skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like my life would be less convenient without my phone, but I’d also probably be happier. So idk. There are easy alternatives, like using the website on a laptop, you just can’t pay your bills on the train without a smartphone..

I’m actually getting rid of the cell-phone plan on my iPhone, keeping it as WiFi only, and getting a dumb phone for calls. It may suck but I’m trying it as a 6 month experiment, so we’ll see!
Perhaps a solution is to distinguish between an estimate and a detailed plan.

One is a quick guess with high risk, the other takes time and research to prepare and the risk of running into a delay is lower.

And often the best solution is to have none; perhaps part of the problem is that people are often too afraid or have not enough trust to work without plans or estimates when needed.
Now would be the best time to push it, when Silicon Valley employers have a significant advantage over workers, and the amount of people willing to work on anything is the highest its been since the dot-com crash.
You're making the assumption that without social media outrage, that that catching a cop doing bad things on video matters, or us evidence of some crime.

They aren't. The cops won't go after their own, and the politicians will only respond to public pressure.

Video footage makes it easier to get public outrage, but it's still the public outrage that has to do the work to hold cops accountable
It is a radical shift. But so many so is the current internet a radical shift from its initial inception. People wrote blogs and articles long before ads. And now most people still do write them for free, it’s just that their content gets gobbled up by blogspam sites.

I definitely see a shift in the internet with things like this, I’m just not convinced it’s for the worse.
It worked out really well with the Taliban.
The People's Republic of Utah.
Reminds me of the English word "gaol".
How do you know how something with 5.3 trillion transistors works? If it's Micron's 2TB 3D-stacked NAND, we know exactly how it works, because we understand how it was made.

Just putting a very high number on something doesn't mean it's automatically sentient, or even incomprehensible.

Just because we don't know the precise means by which ChatGPT arrives at one particular answer to a prompt doesn't mean we don't understand the underlying computations and data structures that make it up, and that they don't add up to sentience any more than Eliza does.
Philolaus, a Pythagorean, wrote that the feelings arise from the combination of the soul with the body. And that the soul was part of the same noetic world as mathematics. They didn’t have a word for information—but from their perspective, LLMs might well have soul. But without a body, I don’t think they can feel.
Yeah, carbon tax is also my best idea.

Another simple option is actually taking into account all (or at least most) market conditions when drafting regulation / market rules. E.g. going beyond instantaneous price of energy (which unfairly favours solar) but instead incorporating grid stability as well.

Also I don't understand your point about "subsidising R&D but privatising the profits". If the government wants something to happen, surely they should pay for it? (In this case, development of EV.) And as we know, private industry is more efficient at doing stuff than governments, so surely it's better to let private industry do the R&D, rather than sink the same (or more, as usual with government projects) amount of money into R&D but get worse outcomes.
That's neat! In retrospect, did the database make the problem more tractable from an algorithmic or practical standpoint, or was it mostly just using the tools you're familiar with? If I were to approach the same problem, I likely would have tried to keep all the data in RAM and serialize it out to a file for incremental runs.
>I cannot tell why I'm seeing this all over Hacker News.

I think we can certainly speculate.
After getting a lovely neighbor with a straight piped Dodge Challenger, I completely understand the statement "it’s about feeling trapped or helpless when you can’t get away from these sounds."

Also, if you have a straight piped Dodge Challenger, I assure you your neighbors hate you.
Huh? Of course I understand that they have a backup somewhere. Whether I destroy the CPU or the actuators or some other hardware is not relevant as long as my statement is clear.
So you can tell me the etymology of tear (liquid from your eyes) and tear (like a ripped paper) from the spelling?
Am I allowed to take an imagine and apply a lossy algorithm (say jpg) to it and then use it as my own for business purposes? Nope. You say learn, I say apply a lossy algo and then use the result for business purposes. Seems like clear copyright violation.
I'm sure an actual OpenSUSE expert can correct me, but there is some "dependency SAT solver" that SUSE has that resolves software versions. Sometimes it can't figure out what to do, so it'll spit out some prompt during upgrade that can be a bit difficult to decipher (e.g. keep an obsolete dependency, uninstall the thing requiring it, etc). Sometimes I would choose the wrong thing and break something that was relying on some behavior, but not captured by zypper/yum (e.g. a cmake project relying on specific behavior of some native library). Ultimately, that was my fault for being lazy in the "untracked external dependency" department, and it's easy to roll back with snapper.
their point is simple: during the last 20-30 years we had efficiency improvements by orders of magnitude. Still we didn't have developers jobs reduction in any way. We evolved into doing more and more high-level and high-scale jobs. So no, -10% of time needed to build the same unit of functionality won't lead to -10% reduction of workforce. It will change the scope of said workforce.
>This is a reminder that the economy needs a reliable store of value

hmm yes, perhaps gold, or even bitcoin for online things

>A CBDC

That seems bad.
Are you familiar with the Swedish word/concept "lagom"?
It's funny I rather enjoy hearing city sounds from my apartment. Horns honking, trolly bells, even construction (to an extent...). But if I'm out on the street it's super annoying.

Horn honks while in my apartment: oh my, hear the sounds of life out there!

Horn honks while I'm on the street: did ta really have to honk at that person? Asshole.
> The buyer has to make commitments

Not surprised this discussion devolved into this bizarro world point so quickly. The developer says “there are too many unknowns to provide any sort of estimate”. The manager retorts “but we need estimates!” As if they expect the developer to say “oh, you need them? You didn’t say that. In that case, the unknowns are now known and it will take four days, three if you remove this inconsequential detail that nobody cares about”.

Unfortunately this bit of illogic is so common that I know it’s a waste of time to argue, so I’ve learned how to figure out what they want the estimates to be, give them that, miss them (just like everybody else does), and then get to work on actually providing the feature.
Thr is anthr wy, whch ws dscvred ntrlly by early intrnt usrs: txt spk essntlly rduces englsh spllng to an abjad lk Arbc. Lk Arbc, Englsh is vry cnsnant hvy, and dialctl dffrnces are almst entrly vriashns n vwl qualty, so an abjad is the prfct wrtng systm fr us.

The perfect English abjad would use diacritics to mark vowels and some clever way to identify syllable boundaries (so you can distinguish ideal from idyll). But alas, we’re probably stuck with an alphabetic script forever.
I think there's a middle ground here. they should be bringing in large jugs of bottled water for you folks.
We don't need small plastic bottles for everyday use.
I'm waiting for hedge funds to start blowing up from all of these multi-sigma moves in what should be relatively stable investments. I'm also waiting for Softbank to implode but somehow they're still around.
Can’t be the only one who thinks this is possibly a ploy by VC bros to make Fed blink on interest rate hikes. Only they could have triggered such a bank run and only SVB.
Could you do better in ~10 minutes?

Sure all the content is mediocre - but it's enough to start, and you could choose where to invest your budget - video editing, artwork, web site - to improve on this stuff that is an actual poc - in half an hour?
I have found engineers' estimates to be accurate and straightforward when the team owned all the resources needed to complete their tasks. Whenever it depends on some unreliable factor (often some unavailable expert) estimates are useless. Estimating tasks without estimating each team members capacity is basically lying to yourself.
Ask HN: Capitalism and Artificial General Intelligence
Here is a chance to steelman an argument that there is no inherent hazard in the emergence and embrace of AGI in a Capitalist political economy.

Assertion is that the mix of Capitalism and AGI are only somewhat less hazardous than the Authoritarianism and AGI configuration, and that both systems are critical enablers of AGI dystopias. This is a tech-neutral position that implies (mis-)usage is the only negative aspect of technology (in general). The tech-critical position is a valid point of view but does not inform the question here: do the socio-political regime choices matter in context of pervasive embrace of AGI in human society.
I think this misunderstands my point across the board. Physical distance is progress, and not only that, it's the most fundamental kind of progress for this type of problem. Chairs run up against practical limitations but not in-principle limitations, and people invoke the piling-up-chairs argument because they are confused about which kinds of arguments are about practicality and which are about illustrating a conceptual principle.

>You haven't made any progress towards walking on the moon even if the pile of chairs is as big as Mount Everest.

I literally gave an example where this is exactly the thing that does, in fact, happen.

>There isn't just the question of toppling either, the chairs would start physically crushing each other and then they are no longer chairs.

I guess this means you actually read to the end of my comment, so that's good, but, this introduces JV debate team metaphysics that has nothing to do with anything, and if it did matter, you could substitute out chairs for just about any other physical material where the property of chair-ness is moot and the point would be the same. Gravel? Let's go with gravel.

But I shouldn't even have to make the point because the fundamental insight is that the nature of the problem is about the traversibility of space.

Again, this quote and this argument have been around for decades now, and it has been used to support an a whole range of arguments, some of which are now being abandoned because they seem increasingly untenable with recent advancements.

If the people who used this example in the 1960s knew that, come 2023, people were no longer making the in-principle argument, and were even denying that it was ever ever about the possibility in principle, they would wonder what the hell was happening in 2023 that rendered this position of theirs no longer respectable.
Just to be clear, most of the time “management” comes to developers with a proposed timeline, there’s significantly more complaints than if the engineers are asked to estimate.

Asking the builders to estimate the time they need is a good sign of high trust in that team. It’s healthy. We should want more of it. The business’ side of the commitment is to understand that it is an estimate and should be treated accordingly.
I wouldn't really qualify this as a foot gun, but rather appropriate flexibility. 98% of people never encounter it, and the 2% that do are happy that it is that way, and I don't think alternative approaches like having the compiler hide it are appropriate for C.
Hmm this could be the perfect task for GPT: estimate projects.
Agreed. Having human dependencies who have competing priorities or unknown competencies on the critical path is such a big risk on timelines.

In some cases I’ve got agreements up front that if the dependencies aren’t done or being worked on by particular dates my team gets access to the codebase or systems and can take over. That type of consequence/potential embarrassment can set up potential adversarial positions but it has helped a few times.
"Tasks" are the lowest-common-denominator directives that developers should refuse to estimate as a matter of self respect. If management wants an estimate, insist that they do their job and write a proper story instead.
If you abdicate any responsibility to estimate the work how can you agree to any estimate?
I don't think that most consumers of these books will know that modern changes have been made. And I think that most of them would be less willing to pay for copies with these changes. So they're being mislead for increased profit.

Even in the US, the First Amendment doesn't protect false advertising. I don't think making these changes without informing the buyer would be illegal under current law, but I don't think it would be unconstitutional to make it illegal, not would it contravene the spirit of free speech.
This is absolutely stunning work. Excited to try it out on my husband's homelab.
From my understanding most exchanges put in artificial limits now to ensure anyone with mega bucks for infrastructure are equal
I have a strong, strong, flight or fight aversion to the sounds of people eating with their mouth open. Like, measurably increases my heartrate, adrenaline spike.

It's not rational, it's not something I have control over. It's something I deal with and largely have built techniques to try and lower the stress of.

I'm aware this is fundamentally a "your brain is wired different" issue, and so I'm never sure what the etiquette should be on asking others to chew with the mouths closed.

Many cultures don't have any concerns around slurping/chewing with mouth open, so meal times in mixed company are often quite hard for me. Add on the stress of trying to figure out whether I should even mention something (and make everyone else uncomfortable) is bonus stress on top.
Fixing my Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones
You missed the point, we are not saying that GPT isn't powerful, we are saying that it is different to human intelligence. Of course GPT will get more powerful and generate more interesting sentences.

But until someone demonstrates a GPT that can learn from a tiny dataset what a multi-lingual blind 4 year old learns it is very fair to challenge the hypothesis that humans learn the way a deep learning network learn.
Oreos Baffle Researchers, Challenge the Laws of Physics
Can you share more about what you are working on right now? If not, hopefully we'll see something about it in the near future once you're done.
'Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen.' – Edward V. Berard
I think Norway is far ahead of other parts of the world, due to being rich and the tax structure around ICEs.

But I do wonder about the the gas stations. It is well known, that gas stations make most of their money on snacks and carwashes and random stuff you buy and not on the gas. Does that break down or will people in EVs still stop in gas stations to buy a snack? Maybe on roadtrips yes, on random visits no?

Will there be small shops selling snacks and coffee next to charging stations as well? Could gas stations pivot to being charging stations? (I guess not the inner-city ones, due to space, but the highway rest stop ones could).
>Still reduces to to the same thing. Doctor? You’re extending the life of people who sell shit. Teacher? You’re training future shit sellers.

The difference being that a human life is valuable outside of what shit they sell in their job. They're also friends, spouses, parents, and, well, individuals.

People are not reduced to their job.

Whereas a job selling shit is a job selling shit. It doesn't "reduce to", it is 100% that and only that.

Doctors will also treat criminals if they're shot etc., as they should - and it's a good thing. Doesn't mean crime is good.

I mean, as much is obvious...
To smell the ocean

To kiss your lover

To play with your dog

To ponder the stars

To reflect on what is the point

This is the opposite of hell.
The whole idea of venture capital comes from the broken taxation model. The people who actually produce things, you know doing the work and have knowledge how to do something are burdened with heavy taxation, because years ago, when companies had high headcount, it was a way to make companies pay taxes. Now that everything gets offshored, including work, that model doesn't work anymore, but politicians for known reasons (corruption) don't want to change that, so to plug the tax gap, they increase taxes on labour and continue the squeeze, while not touching the big companies and the rich.
This has created a situation, where educated and hardworking people can't amass enough capital to start their own business and their only way to get their idea running is to beg venture capitalists for money in exchange for a slice of their business or banks for a loan.

This has created a divide and widens the inequality gap on a scale not seen before in our lifetimes.

The rich get extremely rich, because they don't pay the same taxes as labour and they have so much money they own politicians and can make sure the status quo never changes.

This has caused things like "quiet quitting", because people no longer see work is worth anything anymore if you can't progress your life in any meaningful way.

All ladders to wealth and fulfilment that our parents and grandparents had have been destroyed.
Well, if it's a one-track project, estimates can be treated casually.

However, I spent the majority of my career at hardware manufacturers, where software was actually kind of an "annoying extra requirement" (I'd like to think that's changing, these days, but not so sure. Contempt for software seemed to be a fundamental pillar of hardware engineers).

Our projects were always done by fairly massive, interdisciplinary teams, and everything had to "sync up," at the correct time. If the hardware would be ready at a certain date, the host drivers needed to be ready then, because the SDK people and the QC team needed them, etc.

And even though engineers love to rag on marketing, they have to have very complex projects, to generate buzz, advertise, ship, distribute, etc. Hardware is a lot more difficult to distribute than software.

Also, Quality was really important. A recall of hardware is a nightmare. Sometimes, we could be heroes, and save customers from hardware defects (like having an image processing filter to correct some chromatic aberration). Other times, we could brick the unit, or wipe out customer systems (I once wrote a SCSI driver that wrote to sector zero on hard disks -oops).

Estimates -not just software estimates- were critical.
> Are you passing the original task in each prompt?

Currently yes.

Planning: Prompt + Code base summary + All tasks
Code gen: Prompt + All tasks + Current task + Existing code

All tasks include the original task.

> If not I think that it's going to lose context of what it's trying to build overall.

It can be a problem but there's a lot of room for improvement. An obvious optimization would be to hide subtasks of completed tasks. Then, perhaps hide subtasks until model decides to focus on a particular part of the tree. Summarization is also a possible strategy, e.g. LangChain uses that approach extensively.

But I think once 32k GPT-4 it might be able to do quite a lot without these tricks.

> How are you deciding what are relevant code snippets to send?

Model receives a full list of files as well as fragments in each file.

It can then select which fragments are needed for a selected task (in the generated output task_id is before the list of relevant files).

E.g.: https://gist.github.com/killerstorm/dd6e26dc80064b7fc731d583...

selected_task_id: t_0_2_3_2

required_code_fragments:
src/models/Comment.ts:
- class_definition
> I doubt most software is open-ended research.

No, just all software that provides any sort of tangible benefit to anybody. I’m sure you could estimate fairly accurately how long it would take to implement quicksort - but nobody’s going to ask you that.
I believe we are in the midst of the singularity. How exactly it plays out is important. It happened faster than anyone anticipated. People need to know. I see no moral value in claiming that this is business as usual.
Rather than collapsing, Ethereum sought to reduce the energy footprint and they did. Now Nvidia is angry that nobody wants to pay a premium for a 4090 that catches fire.
Frederick Brooks' "Mythical Man-Month" book is the classic answer. For my own evidence I base it on 50 years experience. I just wrote a piece of code that I had all working, but then I discovered a new method (requiring rewriting it all) that greatly improved it in every respect. So was I 90% done before that? Coding is just a very non-linear and never-ending process.
Would you be better of working off of only the prompts, or the ai poc - if op sent it to you and asked you to improve it for ~ 5 000 or something?
As a developer, I love being able to give you an accurate estimate. It means I know the weight of all of the tasks and likely have done them all before. So creating an estimate is basically a rough outline of the tasks I need churn out. I can go on autopilot and crank out some solid work that improves on previous well-tested experience.
This "study" (not peer reviewed) is questionable in various ways and published by a "think tank" that has a strong libertarian agenda and an obvious axe to grind.

First of all, it compares figures from two different data sets. That is usually something that is quite hard to do correctly, because different data sets usually use different definitions for stuff like "household consumption" etc. Without a peer review it is really hard to tell if they've done it correctly and given the intricacies of economic statistics, my guess is they didn't.

But maybe even more importantly, the data concentrates on "private consumption" and thus leaves out all the goods and services that governments pay for – which is the entire point of public services like a public health care system. I.e. when a poor person in the U.S. visits a doctor, they pay for it out of pocket, the transaction will be registered as "private consumption". If I (in Germany) visit the doctor, no money ever changes hands. My contributions to the public health care system are deducted from my income before it ever reaches my account and about half don't come out of my own paycheck anyway, they are the responsibility of my employer.

So my guess would be that this "study" undercounts exactly what it professes to account for: Goods and services consumed (but not necessarily paid for) by the poor.

But how about we measure outcomes? For example in terms of life expectancy, the U.S. is much more "unequal" (if you are poorer, your are more likely to die younger) than other developed economies: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#inequality-of-lif...

And because the U.S. has worse life expectancy than other developed economies in general, poor people are likely to die younger in the U.S. than in, say, Germany in absolute terms as well. That is just one indicator but if you accept that "the number of years you live" is an important indicator for general quality of life, the U.S. seems to score quite badly on this.
> In an ideal world, such efficient folks like yourself would invest a few hours per day working hard, but then spend the rest of the day in a lazy glory

I detest laziness. There's only so much 'Netflix and Chill' a person can do, and after lazing around, I actually feel drained, rather than energized. You would think that laziness gives you energy, but it saps it instead. I guess this is because we're all human in the end, wired to be productive and working on at least one problem.
can you name it please? I'm interested in a hobbyist project and although I haven't got up off my arse yet, I might one day...