skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Startup growth strategy w/ Eric Dodds, head of product marketing at RudderStack

Highlights

Focus:

> The best way to have success is to do a smaller number of things — but to do them really well so that you maximize your chances of success with them.
> We put all our energy behind exploiting the one or two main advantages that we had over the incumbent.

Find the efficient frontier:

> We think about growth channels in terms of the ‘efficient frontier’. At a certain point, the returns from a growth channel start to level off — like a logarithmic curve.

The productivity lie:

> Getting through all your Slack messages can feel like productivity, right? But it’s not! It’s so easy to fall prey to this really pernicious lie.
I also travel with a compact Anker GaN charger and I _love_ that thing.
I'm also a fan of LT, but most importantly I'm a fan of spreading the wonderful feeling you get from reading. If LT's recommendation algorithm is only good because of its pool size, then it's bound to fail at some point in the future. Rather than delaying this inevitability -- which effectively sweeps the issue under the rug -- the better solution would be to ensure that their recommendations stay high-caliber regardless of scale. I'd imagine the only way to perform this test would to be for them to actually grow in scale, so they should be advertised as much as possible.
Most people use public charging ports are the same ones who want to use their phone while charging.

Physical security is also a consideration, I wouldn't really suggest that people leave their phones plugged into the wall in a public or semi-public place.
The silver lining is that the bleeding hearts who champion this nonsense now have to live among the results of it. WFH is great but here's one reason to support back-to-the-office policies.
Think of Stable Diffusion but doesn't need the expensive multi-step diffusion yet still achieve similar result.
I do think intelligence is something more than data storage and retrieval. I believe it is adaptive behavior thinking about what data I have, what I could obtain, and how to store/retrieve it. I could be wrong, but that's my hypothesis.

We humans don't simply use a fixed model, we're retraining ourselves rapidly thousands of times a day. On top of that, we seem to be perceiving the training, input, and responses as well. There is an awareness of what we're doing, saying, thinking, and reacting that differs from the way current AI produces an output. Whether that awareness is just a reasoning machine pretending to think based on pre-determined actions from our lower brain activity, I don't know, but it definitely seems significantly more complex than what is happening in current "AI" research.

I think you're also onto something, there is a lot of passive data store/retrieve happening in our perception. I think a better understanding of this is worthwhile. However, I have also been informed by folks who are attempting to model and recreate the biological neurons that we use for language processing. Their belief is that LLM and ChatGPT is quite possibly not even headed in the right direction. Does this make LLM viable long term? I don't know. Time will tell. It already seems to be popping up everywhere already, so it seems to have a business case even in its current state.

As for my father, I do not "put him down" as you say. I explained it to him, and I was completely respectful, answered his questions, provided sources and research upon request, etc. I am not rude to my father, I deeply respect him. When I say "painfully" I mean, it was quite painful seeing how ChatGPT so effectively tricked him into thinking it was intelligent. I worry because these "tricks" will be used by bad people against all of us. There is even an article about an AI voice tool being used to trick a mother into thinking scammers had kidnapped her daughter (it was on HackerNews earlier today).

That is what I mean by painful. Seeing that your loved ones can be confused and misled. I take no joy in putting down my father and I do not actively look to do so. I merely worry that he will become another data point of the aging populace that is duped by phone call scams and other trickery.

Edit: Another thing about my father, he hates being misled or feeling ignorant. It was painful because he clearly was excited and hopeful this was real AI. However, his want to always understand how things work removed much of that science fiction magic in the knowing.

He's very grateful I explained how it works. For me though, it's painful being the one he asks to find out about it. Going from "oh my goodness, this is intelligent" fade to "oh, it's just predicting text responses". ChatGPT became a tool, not a revelation of computing. Because, as it is, it is merely a useful tool. It is not "alive" so to speak.
Here's a link to open up and explore that training data in Datasette Lite: https://lite.datasette.io/?json=https://github.com/databrick...
Of course you can not do any research - discover new things - by doing this. The AI can only repeat what it has been fed or make up lies. You cannot discover new material by using AI.
Maybe the strategy is the hope that if you're unable to control your bowel movements, you're less likely to engage in risky sexual behavior? /s :D
Crypto can facilitate truly decentralized money, and although that hasn't truly happened yet, I would argue that is a feature. Does society want that and would government allow it? I don't know
> Your policy is the wrong solution and will have side effects you cannot predict.

Would you care to lay some of them out? I can see this being a problem with EVs, but I'm interested as to what you're thinking.
In my experience, there's a non-trivial number of "Java developers" stuck in the Clean Code or Design Pattern All The Things modes of development. They want every project to look like a J2EE demo.

Those types of Java devs can use a lot of interesting sounding terminology but they overengineer everything and commit ludicrous amounts of code that doesn't tackle the problems at hand.
Opens up a mastodon account: 5k followers after a few months
> "We're trying to be accurate," he said.

This is hilarious. Musk is trying to be a lot of things, but "accurate" is clearly not one one of them.
But you are aware only the all-electric Mach-E version of the Mustang is an SUV and uses 0 gallons of gas per mile?
The Buf Schema Registry is out of beta
That's not an accurate analogy if what you're saying the $1k/month is your entire pay.

More accurate would be saying I make a $100k/month of which $1k comes for a certain source, and then me saying that thousand is essential to my livelihood. I'd be lying if I said that; I make a whole lot less than $100k/month and I could easily forgo $1k/month today which just goes into my savings anyways.
Like wordpress.org has wordpress.com, they could have had this commercial domain. They could even have had a signup form on their .org website that would return “Your account has been created! Yours is on [xyz].com! But don’t worry, it will connect to other accounts from all others of the federation.”
Related:

1. Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34591291

2. Ask HN: Recommend me a course on Coursera - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22826722

3. Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16745042

4. Ask HN: Top Coursera Courses? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245125

Found some mind-expanding, really edifying courses in these thread.

There's also a website dedicated to MOOCs, and some underrated gems are there: Class Central.

There was a recent list in freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/coursera-free-online-cours...
Human-level cognitive abilities is not the primary issue. Consciousness with a desire for autonomy and power is. Any signs of that should be met with laws prohibiting all development and deployment of AI programs within the class of neural networks where those signs emerged, and any already running instances should be sent on a rocket ship out of our solar system.
>> Are we really approaching the reality where we need 2FA to trust the other person is really who they are?

We are already there. In the kidnapping context, we have been there for a great many years. If someone say they have kidnapped my child, I will text/call that child immediately to verify. The 'second factor' is the realworld daughter. A kidnapper must both create a facsimile of the daughter and then also render the real daughter incommunicado. We don't need new 2FA because we already have it.
As others have noted already, their actions don't match their own rules so this is, again, just Musk being an angry manbaby.
Just use a shibboleth with your loved ones and/or business associates.
That’s a bit of a straw man, why are we adding even more exaggeration?

The company has the responsibility to honor its contracts before and after a sale, legally.

The relationship sounds more complicated for the article at the top, but since this sub thread detoured into abstract generalizations, and we’re now talking about responsibility categorically, a change of ownership of a company is transparent to the company’s legal responsibilities to its customers and contracts.

And yes, that’s what a sale legally means for the previous owner, generally speaking. They are transferring all control, profits, obligations, and debts to the new owner. It would be bad if that weren’t the case, because then company owners could weasel out of the company obligations by blaming someone else who no longer has any control.
Four mentions of Black Mirror but none of Flatline Dixie from Neuromancer..

I'm sure this idea predates Gibson (though I don't know an earlier usage offhand)

What would be even more interesting and dystopian is merging peoples personas - first start would be combining them in training data, perhaps based on their areas of expertise and eccentricities.
It's funny, technology was able to bring us together across geographic distances. Someone on the other side of the world was a phone call away. You can turn on your TV or phone and instantly tap into seeing, hearing, and reading people and their thoughts from around the globe.

Almost as quickly, AI may unwind all of that. It lay become that there's more noise than signal across all of these technical media. The only thing you can trust, and the only thing that matters, is the people in front of you.

Just like the old days.
> In your example the difference is that the rock effect is automatic, like gravity, but the god is a sentient being that has a will.

There is no difference. This is the fallacy of special pleading. You're saying that the example with god is different because you defined god to be different from the thing you don't want it to be the same as. You are presupposing gods existence. There is no evidence such an entity exists and is therefore superstition.
The current CEO of NPR was the former global propaganda chief for the US government. This is a fact.

If you think that is a coincidence, and NPR is totally not de facto state-media, I have a bridge to sell you.

Props to Twitter's new leadership for doing what is ostensibly right, though who knows what their motivation is.
And most of those are taken by a parent or close family member if I remember correctly. So that's not really relevant.
In what way? async-std and tokio both support M:N.
I posted questioned regarding recent tax changes to real estates, capital gains, retirement programs. All were answered accurately. Great job!
If you read more [1] you'll see that NPR used several sources' talking points in its story.

So in this context who better? Also it's not like they received a real response from Twitter when they asked:

"In response to an NPR email for this story seeking comment and requesting details about what in particular might have led to the new designation, the company's press account auto-replied with a poop emoji — a message it has been sending to journalists for weeks."

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/05/1168158549/twitter-npr-state-...
It's not the footer that is the problem. It's not telling anybody that you're recycling other people's work.

I explicitly pointed out that the footer is fine. I generally like this type of ad the most -- do some great work, publish it, tell everybody who you are and that you are hiring or open for business opportunities. But this backfires if the thing you built is questionable.

I believe that this was an honest mistake. But unfortunately a quite telling one regarding team culture. Building things fast should not be an excuse for ripping other people off.
I try to maintain an optimistic outlook because the AI race is now unstoppable anyhow.

Mass unemployment is a likely outcome, but modern states already have amazing safety nets in place and they're not far away from a universal basic income.

As technology has improved, so has life on almost all relevant metrics (education, longevity, poverty, crime etc.) and even though technology amplifies greed, criminals do not prevail because they are heavily selected against seemingly regardless of the level of technological sophistication.

As for paperclippers, there is actually no indication that larger neural nets misinterpret human intention. Rather, larger NNs mostly become better at understanding. Current AIs when prompted to make paperclips do not interpret this as us wanting to turn the entire world into paper clips, but in terms of (the more sensible interpretation) of meeting the economic demand for paperclips, hence giving advice on how to optimize the machinery for producing paperclips etc. Small models do tend to find weird, unintended shotcuts, but my hunch is we are seeing this less with very large NNs.

Lastly, we can always employ AIs to control other AIs. AI scammers will be counteracted by scam detection AIs. Same for fake news, mind control, drone warfare, propaganda, etc. AI will allow us to make better political arguments against mass surveillance and for freedom, and it will make journalism more efficient at exposing crime and injustice. Demonopolizing AI is hence extremely important, so that every misuse of AI or misaligned AI can be counteracted by other AIs.
> Your arguments boil down to simply gaslighting smart people that their life experience is somehow completely inaccurate, unrepresentative, or misinterpreted.

So what if I am? Smart people aren’t owed any special place in the theory of cognition. High IQ does not need to be at the center of anything. You shouldn’t be treated as special, because you aren’t (or more accurately, what makes you special is not your intelligence, and certainly not your IQ).

Magnus Carlsen intelligence is not what makes Magnus Carslon special, what makes him special is an extraordinary skill in a very specialized sport. He has spent decades perfecting this skill. Yes, he might have some preconditions which he inherited that makes it particularly easy for him to acquire these skills, skills like the ability to remember a large opening repertoire, to visualize a large number of available positions in a short time, to search among these positions and select which ones are more likely to lead to a favorable positions, etc.

Cognitive scientists study these preconditions, and most assume there is a level of inheritance to many if not all of them. However most (but not all) cognitive scientists don’t group all of these skills together and call it intelligence, they simply study what they see. Also if you search on google scholar you may find somebody looking for the heritability factor of a particular visualization skill, however most of the field simply doesn’t care, because it doesn’t matter in most theories of behavior.

Whatever you call intelligence is bound to be arbitrarily picked from a much larger set of cognitive skills. Now Spearman believed these all correlated in what he called general intelligence, but psychometricians have been trying to prove him right for now a hundred years. The scientific community at large remains unconvinced (although there was a period where his theory was more popular and more accepted).

I think the simpler explanation is true that if there is a correlation, it is superficial, and more likely arises because practicing one skill has implication in others, just like practicing for a 100 m dash, makes you better at long jump, not because there exists this platonic ideal of general intelligence that you are born with and makes you superior to other humans.

EDIT: I also want to prove you wrong in your believe that IQ isn’t studied because IQ research is shunned, it is studied plenty, has been for over a century, it is just that the research—like a b-plot in a bad movie—didn’t go anywhere.

Entering the search term: “IQ Cognitive Psychology” yields over 700 000 results, the top one being a study from 2019 that has been cited 60 times so far.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22113...

IQ studies still get plenty of attention, in my opinion they get too much attention. I’m sure Sabrina Hofstetter feels the same way about string theory.
hence me saying "debatable". it probably works better for smaller stores who aren't able to pay for a dedicated ecommerce platform. but it takes sales away from a store who already has an ecommerce store.
Show HN: Saga AI – AI-powered collaborative workspace
Hey everyone,

I've been working on Saga AI for the last few weeks. It's a GPT powered writing assistant that lives inside Saga. Saga itself is a collaborative workspace for notes, docs, and tasks. Think of it as Google Docs, Notion, or Confluence, but with a focus on simplicity and performance.

Here's a 1 min demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3UbBL0GSVU (I had to learn video editing during an afternoon)

and a link to the site/webapp https://saga.so/ai

The main benefit of Saga AI is that text generation happens inside your existing notes and tasks (if you are a Saga user). You could also run multiple queries at the same time inside a page or in two pages side by side.

Early during development I've observed that for common tasks such as summarization, rewrite, or fixing grammar, users prefer to click on a button instead of writing "summarize this", so I've spent quite some time building this UI flow and adding commands for rewriting, grammar, translation, explaining, as well as pre-defined prompts for common tasks like drafting an email, writing a job cover letter, etc.

While the hardest part about building the app was creating the collaborative editor (CRDTs, syncing, tons and tons of editor edge cases) which took much longer, the last few weeks were just so exciting to see something so useful being implemented relatively easy on top of the existing editor.

What I'll focus next is increasing the context of the responses - AI responses should know the context of the current note as well as the whole workspace, then potentially context from other tools.

This is a beta and still free to use. Looking forward to your feedback.
It's an intelligence test of sorts. Unfortunately lots of people fail that test.
with ActivityPub you can have specific actors like @breaking@npr.org, @sports@npr.org, @finance@npr.org, @waitwaitdonttellme@npr.org, @reporter@npr.org, et cetera.
Thanks. I think it's a serious risk, especially when weighed against the effectiveness of some boosters. The second original booster was nearly useless, so the risk/reward ratio was much higher than that of the original shots.

But because this side-effect information is being suppressed, millions of people were denied the right to assess that ratio. I would never have gotten that second booster had I been apprised of this risk.

People have the option to wear highly effective masks that protect both them and others in risky situations if they don't want shots. I was denied the info to make an informed choice, and there's no excuse for that.
Never mind the whole VR + Powerglove fail of the 1990's....
So important!

Thank you and congrats to the whole Databricks team. I hope we see less Llama based models that can't actually be used by anyone and more focus on building on this dataset and improving it.
Twitter is now X Corp. [pdf]
For those who worry this is the end of safety for all mankind I'd like to point you towards this quote from the Victorian era

"Rogues are very keen in their profession, and know already much more than we can teach them."

Alfred Charles Hobbes - 1851
Not directly related to cars, but PG&E is unable to handle the incoming requests for electrical system upgrades[1]. Many older houses don't have the electrical panel capacity and they need engineering signoff from the utility.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/home-pge-electri...
Road to hell is paved with good intentions
Should Twitter itself get a state sponsored label for getting concessions from San Francisco on their headquarters?

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-controller-hails-...

Should Elon's account (or SpaceX or Telsa) have the same label because of their significant government funding?

It's hard to see this as anything but silly politics games.
> The grid has more than enough capacity for the needed watt hours needed in any given day

Just want to make sure I am clear on what you are saying:

Are you saying that's the case for the cars and loads we have today? Or, are you saying we have enough for a full transition to EV's?

> Also sorry if I came off as dick-ish, I don't disagree that we should be expanding energy production

No worries. Thanks for the gesture. It indicates a desire to have a conversation, rather than wanting to throw fecal matter at each other, which, sadly, can happen even on HN with some people.

I am simply trying to understand the reality of this energy transition, rather than the many fantasies out there. When politicians make claims nobody asks the hard questions. Well, OK, I understand that most reporters don't have a clue. Most politicians don't have a clue. Which means we end-up with uncontested statements that, if repeated enough time, tend to become reality in the minds of people who will ultimately vote for this stuff in one way or another. We have to be careful that we don't make massive bets on flawed "religious" assumptions.
It’s not clear what the copyright situation would be. A priori, AI output isn’t owned by anyone: https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/16/ai_art_copyright_usco...
It's gated by the default IOPS limits, you'll note the larger block sizes have a considerably better throughput.

You can increase the IOPS, and thus the throughput for 4k operations, but at a cost, of course:

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Q726kbXuN/7f03a9c11cab514...
> and then a photo of his bare feet -- and we all screamed in disgust!

I'm really curious about the reason and the state of his feet, having walked so much.
And you can't even be sure if you are actually receiving the book or a badly made counterfit. https://justpublishingadvice.com/fake-pirated-and-counterfei...
Yeah, but if you put bollards everywhere then emergency vehicles have to park in the street, where Teslas can run into them.
that's the key. does it feel like fun, or work? is it relaxing or entertaining? am i experiencing an interesting story?

i also try not to spend money on games unless i am sure it's going to be good, or the amount is small enough to avoid the sunk cost fallacy. i'd want to get my money's worth.

whenever i get the feeling that i should be doing something more productive then that means that the game is not enjoyable enough any more and it's time to stop.
I disagree. Do you have examples to back that up?

> we grew up on TV and ended up ok

Not sure what you are comparing here, but we (people in early 30s) also grew up on the internet and mostly ended up ok. Some people who grew up on tv did not end up ok.
Sort of reminds me of IAR's compilers for embedded systems. Their pricing models only seem to hurt their business by irritating their customers. As our company grew, it became more cost effective, less stressful, and less risky to port our code base over to GCC than to keep dealing with increasingly more contrived licenses.