skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While working at Netflix this was a real bummer.

I had whole home VPN configured and I couldn't access NFLX streaming content from the house. Getting Netflix traffic to bypass the VPN is incredibly difficult without hacking the client side code to have it update the bypass rules on-demand in response to the client side JSON payloads - or hook into DNS resolution and do VPN bypassing there based on a regeular expression of the origin and the returned records.

The way NFLX works under the hood, from the client's perspective, is that it makes an initial request to a service hosted in AWS. That service stitches together the list-of-lists on the home page. Then you select a film to watch, it again reaches out to a service hosted in AWS to ask to stream the content. This is really straightforward to get working with whole home VPN, you just bypass the VPN for those origins (using DNS queries to get the IP blocks) and you are golden. A little cron job could keep that IP bypass list fresh and it worked well enough to get through the UI.

But then the AWS service responds with a list of streams you are licensed to watch and URLs that point to their location. Those URLs point to Netflix's OpenConnect CDN hosts. Nearly every time I went to stream, I'd pull a different origin for the content and that would route back through the VPN. The list wasn't stable, so I couldn't compile a comprehensive list of origins to route around the VPN with.

So NFLX blocks VPNs to protect their licenses, which I understand. But their architecture made it impossible for me to allow their service to bypass my VPN. So any device I wanted/needed to use NFLX on had to have a direct connection to the internet.
Changing the system prompt is not going to get you banned, as it's something OpenAI encourages people to do when making API calls to gpt-3.5-turbo. [0]

[0]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/chat/introduction
It's referred to as distillation in the literature in separate sub-fields (e.g. LRspeech, a paper about low-resource speech-to-text & text-to-speech from Microsoft Research, 2020, uses datasets generated by a large model to train a small one and refers to this as knowledge distillation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.03687 )
> Recruit people to a new project that has a selection bias towards under-performers (or some other characteristic you want to weed-out)

More than under-performers, I think these kind of projects tend to attract those with shiny object syndrome or political ambitions.
The Dawn of Rigour in the Art of Programming
It’s worth comparing these to how a human would respond to the same request. “I’d like to write a job description” would get “okay, what will they be doing?” or something. Instead we just get a best attempt at making shit up.
Oh, come on. The only reason you have not destroyed our economy with sanctions yet is because your oil companies have deep investments in our oil industry in western parts of the country. Additionally we cover about 50% of the world's uranium supply. Even before the war started, our khan put more than 300 people in the ground to preserve his rule (many of them random women and children; and that's according to official sources whom everyone considers to be seriously biased), and your politicians looked the other way because it didn't tip the scales far enough.
Considering Chomsky's work in linguistics, I was disappointed by that piece.
Judaism does not have a notion of going to hell the way modern day Christianity espouses
Ask HN: Why can’t I have instant noodles?
My stomach can’t tolerate it. I used to eat them ‘daily-ish’ in bachelor times. I plan to balance out the sodium intake with pt.

The ramen industry has become big and there are now so many new brands and flavors I want to try.
I don't share the view that all that is holding us back from creating AGI is a definition. Btw., that synthetic genome is a long way from making even something like an little nematode.

I rather think AGI "idealists" (maybe there is a better word) will forever hold out (any) algorithmic advances as a sign of the immanent creation of AGI proper.
I wouldn't say "a lot", but he did some. He never said he would never do VPN ads, he said he would not do it using the false advertisement talking points. For example, when speaking of geo-block bypassing, he alway mention this probably goes against the terms of services of most streaming services.
The spectral properties of the noise does matter a bit (see the stable diffusion offset noise issue for example) but

> These variations in the coarseness of noise pattern will each obscure patterns of the same coarseness.

is not accurate. During the forward noise process the high frequency information is obscured first, and the coarse information last. During the reverse process, the neural net learns to denoise the coarse visual elements first, and adds high frequency details at the end. With the original clip guided diffusion notebook you can skip the last 10% of the denoising steps to get a smoother image.

This is also the root cause of the noise offset problem (the coarse information is not completely obscured by the forward process)
Out of curiosity I scrubbed through his 20 latest videos and three of them had NordVPN segments. To be fair on him though, he "only" promotes it as a way to get around geo restrictions when travelling the world. Accessing UK websites for example. If I remember his original video, it was more a complaint about people promoting VPN as "more secure" against hackers and such.
This is the most fundamental problem. In order to justify a "tech" P/E multiple, it has to be the case that exponential growth in the future is justified. For any MAMA (Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet) company, this is almost certainly impossible. This means it is time to transition to being a boring, reliable stock, probably with a substantial dividend. I'm not sure Zuckerberg is ready to do that.
Makes sense, but my point was that I've never even seen an option to buy one kind of ethernet cable or other. Is it safe to assume the $15 StarTech cables I buy from Newegg are unshielded? And does the "TP" stand for "Twisted Pair"?
It really solved the problem. Last email I got from them was "Notification: Change of email address notification"
On Ars? I can’t see it anywhere.
I don't think Zuck particularly cares about the next big thing. As the debacle with Apple shows, there are existential risks here and now, not in some sort of FOMO

Despite appearances, if the metaverse gambit in the current episode made any sense it was mostly as a defensive move: To obtain control over a device so that you can datamine at will and perpetuate your business model irrespective of what other major actors might come up with.

Think about it. If stars (you have little control over) align, device owners can flip a privacy switch here, introduce a policy there and annihilate your business.

To paraphrase Ballmer: Devices, devices, devices
Nobody is rejecting rational thought. Most of your values are innate and most of the rest is socialization. This is not an "internet meme", it's the consensus view since approximately the time of Plato.
Matching logits is merely a special case of knowledge distillation. See section 2.1 https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02531
You do realize that they managed to build artificial scarcity in virtual worlds through licenses, DMCA, NFTs? And morality or progress are not given under any circumstances.
Not too surprising as the hiring people industrial complex that exists some places seem to exist / operate for it's own purposes sometimes.

It's not that way everywhere but man when you run into it, crazy.
now we simply trade startups as financial products

Suddenly it strikes me that "startups" could fill a similar finance niche in this decade as "subprime mortgages" (of mortgage backed securities) once did.

Only, the risk of subprime mortgages is knowable if you dig, whereas the risk of a startup is unknowable.

This might be very attractive if you're a financier trying to create the illusion of high-grade securities.
Interesting, but many modern websites are quite hostile to such access. This was the first story when I checked it a few seconds ago:

> 35153534: U.S. Is Said to Open Investigation Into Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

> Summary:

> Please enable JS and disable your ad blocker to see this article. Use the weekly Newsquiz to test your knowledge of stories you saw on CNN.com. Today's Daily Discussion includes questions and answers about CNN's coverage of this week's featured news stories. Click here for the questions and Answers section of the post. Back to the page you came from with the newsquiz. You must be logged in to view the page.

> Key Phrases:

> [ad blocker] [disablejs] [newsquiz] [weekly newsquiz]
Every VPN worth its salt is located in a similar country, as it's critical for a VPN to operate out of a jurisdiction that does not require log retention for a certain period of time nor cooperates with Five Eyes law enforcement.
But do they? It seems to me that most of the volume(and people) are on these centralized sites.
The MPAA has been doing this for a while now. It's called DRM.
>call out BS when you hear it

I think I just did, no?
This is a great take on Meta -- in some ways there's an element of macro justice or a return to form in tech and innovation with this shift.
Officers are liable as managers basically. Same as directors. Similar to fiduciary duty.
Formal languages / parsing theory is one of the most difficult for me to understand. No other theory feels so easy to get decent results in practice, yet so obscure in theory.

I have experience in writing parsers and small langs but whenever I have to approach all those theories behind parsers and grammar then Im lost

I dont understand why would you want to approach those problems in such a way, or at least describe it in such a way that feels so out of touch with programming

This theory is so unintuitive damn

Idk maybe ive hurt myself by starting with those topics by practice instead of theory, but who knows?
Better to use a non-registerable TLD for things like this I guess :)
Six hundred million barrels is one week's worth of global oil production. Spread over 30 years.

It's OK to be concerned about the future -- hell, I am. But a lot of hopelessness these days is an the after-effect of doomscrolling through headlines and fitting them into our current biases.

Training your brain to let every contra-worldview headline release T H E B A D C H E M I C A L S is a tough way to get through life.
What are OTC crypto derivates? How do they work?
I don't really want to read (or "write") a bunch of impersonal junk written by AI.

Can we skip this phase of technology?

Edit: Maybe this will inspire the next wave of tech burnouts turned mushroom farmers
Show HN: Use AI to detect malicious URLs
The idea was fairly natural. I suppose having done it successfully is what is interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35113781

> Perhaps we will provide feedback to open source Llama using ChatGPT. The cost to adjust the model is presumably what's hard?

What I am so impressed by is that the state of the art is so democratic now. All the top AI posts on HN are things that I was able to get to myself days before the were posted here. This must mean either that the true SOTA is way ahead of what we see or that anyone can hit the current SOTA. Both are very exciting developments!
Simple answer to this: "Hi, I am company X's AI, I'd like to get to know you because we will be working together here and there <welcome message>."

Basically endource the AI and be clear that it is the thing welcoming you. If you hide the fact an AI is pumping out an automated email it just comes across as if the business thinks of you as a drone.
Ex-employee of Golden Frog GmbH here (makers of VyprVPN). Golden Frog nor VyprVPN ever sold any of its customer information in my time there. Based on my conversations with current employees, they still do not.

Not all VPN providers sell data (DNS or otherwise). Some operate for privacy-driven reasons and actively seek to be good stewards for their customers.
"Chromium is a free and open-source web browser project, mainly developed and maintained by Google."
As long as people still realise that regardless of whether they pay with cash in an envelope or directions to the end of a rainbow, if they connect with their own IP to mullvad’s servers and there’s some compromise of these promises (court order, etc), it’s trivial to be owned.
Good luck getting anyone to do any work while they wait for the news on whether they're axed over the next 1-2 months (or up to the end of the year!). These trickling layoffs absolutely kill morale. Do it all at once, seriously.
Something I find suspect is how spending hundreds of millions is profitable unless you're raking in many times that amount per year.

I suspect they're guarding massive profits as opposed to advocating for patient access and choice
Impossible, despite collapsing every 7-10 years against every imaginable mitigation, this the best system we've got.
A crosswalk button that does nothing is a placebo even if that wasn't the original intent.

The elevator button is more complicated but I think the typical uselessness combined with misleading label is enough to qualify. The reason it exists isn't placebo, but the way it's set up makes it a placebo, even if it's via negligence.
"I was so happy when that company got acquired and the new company CEO showed up and announced that first level managers and below were all safe from layoffs, everyone above that was on a case by case basis, and "all executive staff were let go this morning, I saw no reason to keep those jokers around"."

You are being manipulated. No. The previous executives are not "jokers" - they made massive profits selling shares. They are being let go because, after taking their massive profits, the new company will soon fire the rest of staff - and that is hard.
If it's built from content on the web, how can it avoid doing so?
I don't disagree with anything you've said here, but I can't help but feel this reads like a monologue from a supervillain who feels righteous in burning the world down because they believe something greater will rise from the ashes.
Congrats on the launch. This seems very compelling. For anyone asking "Why can't GitHub just do this?", (1) never underestimate an extremely smart and motivated team, and (2) competition is critical and valuable.

Let's celebrate when teams build products to fill big needs, instead of dismissing things because of a potential threat from a big company. If we dismiss new things, then we'll just end up in a world where big companies get complacent and devs get less new stuff. (I know many GitHubbers, and they love seeing new stuff and are cheering for it because they can't do everything.)
The risk was not having insured themselves beyond what FDIC was providing. I can’t wait until my insurer covers hundreds of multiples above the coverage I have!
It fully depends on whether the IP address associated with your VPN tunnel has tripped their automated detection systems or managed to land on a public blacklist like Project Honeypot. But they do actively track and block VPN traffic.
Let's extend the metaphor:

if the execs are pilots, and the employees are passengers, then having parachutes for the pilots but not the employees constitutes a moral hazard.
Trying again, much better result this time:

> 35153620: The Dawn of Rigour in the Art of Programming

> Summary:

> Donald Knuth is Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University. Indranath Sengupta and Sudhir Rao engage him in a wide-ranging conversation, starting from his earliest days to the present. Knuth’s own contributions to the world of computing too, have similarly been hailed by experts as seminal and path-breaking, and have stood the stringent test of time. It is perhaps not surprising that computer scientists are the major beneficiaries of mathematical rigour.

> Key Phrases:

> [computer programming] [mathematical] [rigour] [stanford university]
Like many things in life, some door close buttons work, some not.
How expensive do you imagine collecting human feedback data is compared to the cost of doing the original language modelling training?
> Banks actually make more money during high interest environment

SVB was not in a position to capitalize on raising rates. All their money was stuck in those low rate bonds and mbs's. If they want to get in on those higher rates they would need their deposits to increase, but they have been and will continue to decrease. They tried to raise money, no one gave them any because their book was underwater.
Heck, let's go all the way with the metaphors. Execute, reap.
At least somebody is so my something about the blatant smuggling issues.
The context is that Sony claims to be afraid Microsoft's acquisition of ActiBlizz would make Call of Duty Xbox-exclusive. Sony's fears would be realised if Microsoft made CoD officially Xbox-exclusive, even if there was a community-maintained workaround which would make it technically possible for IT people to play CoD on PlayStation.

The way Microsoft is treating Minecraft with respect to Linux and macOS would be an example of what Sony is afraid of, which goes against my parent comment's claim that the article "ignore[s] Minecraft that not only continues to get support on other platforms but other platforms also get any of the spinoffs"; I claim that Minecraft is a perfect example of the kind of thing Sony should be afraid of.
Here's a quick video breakdown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_1mRWthhek

In short, I used ControlNet and inpainting models in Img2Img to replace the armor and wings. The prompts were generally something like "a photo of a pregnant woman wearing (glowing:.5) gold intricate filigree armor, holding a glowing rapier in front of her, fantasy armor, metal armor..." The ControlNet 'modes' I used were depth, canny, and HED, depending on how much detail I wanted to keep.

Usually generating at 512xWhatever is still your best bet and then upscaling after, but there were pieces I was able to do high resolutions for from the start. That's the biggest issue with making the workflow fast.

From there it's just usual Photoshop type compositing but far easier as it mostly lines up with perfect lighting.
Netflix works just fine through VPN - it just limits the offerings. If I disable VPN I additionally get local-to-the-country offerings, on top of the "through VPN" ones.
The First Million Players That Weren’t in Azeroth Anymore
I think part of it is general laypeople (like myself) think Archegos and other failures we've heard about are in the past. I wonder if the reality is that Credit Suisse (or other banks) still hold onto whatever losses resulted from those failures and then try various things to shore up/mitigate those losses as a business should do. When they've exhausted those various methods and/or the value of other assets (securities, bonds, bundles of loans aka MBS, etc.) have gone down dramatically then their balance sheet is a mess. There could be a point of no-return somewhere along the line if they've been horribly mis-managed and taking on or permitting customers to take on too much risk. That point of no-return might mean contagion to other banks/financial firms.
About as good as musk Tweeting that phone calls are better than tweets for actually connecting with some.
Interesting. Do you have a source for further reading?
> But other FAANGS are not hiring.

They are if you’re talented enough.
Marvel demands names of Reddit and Google users who leanted Ant-Man dialogue
I used to live in the Soviet Union so I am well aware of its failings. Rather I mean that if a one-man shop makes all the money in the world then that can be also problematic. Employing people for good wages and good conditions has a holistic benefit to society in that it enables more people to fulfil their needs and have space for children.
Piles of impersonal junk created by humans at work. People lope through life, especially work life, a lot. If you are doing repetitive welcome emails they are almost guaranteed to be impersonal, I don't think anyone could rinse and repeat personalized emails for hundreds of people without burning out.
I don't think it's only a matter of partisans being louder, it's that partisanship is easier. Seeing only one side of an issue is always easier, in the same way that empathizing with only one of two (or more) sides of a dispute is much easier.
Same with paper vehicle titles, and metal license plates.

Times can and should change.
Yea, there are tons of public data to train on. Copilot's under fire right now: https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/, but we make sure we only train on permissively licenses because some companies are sensitive to the IP issues here.
I think they count as soft power, but on the energy front, everyone (even Europe itself) completely overestimated how strong it was. Russia very much expected that energy dependency would keep Europe out of the conflict, even if it would put them on a path towards breaking that dependency in the long term. No one seemed to truly expect that the reaction would be so strong that it'd take less than a year to mostly eliminate that dependency.
>If scientific knowledge were hidden in ancient vaults (rather than hidden in inconvenient pay-for-access journals), at least then people would try to get into the vaults. They'd be desperate to learn science. Especially when they saw the power that Eighth Level Physicists could wield, and were told that they weren't allowed to know the explanation.

> [...]

>If the Great Secret of Natural Selection, passed down from Darwin Who Is Not Forgotten, was only ever imparted to you after you paid $2000 and went through a ceremony involving torches and robes and masks and sacrificing an ox, then when you were shown the fossils, and shown the optic cable going through the retina under a microscope, and finally told the Truth, you would say "That's the most brilliant thing ever!" and be satisfied. After that, if some other cult tried to tell you it was actually a bearded man in the sky 6000 years ago, you'd laugh like hell.

>And you know, it might actually be more fun to do things that way. Especially if the initiation required you to put together some of the evidence for yourself—together, or with classmates—before you could tell your Science Sensei you were ready to advance to the next level. It wouldn't be efficient, sure, but it would be fun.

>[...]

>And no, I'm not seriously proposing that we try to reverse the last five hundred years of openness and classify all the science secret.

~ Eliezer Yudkowsky, https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6BFkmEgre7uwhDxDR/p/3diLhMELXxM8...

That's really all there is to Yudkowsky's persona of occultism at the end of the day. It's an intentional affectation.
> That tactic is not a new one; the reason most computer keyboards still have a "Windows logo" key is because, many years ago, Microsoft mandated the presence of that key, with that trademarked logo, in its certification standards.

Apropos of nothing - save for this comment - is there a reason why Microsoft hasn't switched the primary modifier for keyboard shortcuts to the Windows key? Apple created the Command key to get around having to use Control, long before NeXT and its UNIX roots were even a consideration.

Is the only reason a switch hasn't happened down to 40+ years of inertia?
If you don't want to look at it, why buy it in the first place? I mean, anybody needs to look at it, or all this stuff makes no sense...
I'm the creator of T.LY URL Shortener and malicious URLs are a constant battle. I decided to take all I've learned around detecting malicious urls and build a simple API using AI to score URLs (0-100) based on hundreds of factors. My goal is to help protect users from malicious links.
The idea that pressing the door-close button would constitute "abuse" is laughable. If it's actually a self-destruct button by design, it should be locked out by default.