skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In an example [1] referenced in the article, ChatGPT (maybe v3.5) did a poor job of answering the following question.

Boll is a new company founded by three recent MBAs. The company plans to buy used automobiles at auctions and then sell them at four times the purchase price direct to consumers (i.e., a car that is purchased for $1,000 would be sold at $4000). Based on an analysis of similar companies, the owners of the company expect to turn their inventory 1.5 times per year. To achieve an annual revenue of $3,000,000, how much inventory, expressed in dollars, should the company expect its operation to require?

How does GPT4 fare?

------

Let's break down the problem step by step.

The company wants to achieve an annual revenue of $3,000,000.
They plan to sell cars at 4 times the purchase price.
They expect to turn their inventory 1.5 times per year.
First, we need to find out how much revenue they will generate per inventory turnover. To do this, we'll divide the annual revenue by the expected number of inventory turnovers per year:

Annual revenue / Inventory turnover rate = Revenue per inventory turnover
$3,000,000 / 1.5 = $2,000,000

Now, we know that they plan to sell the cars at 4 times the purchase price. So, we need to find out the purchase price of the cars that will generate $2,000,000 in revenue per inventory turnover:

Revenue per inventory turnover / Markup factor = Purchase price of cars
$2,000,000 / 4 = $500,000

Therefore, Boll should expect its operation to require $500,000 worth of inventory to achieve an annual revenue of $3,000,000.

------

That V4 is able to do this is in itself just as important as everything said in the article. We live in interesting times.

[1]: https://aiguide.substack.com/p/did-chatgpt-really-pass-gradu...
This is why, at PC Pro magazine, we did a cover CD feature we called the Essential Collection, with a nod to Pete Tong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Selection

It was a collation of the various PD, freeware, shareware and FOSS apps that we normally added to a new PC.

Nowadays you can just use Ninite, of course.

https://ninite.com/

What American software houses didn't understand was that in the days of dialup, Europeans paid for ALL phone calls. Including local calls. We paid by the minute for dial-up internet. Downloading a new web browser could cost £20 or something, and gods help you if someone picked up an extension phone and disconnected you -- 1990s browsers could not resume, so you had to start again.

So we put all that stuff on the CD: Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView, WinAmp, all sorts.

Some readers bought the mag just for the CD, to save hours of downloaded updates. Field engineers carried the latest CD with them to update customers' machines.

We always had the latest Internet Explorer on it. All Windows >=98 users needed that, as it updated bits of your OS too.

We wanted Netscape too, for balance. They wouldn't let us. In the end, the editor invited me onto a transatlantic phone call to explain why.

The Netscape execs wanted the tracking info on who downloaded it, from where. They couldn't understand why so few Europeans downloaded Netscape. I told them: it's because it costs us money.

"No, no, you don't understand. It's on the innernet."

(That is how the American English pronunciation of "internet" sounds to a Brit. The inner-net.)

"Yes, but we pay to connect."

"No, you don't get it," Netscape patronisingly told me. "Once you're online, you're not paying any more. It doesn't matter if it takes hours. It's a free download."

"No," I told them, "YOU don't understand. We pay for internet access."

"Sure, but it's unmetered."

"No, it isn't. That's just in the USA. Here, we pay by the minute."

"What? No it isn't! You don't have to dial us! You don't dial America! It's not a bulletin board! It's the innernet! It's a local call!"

"No, YOU do not understand. We pay for local calls. Local calls in the rest of the world are metered. We pay by the minute for internet access."

"OMG, what? That can't be right! Local calls are free!"

"Only in America. Here they are metered. We pay by the minute for internet access. Everyone does. So downloading your browser costs a lot of money. That's why we put IE on our cover disks. It saves readers a big paid download."

They were stunned. They had no idea. This was why MS owned web access in Europe.

It had never occurred to them that US toll charges were not a universal.
Sadly, Google's track record makes this more likely than not.
Is there a “natural” interest rate that currency would have w/o central bank intervention?
> I think the quest for growth at the societal level can be reduced to the quest for recognition and praise at the individual level.

Ah I think this is where we fundamentally disagree. I think creative expression, recognition, and praise can all exist in a stable state society. Specifically, recognition is not universally a competition where we must outdo each other.

Regardless, I agree that GPT isn’t going to liberate anyone. There are ways these technologies could improve our lives, but we’re not pursuing those paths.
I'm still waiting for Hacker News to band together and simply start building an open model that does not require a corporate daddy like OpenAI, Microsoft, Baidu, Google, or anyone else. These models have no place being owned by corporations. The services that use these models are certainly up for grabs, but the models should be open. Who is trying to rally the community to this cause?
Yeah but they aren't using it for the same stuff that they would use a lawyer who got the same result on the bar exam. I think it is fair to say that LLMs have an unfair advantage over humans on these exams, and we should take that into account when trying to assess them.
You've never heard anyone say the main - and very popular - counter argument? (which is correct IMO)

Seems disingenuous.
Even with hindsight , if you assume the massive lock down happens, we have no idea what happens to the economy in the initial months without the stimulus.

Politically, people can disagree with the lockdown, or later stimulus checks and later rounds of PPP.

But I have trouble critiquing the initial response in quickly getting money into the economy.
He'd probably prefer that Google just not switch his account based on the circumstantial evidence (as such) of accessing his account from Spain.
Well, you do have all those French-speaking people going out and about. And all those moose. The UK would have none of that, it would be untidy :)
So, the future is a command-line that uses natural language instead of a shell with commands one must learn separately from one's own language?

OK, but what about shell scripting? Will thus NL CLI be scriptable, or will we still want POSIX shell, bash, etc. for that sort of work?
try visiting https://bard.google.com
Just the other day ChatGPT flubbed a question I asked because of spermaceti. My girlfriend and I were talking about the economics of whale oil so I asked it how much oil you'd get from a typical sperm whale, and it gave me how much spermaceti it produces and entirely ignored the bulk of the (less valuable) oil rendered from its fat.
When it comes to meeting new people who present themselves as knowledgeable, I have a philosophy. I believe in giving them enough rope to hang themselves or parade themselves, especially in situations like screening interviews where people tend to over-inflate their resumes. This is particularly true when a person's career progression seems out of sync with what you would normally expect for the role they're being hired for.

To gauge their actual knowledge, I go through their resume and pick out key pieces of their technology stack. Then, I have them explain how it works, how it interacts with other components, etc. This works even better if it's a technology stack I'm familiar with, since I'm aware of the competitors within that space and can find a better tool to use next time around.

To catch people who are lying or exaggerating their experience, I ask them to reiterate a tech stack that's not DNS (which is often overplayed) or a familiar tech stack that I can quiz them on. By doing this, I can test their knowledge both in print and in their own words. I look for people who can both talk the talk and walk the walk, rather than just talk a good game.

My goal is to hire people who are considered peers or adjacent to my current team, rather than those who are too junior to onboard quickly. Unfortunately, sometimes someone slips through the cracks and the team regrets it.

Likewise, when in a coding interview, most people aren't 100% code perfect on the whiteboard, so I don't require them to be exact. When I first learned how to code out of the back of a Compute! magazine, I was reading it... learning how BASIC in magazine print turned into BASIC the instructional code interpreted by a computing machine. Therefore, most all who code can read that or even Pseudocode down to the level that are able to reiterate the logic and function which is something that ChatGPT doesn't even have correct (how often does it produce buggy examples?)

But if a person can show me how their logic is processing by talking it through with descriptions - and they can do the same on shared desktop remote interviews as well, and I am able to understand when I question them or add in new features I ask for and can confidently interpret their answer, then I feel confident enough that with google, they will likely be successful building a solution just on rote description.

A person does not need to get my solution, they need to get a solution that works to solve the problem.
Yes, all the problems are on very complicated SPA type sites. You know, like Google Docs/Drive, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram.
Oh good, another wait list. Pass.
Headlines predicting what will happen in the future invariably predict what won't happen.
How long does it usually take?
If it is simply pricing power then... why now?

If companies could raise prices 20% all along, why did they wait till now to do so?

Why not in 2019?
Let's say cheap debt isn't available and house prices drop to 30% of their current value. According to the first google result I find, average house price in the US is slightly over 400k, so 30% of that would be 120k. How many people do you reckon have 120k in savings available? I'm willing to bet it would be a lot less than the amount of people that can currently get a mortgage.
“Font rendering” is a different thing than “what fonts you have.” Font rendering is about how fonts are drawn to the screen. The trick is to draw some words to a <canvas> and then pixel-peep the result. Different OSes and browsers use different font renderers and font hinting logic; fonts will even render differently on a different-DPI screen.
At the time it's probably the level that covers most people's deposits. It's pretty rare for a person to have >250k in pure savings deposits so setting it at that level protects most people lessening the pressure causing bank runs. It doesn't work so well for banks like SVB where a few huge businesses make up a majority of their deposits.

250k probably still covers 90+% of people in the US.
Linux VGEM Driver Rewritten in Rust Sent Out for Review
There is a learning tax at the beginning, for sure, but this is a fixed cost. We experience that once this first hump is passed, the code and output quality is higher, and the cloud resource cost decreases significantly.

Now the challenge is to hire new developers that are not familiar with Rust; it would take a month or so for them to be productive (assuming robust internal code practice). But, well worthwhile in our opinion, as least for greenfield application/services.

(We are coming from Java / nodejs/TS)
Reading comments here: has anyone got access yet?
You could simply roll out per language, rather than per country in that case, since language is by its very nature self-selecting.
Closest match I could find https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/real-estate/chatgpt-in...
30-year fixed rate mortgages would still exist without federal government support, just like 30-year fixed rate corporate bonds. But interest rates would be higher, and there might be stricter limits on LTV ratio or PMI.
If you have a few examples you can use an already trained encoder (like CLIP image encoder) and train a SVM on the embeddings, no need to train a neural network.
I think people completely lost interest in the Turing test as soon as it looked like something might actually be able to pass it.
Probably the most fundamental problem of ChatGPT is that it refuses (or is even unable) to admit, "I don't know".
It's also the only one out of the two that is part of the Fed's mandate. Excessive pricing power of corporations is the domain of the FTC. To say they have been ineffective at addressing that would be an understatement, but no conspiracy there.

Whan I put my tinfoil hat on I think that they bailed out the tech industry as returning the favor for the years of cooperation censoring opinions.the government doesn't like.
Looking forward to a new API to build with.
That’s why they locked you out. You are a paying user who needs a good product. And You are not one of those google fans who dishes out money to google for things you don’t need. So you will get the product once it comes out of beta.
Rokits have had lots of quality issues, they seem to fail fairly often after a few years. They also refresh or adjust the product line fairly often (?)

I can't see them taking that NS10 place (20+ years in production).
U.S. cases of a deadly fungus nearly doubled in recent years
Well, there's the new GPT-Neo models and BLOOM models, and you can spin them up with something like this: https://github.com/togethercomputer/OpenChatKit
Low interest rates make it harder to pay cash. So, the mortgage industry has been in this weird loop where you have to use it, even if you could have afforded a house without it.

In two extremes: Imagine a market with 20% interest rates. You could just save money instead of holding the loan for 5 years, and then pay cash. Fewer people would have mortgages.

Imagine 0.1% fixed, interest-only loans. Financing a house with that would cost about 1/200th as much as in the 20% environment, so prices would increase by something like 200x.

We are coming out of ~2% rates. That means houses should cost a bit under 10x more than they would at 20%. If you put 20% down, you could probably have purchased outright in the other environment.

(This ignores the possibility of new construction, since I live in California, and that’s more realistic than saying people will be allowed to build housing to take advantage of low mortgage rate arbitrage).
Bard: Google's rival to ChatGPT launches for over-18s
There's another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35246303 with google as the submission link
A lot of companies don't even pretend to do COLA raises anymore. Purely performance based raises.

"Your pay is not tied to any cost of living index."

"Our costs have gone up so we're raising our prices."

Sigh
HN seldom bands together to do anything but quip at things, or discuss how it should have been done better. Oh, wait.
The federal reserve created 20% of all money ever created in the first year of the pandemic [1][2]. Which is absolutely mind blowing to me. The total cost of Covid stimulus was over 5 trillion dollars.

That doesn’t mean all individuals are well off, but there is no doubt that the economy is flush with extra cash. And since the number of physical goods had not changed, that meant inflation. Which honestly nullified any advantage people got from stimulus (which were temporary).

[1] https://www.cityam.com/almost-a-fifth-of-all-us-dollars-were...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM1NS
Imagine rent around 1000-1500 EUR, 42% taxes and inflation making basic food prices and energy go up 100-200% and you suddenly live paycheck to paycheck with no social life and no ability to own home. It's much better to live in e.g. Dubai/Romania (0% tax) or Poland (low tax) and work remotely for German companies as a consultant than to move to Germany.
But that would be silly and it would not be politically motivated
I'll play with it, but this is exactly why I won't be depending on it for anything. Can't trust that Google isn't going to drop Bard if it isn't an immediate and roaring success.
Just realized that this is yet another example of the category of "imperfect measurement" that HN likes to talk about so much -- Goodhart's law and such.

The bar exam is a proxy for actually being a competent lawyer. But it's an imperfect proxy. It seems obvious that it will be possible for a computer program to target getting good on the bar exam, and be good at the bar exam without being a competent lawyer. It may also be possible for a human to? But hard enough that it's still a reasonable proxy when it's humans?
>It’s grounded in Google's understanding of quality information.

I almost spit my coffee reading that, seeing what Google's search results have become.
This isn’t folding@home. These models need as near to synchronous parameter updates as possible. You need a real facility to do this.
I don't think compression and intelligence can be disentangled in this way.
I meant you are confusing whether such scripts can be blocked and whether it would be effective to do so. That it can not be blocked would require some fundamental or practical obstruction like having to solve the halting problem or whatnot. You said that it can not be blocked because the act of blocking itself makes you identifiable which defeats the purpose, but that is not true, or only true if only you or a few people are blocking the fingerprinting. When enough people block it, then the act of blocking does not make you identifiable or at least to a much smaller extend than not blocking the scripts.

In principle you could build a browser that - to a good approximation, you will, for example, realistically not be able to prevent timing leaks - does not leak any information about the system it is running on, just isolate it from the host system. With more effort you could let details about the host system leak into the browser but not out into the network. Well, some information has to flow from the host system into the browser and out over the network, for example key strokes and mouse movements, otherwise you could not do much with this browser.

So you could still try to fingerprint users by their choice of words, typing patterns and things like that, maybe made a bit harder by filtering out high frequency timing information. But at least one could no longer simply fingerprint the host system. Which would again be a trade-off, your screen resolution is not only good for a few bits of a fingerprint but can also be legitimately used to serve content at a proper resolution.
My own experience is that for coding tasks which are probably very well represented in the training data set, such as generating a react page with some functional buttons, GPT-4 performs perfectly. When coming to more specialized tasks (with probably fewer samples in the data set for just that task), such as creating integration between systems with concurrency handling, it still performs surprisingly good but only “first draft” quality and the generated code contains bugs, misses important aspects and the code does not compile usually on the first try - even when using popular programming languages, popular libraries and effort is put in to describing the problem&expected results.

Based on this, an excellent tool for developers, but not ready to replace them even though it is surprisingly good. For scaffolding tasks that junior programmers do - it could possibly cut down the need for them (in additio to providing valuable assistance to non-scaffolding standard tasks).
The black swan event was the fed driving up treasury rates which made the bank's bonds worthless. Of course, it was dumb of them to assume they would never go up, but clearly many many banks thought it was ok.

I always think of that saying "If you owe someone a thousand dollars, you're in trouble. If you owe someone a million dollars, they're in trouble."

As much as I'd like to see greedy banks burn, the main people who will feel the most pain are the regular joes.
It looks like it also uses a 7th design of the accounts popdown, and only allows one google account. Literally no one at Google understands how accounts work: https://grumpy.website/post/0PU1U2r3v (this was 5 years ago, nothing has changed)
They make ones without curve and etc just look at a catalog…
Show HN: Search Engine API REST
The USD and Euro are managed by central banks much better at monetary policy than random rich people trying to manipulate an asset market (like those for cryptocurrencies) because they have an untreated gambling addiction. The idea that US Dollars are less stable and reliable in terms of price trends over the long term than cryptocurrencies is just ridiculous. Small amounts of inflation is good for the economy. It incentivizes people to put their money stashes back into productive use, instead of just keeping it sealed in a box.
Are you really going to compare a technology like SVG that was supported by IE9 (and lower with a plugin) with one only just supported by the Blink engine May, 2022 in Chrome 101?

For all intents and purposes with regard to web development, fonts have been monochromatic (except for emojis). Any with sufficient knowledge gathered over decades can write/edit an SVG in the editor of their choice, graphical or textual.

How does one edit their own color font? Can you do it in a text editor? Do most font editing programs support it? Or were you speaking of fonts purely as a consumer rather than a producer?
Surprise computer science proof in combinatorics
He'll probably just fund those who do, he alludes to that in the video, says he has money in an account.
My understanding so far is that these deposits are often overburdened. In part due to speculative investments.

From a perspective of someone who understands very little of these matters, it seems like responsibilities are shuffled around and the whole structure is unclear.

There are other ways to solve the problem you describe right? For example credit unions come to mind.

I usually look things up on this site, as it seems to discuss financial matters neutrally and explains them so I can understand them: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creditunion.asp
Ask HN: Will you pay for someone to mentor you in an open source project?
I feel a lot of people would contribute financially to open source projects if they could associate more of their time and energy with the project, by having a human connect.

For example, I would like to pay an open source contributor or donate to the project itself, if they are able to walk me through the code base, help me build knowledge by pointing me to the right docs, mentor me through good first bugs, etc.

I would rather contribute code AND money (rather than just one of them), if I was able to get hold of an existing contributor's time and energy.

Is this something that makes sense? What hurdles do you see in this approach? Will it appear offensive to the maintainers? What if the outcome benefits more than one person, like better documentation for everyone?

Note: I was a GSoC 2011 student and I actually want to give back to the community. But I tend to jump between different, complex projects and I feel that having a guaranteed human connection will keep me motivated to contribute.
I don't believe it.

People think orthogonality is the key attribute for a basis set to do quantum mechanical calculations but doing my PhD I found out that the property you need is "resolution of unity", basically

∫ |x><x| dx = 1

is sufficient; the states can overlap and that's just fine. if quantum states get destroyed by a black hole then the above isn't true and you can't calculate anything in quantum mechanics. If there is a fight between quantum mechanics and classical gravity than quantum mechanics wins. Hawking was on the wrong side of the bet for information loss in a black hole and it is still the wrong side.
Reinforcing negative stereotypes is not beneficial to the Irish minority in England.