skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Neural networks make great pattern-matchers

Not really. LLMs and diffusion models have one thing in common: they don't match patterns. They elaborate. Pattern matching is needed for that to some extent, but these models are not as good at it as they are at completing models. Machine learning is really good at "masking". And the short version of that is "there's something missing, fill it in". This is why people call ChatGPT "autocorrect". It fills in the missing word at the end of the conversation. Any pattern matching it can do is only in service of that.

I might remark that I have 3 daughters, and when I look at the exercises their schools provide them, that's exactly what they get them to do, starting with "fill in the missing word" going all the way to "write an essay defending ..."

> They will produce something that matches the query, but not necessarily any correct information.

Here's the problem I have with this statement. You can say the exact same thing about humans. I remember math teachers in high school where I now know ... they were idiots. In fact, a few things they presented as truth took quite a bit of effort to train back out of my behaviour.

Things we know about human behavior: it's mostly based on imitation. One might remark: imitation creates a strong possibility of stupid behavior, including behaving stupidly in large numbers. We know incidents where large numbers of humans have literally killed themselves through stupidity, both intentionally and accidentally. The reason we find the many sketches about dodo birds funny is that we've all seen people behave (somewhat) like them.

Plus this matches my experience. If I look at what people do, it's trivial to see: no matter what problem a human encounters, they will do something. If they don't have a good answer that including incredibly stupid things, hurting themselves or others. And where we do exhibit good problem solving behavior, is spreads through humanity through imitation. In many instances it is said that those behaviors were discovered by accident, and then spread through imitation.

Equally, if I look at how signals are propagated inside the brain and nervous system, it's kind of obvious. Signal comes in, signal comes out. The odds of a signal dying or amplifying (outside of medical problems with the brain) are very small. Your brain doesn't generate intelligent behaviour, it "converts" input signals into output signals. That's what it does. This seems like an excellent way to guarantee the "any problem will get a response, if necessary a very stupid one" behavior.

Given that all LLMs can do is read what humans have written, they are remarkably correct and creative. Of course, for them to actually progress the state of the art they will need to become actors in society, not just read the internet. They'll actually have to try stuff out, make things happen.
Are they blocking Google Tag Manager?
The Pocket Guide of Essential YC Advice
I think the accusation that 4chan is a far-right message board is accurate, and I believe that accusation can be supported by showing that 4chan's explicitly stated rules can be used to plausibly deny this accusation, while demonstrating that they're are not enforced (or selectively enforced).

4chan's Rule 3: "You will not post any of the following outside of /b/: Troll posts, Racism, Anthropomorphic ("furry") pornography, Grotesque ("guro") images..."

These rules are constantly being violated across many of the boards, and moderators rarely take action on some of the boards when posts are reported unless they explicitly violate US law. I've seen so many threads get to 400+ replies and fall off the boards, threads that blatantly violate these rules. The period of time after the 2020 election was brutal, an enormous amount of violent and racist content was not removed.

Rules are often even selectively enforced, sculpting narratives that moderator cliques decide on (see /pol/ for example).

At some point, it's worthwhile to ask "who benefits?" from these rules not being enforced. The kind of content that doesn't get moderated is strictly far-right stuff.
Ask HN: What would you build if you could travel back in time?
If you could travel back in time with your current knowledge, for example to the early days of the Internet, what would you do, build or maybe launch?
Close. If a doctor gives you a placebo, you can only get the placebo. No guarantee you will get anything, of course. You could also get the negative side effects of the real medicine, without any cure.
Is the teen suicide rate today actually higher than it was in say the 1990s?
This reminds me of an Arduino project I started but never finished! I bought an IR LED and made a dumb TV remote webapp that could change the volume and channels and mute the TV and had the mute time be 30 configurable. The Arduino just sat on my coffee table pointing at the TV and was connected to my wifi.

I ultimately wanted to detect how loud my TV was and lower the volume automatically when I watched Avengers or something because I was constantly fiddling with the volume when some parts were excessively loud. I wanted to extend this to ads too so that when they came on my TV would mute automatically but I got the microphone and kinda lost passion for the project.
> article evaluates whether engineers with the badge are higher or lower skilled than average.

It doesn't even do that, really. Unless you expand to ".. than average performance at a particular type of interviewing"
Working on yourself will lead you where you want to go. Wishing you health, happiness and peace, and the same for anybody else reading this.
"Defense" weapons being used to slaughter innocent people, including children (you used the phrase "baby killer" first), is well documented fact.

It's not insult if it's verifiably true, is it?

There are plenty of people that are okay with their work being used to kill babies. They can work defense jobs. I just wanted to provide a little reality check for downtrodden devs considering defense work for the first time, because I'm sure a lot of them in fact are not okay with their work being used to kill babies.
My point is that we have our limits too in our sense of time. The difference is one of scale and more importantly here, in how it affects the tasks at hand. An LLM is certainly not going to catch a fly ball, but would have no problem tending to plants.

LLMs have a context window, as it would be impossible to carry on a conversation with them without it. They can answer questions about when some event in that conversation happened relative to other events in it. GPT4's 32K tokens isn't human capacity, but it's not zero.
> It can be run off of a small generator, which ~every homeowner in New England has.

This is absolutely not true. I actually don't know anyone who lives in an urban area in New England that has a generator. And I know some who live in fairly rural Maine that don't have one.

Generators are not ubiquitous, or even common, in New England.
In hindsight, it's the most natural, most obvious next step to get LLMs to write better code:

Explain to them how to debug and fix the code they've written.

Which is pretty much what you would do with an inexperienced human software developer.

Looking at this with fresh eyes, it's both shocking to me that this sort of thing is even possible, and yet also completely unsurprising as yet another emergent capability of LLMs.

We live in interesting times.
> Every bank check lists the bank account number, which serves as the only information needed for a party to issue a request to withdraw money from that account.

Just here point out that the issue is that it's enough to have the bank account number to issue a request to withdraw money from that account, and not that the bank accounts numbers are listed.
That might have worked before ChatGPT. :)
The post and some comments seem to be assuming that whether you flip this bit or not can effect your chances of getting hired. Maybe, or maybe they just found a correlation, that people more or less hireable for other reasons are more or less likely to flip this bit, and nobody actually pays attention at allto whether the bit is flipped or not, the same person choosing to flip the bit or not would not effect their chances. Which seems plausible to me. Or some combination. The data analysis as given doesn't give us a way to pick from these explanations.
It would be fair if you also compared Wayland to X11 in the areas wayland really lacks, which are the ones I originally posted.

It is a strict regression in all of these. In my mind, a modern framework should embrace security first, then accessibility, then architectural beauty. Wayland gets this, from my humble point of view, exactly wrong (architectural beauty, security, accessibility).

Maybe it's time for another re-approach of linux DE's.
Yes, first thing that comes to mind: How much worse will this become with LLMs in the loop - almost assuming that this page was even submitted for that thought?
House ads are ads.
I stuck to the same question for nearly a decade too, even if it was barely more difficult than fizzbuzz. The ability to compare against the past candidates was very useful, which would not be possible when changing questions too often.

The sad reality was that it was waaaay too effective as a fizzbuzz eliminator (> 80%) which I don't know what it tells me about the candidates in general or just about our recruiting :-)
Has Chrome already been doing this for a while? (I'm not sure, but I think I've heard that it has).

Disclaimer: I'm a FF user, not trying to say FF is bad, I just want to know how much of this is actually new cutting edge privacy protection vs. marketing fluff.
This must be the peak passive aggressive. Dare to explain why that is a good thing?
Your metaphor is does not work well because water and coke are both pernicious to a car. A better one would be quelching thirst with water versus coke. Both will calm thirst, and are reasonably “neutral”. The second has pernicious effects, especially in some people (diabetes for example)

Distilled water has other uses besides drinking. It can be used in chemistry for example. You would not get good results in chemistry if you replaced distilled water with coke. “I can drink water, surely I can use coke instead of water on this chemistry experiment, because I can also drink coke” is clearly faulty logic.

And yet, that’s exactly what people do with homeopathy.

While it should always be presented as a “complement” to medicine(because it can have some mental/placebo effect in some people, in some cases), very often people take it as a substitute (the marketing word is “alternative”) to medicine. This is something that the homeopathic industry can’t help but “allow happening”. In fact they are motivated to promote that way of thinking. First it increases direct sales. Secondly, the more mixed up their product is with medicine, the stronger the placebo effect will be, and that will increase sales further.

Unfortunately the placebo effect is very limited. You can’t mend a broken arm with placebo alone. You can’t cure cancer with placebo alone. And yet people replace chemotherapy with homeopathic “remedies”. And then they die.

In short: doctors should never give homeopathic remedies, because that puts them on the same level as medicine. That will ultimately make some homeopathic makers richer, but it will also get some people killed.
They won't have to enforce it on thousands. Just make an example of a few poor saps within the country and most will shut down. And the US loves to make examples out of people. Just look at how people were charged and given hysterically ridiculous sentences in the war on drugs.
I think in some cases they’re actually slow.
If you don't mind me asking, how did you search actively? Why didn't it work out?

I've also searched actively. It didn't work out in my case as well. Relationships are hard.
Not exactly. I can't even remember where I've read that. Most probably on some (pop-)science aggregator like phys.org, or similar. About a few times, popping up again several years later. Then somewhere else on some blogs, maybe even scmp.com
I mean, just google `cognitive psychology iq` and you'll see that's false. It is used when folks can "get away with it." The issue isn't that there's some principled rejection of intelligence testing. It's that western elites have found it convenient to advance the alternate theory that differential outcomes are because of systemic oppression.
First off, bravo for sharing. Much respect.

That said, this is borderline navel gazing. Stop thinking about "what it's like to go swimming" and jump in the lake. Yes, you'll get wet, look stupid, and make a mess. There's no way around that. The sooner the better.

If you need to reason yourself into the water, I recommend "The Village Effect." Statistically, humans fair better with a rich tapestry of relationships. Are you ready to bet your life on being the exception? Move over, Pascal.

More pointedly, can you really say you've examined life and lived it fully if you've never shared it intimately with another person? Can someone say they understand the world if they've never left their home? Do you want to be that person?
'Sparks of AGI' https://youtu.be/qbIk7-JPB2c
Like the moon landing?
Great post. And brave.

One thing I believe strongly now, (although I did not always), is that we all very much have the right to be our most charming selves, and ask out people that catch our interest, but then gently let them down gently at any time after 1, 2, or even 10 dates, with no reason needed to be given for why you are breaking up. And if the other person sends the signal of "you are so unkind, for making me like you so much/love you, and then leaving me", you can reject that message; it's not fair or valid.

I hear you when you say you don't want to break anybody's heart. But you have the right to. And sometimes we do it, even though we don't mean to. And sometimes it is the right thing to do.
Hold on, 1/3 of what? What funding paid the dues back to CPB?

My local affiliate breaks their funding down as 50% member support, 40% corporate/charitable underwriting, 10% state/local govt funding. Maybe other NPR affiliates also get federal grants, but this one doesn’t.

Seems like we’re back to a pretty small fraction of funding for the US State to exert hard control over the content produced.
Yeah I find the argument for Graal to be very disingenuous. It’s certainly not an out of the box solution; I’d say it’s just another Java technology stack we would need to learn. And there are so many of those.

So I guess I also like Go’s batteries-included standard library.
Anecdotal, but dating apps have to be the worst way to meet someone. Everybody I ever met through them has major problems and that's why they have to meet people through an app dedicated to meeting people for relationships. It's such an unnatural and strange concept.
Google is a patch work family where the siblings constantly fight each other for their parents' favor. All the teams are competing for promotions and money that you get through "impact". Go and Dart are just like all the other Google products that get released with much fanfare and then quickly forgotten once their creator's no longer need them for their next brag sheet.
All 3 of these technologies retain a very strong, putrid stink when given a rational smell test. Until someone finds a way to permanently wash away this foul odor, I will remain skeptical of them.

Metaverse stink: "This could have been an email" in 3-D!

Bitcoin has 2 stinks:

A)Find a lot of computing energy. Think about building power plants to make coins, and you're starting to get somewhere.

B)Price will rapidly drop and spike, maybe thousands of dollars per day. That's a feature!?

LLM AI: 60% of the time, it's right every time! This tech includes very nice graphics to back up any of its highly confident and hallucinogenic bullshit. Until this phenomenon is well understood, it stinks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_inte...
Useful, but still wouldn't count on it.

With respect to GPT etc. as a copilot, the current dialogue seems to focus on "ask for GPT to generate code to do X" then "just paste in the error message to fix bugs in the code GPT generates"

A.) Why is GPT generating code that results in simple compiler errors (that is why GPT probably shouldn't be used to generate any code / replace devs for real projects yet), and

B.) error messages are (just guessing here) probably <1% of the actual errors in most codebases.

I personally know of a few large companies laying off devs over this.

IMO, the tech debt we're going to see in 6 months will probably be huge. Good now to start a staffing agency of human experts who can come in and fix this type of problem (extricating massive amounts of code generated by GPT without starting from scratch) because there will be a bunch of fires to put out and those fires will be worth $
This is very interesting, thank you for sharing! I do have one tangential comment based on this:

> I continued to use [the interview question] because I got good signal from the candidates.

Working at Google, this is something I hear a lot: that some question, or other interview thing, is good for getting "signal" from candidates. But how do you actually know?

Like, I feel to definitely know a question is good you would actually need to track candidates after they start working and see if their performance on the question correlates with their job performance. (Unfortunately, it seems impossible to track candidates who don't get an offer.)
I would imagine TSMC and the Taiwanese government are keeping a really close eye on this and doing everything they can to mitigate their the erosion of their Silicon Shield. I wonder what exactly though...
Nope, you are not paranoid, that’s exactly what will happen, since the patriot act, both “Terrorism” and “not the children” are the main excuses to undermine and attack privacy online, soon you won’t be able to use any online services without attaching your ID, but that’s only temporary until they make the digital ID -in Canada there’s already a bill about it (1)-, hence the push for it especially after covid digital passports and how they can be used to attack such privacy (2), and making the process of violating this anonymity easier, but the worst part in my opinion isn’t just the online side, but the offline one, as soon as such digital ID is implemented, the gap between the online usage and offline one will vanish, your bank account and taxes are linked to what you post online for example, and just a single query on your name and all what you do online and offline is on screen.

(1) https://citizenlab.ca/2021/04/bill-c-11-explained/

(2) https://www.biometricupdate.com/202206/canada-us-officials-s...
I am many years behind the literature/research and do not personally feel qualified to write a short summary on this specific academic's work.
Ask HN: What gotchas have you encountered when implementing eSignature?
We are in the process of evaluating moving away from one of the popular online eSignature platforms into rolling out our own method. For context, it is only 1 contract template that we use.

If you've gone through similar migration, what gotchas have you encountered?
Apple is doing the same thing, just more overtly. I find your comment a bit jumping on the bandwagon and lacking of thought.

Off the top of my head, apple has advertising for:

- Stocks
- Maps
- iCloud that never stops pestering you.
- AppStore
- News

It looks like Apple may add ads into Podcasts and Books.
Here's a fictitious citation that commonly appears on HN - "Dunning-Kruger effect":

> The expression "Dunning–Kruger effect" was created on Wikipedia in May 2006, in this edit.[1] The article had been created in July 2005 as Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. Neither of these terms appeared at that time in scientific literature; the "syndrome" name was created to summarise the findings of one 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger. The change to "effect" was not prompted by any sources, but by a concern that "syndrome" would falsely imply a medical condition. By the time the article name was criticised as original research in 2008, Google Scholar was showing a number of academic sources describing the Dunning–Kruger effect using explanations similar to the Wikipedia article.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=55273744&diffmode=...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...
On Expert mode, I decided to ask it a simple question but in a niche language, to see how well it can scour the internet.

How do I emit JS object literals in a ClojureScript macro?

Instead I was given an answer to a completely unrelated question and it cited some "Learn ClojureScript" website. In short, it provided the following example.

(def js-object (js-obj "key1" "value1", "key2" "value2"))

But I was looking for (1) a macro, and (2) the JS object to be generated at compile-time, not run-time. Also, the stray comma is very weird, but thankfully commas are ignored. Concretely, I was expecting something like this

(defmacro mac []
(let [js-vector (JSValue. [1 2 3])]
`(f ~js-vector)))

which will emit a call to `f` with the JavaScript array `[1 2 3]` at compile-time.

I know what the response will be to this comment: either "Clojure is a niche language, who cares?" or "get better at prompting." But otherwise, this is on-par with ChatGPT Plus, even when presented with the possibility to crawl Clojurians Slack archives, Stack Overflow, a bunch of blog posts, etc.
> you log into VRChat today it feels… good. It feels like you are actually interacting with people.

That's exactly it: you're actually interacting with people. In the beginning, Facebook had _only_ people: your friends. If you logged into Facebook then and had 0 friends, arguably nothing would happen.

Today, only about every 3rd post is by a person, even if you have hundreds of friends. There probably is a ratio of algorithmically-generated v.s human content that is acceptable to their users.... but I'm chasing the 100% too :)
Could also be a consequence of just not having much desire to "mate". It's not unheard of for people to not want to "mate"; there's a reason why asexual is a term that people use to describe themselves.
I'd be curious to know if having few-shot prompts that demonstrate making mistakes and then correcting them causes the model to make more initial mistakes so that it has something to correct.

Like as far as the model is concerned, how can it distinguish between the task being "do your best but if you do make an error, correct it" and "make some mistakes like in this example and then fix them".
Mad props for taking this into your own hands and for being straight with your org. Also, fine username (former VBA language PM representing).
Or just harden up and actually take the kid like in the old days. People these days are so lazy, relying on technology to do the work for them.
Based on my discussions in this thread, maybe I've learned a little more! First and foremost, I believe that the Metaverse is something that does not exist and is mostly corporate jargon. I don't think I can "log on to" or "download" Meta's Metaverse at this point in time. I believe it is intended to be a 3D, avatar-based chatroom, presumably with some yet-to-be-defined killer feature that is intended to differentiate it from the kind of avatar-based chatrooms that have existed for a generation.

Am I close?