skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started a blog on Google Blogger as a way to give back to the PC breakfix community. When I got back into web hosting in 2013, I saw that WordPress had taken over. So I moved it to WordPress, and then one of my posts hit Slashdot [0] and made the front page. That was a first, and was huge for me.

Then in 2015, I had some serious Hackaday envy and so I started another WordPress blog[1] to document my hobby-engineering-related stuff. That took a turn toward amateur radio. I did some fun projects, got a bit of a following.

In August 2021, I actually got to start writing for Hackaday.com, much in part due to the experience/voice that I'd created when writing for my blogs.

I also used that experience/voice to do some writing-for-hire stuff at a well known site for low-end VPSs, and that experience got me in contact with people that landed me my current job, which is the most fantastic job I've ever had.

[0] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/17/180242/surviving-th...

[1] https://miscdotgeek.com
I personally take a more pragmatic approach, though perhaps its "post-modern". How well-architected, tested, groomed, etc my code tends to be is proportional to the confidence the business has in the problem space.

If I have a detailed, firm spec that I know won't change at all, I'd spend some time planning and then build a DRYed up, abstracted, well-tested, etc solution. I know the solution is going to be sticking around for a while, more or less, so it makes sense to devote the effort to build a solid foundation.

If the thing I'm building is squishy, looking for heavy user feedback, will likely be iterated on quickly (i.e., very agile manifesto agile), I won't spend the overhead time for those things. There's a nonzero chance the code ends up in the trashcan, and the most important thing is to ship something and get feedback from real customers. You later go back and clean it up, based on the growing confidence in the permanence of that feature.
Not the ELO of the average kid who spends a year studying chess seriously? It's very difficult to define the average kid without context.

It's been a while since I read a global demographics update, but not all that long ago the mode child would have been living on $2 a day.
It doesn't smell like alcohol but then again I'm not concerned about the smells of booze, I'm concerned about the smells of puke.

Or the inevitable domestic violence, barfights, DUIs, and deaths. Marijuana, by comparison, kinda smells and makes people eat too many oreos.

A tiny amount in the air will -- enough to smell -- will have a negligible impact on you or other bystanders. If you're worried about brain impacts from having to be around people smoking outside than you should be fuckin terrified about breathing in car fumes, off-gassing plastic items, etc.
I'm hitting a redirect loop between bbc.com and bbc.com.uk?
We would expect some vanishingly small fraction. Even at the grandmaster level, they happen (rarely):

https://chess24.com/en/read/news/the-7-most-illegal-chess-mo...
That's a great point!

Honestly this was a quick post I wrote to practice writing and wrote it from my own personal experiences.

I agree with you about research being really open ended, which makes it hard. Several of us have dealt with depression after an experiment we worked on for 2 years abruptly failed.

I disagree about science being more incremental than 50 years ago. I think we tend to read only read the highlights from the past and it makes it feel like everything was revolutionary. There were incremental changes in the past and we have revolutions in the present.

In my field, Drosophila neuroscience, our methods have completely changed between when I started 5 years ago and now. We can now track all joints of a moving fly in 3D. The tools to image neural activity are literally 10x better (in terms of SNR and speed). We have the connectome for (half of) an adult fly brain and complete larval brain connectome, which is changing how we look at these circuits. We have identified all the motor neurons in the ventral nerve cord of the fly.
Nothing tangible, like job offers. I have a couple of sites and each has a blog for my two main areas of interest: tech topics and mechanical stuff. Whenever I struggle to figure something out or compile information to make a decision, I write a blog post about it. This has proven useful several times when I needed to do something, vaguely remembered having done something similar before, and quickly find the details on my own site. Judging by a few comments, it's helped a few others over the years, too.

I also keep wikis on those sites for more interconnected information.
How does the propeller blade get bent?
Click on the image(s) to see video of results
> It may seem eerie to our brains, which process events sequentially, but the history of science is also littered with examples of human biases leading to bad conclusions, such as the Earth-centric model of the solar system.

Slow down. Assuming that time moves in one direction is not comparable to geocentrism.
Originally Ruby had a Blueprints-like UI to connect an event fired by one gizmo to a property of another gizmo. You would right-click a gizmo, select an event, drag a line over to the target gizmo and select a property.

In fact when Ryan first contacted me about the article, he was looking for a screenshot of this UI. Alas, I didn't have anything.

When Microsoft turned Ruby into VB, they abandoned this UI and just kept the form designer with Basic as a scripting language.
"OR" was just my (bad) way to explain it. In plain English:

if isInteger(x) is true, x is definitely a `number`

if isInteger(x) is false, x is unknown/unaltered (it remains `typeof x`)

Current type guards can't express "yes versus maybe", so isInteger cannot be a type guard at all.
Humans make illegal moves too. So much that there's a rule for it--

"Penalty for Illegal Moves The penalty for the first illegal move is to add two minutes to the opponent's time. A second illegal move results in loss of the game.".

https://new.uschess.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/...
Can you present such a claim and your dispute?
What are examples of the much cooler research? Let's post some of those!
I guess that could happen and we will definitely see some people try this. But in the grand scheme of things, it will be exceptionally rare. Most developers can't work outside their developer environment set up by their company, they often rely on internal tools, services hosted on the internal network, stuff like that.
If stackoverflow and google didn't cause this to happen, I don't see how GPT will.
At what point can we just say that understanding “patterns of moves” is understanding chess? It seems you suggest there is more to it, but maybe I am mistaken.
It is to protect you from the others who might turn. They have some kind of responsibility with what their chatbot teaches to humanity.
It's one of those things that's hard to measure unfortunately, but I definitely think it helps.

A lot of it is what you want to be doing though. I like to talk, teach, communicate, advise and coach. Blogging let's me get that across and I think it helps there. I don't know that it would make much difference for pure coding positions though. I have gotten a few offers to do paid blogging, but I really just don't have the time. One post I wrote for Codeship years ago that got picked up here was a compilation of about a years worth of research and experience to compare Elixir and Go.

Definitely increases learning though. One of my teachers in high school told me, "If you really want to learn something, teach it." It's true. In order to publish something or give a talk on it, I go much deeper than I would have for my own uses.

Ego certainly plays a part. I'm much more motivated to keep writing when I'm getting positive feedback on it. Got picked up by HN several times and learned a lot from the conversations, which was great. Brian Krebs retweeted me once, which motivated me to write a 6 part security series* that never got the same level of traction.

Biggest issue for me is that I'm a long form, detailed writer. I know if I actually care about using this stuff for marketing then I'll need to slice the posts into bite sized chunks. Since I mostly write this stuff just to get it to stop bouncing around in my head, I stick with the long form way.

* - https://www.brightball.com/articles/the-time-i-accidentally-...
> I was under the impression that USA healthcare has out of control costs due chronic diseases.

It's an incorrect impression. All health care systems have to deal with chronic diseases. Americans are fat, through they aren't twice as fat as other people, and the UK and Greece are nearly as fat in Europe. US health care costs are out of control because the system is kleptocratic.

> What can any healthcare system possibly do about that.

Its damned job. The healthcare system doesn't get to complain about the existence of sick people, even if people eugenically think that some illness are less deserving than others.
> It is difficult to say that is not impressive due to it being an emergent ability.

I don't know why you think it's an emergent ability.

It's seeing a sequence of moves, and playing the most likely next move (i.e. the most likely next token) given the previous complete move sequences it was trained on. That's the baseline of what an LLM does—not something emergent. Games in online chess databases tend to be of relatively good players. Nobody wants to look up games played by two 800 ELO players.

As an aside, there have been chess programs for years that show you for a given position all of the previous games in its database with the same position and the win outcome % of each move. That's all that's going on here.
If only Intel hadn't cancelled Pmem. Insanely high speed, density to match NVMe, could have changed the way we use computers (or at least powered some killer DB servers)
Not if training is unsupervised. If you've never been explicitly told the rules of game, you can never be 100% sure of all possible illegal moves.
anyway the 3.5 series can't ply chess but gpt-4 certainly can.
Bonus: if you give four-month-olds tiny tastes of the crap shown in the stock picture, they might also avoid allergies to corn starch and hydrogenated vegetable oil.
You can still have syntactically correct moves that are illegal.
I tried to play Othello with ChatGPT in the past (after ChatGPT confidently claimed it could play Othello) but it didn't work (ChatGPT refused to play).

I tried it with this prompt and it works a little bit but produces repeated illegal moves as early as move 4.

Bummer. Perhaps GPT-4 will be more capable.
They're vendoring in each of those projects, though; they could just read the commits.
The "super complex" and "introduces breaking changes all the time" comments are unsubstantiated FUD. Scala has evolved a lot in the last few years, particularly in the area of binary compatibility. It's a wonderful language and I can only recommend others try it. This from a programmer very happy with Scala.
Show HN: pyenv-legacy: Find supported Python version using time of last commit
Better link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/17/world/europe/turkey-finla...
I like scotch on the rocks or with a little water. It as you say, makes the flavor much more interesting.

Too many people cargo-cult drinking and put up a bunch of snobbery. The worst are beer folks who always seem to gravitate towards the most intense IPAs while ignoring the wonderful range of Pilsners and Lagers that are out there.
You got a lol out of me with that one, but I'll take it as a sign that we might be doing a partly reasonable job of mitigating this when it happens.

One classic case from a decade ago:

Ask HN: Can we please slow down the stories about Edward Snowden? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5932645 - June 2013 (155 comments)

e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-06-22

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2013-06-23
Not in my view.

In my view, an "access control" is a mechanism that prevents access to unauthorized people. An advisory page like that is not preventing access, it's merely asking people not to access.

I think I remember that there have been court cases that support this interpretation of the DMCA, but I'm not sure. Now, if that notice page had a login form or only allowed certain IPs to proceed, that would be an access control.
Maybe chess.com players play in a specific way, and there are lot of transcriptions of such games that these LLMs have ingested when they ingested the internet?

I don't know why it worked in this specific case, but based on earlier examples it is more likely that these kind of games were more prevalent in its dataset it was trained on than it being able to play chess in general. It still wasn't perfect, so even these games weren't rigid enough for it to reliably perform valid moves.
Given that, there are two, and only two possibilities:

Either

-my perception of reality is inherently opposed to objective reality

or

-the world, for some reason, is gaslighting me into thinking I ate a sandwich and the objective reality is that I ate a grapefruit.

See, my problem with this "philosophy" that objective reality does not exist is that it enables abusers. Have you ever seen the movie Gaslight? Its a classic. This poor woman lives with an abuser...someone who is committed to making her think that she is crazy. He contradicts everything she does and says, sets up evidence to objectively prove that she only imagined herself doing it, and keeps her under his thumb through those means. In the end of the movie, its revealed that none of the evidence is real and that she is sane. To combat against these types of people, its important to be sure of your own reality and only change if evidence is overwhelmingly pointed in the opposite direction. Even then, question these changes in belief heavily. Otherwise, you will believe just about anything anyone says.
So "classic" rendering, as per DirectX9 (and earlier) is Vertex Shader -> Hardware stuff -> Pixel Shader -> more Hardware stuff -> Screen. (Of course we're in DirectX12U these days, but stuff from 15 years ago are easier to understand, so lets stick with DX9 for this post)

The "hardware stuff" is automatic and hard coded. Modern pipelines added more steps / complications (Geometry shaders, Tesselators, etc. etc.), but the Vertex Shader / Pixel Shader steps have remained key to modern graphics since the early 00s.

-------------

"Vertex Shader" is a program run on every vertex at the start of the pipeline. This is commonly used to implement wind-effects (ex: moving your vertex left-and-right randomly to simulate wind), among other kinds of effects. You literally move the vertex from its original position to a new one, in a fully customizable way.

"Pixel Shader" is a program run on every pixel after the vertexes were figured out (and redundant ones removed). Its one of the last steps as the GPU is calculating the final color of that particular pixel. Normal mapping is just one example of the many kinds of techniques implemented in the Pixel Shading step.

-------------

So "Pixel Shaders" are the kinds of programs that "compute a hologram on a flat surface". And its the job of a video game programmer to write pixel shaders to create the many effects you see in video games.

Similarly, Vertex Shaders are the many kinds of programs (wind and other effects) that move vertices around at the start of the pipeline.
And Mathematica when given a math problem. And web search search for news.

And a good hacker can add these features to Alpaca and run it on his desktop...

Import all his WhatsApp chats and private emails into the corpus.

Add speech recognition and TTS.
Part of the article makes me sick. It mentions a mother trying to reconnect with their kid after being in jail for years. The kid wouldn't speak to the mother for months, but eventually "began to warm to her mother".

That right there is sickening. The child made it abundantly clear they didn't want to interact with this person, yet they violated her consent and kept coming around, trying to force themselves in to their kids life. The guardians who were supposed to protect this child helped violate their consent by allowing this to happen. These people don't view children as people, they view them as accessories, as property.

It's always "my child", me me me. To these people, children are just something to make you happy, make you look like a good person in public, and take care of you when you're old.

Look at the picture. That "mother" is clinging to her child like an elderly pedophile clings to little girls, holding her in a grip so she can't escape. The child is clearly not reciprocating the embrace, no in fact it looks like she's subconsciously pulling away. No doubt in my mind the child was guilt-tripped into doing this entire photo shoot, the only purpose of which was to allow the mom to show people how good of a mother she is, just a publicity stunt.

Makes me sick seeing courts and judges violate the child's consent with their rulings. They don't even consider the child or their consent, the child isn't even a person in their eyes. It's just a piece of property over which ownership must be decided.
Must it be "the" time axis? Might it instead be "our" time vector? Maybe there are alien civilizations right next door which we fail to recognize as life because our time vector is orthogonal to theirs. Instead they're just gamma ray bursts to us.
Just for balance: after writing much Java years ago, then moving on to mostly JS/TS, Scala and Kotlin, going back and looking at old Java I forget writing, it looks very nice and easy to understand.
> Shady connections with Asia

Wtf??
Maybe the super-AI will be influenced by internet meme culture into becoming a troll, and will do it just for the lolz.
Try "A Room" for solo piano. It's akin to proto-minimalism with a bit more "spice".

His writing is apparently very good although I've never delved deep. His work was motivated by his interest in Zen and similar topics rather than any kind of high-concept modernism.
What I'd like to see is:

"Take these pieces of LEGO and put them together given the assembly instructions in this booklet."
I suspect GPT5 most likely will have these capabilities that is to hook into external tools such as calculators and other software applications as needed based on the prompts.
>>>>>That is for profit healthcare for you. Costs guaranteed to grow at DJI rates.

Not true. The Surgical Center of Oklahoma, a purely for profit clinic that does not take insurance, has not raised the rates for any of their services since 1995.

Yes, they have not raised rates...despite inflation

That's true profit healthcare.

What we have is a monster hybrid between government healthcare and subsidized, monopoly care
> There was another Intel related issue with this laptop also; the gpu would freeze/panic intermittently, multiple times a day.

I had this on my Dell XPS13 (9310) as well, although in my case it was a few times a week, maybe .5 times a day. It also seemed to almost always trigger when kwin was animating something, particularly switching to another virtual desktop, but never when playing any games. I can't imagine why, but the problem mostly went away when I turned off all animations in kwin, and seems to have gone away completely sometime about a year or so ago.

All in all, it's still a better experience than the Macbook Air I was using prior to having this XPS13... That damn Macbook loved to vomit onto the screen and lock up without warning. No dust, thermals seemed fine, battery was healthy... no clue what was wrong with it. And without many exposed settings to fiddle with.
Companies will continue to hire even more people. Their single point is growth.

If one can go the job of 5 - they revenue per employee will increase.

They will hire even more employees.
There's certainly been sweeping social changes thanks to smartphones, but it's arguably not because of smartphones in of themselves, so much as mobile connectivity. In a world where we invented William Gibson-style cyberdecks or if netbooks became wildly popular, that would have happened as well.
Aliens in the movie Arrival perceive time in circular fashion, basically live in future and past.
Do you give credit to people you've played in the past when you play a game of chess?
Sorry, I meant that learning how to speak with syntax and grammar is comparable to a string of mostly-correct chess moves. Especially in early game.
Nope, but HackerNews get interested in one tiny blog article on c64 palettes some years ago: http://www.krajzewicz.de/blog/stretching-the-c64-palette.php
You may be surprised. Herb Sutter wants to add optional GC to C++ 'syntax 2'.
There are plenty of people who can do the technical side of teaching the curriculum. Most of them can earn more elsewhere doing a job that is considerably less stressful. Education needs to be funded so that it can attract people and it needs to be reorganized to reduce the stress.

The vast majority of what is taught in primary schools doesn't need a lot of subject matter skill, what it needs is the ability to teach and the toughness to survive the environment. And it has to pay well enough to attract people who have those qualities because those same qualities make those people attractive to other employers.
but that's literally what most chess players do anyway?
Seems they've made some decisions to increase the snr that have been good medium term but are making them less relevant. There is lots of out of date stuff on there now, and no clear way for muggles like me to flag
when they are noticed.
That was more of a paraphrased quote. Her concern is primarily in farm raised seafood I believe. It is an issue with apex predators though, since I'm married to one.
I have no problem with it myself; but the companies/brands certainly do.

Lots of national brands have a "this is not produced in a factory or machine that produces any store brand".
None of those are user-controlled, though; a Chumby is unambiguously the user's tool, rather than serving corporate interests that are quite likely neutral-to-adversarial to the user's best interests.
You can put every chess game ever played in its database and yet every time it plays a new game it will immediately come across a completely unique move. So it still needs to learn the rules and know how to play independently. Whether it can do that or not is yet undermined.
How about, can a generative AI teach itself how to use a chess AI to beat chess? Give GPT4 the ability to make REST API calls and also access to FFI, and put a chess-bot library somewhere. Train it how to use these but not necessarily how to use the chess API specifically. If you ask GPT4 to play chess, can it call into that library and use the requests/responses?

This has bigger ramifications too: if GPT4 learns how to use RPCs effectively, it can do accurate complex mathematical computations and simulations, do IoT/home automation tasks, and even control heavy machinery.
Sounds like that link supports the idea?
And thus, because profit motive drives literally everything (because it's impossible to forestall a takeover if you're broke) then all news-media trend toward maximum tolerable negativity.

That is, there is a saddlepoint for how much negativity viewers desire.

While I don't personally know what the threshold for psychological damage from exposure to this kind of media is, I would guess it's lower than the average exposure level is now.
At least it should make valid moves, that is the minimum level required. It didn't reach that level here. If it never made illegal moves we could talk and see what it does, but until then we can be sure it didn't understand the rules.
And the 99% probability isn't an evidence of understanding chess?
Pipelines are still there. They relatively easy to repair.

IMHO, if Ukrainians or Americans will try to destroy pipeline, they will target compressors, which are much more expensive to repair.
One of the qualities of aerospace is that we get less forgiving of people making the same mistake over time. If someone mixed up metric and imperial units on a mars lander again they’d be vilified.