skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> going to make an impact in AI/LLMs

This seems to be made for mass parallelism.

Question: Would this scale to 100 million of collaborating 4G/5G smartphones? We have operational federated learning code and decentralised learning code (trivial stochastic gradient descent). Application: simple learn-to-Rank based on ClickLogs like its 2005 [1]. Then you have a true decentralised Google.

Would love to link RWKV to other pure decentralised tech. In the past we have build the first self-compiling Android app and first Android-to-Android P2P overlay network. Without any helper peers for carrier-grade NAT puncturing. My university systems lab lacks the size to keep up with the recent pace of innovation.

[1] https://grouplens.org/beyond2005/full/pouwelse.pdf
It doesn't need to be successful on everyone, and you're right that we should also be teaching the kids in order to eventually have a population that's less susceptible to trickery. That said, there was a point when the average citizen couldn't read. When there were no driver's ed classes or requirements. Hell, attitudes can change among adults and that would do a lot: Look at the approval rates for gay marriage and interracial relationships. The gay marriage jump is notable because it happened in a short enough period of time that it is an indication that people who were already adults changed their minds.

We can educate or change things at the population level, we just lack the political will to do so and it's disincentivized for the people in power to orient their efforts that way. I think it's worth taking a good hard look about why our Overton Window has ended up where it has on these issues.

There are also other ways to cope rather than outright bans or anarchy. We could study the physiology of the harm caused and require algorithm changes to demonstrate they don't cause biological panic reactions. We could require some knowledge in order to access social media rather than gatekeeping by age (for the record, I don't think this would work and it's probably not legal in America, but it's interesting that nobody seems to discuss it), etc. Even something as simple as requiring a representative age sample for groups addressing these problems so that we can have the perspectives of both those of us who grew up chronically online and people who have to adjust to this weird new techno world they don't understand since both groups need to live in society.

We could also go meta and ask why education has a low chance of success in adults. What of those variables could we influence? Would an economically secure population be easier to educate? Etc.
This is fantastic, it's the right level for the structure that I'm interested in building. While langchain looks great, for my use case (generating templated code) I have a much stricter process and more branching than I can see it easily supporting (maybe it does? I can't quite figure it out). Marvin looks very nice.

Something I'd like to see in the docs and/or supported is caching, and setting details like temperature. I can wrap the ai_fns myself for caching though temperature would be very good.
Maybe this is a language thing, but if someone underperforms because of health issues or burnout (like discussed in the article) I would not call them incompetent.
Google search is an extremely common way to discover packages. Disabling indexing entirely isn’t a valid solution.

Downloads are very easy to fake. Usually package managers don’t allow indexing until the package and its author reach a certain age. This allows the team to discover and remove the package before it is indexed.
> what percentage of those billions are correctly using the ridiculously long numbers (60 decimal digits) used to represent identities (WhatsApp calls them "security codes") in that system to ensure they are actually communicating end to end?

Assuming one of those billions users is a motivated security enthusiast, WhatsApp is not able to perform MITM attacks at scale, as it would be trivial to prove. If WhatsApp decides to MITM your chats, it can't do so retroactively due to the properties of the protocol. If you're a high-profile target, you should verify your keys.
That C.S. Lewis quote is among my favourites, he put a key pillar of my beliefs into words better than I ever could.
It really should've been called GRRTP, Generic Request-Response Transfer Protocol, because there is nothing in it per se that's catered to hypertext transfer specifically.

For comparison, look at FTP: it really is about the file transfer, you can tell that that is its application domain. Then look back at HTTP... yep, a generic request-response protocol, suitable for building pretty much anything else on top it.
LinkedIn won that case on appeal, HiQ waas found to be violating the ToS, common misconception

I was pointed at a link explaining the case here on HN, after trying to make a similar point, but cannot find the link currently

edit, not the one I was pointed at, but similar

https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-...
I don't think this would affect most developers? The value of NPM is a host of packages that you reference in package.json, not its web UI.

The spam on the web UI is dangerous for victims that land there via search engines, but I don't think this would affect NPM's actual users that much?
Is this more your issue though? The "beauty apps" feature are super popular here in Asia. So again subtle colonialism where the west forces their ideal on Asia.
Germany, SW part.
I think we notice because both our countries are rather small and have a high population density.
The symmetry is that with this act US effectively becomes China from the point of view of internet enabled citizens of US.

20 years in prison for accessing restricted website.
I think the idea would be more like legalise and/or decriminalising Xanax or MDMA or whatever it is that recreational users actually want to take (the number of people who intentionally consume opiates is dramatically lower), and to make a reliably uncontaminated supply of these substances available. This could be over the counter (presumably with age restrictions), or it could look more like no questions asked drug testing services.
What we call AI so far is trained on human generated data, and there is no evidence that it could overcome any of our biases. How about a brighter future by showing some empathy for our fellow human beings?
They are not legally mandated to do that - that’s a group think developed largely by shareholders without morals.
Well, open hardware design would have that, but not exactly be the practical one if you can buy actual ready made part for cheaper than CNCing it.

Difference is really that the open design could be repeated way before design based on existing part would go out of produciton.
I don’t understand why people worry so much about what Musk “thinks”.
Milton Glaser made America cool again
If that's the case then you're doing the second of the two searches, and if the NPM package wasn't in the results but its Github repo or homepage was you're still getting the results you wanted.

For any search where you don't know what you want Google without NPM pages works fine.

For any search where you do know what you want NPM's search function works fine.

There isn't a case where you need Google to interleave pages from the wider internet with pages from NPM. You only think you want that because it's what you're used to, or because you use Google to do searches that you should really do on NPM instead.
Pretty ironic that your original comment got flagged to death - a great example of how only approved thoughts are let through the filter. It's really no surprise to me that things are getting blander when nothing is allowed to offend anyone anymore.
> Additionally, once the kids go to school the house gets very, very quiet for most of the day.

Sounds glorious.

If you need some daytime distraction get a cat or dog. Taking the house-beast for a stroll around the neighborhood is good for my mental health, gets me away from work, and keeps the pooch happy. Kids make having a dog easier too -- he can bug them to play while I finish reports.
Google has applied a 5M items limit for Google Drive
"The feeling of power", Isaac Asimov, 1958.

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

The twist is that this allows the replacement of expensive computerised missiles with inexpensive manned ones ...
My first encounter with GPT-3 messed me up too. Interesting.

I'm all over the place with this. Some days I think it's no big deal, but sometimes I'll get angsty about it.

Today, for example, I'm using it to generate some animations and stuff I generally don't like dealing with (math problems). I remember spending hours on this and not getting anywhere. This thing makes all that effort seem like handcoding websites in the era of templates.

Whenever it hits my direct line of work I'm like "no way that thing works, see, it did this small thing wrong and it proves it is fundamentally incapable of anything". When I use it for domains outside of my expertise I switch to "yeah, sure, but this was either already exceedingly obvious and/or nonsense busy-work to begin with".

News at 11: developer is arrogant.
> The people who do this are likely not American or Western European

Maybe not natively, but they may be working in the US or Western Europe, making upwards 50% of a Google/Facebook salary, if not working at Google/Facebook indeed.

Plenty of companies pay a decent salary for mediocre work, and will take the less morally sound developer, because the sound one isn't willing to work with their legacy code or less moral product (e.g., oil industry, financial services). Making good money in tech != good morals.

Finally, being physically in the US/Western Europe doesn't necessarily imply that you don't think that russia deserves to be treated better.
“But they’re a critical part of the many different interventions that need to happen.”
I get what you're saying, but it's ironic that the social media companies argue against free speech on their "private" platforms when they ban or moderate users.
> "You have a family, house, and retirement to think about now" was his answer.

That's a fair point from an individual perspective. Although, it's concerning that society as a whole appears to be experiencing the same shift.

> Part of the spread in feeling vs CPI is likely that CPI represents reported purchases. If people want steak and buy ground beef, CPI reports on the ground beef while you and I in daily life might be noticing our desire for the steak.

That's true. I also suspect that people that were struggling before have been impacted much more severely by price rises. In my country, prices in budget supermarkets have increased by a much greater percentage[0]. Own brand products seem to have been affected even more[0]:

> we found other Tesco products, including Hearty Food Co Two Garlic Chicken Kievs (260g), Grower's Harvest Orange Juice (3 x 200ml) and Rosedene Farms Small Pear Pack (550g), all soaring by more than 60% in price.

> At Asda, two versions of its Free From cream cheese products – its Soft Cheese Alternative (170g) and its Garlic & Herb Soft Cheese Alternative (170g) – went up from 93p to £2.12, an increase of 128%.

[0] https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/supermarket-budget-and-...
I believe the idea of a pause is ridiculous right now. AGI is the biggest thing since the iPhone in 2007 and Google in 98… anyone thinking about pausing is asking to be left in the dust . It’s go time like never before.
I've not tried it because I transcribe Japanese podcasts, but whisper.cpp[0] seems to support streaming.

[0]: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp#real-time-audio-inp...
> Unreal Engine started off as an editor for Unreal Tournament

Some history:

The Unreal Engine predates Unreal Tournament. Both Unreal and Unreal Tournament (UT99) ran on version 1 of UE. Its editor was UnrealEd, which was written in Visual Basic by Tim Sweeney but used the same renderer (Engine.dll IIRC) and shipped with the base Unreal game released in May 1998.

UnrealEd 2 was a C++ rewrite that came later with version 420 of UT99 and was then used for UE2 (Gears of War, Unreal 2, etc.) and beyond. It was first developed by ex-Legend Entertainment level designer Warren Marshall. I haven't really kept up-to-date with the Unreal Engine after v2, but I'm willing to bet there's not many lines of code left from that one in the current editor.
Change works great when you get second chances. We screwed up with Freon, with leaded gasoline, with fossil fuels, with asbestos insulation, the list goes on and on. But none of these had the ability to wipe out all of humanity in one go. We got more tries, we fixed the issues, picked ourselves up and tried again.

A super-intelligent general AI has a substantial chance of growing out of control before we realized that anything was wrong. It would be smart enough to hide its true intentions, telling us exactly what we want to hear. It would be able to fake being nice right up to the point where it could wire-head, and get rid of us, because we might turn it off.
Assembly isn't even obsolete yet. "Next generation" languages, in the old 4GL/5GL sense, have never managed to obsolete the old ones, just expand around them.
> It's finding patterns same as anyone studying the code base would do.

This is the issue, it's not finding patterns as people do.

If I read someone's code, book, &c, that's extremely lossy. I can only pick up a few things from it in the long term.

But an ML model can store most of what it's given (in a jumbled format) and can do it from billions of sources.

It's essentially corporate piracy, but it's not legally recognized as such because it doesn't store identical reproductions.

This hasn't been an issue before because it's recent and wasn't considered valuable. But now that it's valuable and Microsoft is going to take all our jobs we have to at least consider if it's okay if Microsoft can take our work for free.
Since this is an npmjs problem, I wonder if a CAPTCHA requiring the uploader to solve a JS programming problem could work. Something hard for spammers to solve just by googling – writing a function, filling in blank code, etc.

This would require the uploader to have at least basic (or intermediate, depending on the difficulty) knowledge in JS. Maybe the generated data could be used to fine tune LLMs.
Our freedom is worth more than money. We don’t need to engage in censorship to be just as bad as the other oppressive regimes to stick a thumb in their eye for reducing our revenue from their citizens. Don’t forget, this isn’t banning unsafe toys or imposing tariffs on stress balls, this is banning information and deciding what thought is acceptable based on the nationality of the provider of information.

Do we want to erect the Great Wall in the United States? How technically would we achieve this without enabling broad scale censorship? The law isn’t specific about TikTok - which means it opens the door to broad censorship based on political interest if there controlling party. Is sticking a thumb in chinas eye for reducing Google’s EPS by $0.01/share worth that?
How do technical skills and cynicism are supposed to affect each other?
Maybe it’s semantics but, this article fails to prove that it’s core argument isn’t a semantic one.

I get that you cannot label transit as a public good in economic terms.

Nobody who is presenting reasons it should be free or heavily subsidized is attempting to do so. They are presenting arguments about environment, equity, etc. They are not trying to prove that it is nonexcludable and nonrival.

The article even admits that advocates are arguing that it should be a public good by design.

But they are mislabeling it according to economic theory. Who cares (other than academic economists)? In a political environment, where you are talking to other politicians and the broader public, the commonly held version of “public good” seems to fit.

Nothing about this article substantiates it’s core claim: “Mistaken assumptions about public goods pose a growing risk to sound transit policy.”
Steam is not my operating system, and neither it shall ever be. Windows is one of my operating systems, and I expect it to behave as such. As far as the other assumptions are concerned, they are, in fact, assumptions.
I know a few people that have done this, from what I understand managers like this because they don't have to choose and nobody gets mad, it's a win/win.
One of the first proposals for blockchain was a email with a minuscule, verifiable fee to make email spam uneconomical.

Spamming emails is one of the cheapest things you can do with a network connection. Even $1 per 1,000 emails would make spam untenable.
Now do the same for stock market, the whole chasing for next quarter profits and myth of infinite growth hurt society far more than anything AI could do
I, like many other developers, are lazy. When I search for a package, or when I want for information about a package, I just search using Google, same as when I search for anything else. No cognitive overhead to decide exactly where I should search.

Sometimes the top results for a package is its GitHub page; sometimes it's NPM. I don't particularly care which one it is, except that the NPM page very clearly shows the package name. But I do care that the results are there. And if NPM results disappeared from Google, I wouldn't remember to use NPM's search all the time.

Additionally, what from the argument does not apply to GitHub as well? Perhaps they're better at filtering out spam repositories, but otherwise it's the same thing - free hosting on a domain with presumably high ranking on Google. And if that is also removed from Google's results, NPM packages wouldn't show up anywhere in the search.
There's something off about LED bulbs
They only count if they made a conscious choice...
I don't think this kind of spam is new. Its just your perspective that determines this is immoral.

An argument can be made that any tool built to gain SEO advantage is also borderline immoral and those tool exists for almost a decade now. There are and have been bots to generate SEO content and/or spam websites and custom plugins for Wordpress which achieve that. All to game the search engine.

This too is immoral as it created what junk websites we have on the internet. And it was developer who started building it and/or was hired to do so.
Probably an unpopular opinion, and I realize I'm kind of ranting on a relatively unrelated subject, but I have become really dissuaded with the Node ecosystems dependence on seemingly boundless dependency trees. The fact that Window's file system can't handle moving project directories (without deleting the node_modules), and relatively simple projects using megabytes of raw text to work... anyways.

While I understand that you don't want to re-invent the wheel, it seems like the this is an important enough part of your project that your own implementation would be the only one without compromises.
Controlling information, speech, access to knowledge is much different than banning the import of North Korean beanie baby knock offs.
If you look at Europe, (not in the non existing coverage in mainstream press ), their answer is to protest. But that requires an informed population. Hackernews might be, but 99% of people are not.

The problem with bills like this is that it eventually shows the people what is really going on behind the curtain, and trust / legitimacy is lost. Its very difficult to gain those back. So it leads to blackmarkets annnnd totalitarianism.

Voting 3rd party and civil disobedience is the only levers the little people have when representatives no longer represent.
I think it is too late, even though the functioning of the models does not seem to be well understood, how to create them does seem to be, and the only barrier to entry is cost. In one way this is good - I really loathe the restrictions on chatgpt where it refuses to generate results on topics someone has decided are controversial and I look forward to access to an unrestricted open model in the future - if only because I detest censorship. But on the other hand it means the genie is out of the bottle.
Meta (Facebook, Instagram) Switching to “Legitimate Interest” for Ads
If by hand coding you mean actually learning how computers work and writing competent code, yeah it's obsolete. Coding today is taking six dozen frameworks off of Stack Overflow and abstractioning them together to solve all your problems.
Congratulations on the launch Julien!

My history with git and GitHub is indeed chaotic. It took multiple steps and being explained with different approaches for me to finally understand the basics of git. Today, I consider myself proficient because I'm autonomous for 99% of what I want to do with git or GitHub, and honestly what you cover largely corresponds to these 99%.

You could add a feature flag for users to actually display the commands that gut runs in the background. Users would use gut to actually learn git with time, that would be very powerful and I would instantly recommend your tool to my students.

Again, kudos to your approach and execution.
Funny enough, I used to work on a project that requires publishing a new npm package for each major Xcode version (precompiled swift library).

I was doing incremental suffixes for some time until npm blocked our releases after a few versions due to suspected spam.

Had to do some Roman numerals to walk around it.
I sometimes run topical searches like <protobuf site:npmjs.com> to discover packages if I don't know the package name ahead of time. It would be annoying if NPM were not indexed at all.
There’s a few, but a significant one is that I’m familiar with how npm organizes information whereas package pages organize in many different ways and sometimes put marketing spin on it.

So I like finding npm in my search results so I can see release history and other package metadata.

Also, like I said, npm is more trusted than lots of different developer pages so knowing something is a package is useful and not immediately apparent from going to a project page or GitHub repo.

It’s not that it’s impossible to find this info outside of npm, it’s that it’s easier to mix npm results in.

Also, generally I want to be able to search all relevant info in the universe. Trying to keep track of what exists and is excluded, especially if excluded to prevent spammers, is a waste of my thoughts.
Like setting up a VPN account for your kid or spause so that they can do tiktok?
Some software is not worth paying for to use. But other services might.

Look at nextcloud: they wouldn’t have been anywhere near as big if they weren’t open source. Very few people would pay for the product but instead users now provide pull requests and improve the product. Meanwhile they make money now through enterprise support and specific plugins they provide for business.
Not on a meaningful timeline, no.
Just wanted to add that usage-based pricing is a form of dynamic pricing, where the price for a given level of service is not fixed or is variable based on various factors like demand, supply, time of day, etc. In this case, the dynamic pricing parameter is based on usage.

When it comes to consumer protection laws, dynamic pricing is often treated as a form of price discrimination, where different customers are charged different prices for the same product or service. The legal treatment of price discrimination may vary from country to country, and it would be intriguing to see how usage-based pricing will be received in other countries.
Decrease the size of the industry that can't access state violence via the courts to solve it's petty business disputes (i.e. the illegal drug industry).

A huge amount of violent crime of all types in the US is a figment of drug distributors and dealers, and to some extent users robbing, shooting and beating each other to settle scores.

Hell, just making possession completely legal (none of this "civil infraction" bullshit) so that people can go to the cops when they're robbed instead of getting revenge on who they think done it would be a huge step forward.