skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reasonably accurate estimates aren't that hard to get if engineers and management REALLY want them. Just remember that estimating a project is a project unto itself. You just need to break things down into small bits that can be accurately estimated and be honest about the bits you don't know enough to estimate and dig down into those bits until you know enough to accurately estimate them.

It's not easy and it takes time. I used to do a lot of fixed price work and you'd live or die based on how well you could do this. Let me tell you, nothing is worse than busting your ass on a project for six months only to lose money on it. Ugh.
Perhaps the most wrongly maligned group in the history of the world were the Luddites. A chaticature of the Luddites comes down to us. It is of a people who would deny progress which was obviously inevitable so that they didn't have to change. They are cast as inflexible, lazy, stupid, belligerent.

But when we read the speeches of the Luddite leaders, more than anything else they talk about "liberty". Luddites spoke and wrote about the dangers to their liberty created by wage pressure from power looms. But much more, they spoke and wrote about the danger to their liberty posed by moving away from handloom weaving in homes and small shops towards weaving with power looms in a factory system.

What they resisted more than anything was the destruction of their autonomy, their subjection to abusive floor managers and the grinding dullness of repetitive machine labor.

Programmers have been facing this down already for some time. As full-stack engineering, excellent automation tools and powerful APIs have proliferated, we don't often get to go deep into some problem. Algorithmic design and development, which is a huge pleasure of mine has faded to the background of gaining a shallow understanding of many technologies, plumbing them and futsing with their numerous configurations. AI is already accelerating this for my work and I am struggling to find it not dismal. It is no surprise that now that the tools exist to comoditize art, the work is following a similar trajectory.

AI should be a unifying event for tech labor. Not to resist it entirely but to ensure in whatever future develops that we have some say in how work can remain enriching and dignified alongside the growth of these tools.
I'm sure some VC firms also encouraged their portfolio to bank with SVB. They were regarded as the most "startup friendly" bank.
OpenAI actually thinking about this too. It’s buried in their open source repo and not clear the exact mechanism that ChatGPT knows to make use of it. But we’re already here evidently.

https://github.com/openai/chatgpt-retrieval-plugin#memory-fe...
$20/month? I can bet that Apple executives are already trying to broker an exclusive deal for Siri-GPT-4 for tens of billions.
I am going to assume that you are OK with fractional reserve banking so I won't talk about why that is necessary as a function in an economy.

If I understand you correctly, you're basically saying why use a bank versus something else? My answer would be because for vast majority of retail bankers it doesn't matter. Same reason many would use Gmail vs self-host. They want to put their money somewhere and ensure that it will be there when they need it. As a society we have a framework around that and we provide deposit insurance and we call the orgs who take your deposit, give you an IOU (in the form of an account balance) then lend a fraction of it to others a bank.

For significantly larger sums no I don't think it makes sense to use a bank and most large corps have a treasury that specifically deals with that.
I would argue that cryptos are typically not equities; they're usually either commodities (cryptocurrency) or some sort of non-current intangible asset (NFTs). The exception would be things like shares in the DAO, which, while interesting, is not typically what people have in mind when they say "crypto" these days.
For me, it's like why don't I like my drawing, or why can't I draw what I imagine?

And Ira's quote helps some, I guess. So, I should only work up to what I think is pretty okay. Much better than hating it :)

For others looking at the work, I'm not sure. I haven't considered commissions or anything like that. You have to be pretty darn good I think.

And I don't think I could be a taste maker. It would only be a personal thing to draw well. Every time Humble Bundle offers a round of game assets, I think, Well, that would let me practice making those if I did it myself, gosh darn it.
Calculating a hash value for a string and hitting a lookup table hardly seems "thinking", even at scale.
> Apart from magic internet money, I cannot figure out any other way in which to "make myself heard".

Your way of "making yourself heard" is to trade your real dollars for digital dollars?

The thing about cryptocurrencies is that you don't need to invest in them to use them as needed. Sure, you could argue that maybe at some future point the governments could possibly all band together and shut down every on-ramp to cryptocurrency, but that's extremely unlikely to happen universally across the globe. As long as some country, somewhere, allows cryptocurrency purchases then there will be a way to use them.

The narrative that you have to invest in cryptocurrency to stick it to the government is really just consumerism being applied liberally by people who want the price of their crypto to go up.
AI Development Is Too Fast
In my opinion, Windows 2000 was the best Windows GUI. Clean, elegant and to the point with no useless crap.

http://toastytech.com/guis/w2k.html
I also use this benchmark for a real world estimate. Here's some numbers. For the pretty ginormous Ubuntu kernel config for RISC-V, it's 7.5 hours on the HiFive Unmatched (at 1.5 GHz) versus 25 minutes cross compiled on a E5-1650 V4 Dell box.
Confiscation resistance is not useful?
> we took on the task of continuing to package key components such as Abrowser

Abrowser seems to only get updated with each major release of Trisquel, which means people are stuck on an old and potentially vulnerable Firefox (which Abrowser is based on). I much prefer mainline official Firefox which gets frequent updates.
Don't contradicting you regarding the crypto space. My first point is that crypto also helped people in several societies. This is true beyond the conmen, etc you have.
I find ASMR videos about as pleasant as nails on a blackboard.
Yes, for cats it's 1975.
Interesting but unsurprising to know about California, but I have no reason to ever travel there via classic car, or really for any reason at all.
I remember reading this back in 2019. It was the first article that really made me pay attention to GPT. The bits about making acronyms and poor counting as second-order behaviors really jumped out at me at the time.

It's remarkable how well the article has aged - all the bits about "wow, look, it can kinda sorta try to summarize an article if you prompt it the right way" obviously all became insanely more relevant with GPT3 and GPT4. Same with the bits about translation and how it seemed like it could sorta write a poem.

Still a good read, and scary that it was written only 4 years ago.
This is great! How do you account for updates to a note?

I’ve been building an archiver tool as well to convert notes into markdown and post to git using Apple Shortcuts.

The interop between almost all iOS data formats (notes, safari, calendar, etc.) the content graph[0] provides is really impressive.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-me/guide/shortcuts/apd4618db957...
It's well known what stages kids start to solve certain reasoning tasks.

Like putting water from a tal glass in a wide one. They understand this quite late.

Just because humans have additional more/different inputs doesn't imply chargpt can't start to learn to reason like us.

It could easily be than the fine-tuning we do (thinking through things) is similar to reading a huge amount of text like chargpt does.
I generally think the plumbing analogy is a pretty good one.

It even works for estimates! We're often asked the equivalent of "how long will it take you to hook my sink up to my toothbrush for my Thursday home parties" and...

well it's nothing new. It's just pipes. Anyone can do it. But estimating it requires an absurd amount of context which is not always available. How far apart are those two things? Is there enough water flow to power the toothbrush, or will you need to upgrade the piping to the sink too? Sometimes the house has everything made of marble and it'll cost millions of dollars to replace the holes you need to make to put those pipes in, though piping itself is only like 30 minutes. Sometimes the toothbrush is a legacy model that only works with deionized water from Uruguay that has been flown within 50 meters of the south pole in the middle of March, do they have a reservoir available for that or can you convince them to just buy a modern one from Walmart to replace it? Does a DWUSPM50 water supplier even exist any more? Oh, you meant only during those Thursday parties? Is there a way we can tell when those are happening, or can they just pull on a lever to change the system? Does GPRD require the pipes to physically separated by 1m when turned off, or is a valve good enough? Why in the world does the customer require all horizontal pipe runs to only go North unless they're underground?

None of which is hard, and the plumber doesn't have to build it all in many cases. But how long is it going to take? .... somewhere between an hour and the end of the universe, most likely, unless there's proof the request is impossible.

It's not a perfect, beautiful snowflake, but it is a snowflake.
Doesn’t nearly-supersonic flight require more fuel than supersonic flight, at least in some cases? That seems to contradict fuel efficiency being a decreasing function of speed.
Maybe at the beginning. Right now they're all just trying to replicate the current system with less regulations and with them at the top, nothing punk about it.
Slatestarcodex shut down before GPT-4 came out. His new blog is astralcodexten.substack.com and has lots of posts in GPT-4.
The idea of “emergent behaviors” is no better an explanation for say, human consciousness, than the idea that we were made in the image of a god. Emergent is just a way for an atheist to cover up that they have no idea. That chemical 1 + chemical 2 + electricity happens and is observed and the reason we can’t explain the other 99% is……emergent.

Now I hear gravity must be emergent. What a useful tool to sound smart.
A Photographic Mission to Make an Amazonian Tribe Known
The “anti-TikTok” RESTRICT act seems to apply to nearly every U.S. tech company
The case being made for the RESTRICT act is that it's needed because of "Chinese communist control" over TikTok.

Whether that's true or not, my reading of the actual proposed law is that it allows basically any U.S. tech company to fall under direct U.S. government control.

The reason I'm saying this is that companies that fall under this act are any in which any person in any foreign country that is now or is ever declared to be "foreign adversary" owns even one share of stock, at least by my reading.

From the bill:

A "holding" is defined as:

(i) an equity interest;

(ii) a stock;

(iii) a security;

(iv) a share;

(v) a partnership interest;

(vi) an interest in a limited liability company;

(vii) a membership interest; or

(viii) any participation, right, or other equivalent, however designated and of any character; and

(B) includes, without limitation, any security convertible into an ownership interest and right, warrant, or option to acquire ownership interests.

===

In other words, if the company is public and someone from China owns a share, or if the company accepts VC money and anyone from any country that is declared an "adversary" was an investor in the fund, that company now is fair game for falling under government control.

I'm not a lawyer or legislative expert so it would be great to hear from people who are who can confirm or deny that this bill is actually a giant power grab, either intentionally or by sloppy drafting.

If this bill has the effect that I'm afraid it might, everyone in tech should be very concerned.

What I think we need instead of a bill like this is to institute privacy restrictions in the USA like GDPR, and to enforce those against every company, not just foreign ones. There's a good case to be made that Facebook and others are at least as bad as TikTok, not because they are owned by a foreign entity, but because their policies allowed and allow them to be used by propagandists inside and outside the country.

With the rise of GPT and other LLMs that can generate propaganda at scale, we need these protections more than ever.
As opposed to the incumbent socioeconomic system, wherein "people should be scammed out of as much money as possible" is the rule of thumb.
I don't give a f*k about someone following my activities, I'm not doing anything illegal, that's why I don't understand this privacy craze going on. The most they can do is show me some personalized ads and I don't care. But the downside is getting scammed, get money stolen and not being able to figure out who did that.

That's what anonymity feature of crypto promotes which I think is a much bigger deal, especially if you count all transactions it enables on dark web.
One of the things that landed in my lap early on (System 8?) at Apple was the color picker. We were moving to PPC (PowerPC) and much of the HSL (hue, saturation, lightness)picker (HSV, hue, saturation, value?) was in raw 68K assembly.

Having never written assemble (68K or otherwise), I knew I was out of my league ... but I persisted.

Line by line, I replaced the assembler code with straight C. I was able to scare up a Motorola 68K assembler book around Apple and I recall that there was one assembler code I could not find: it turned out that it was a 68020-specific operator (and since we're talking color picker I suppose an '020 could be assumed — some kind of bit-shift-with-mask or some such weirdness, FWIW).

(I guess each pixel of the "color wheel" was a rather complex calculation that someone had found benefitted from a straight assembler implementation — keep in mind you could slide the brightness/value slider and the wheel would redraw in real-time on those underpowered Macs.)

Apart from getting the assembler over to straight C so the PPC compiler could have something to compile I also had to move over the API. Color pickers were plug-ins and had a couple of calls that, again, I believe had a different signature on PPC.

To learn the API and test it I wrote an HTML color picker that was essentially an RGB picker that gave you hex values instead of 0-255. Further I did a crayon picker as sample code (I thought this was kind of "Mac-like", right?).

I was a bit surprised when the HTML and Crayon pickers shipped. Then, much later, when someone ending up "porting" the crayon picker to Mac OS X I suddenly had regrets at having not spent more time coming up with good names for the crayons. (There was a general pattern though: naming the grayscale colors after minerals for example.)

I was almost fired I think though when my crayon picker shipped and it got out that I had slipped some T.S. Eliot quotes into the resource names in the Color Picker modules. I was called "into the office" and told that I had fucked up.

It's true though, I had fucked up. I had let the "Easter egg" thing get to my head and wanted to leave my mark. I think they had to quickly rev the OS after stripping out the offending T.S. Eliot quotes.

(There may though have still be an Easter egg lying around where the crayons would wear down until Jan 1 when they would be restored to full size.)

(Also, that was the first time I almost got fired. The second time would come when I was on the Photos team some 15 or so years later.)
Every time this comes up someone shares the joke about the European Union’s changes to the English language ..
> I can't imagine how my mother has slept next to my sleep apnea father in the same bed for 40 years and not gone insane.

Ear plugs.
About 509 years ago the Dutch invented common stock in companies, creating a new way for humans to work together. That had long-term sociological impact in society.

Today, there are people who have created new ways of working together by building on top of bitcoin, where its not a company or a legal entity of any king, but people who may not know or trust each other in meatspace are collaborating and getting paid for their work as they deliver products and services. And their collaboration is governed by humans, not a smart contract, but in a decentralized manner to protect their project. They're developing software, providing customer support, tutorials, project management, etc, and all of it being paid for by the project---all without bank accounts, a corporation, or geographic dependency.

As far as I'm aware, https://bisq.network/dao/ is the only running project that gas built functioning governance on top of bitcoin. I know that the MakerDAO (that runs the DAI stablecoin) and ShapeShift (altcoin exchange) have been built and are running in top of Ethereum or other altcoins. So that's at least three separate projects creating value in historically new ways.

When I explained this to a sociologist friend of mine, she was amazing, asking who's studying and writing about such historically important innovation.

I fail to see how those aren't examples of how this technology benefits society. Its trailblazing, hinting at the new possibilities that combining the Internet with programmable decentralized permissionless censorship-resistant money could bring to humanity. Only time will show which approaches bear long-term fruit here, but there's a lot of potential.
Larry knows if he were to sue Shuttleworth/Canonical it could potentially bankrupt them both.
I am of Danish origin and stating that the central government has a limited role in healthcare is just downright incorrect. The Ministry of Health (Sundhedsstyrelsen) sets the budget, determines national practices, manages the public health insurance scheme, and manages the list of approved medicines. Yes, execution of healthcare is with the regions, but there has been a significant increase in centralisation of healthcare since the “amter” were disbanded.
If you want to call a local plan long term go ahead. People will continue to correct you.

It has no "plan" other than local context. I posted their own statements on it.

I don't know how much simpler it clearer I can make it.

A human can make a long term plan, and write unlimited words about it, and still leverage any part of unlimited context. This is a long term plan. A human can reference 1 token back, 10000 tokens back, 1 million tokens back, any number of tokens back.

No LLM can do this, since they have limited context. The site I just posted from GPT4 themselves gave you the context length.

Have you ever coded a LLM? Ever read one of their papers and understood it? Do you understand what the word "context" means?

We're done.
I only commented on what is the current dynamic. Your thoughts on why there ought to be a different dynamic is interesting, but it doesn't seem like something anyone could predict.
I'm specifically talking about the video... as I mentioned at the top of my reply, many/most civil complaints are made up, and I'm a proponent of filming and body cams, it's the best way to know (unedited, full-length content). It didn't take more than the video to see it and only took the video. It didn't matter the commentary around it.
Can I interest you in a Johnny Rotten NFT? https://www.johnlydon.com/mr-rottens-nfts/
Don't know, but it certainly jumped out at me. All I could think of was that some part of the design isn't finalised and/or hiding part of it (or an identifying mark?) in an attempt to delay the counterfeiters.
> Cryptocurrency is rightfully many things: a cutting edge payment network, an enormous boon to financial privacy, a way to enable entirely new types of organizations and funding models in the business world, a source of rapid developments to and applications of fascinating and obscure cryptographic concepts (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs), a hedge against systemic FIAT and some geopolitical risks, a driver of needed improvements in FIAT financial infrastructure (just like Google Fi was a driver of needed improvements in consumer internet infrastructure), I could go on and on...

Legitimate question for you because this has been a remarkably civil dialog considering this is such a flash point on HN (I appreciate that):

If it really is all of these things, where is the user adoption? Every six months or so I undertake the following exercise:

1) Get the 10 most active chains (variety of sources for this). Always includes bitcoin, eth, a bunch of l2s/sidechains/etc.

2) Visit their respective block explorers.

3) To the extent the data is available, capture daily and monthly metrics for the following: number of total transactions, used unique addresses, and (ideally) unique TX/RX transaction pairs.

4) Add them all up (rounded up).

5) Assume each address is a distinct user (they aren't).

6) Assume each address on each chain is a distinct user (they aren't).

Every time I undergo this exercise I come to the same conclusion: based on actual network stats the number of blockchain users is incredibly low - even when strongly favoring crypto with the methodology above the DAU/MAU metrics are at best in the low 10s of millions. Even when you take the all time high metrics with the methodology above it's still well under 100 million.

Considering there are an estimated > 5 billion internet users (crypto TAM) ATH numbers represent approximately 2% adoption, and I'd argue if you used a methodology that could resemble legitimate DAU/MAU stats you see from Meta, etc real adoption is probably 10-50% of that.

I talked about my crypto journey - I looked at the technology over the past five-ten years and agreed with you. I was convinced it was the latest emerging technology that would provide a platform for the things you speak of and more. Then I started realizing no one I knew outside of the crypto-sphere actually used it for anything other than trading on CEXs. That's when I started performing this crude study and realized crypto/blockchain is completely irrelevant. The entire space could disappear tomorrow and barely anyone would notice.

You seem to be much more capable of looking at things more holistically than I do/can. Historically, prior platforms/technologies from everything to the PC, the web, social media, smartphones, etc, etc easily hit 1 billion users inside of ten years. Generally speaking I feel like people are able to embrace things that are actually useful and benefit their lives. Crypto has been around for 14 years, has the benefit of leveraging all of these platforms, and still has abysmal user adoption.

Why?
If you look at most of the new projects, this is probably true. It's startup-Chads trying to get lots of bucks quickly.

But if you look at the original, Bitcoin, it's harder to make the same argument, as arguably, there is no "them at the top" for Bitcoin.
Care to explain your statement?
Money laundering is a social good, necessitated by corrupt governments who steal innocent people's cash [1], [2].

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fbi-seized-40-000-couple-1515...
[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/civil_forfeiture
Think it is the best GUI in general, not just MS. Not perfect of course and many useful features invented later are missing but still ...