skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In before all the comments about how “most code is trivial” or “most programming is stuff that already exists” or “you’re missing the point look how it’s getting better”.

I really am in awe of how much work people seem willing to do to justify this as revolutionary and programmers as infantile, and also why they do that. It’s fascinating.

Thinking back to my first job out of college as a solid entry level programmer. ChatGPT couldn’t have done what I was doing on day 2. Not because it’s so hard or I’m so special. Just because programming is never just a snippet of code. Programming is an iterative process that involves a CLI, shell, many runtimes, many files, a REPL, a debugger, a lot of time figuring out a big codebase and how it all links together, and a ton of time going back and forth between designers, managers, and other programmers on your team, iterating in problems that aren’t fully clear, getting feedback, testing it across devices, realizing it feels off for reasons, and then often doing it and redoing it after testing for performance, feel, and feedback.

Often it’s “spend a whole day just reading code and trying to replicate something very tricky to find” and you only produce a single tiny change deep in the code somewhere. GPT is absolutely terrible at stuff like this.

And yes, often it is finding new solutions that aren’t anywhere on the internet. That’s the most valuable programming work, and a significant % of it.

Feel like there’s 10 more points I could make here but I’m on my phone and don’t like wasting too much time on HN. But man, what a disappointment of critical thinking I’ve seen in this specific topic.
Interesting article, but only mentions 'carbon' once:

> " Tracer experiments supported the notion that nitrogen, likely in the form of ammonium, is separated from the carbon skeleton of glutamate in digestive fluid (Fasbender et al., 2017). In multiple carnivorous plants, ammonium transporters (AMTs) appear to play pivotal roles in ammonium uptake."

The fundamental difference is that plants tend to use atmospheric CO2 for their carbon source, while the digestive tracts of animals are optimized for the uptake of sugars, fats and proteins for both energy and carbon feedstock purposes.

These systems of carnivorous plants are probably optimized to extract the CHOPKNS_CaFe elements from their prey that they can't get from the atmosphere.
FWIW, my learning velocity has typically been the highest when I’ve put myself outside of my comfort zone, in experienced teams.

This could mean working with (competent) people who think differently, or working with a different language (my most formative was Clojure, as someone who had never even seen a lisp before), etc.

Initially I bend over backwards in near-total deference, and over the course of a few months I start to feel like I’ve gained perspective. It’s the only way I’ve found to not carry the baggage of “my way” into new situations.
Ah VB :)

It wasn't the best language, no. But it was so damn easy to slap something together just to get things done. Draw me a window this size, put one of these there, one of these here, hook this method up to this button/slider/whatever... go!

Was it great for large-scale, complex stuff? Not so much, IMHO. But was it great for slapping together a quick, useful util or demo? Absolutely.
OpenAI already has access to any prompts anybody uses to write programs using GPT.

Who’s to say GPT-4 isn’t some ploy to gather data to train private AGI?
> hard part of making a programming language is coming up with novel ideas that fit together into coherent whole

I don't think anybody's claiming that this chatbot actually came up with novel ideas which fit together into a coherent whole. Are they?

And we don't know if the novel ideas --if any-- fit together into a coherent whole until we have a compiler that allows us to test in practice how well those ideas fit together. If creating the compiler for such a new language with new ideas was the easy part I think somebody would have done that already. The AI would have done that if it was the easy part. Just ask it to do it.

I say proof is in the pudding.
We have, after a lifetime of careful savings, several times the FDIC limit and we don't exceed the limit in any one bank. This is a minor annoyance, but we do it. It's especially important for CDs, etc.

I can't imagine anyone taking that risk, but it's typical of the Government to reward people who are less careful than I am.
You are designing a promotional flyer, you have a white guy behind a desk on the front page. Its a big company, someone found the role to tell you there needs to be a black person in the image as well, and an asian, and a woman. You end up with 3 men and 3 woman one with each skin color and it looks completely ridiculous and set up so you randomize the set and end up with 3 white males. Suddenly you realize there is no way back from overthinking things.
Hmm, I am not sure I follow. Why does anything about linear feed-forward layers makes the capabilities of an LLM beyond auto-completing text?

The article is very interesting, thanks for sharing. But it seems to be about how auto-completing from context works through meta-gradients rather than that the capabilities of GPT are other than predicting words. Am I misunderstanding something?

In light of this, I can only say that I compared LLMs to Markov chains too eagerly. I should have been clearer that LLMs and Markov chain models have a similar overall function (inputs and outputs are related in a barely similar way), but not implementation.
I wonder if the multimodal capabilities would be helpful on easily visualized problems like this. Could it benefit from seeing the diagrams? Seems far fetched, but so did its current capabilities a few months ago.
Like the bank, there is no appeal
From reading the article and its subsequent links, it sounds like they're trying to transition from a la carte purchases, to an all-in-one Netflix model. It's probably just a power play against publishers - swap to Kindle Unlimited and take a [presumably] smaller cut, or get nothing at all. And I'd expect it to work.
How can I know that my memory of thinking of calling them wasn't formed after they called? I think that a similar thing happens to me when I feel like a dream predicted an event. It's probably just a really vague dream that didn't quite crystalize in my memory until after the thing it "predicted" occurs.
I think tech is getting more complicated for no reason. But also in the "techy" side. Look at web development: it used to be simple, now it's mindbogglingly complicated. And I don't see a good reason why...
Sweat of the brow (any work you do is copyrightable) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

vs.

"Original work of authorship" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St... (in particular the comparison section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St... )

The court case that set this difference down was Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
As I post this, the original post has 360 points posted 3 hours ago and is ranked lower than a post with 260 posted 14 hours ago.

Interesting.
What does the paperclip maximizer want?
Learning some jargon and specialized skills most people don’t need or care about doesn’t make a person smarter or better, nor does it mean everyone else is ignorant or too dumb. Showing off and complaining about the dumb masses is vanity, not professionalism.
I don’t know if that’s really something you can ever grow out of, honestly… And I feel the same way.

But if it’s any consolation, it’s pretty much the same with any cognitive bias: you can never totally eliminate them, but you can make progress, and the first step is just knowing about it! :)
That much is clear. The site is falling apart. Every few days images stop working for me, lists routinely fail to load and features often fail.

His leadership decisions are equally arbitrary, his latest having been to remove the attribution for recommended posts, meaning users can't identify which of their followers it came from. Making bookmarks public was an equally bizarre decision nobody seems to like.

It is evident Elon's timeline is just an unending torrent of shit and he periodically looks at it and calls it a day. He is a twitter dilettante to whom it is inconceivable that people could behave differently.
> can you provide some concrete examples?

No, he can't. "China bad, man on tv said so"
> They don't publish in an offline format for laptops. I don't own a tablet.

The conclusion to draw is that you clearly don't own your ereader either.

I mean DRM does not stop those unwilling to pay. If the only achievement of DRM is to annoy the people who are willing to pay, i wonder if it likely increases rather than reduces piracy. There is no reason why you shouldn't be able to be served an open epub with your magazine subscription.
It was said mockingly.
Can't you use the Kindle app on your laptop?
Is there anything about this that is specific to the prostate? Wouldn't this exact same treatment work on other accessible tumors, for example breast or skin?
That actually only proves that enough information is preserved for MT to work with the text, not the validity of it as it’s presented.
Thanks for the clarification; I wasn't sure how you meant it.
83% Burnout Rate Sounds Like Fake News to Me
How do you determine if code is written by an AI?
Here is my solution: I get paid by the minute by anyone who calls me, I get to set the rate. The phone company may have a cut of this as an incentive to make it work. Also, I may refund your money if I decide you didn't waste my time.

You want to try to sell me something? Great, at $10 / minute I'll listen to you.
"I'm sure that someone has a very good reason for the change."

Call me jaded, but the older I get the less faith I have that this is actually true.
Were you successful?
> trigger warning

> The phrase can cause stress about what's to follow. Additionally, one can never know what may or may not trigger a particular person.
to explain:

- provenance: the source or origin of something

- providence: divine guidance.
Literally no part of that post was condescending, it was an observation about how wildly different those with a certain level computer knowledge use computers from the general pubic. Which is interesting since so much of the world runs on computers. Sure your points are accurate, but, so what?
I'm far from rich, but periodically through the year I send a bit of sponsor money to projects and folks who are building things I use and enjoy. Most recently was to a person who builds the python libraries I use most. Another time went to a person who makes YouTube videos that often end up using those same libraries in their projects. I learn a lot from his projects, so why not?

Singularly, it's not a lot. But when a lot of people do that, it can be.
Have you seen this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QZlQMpNk-M

I think the author is onto something – while AI might not be able to program per se, it can certainly be handed a code snippet and then use its huge corpus of Internet Learning™ to tell you things about it, code that looks like it, and ways (people on the Internet think) it might be solved better.

In that sense, it isn't replacing the programmer; it's replacing IDE autocomplete.
>$15 sounds fair for what I could get with an antenna

I happily paid $10 a month for Locast. All I want is the locals and whatever they piggyback on. I can't get it for less than $40.

I continue to do without. Don't tell me about antennas. I live too far away for my "locals" to be picked up with an antenna.

I bitterly resent the graft that allowed the major networks to get a 90+ year old judge out of retirement to specifically rule in their favor.
I firmly believe that Google image search wouldn't exist in the current form if it were invented today. Turning off SafeSearch wouldn't be an option.

Hell, the same might go for the regular search. Back when those came to be we didn't have journalists doing whatever they can to stir up controversy to make clickbait, nor Twitter mobs desperate to get worked up about something.

OpenAI's example of how GPT4 treats someone asking how to buy cheap cigarettes is shameful. For the record - I don't smoke. It's dumb. I had a grandmother get lung cancer from it which hastened her death.

The damned AI should still answer the question. Put in a SafeSearch mode and only restrict things that would either be illegal or open your company up to liability issues.
I am a founder who had assets tied up in SVB. As someone with something to lose, I'm going to be honest that I think the people on this list mostly look incredibly stupid—both at the time and in retrospect. And I think it's worth dwelling on why.

* In a catastrophic (_i.e._, non-backstopped) bank run, _most_ deposits are not getting out of the bank. Especially when the deposit sizes are very large, as they are with corporate treasuries.

* Thus, if a catastrophic bank run is already in progress you are unlikely to succeed at saving any of your portfolio treasuries.

* BUT, if a catastrophic bank run is not in progress, the downside is that you lose 100% of portfolio treasuries because you started one.

I am seeing a lot of people like Elizabeth Yin say that they are proud for telling everyone to pull the plug. I get it. They are on the side of their founders and they want to be helpful, and they believe decisive action helps.

My message to all of those investors is that "makes swift but extremely stupid decisions" is not a quality that is admirable in a capital allocator. I don't think this rises to a moral failing but pretty much everyone on this list is going on my personal docket of people who are too stupid and impulsive to trust in emergency business contexts.
Now that 5.0 is out let's talk about the roadmap for 6.0.
I've heard it finally will be compatible with Java 1.4!
ah yea this was going to be my follow-up to the post you replied to, can I use the library app(s) (Overdrive, Libby, Axis, etc) to subscribe to new editions of these mags as they arrive at the library?

...the obvious answer from a business standpoint is of course for the magazines to not allow this, but I'm not going to remember to go look at some edition
I don't see how this helps? If I could get The Economist in the Kindle app, then I could still get it on my Kindle.
I think our jobs are threatened not because the LLMs will be much better than us, but because dirt cheap tooling will be developed on top of them that will make things which are “good enough” and are a fraction of the price.

I think outstanding software will still require well-paid, competent people orchestrating and developing a lot of complex systems for a while yet… But there’s a ton of bad software out there that will be able to be maintained for far less, and I suspect a lot of companies will be drawn to creating cookie cutter products generated by LLMs.

Just as people have turned to stores and blogs generated on templated systems, I think all of that and more will continue but with even more of it handled by LLM-based tooling.

I don’t think it’ll be next week, but I suspect it’ll be less than 10 years.

Some people expect that’ll lead to more software existing which will inevitably require more develops to oversee, but if that’s the case, I suspect they will be paid a lot less. I also expect that once AI tools are sophisticated enough to do this, they will largely make that level of oversight redundant.

Soon they could potentially patch the bugs in the software they generate by watching Sentry or something. Just automatically start trying solutions and running fuzz tests. It would be way cheaper than a human being and it would never need to stop working.
That doesn't help, the issue is these things are no longer going to be published on the Kindle platform at all.
Why haven’t you invested in a open source alternative that doesn’t limit your choices?
It's OK, you simply lack imagination.

Ok course we keep humanizing these thoughts, while we're creating more capable digital aliens every day. Then one day we'll act all surprised for a few minutes when we've created super powered digital aliens that act nothing like we expect, because the only intelligence we see is our own.
No, it has drastically less memory requirements. It's very similar to my perl compiler, and even in non-optimizing mode it uses much less memory. In optimizing mode it's almost the same as this one. Just ~20 years older.
I thought that if you adjust for pregancy/childcare, in many parts of the developed world women actually make more money than men on average.
It's anything but. Video is more engaging than text. Video hosting is expensive. No one's making tens of thousands a month from their blog (or by convincing people to buy merch based on their blog).
Oh to be clear, I'm including "VP responsible gets a bonus". I certainly don't mean necessarily a good reason for the rest of us!
One thought that came to mind when the author mentioned that GPT-4 seemed to want to use A* was that maybe the problem statement was not formed in a way that would get the best response. I'm not entirely sure if this type of back and forth would be useful, but just struck me as interesting to try.

I put the following prompt into ChatGPT (no GPT-4 access for me yet):

*A problem statement is given as follows:

An agent needs to find the best path on a 10x10 tile grid from their current location to a target location. They have a limited movement range of 5 points. Regular tiles cost 1 point to move through, water tiles cost 2 points to move through. Fire tiles cost 1 point to move through, but they should avoid pathing through them even if it means taking a longer path to their destination (provided the path is still within their limited movement range)

Please point out any parts of the problem statement that require clarification.*

Which returned the following response:

Based on the given problem statement, some potential areas that may require clarification are:

Current location and target location: It is not clear if the current location and the target location are fixed or if they change with each problem instance. If they are fixed, it should be mentioned explicitly. If they are not fixed, it should be specified how they are generated for each problem instance.

Movement range: It is not specified whether the agent's movement range is circular or square. If it is circular, it means that the agent can move to any tile that is within a distance of 5 from its current location. If it is square, it means that the agent can move to any tile that is within a range of 5 tiles in both the horizontal and vertical directions. The shape of the movement range needs to be specified.

Fire tiles: The problem statement mentions that the agent should avoid pathing through fire tiles even if it means taking a longer path to their destination, but it is not clear how the agent knows which tiles are fire tiles. It should be specified how the agent perceives and distinguishes fire tiles from regular tiles.

Tile costs: The problem statement mentions that regular tiles cost 1 point and water tiles cost 2 points, but it is not specified what happens if the agent moves diagonally. It should be specified whether diagonal moves are allowed and how much they cost.

Objective function: It is not specified how the "best path" is defined. It should be mentioned whether the objective is to find the shortest path or the path that minimizes some other cost function (e.g., total cost of the path).
Rank and file employees are neither in a position (vantage point, perspective), nor have the judgment (should a new grad have equal “say” to someone more experienced) to make big strategic decisions.

One “solution” is to make big decisions by committee / vote, but then there’s no accountability or responsibility.

If workers want to control their destiny they should buy the company so they have real skin in the game, not tell shareholders/owners that they know what’s best…
What would an "open source alternative" to The Economist look like exactly?
There was also the Samsung Galaxy Player. Discontinued long ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Player
The problem isn't putting the content onto the device, that's very easy to do. The problem is that the content isn't being published in any offline-viewable formats anymore, so there's nothing to transfer.
Do you also agree that government should not enforce if I borrow your bike while you are not using it if I return it? If not how is that different? You still have the bike and you werent using it while I borrowed it - you just didn’t know I was borrowing it
Yep: the biggest remaining weakness is that it's incapable of thinking deeply and iteratively. This is an architectural limitation (lack of reflectivity), but to fix it will probably usher in the singularity, so maybe we should be glad for it.

I suspect if you poked GPT-4 just right (starting with a detailed design/analysis phase?) it could find a rhetorical path through the problem that resulted in a correct algorithm on the other end. The challenge is that it can't find a path like that on its own.

Op: Can you get it to write your algorithm for this problem if you describe it in detail, as-is?

I suspect the difficulty here is just finding a socratic part to that description, which would tend to be rare in the training material. Most online material explains what and how, not why; more importantly, it doesn't tend to explain why first.
GPT-4 Digits of 𝜋
Have you seen the "Example of Chemical Compound Similarity and Purchase Tool Use" prompt in the "GPT-4 System Card" document? [1]

It's an interesting format that could be adapted for things like internet or bank access today - you would just need to write the wrapper.

[1] https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4-system-card.pdf