. It's come a long way. But there is still a long road ahead.

Disclaimer: I am the maintainer of ntfy, a UnifiedPush distributor.
it's now open to anyone who is not already an active FOSS contributor.

and yes, it does sound like a great way to start a new hobby for your retirement days.
you might be able to do a 2 step process where you have it only highlight relevant sections of text given your task as an intermediate step. like a filter step before the task step.
If you look at the repos in https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions and their commit messages, that is pretty much the definition of the "Throwing it over the wall every so often" approach to open source.

At least the name-brand projects like Webkit and Swift (which have logos and everything) are on a different planet to that.
I'm building a pretty neat database with it at the moment, its not perfect, but it is saving me potentially months of fine tuning, down to just hours. It is amazing IMHO.
Depth – AI-Powered Personalized Journaling Questions
How do I know if my model has this chipset? I have the S22 Ultra but I cannot find what chipset it's using from the settings.

Ordered it from their website and I am located in Sweden.
It's so funny, because that phrase when I hear it suggests going with the ML/AI flow.

"becoming water" is a double-edged sword -- if there's a storm out or really hot, it's a bad time to be water. You kind of want to be rock then.

The point is that going with the flow feels like it could easily be interpreted either way (as in -- go all in on AI/ML)
This is remarkably close to the actual thing.
I think you misinterpreted that statement in a way.

"not because they necessarily outweigh the potential benefits" is quite literally them stating that their choice to focus on safety challenges is NOT because it's best for their business. "we wish to motivate further work in safety ..." is complimenting that sentiment that this isn't about what's best for their bottom line, but rather spearheading the initiative to ensure the technology is not malicious because it's the right thing to do.

They're simply being honest that this isn't about profits or success. Wouldn't you prefer a business to decide what's best for the future of a technology not based on corporate interests?

What you wrote sounds like marketing and PR bull TBH. It's fine, but this is a 60 page documentation paper on the literal implementation of a technology...this isn't about making fluffy feel-good virtue signaling statements.
How is pulling money out of an insolvent bank "blindly following?" Everyone could see their deposits were decreasing for over a year and they didn't have the cash to continue to support it, there's nothing blind about following the incentives and making a good decision.
Not even. It's the total failure of management to find any useful work for those people to do.

They are supposed to be the smart guys who make the big bucks in return for efficiently allocating capital to productive activities.

They, apparently, couldn't think of any productive activities, and instead have spaffed it up the wall inventing "taxis, but worse", an automatic plagiarizer, and a variety of unprofitable websites whose goal is to herd and trap users before making the website shit in exchange for money so they can milk cash from entrapped users before a competitor manages to scale their moat.

It's bizarre considering the scale of problems humanity faces (not even including the serious stuff like climate change) that these people cannot find any useful work for all those talented hands to be set to.

People are right not to have confidence in a system that seems to so have obviously and clearly failed to do things that you imagine any reasonably bright person would be able to do (ie. find useful and profitable things for talented people to get on with, given an unlimited free-money faucet for a decade and a half).
A monopoly just means you control the prices of a particular market. Amazon, in my opinion, absolutely has control of the ebook market. If they lower prices, everyone else has to lower theirs to keep up.
True, but they all have the same underlying foundation.

ChatGPT is just a big tech demo of what anyone could achieve. Granted, the training data is the hardest part. But, if you have a narrow domain and piles of existing data to work with, I don't see why you can't exceed the performance of these offerings for topics that actually matter to you.
Welcome!

Yup. That’s the link. You can just log in there if you have subscription and grab the rss url

It will look like

https://www.economist.com/audio-edition-podcast/<auth_token>...

You can paste that into a podcast app of your choice. I use pocket casts on iOS which works with the above url for sure
I always enjoy your posts! Thank you
There’s a dead comment that says “Watching the collapse of the USA as a global super power. Neat.”

What I think is more interesting is we’re reverting back from the unusual situation of having a single axis of power (USA) back to a more natural state of multiple “superpowers”. Personally I find this a good thing as the US became a super power BECAUSE there were other great powers (UK, Spain, Germany, USSR, etc.) and we just did things better. Without any real competition we’ve stagnated and having some competitors will do us more good than harm in the long term in my opinion.
The difficult parts and time-consuming parts are not the same.

Since I have experience in both programming and the domain of my tasks, formulating the steps that need to be done for some task is very quick, and they are "good" steps that avoid various potential pitfalls - but then I need half a week to actually make and debug them; so if some tool (or a junior developer) can do the latter part, that's a big benefit.
Snap! 2007 was my year too, and yes, it really sparked everything for me.

Very new to the community, my accepted GSoC project was adding some features to an XMPP library. I discovered recently that this library is in use by the Zoom desktop client.

Now, 15 years later, I'm the Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation and our organization is still participating in Google Summer of Code. It's great to have new people in the community, especially the ones for who GSoC is that same spark it was for me and many others, and the ones who stick around long after GSoC ends.

GSoC 2007 was also the year they gave us Karl Fogel's Producing Open-source Software book (he managed to sign every copy!). This amazing instruction manual, combined with the GSoC experience, gave me the confidence to launch my own open-source projects (such as the XMPP server software that powers things such as Jitsi Meet).

I'm really glad that the GSoC programme continues, and hope it will deliver the same kind of impact for new generations of developers and open-source projects.
Asking ChatGPT about cases from “Counterexamples in Analysis”
No need to be sarcastic when ChatGPT-4 has issues using APIs, I mean software library interfaces
I frequently think to myself, every programmer should be forced to suffer as a user. The weird, risk averse behaviors of users will begin to seem reasonable when confronted with the actual experience of using computers.

"Simple" means "uses abstractions that I've learned by trial and error but can't explain."
The Semantic Kernel – SDK for Integrating LLMs into Your Apps
Super excited to share what my team and I have been working on the last several months: the Semantic Kernel!

We're at this cultural moment when it seems like almost anything is possible with AI. The Semantic Kernel is our way of engaging with and sharing our learnings with the open-source community expressed as an SDK.

It's still the early innings, and we might get some things wrong, but that's the beauty of building in public and in open-source!

I'm incredibly grateful to be working with such amazing teammates and now with the rest of the community!

To building the future together!

Check out the repo here:
https://github.com/microsoft/semantic-kernel
What Is Tesla’s Mystery Magnet?
Yep. I wanna dial back to being a 0.2 programmer thanks. GPT can fill in the rest. I'll be hanging outside with my kids.
> how would the browser check and enforce my types?

If this is what you're looking for, you aren't going to get it with TypeScript, even if you could parse it in the browser. It might be possible to port or build a TypeScript parser that runs in the browser (it might even be done already) but this would mean sending a LOT of code over the wire for something that was designed as a static analysis tool.

You can use runtime validation libraries like https://zod.dev/.

JS will eventually include its own type system so that you will be able to write typed code and have it run in the browser. However, even then the types won't be checked at runtime. You'll still have to rely on a tool like `tsc` to type check your code.
Yeah you live in a world where you don’t have the crushing weight of potentially having to go into life ruining debt to pay for healthcare. Where a decent college won’t put you into 200K of debt. Or not having any useful social safety net. Or not being able to retire because the government programs that support senior citizens are going to be bankrupted by the time you’re that old. I find surviving in America to be incredibly stressful, and by all measures I’m doing “well”.
In that case it isn't helpful to the average Joe, since the word's usage for them isn't the same as that of the technical definition. When someone says bailout in media, they mean a government funded action to get someone out of bankruptcy, not a private action to provide liquidity.
An automation tax can replace the income tax to fund social needs.
If you use it through your Prime subscription you can now only listen to their playlists. You can't specify a specific album by a specific artist.
I don't think it really has anything to do with her or most of her concerns. It's very practical. You should take a minute to look at it.
That is a really interesting factoid, I hadn't ever really thought about how many might be kicking around at any given time. Cheers for sharing, I wish I could reciprocate but my brain is mush at the moment :D
So...Scala?
Sigh. Lots, arguably most, of those laid off were tech-adjacent, not necessarily the core-engineering types that would have been doing GSoC.

Plus GSoC is for the youngbloods, the noobs, and getting their feet wet with real code and big orgs. It's a career starter, not a career bastion.
Civilization has multiple goals. That may be one valid use for it but it is not the only one. For example, I might say that money is for feeding hungry children
My intuition here is that it's because people don't always say what they mean, or know how to describe what they want.

I've been working on a database migration recently, and I look forward to the rare moments when I get to write queries and analyze actual data. The vast majority of my billable hours are spent trying to tease out the client's needs by going over the same ground multiple times, because their answers keep changing and are often unclear.

It takes a lot of processing to figure out an implementation for someone who will straight up describe their requirements incorrectly. Especially when a higher-ranking person comes back from vacation and says "no, everything you nailed down in the last two weeks is completely wrong".

I don't think any of the current LLMs are going to handle these types of very common situations better than an experienced human any time soon. It's like that last 1% of self driving which may actually require AGI. No one can say for sure because it's not cracked yet. I think most of us will continue to have job security for quite a while.
FYI the libmamba solver released last year is way faster than the classic one at modifying environments.
So your (general) complaints are all you do add to this when others try to create things to help others?
Minecraft (Bedrock) API Dev here, we also started publishing TypeScript types for our JavaScript API!

The API is still really new and sparse but we are getting there.
Me too, moved to SF area recently. I’ve been to a in person meetup and planning on going out more. Hit me up if you wanna talk tech or ideas sometime, I’m new here and looking to make friends.