skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personal computing has gone mainstream.

Video games have gone mainstream.

Internet has gone mainstream.

Anime has gone mainstream.

"AI" has gone mainstream.

I think it's fair to say that nerd culture does, has, and always will exist, but what nerd culture is changes with the passing sands of time. The nerds of today are not the nerds of yesteryear (read: us).
I don’t like the term nerd, because when I was growing up it was a very hurtful epithet, but exactly this. There’s nothing inherently connecting liking math or computers, on the one hand, and super hero comics on the other. It was just an accident of history.
George RR Martin made a good point- that if a nerd is someone with a lot of knowledge about something others find uninteresting, we've all become nerds with the advent of the internet. It's just too easy to go down a rabbit hole not to be a nerd in regards to something.
Because I've done it this way for years before USB condoms were a thing.
I mean, you did say you wouldn’t want the government regulating jeans manufacturing.
Turbulence Cancelling – Making flights turbulence-free
Nerd culture has been mainstream since The Big Bang Theory; le geek c'est chic. D&D, Comic books, nerdy plastic-framed glasses, etc... are all "having a moment".

So is nerd culture dying? No, it's just being sold now, too. Nerds will never die, as witnessed by anyone who has ever played D&D with a "rules lawyer".

Nerds, the people, who are--according to my own mushy definition: socially awkward people who obsessively pursue a niche interest/hobby that is outside of the mainstream. If their hobby/interest is in the mainstream, they know all the lore, such that, if there is an argument to be had about some small detail, they will be prepared.

Legend has it, they are in their basements right at this very moment, studying, reading, preparing, for that argument about whether or not the DM was right about encumbrance...
> Integrated with lightning, Nostr enables new value-for-value business models that have the potential to be more fair.

I don't understand this.
From my perspective Mastodon has clearly took off. My bubble already has much daily fresh content.
Surely burden of proof would still be an issue?
There are actually only 21 isotopes with "tens or hundreds of millennia" half-life listed on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radioactive_nuclides_b...
> It's not really that, it's that recalling a set of rules and following a set of rules are fundamentally different tasks for an LLM.

My point is that this appears to be the case for people too. It is often necessary to explicitly remind people to recall a set of rules to get them to follow the specific rules rather than act in a way that may or may not match the rules.

Having observed this many times, I simply don't believe that most humans will see e.g. an addition and go "oh, right, these are the set of rules I should follow for addition, let me apply them step by step". If we've had the rules reinforced through repetitive training many enough times, we will end up doing them. But a lot of the time people will know the steps but still not necessarily apply them unless prompted, just like LLMs. Quite often people will still give an answer. Sometimes even the correct one.

But without applying the methods we've been taught. To the point where when dealing e.g. with new learners - children in particular - who haven't had enough reinforcement in just applying a method, it's not at all unusual to find yourself having conversations like this: "Ok, so to do X, what are the steps you've been taught? Ok, so you remember that they are A, B and C. Great. Do A. You've done A? Now do B..." and so on.

To me, getting a child to apply a method they know to solve a problem is remarkably close to getting an LLM to actually recall and follow these methods.

But even for professionals, checklists exist for a reason: We often forget steps, or do them wrong, and forget to even try to explicitly recall a list of steps and do them one by one when we don't have a list of steps in front of us.
Yes. That's my setup as well.

Only downside is the "local" timeline is... pretty empty. You won't find new people to follow in there, but you can always browse other interesting servers' local timelines if you're searching for more.
Zenoh – Zero Overhead Network Protocol
First define something that doesn't exist. Then, say its dead. Voila!, now you're an astute critic of culture.

I never really liked the term "nerd". I always felt it was something used to denigrate people who had interest of passion about something. Maybe people started to fetishize it recently. But either way, can't people just let people enjoy things without classificaiton.
How very droll. Why are engineers considered so lowly?
You can have a mod on Nostr, basically by only subscribing to servers operated by such mods.

In Nostr, users multi-post their tweets to “relay servers”, and relay servers push it to you. Follow actions are a type of tweets as well so all relays can know who you are following. You can also have as many relays as you want.

Isn’t it going to waste a lot of bandwidth, you may wonder. It does!

Huge benefit of Nostr architecture is that your identity is based on your generated private key and optionally a DNS name you happen to own, so any server operators’ opinions about you won’t affect your identity.

This happens a lot with existing platforms, not limited to Twitter. “Yesterday evening I took pictures of gorgeous Egyptian sand hills, and since this morning Google left me saying I violated them, now even the embassy says they can’t verify my nationality status” - can’t happen on Nostr.
The others before McNulty in 1943, the others were thematic, but not there. Berra was born in ‘25. It’s possible in the days before the internet that two distinct an unconnected people came up with a similar expression, or, given baseball traveling maybe he picked it up from others along the way. So I think it’s a tossup between Berra and McNulty. The others are on their way there but not there.
The Sopranos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyvUFmm3h54
Can you be more transparent about who you’re insulting and how you hope to thus raise your own status? It’s difficult to figure out anything from what you’ve written except that you hold someone in contempt.
I see overlong thinkpieces are not dying off and that humble-braggadocio is alive and kicking
There are so many ways to be subversive. But it’s becoming more and more socially costly to be subversive.
Remember, they don't want to solve problems. They want revolution.
It's some form of intelligence for sure, it displayed logic/reading comprehension of middle school / highschool at a minimum.
We already know it scores 93% on SATs so ... it's actually much smarter than most humans in standard intelligence tests.
I wish people would talk about their work more. There's so much to learn about how different industries function that's invisible to outsiders.

I don't want to hear about office politics, but I want to hear about your suppliers and customers, how do you decide what to sell, what to buy vs build, what weird regulations or norms exist in your industry, who are the experts in your industry and how did they become experts.

The productive part of our days are at least as interesting as the leisure parts.
I've done that twice with some shops I didn't have any history with.

Once I got them to replace my gearbox oil even though they said it wasn't needed. With another one I brought them a third-party pedal and asked them to install it. In both cases it did solve my issue by the way, even though I might have been wrong.

They don't care as long as you're ok to pay for the hours regardless of whether it solves your problem or not.
There are so many groups and most of them don't regularly pop up in mainstream culture.

The fact that mainstream has co-opted many of the past nerdy things doesn't mean they are gone. They have just moved to new not so visible things. And those are hard to see in sea of all the content produced. Independent podcast and comics are a thing. And then there is novels and such from China, Korea and Japan. Some of these more mainstream already lot less.
Interesting how she ended up marrying some rich guy and live in a mansion after her conviction. Did she launder money to his family while she was CEO of Theranos? Otherwise I just don't get it.

11 years is a great deal if she gets to live in a mansion afterwards. Why did I waste my career being honest?
counter culture these days is returning to conservative traditions and monotheistic and other long lasting religions
Hm, dare I ask what you mean?

I also removed those things from my life but it has just made more time for active participation in some of the things I do. I found I had essentially replaced actively nerding out on stuff with passively viewing streams of nerd"ish" stuff.
RationalWiki is partly written by highly biased political activists and sometimes borders on defamation, at some point they also attacked people like Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, or Eliezer Yudkowsky. Here is what Kirkegaard has to say about the main author of this page: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/inaccuracies-in-rationalwikis-o...
It's sort of like rap music. In a way, the more popular bits have essentially become a part of the commodified dominant monoculture, insofar as we still have a monoculture left.

On the other hand, the niche has become significantly more niche after a messy de facto divorce from the 'poppy' parts of rap/nerd culture. The barrier to entry to these subcultures in a way are higher than ever, because the monoculture bits capture and hold the vast majority of people with a more casual interest.

This natural schism and reification that develops is something I think David Chapman's "Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths"[1] fails to identify, but we have the advantage of over a decade of evolution and hindsight since it was written.

[1] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
I understood everything except:

> reinforcement though (LLM supervising LLM).

Is there something I can read to understand what that looks like?
> it’s often a signal of a lazy conversation starter

But this is fine, no? If it helps start a more enjoyable discussion afterwards. When you don't know the ones you are speaking with at all.

Though I indeed avoid focusing on work when starting a conversation. I usually try to phrase the question as "What do you do in your life?", which is more general and allows answering hobbies. I'm more interested in what people like than what they are possibly forced to do to fund it, or their opinions. Usually people will answer their what they do for a living but they will get another, more explicit question. I'm interested in knowing whether they will indeed answer by what they do for a living though.

And if they do something meaningful or enjoying for their living, it's actually interesting.
The effect is created by scaling and blurring the storyboard images that are also used for the seek preview. The image is refreshed every ten seconds, with a CSS opacity animation fading from the old background image to the next over a couple of seconds.

This sounds like it should be relatively cheap if composition is properly accelerated.
Look at the consensus about Google when it comes up in the news or other articles posted to Reddit's most popular subreddits. It's not good. Then look at how technical subreddits talk about Google. It's even worse.

Even popular science and tech press is highly critical of Google, and no longer just publishes the company's press releases with gushing endorsement.

Back in like 2014, I agreed with your sentiment and even said the same thing myself. Back then, popular sentiment towards Google was very positive and there was a lot of excitement, but generally, the nerdier someone was when it came to computers, the more likely they were to be at least critical of Google if not hostile towards them.

Now it's different and people are looking at Google like they look at Facebook or Comcast.
Haha, yep. She refers to it as the literal "just driven to the grocery store by a little old lady" car (because it's basically that and Home Depot). She even got the lowest trim level (on purpose) so it doesn't have anything fancy (no BT radio, no keyless start, no big display, etc.).

Good point on the maintenance. I do get the oil changed, again more by time than distance, and I'll look up the other stuff now that you've mentioned it, thanks.
Absolutely. Do we have something better than the GPT-2 Detector[1] to understand if this is the case automatically?

[1] https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/
> Elizabeth Holmes purposefully went on to get pregnant, just to garner empathy

No one knows that, and it's a disservice to humanity to push this narrative.

She committed crimes, and is being rightfully punished. That doesn't mean as a human she looses the right to have a family. I imagine facing a very long stretch in prison that will take you past the point where it's possible to start a family motivates you to consider starting one.

But that's not to say it was a "good" or moral choice for her to make - I feel for any child who parents are incarcerated.

As much as people like to see criminals as 2d villains, they are humans with fundamental human drives.
Social welfare hasn’t been centuries. Many social welfare programs have barely been 1 generation. The big ones (social security, food stamps) aren’t even 1 century old!
If anyone is arrogant it's those that think they can make information publicly available but then still control where it is shared.

You don't get to define "netiquette" to whatever you want it to be.

robots.txt in particular has been a giant mistake that only seves to entrench Google. Anyone that wants to archive or index the web as it appears to humans SHOULD ignore it.
why should it be surprising? neural network are very capable at approximating functions, isnt it their main use case anyway.
Gothamist did a great interview with him 6 years ago. it’s 5 minutes and he talks about the origin of the foldin.

https://youtu.be/pK6xE-9sdII

(5 minutes)

From the article:

https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/hanging-with-al-jaf...

When I was a kid I always loved when I could get a hold of a mad magazine.
We don't want/expect everyone to be driving a Mercedes SUV. We do want/expect everyone to be driving a Tesla 3 (or equivalent) in the near future. Not exactly clickbait headline but I get your point.

There's probably a decent conversation worth having about this, somewhere in between those 2 extremes though.
And a big plus is they, the Johns, can’t real-life stalk their objects of affection.
Must be culture or gender specific - I'm over 40 and I've literally never been asked how much money I make.

Are you talking about romantic partners?
Tweet of Raysan5 (Author of Raylib)
[Copy&Paste] After 10 years working on #FOSS, that's what I learnt. Open source is not free, someone else pays for it with their lives... not really open, most users will never look at sources... not sustainable, it will die if not possible to make big money out of it. Change my mind. #raylib
This is true only if all the outcomes are the same. However “all the outcomes” includes long term outcomes of swapping the real for the fake, and historically there have been unanticipated consequences aka outcomes when doing so.

In the case of AI pornography, the scary outcome to me is that more people become addicted to internet pornography and the amount of healthy connections in society decreases.
See https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/inaccuracies-in-rationalwikis-o...
The vast majority of jobs are fairly trivial at its core. How many jobs out there are a combination of esoteric domain knowledge, experience and changing numbers in a spreadsheet?

The real news is how callous people are being about the very real threat of many people losing their jobs and it not being clear what new career they can find that is capable of maintaining their quality of life. Companies are driving salaries into the ground wherever and whenever they can. There might be new jobs, but in the face of rising inflation and ridiculous housing costs, will they be enough to stave off the rise of a new serfdom class?
And shares your username, which in some cases can be linked to other services just doing some googling.

The quality of the journalism is so bad that the screenshot of the reddit post has the username removed, but there's a link to the post.
He almost hits on what's changed in my brain, but then kind of wanders into this weird criticism of...things people enjoy.

I think the shift is that we don't have a monoculture anymore (thanks to the Internet and especially social media) so what seems like we're losing nerd culture and these niche interests in "bad" things really just means that everyone can find them now and likewise folks who are into these niche interests can find each other. This change is creating the (for lack of a better term?) "illusion" of mainstreaming. The people who would be interested were always there. It was just the means of mass cultural communication and spread to reach them with whatever interest weren't. The main "stream" is now the main "lake" and everyone's jumped in. Things you think are "bad" can now reach enough "nerds" who think they're good to reach a modicum of popularity. I view this as maybe a good thing?

Of course, the other edge of this sword is that it allows folks who have unhealthy interests and ideas to find each other as well. That's why we've seen an uptick in radical ideologies of all sorts and things like the incel movement take such deep root. Those weren't part of the normalized zeitgeist before, but now that everything's in the pool and given equal cultural footing, it again creates a bubble of popularity that sometimes has an outsized impact.

We have decided that algorithms are the answer to this problem, and maybe that's a good answer. But I think we've also decided that commercial driven, ad laden algorithms are not the answer. So I'm not sure we have a good solution currently. Maybe if we spread some AI on it (and throw some ML and heck a few blockchains in for good measure) we can generate something useful.
Not sure why it would be better or not, just different.

But besides, I think many people are into it because what it represents, not what the actual pixels are on the screen. They are into it because they think it gives them a sneak-peek into their real life, with photos representing some sort of reality. When that illusion breaks, one way or another, people feel cheated.
The big difference is feedback loop. With prompt engineering you can change your prompt slightly and immediately see if benchmarks improve. With SEO you had to wait at least days, and even then it was impossible to rule out external effects like others adding/removing links to you.
This is how much memory the 8086 had:

0b11111111111111110000 + 0b1111111111111111 + 1 = 0x10fff0 = 1mb+64kb-16 (for 8086)
> probably by 2–3 orders of magnitude

So the web is maybe only 1.2 specs with 114,000 words? I think it's considerably more than that. If that estimate is off, it's by no more than a factor of 10, IMO. No need to exaggerate.
Sadly, it is in fact very real. The difference in how you are treated as an architect vs an engineer [in the UK] is really quite astonishing.

And also perhaps with good reason, as an architect you are keeper of the magic and mystery of the 'queen of the arts', whereas as an engineer you are just there to fix the tv/computer/iphone/whatever. As an architect you are part of polite conversation about what the world is/was/could be, whereas as an engineer you would not even get an invite. As an architect your life is (supposedly) parties and beautiful people, as an engineer board game nights and trappist beer (steady now!).

Of course the tech boom has upended things somewhat, but, in the the UK at least, we have been managing to keep a lid on that particular nonsense.
> the first questions you'll get, including your salary

How, exactly, is asking what your salary is not asking what your salary is?
I also used to outsource copy writing for $70 per 500 words but last weekend I wrote a script and rewrote copy on 40,000 pages within half a day. It cost me $40 in total. This would have costed me 3 million dollars and months in human labor.
> Why did I waste my career being career honest ?

Because you are not rich enough to get the mansion jail package.
Yeah I love applying nerd to people who think they aren't nerds. Car nerds, gym nerds, bike nerds, wine nerds, beer nerds etc. Passion and depth is all it takes to nerd out on something in my opinion.
I don’t know about that. The way I hear it used, every YouTube video is content, even the very good stuff. HBO and Netflix are content. NBA Games are “live content”. It’s just a catch all for digital media
Show HN: Altar I, the minimal keyboard launched on HN, is open for pre-orders
Hi HN,

The low profile, wireless mechanical keyboard I designed and launched on HN several months back (link in comments) is now available for pre-order. It starts shipping in autumn this year.

Getting to this point and has involved wearing many hats and learning lots of new skills. If I had known how much work it was going to take to get from where I was in my previous HN post to this one, I’m not sure I would have done it!

I’d love to get your feedback and answer any questions people have.
Impressive and creative. However, you can tell it's scripted with the rhythm of their conversation. If you're not paying attention though, you would be easily fooled that it's real.
Dear IRS–Here’s Where You Should Spend Some of That $80B
The part that spooks me is how badly everyone got predictions on what will fall wrong.

Remember when creative anything was said to be safe? Stable diffusion. Remember when coding was safe? CoPilot.

Makes it really hard to preemptively plan for this short of becoming a plumber

The irony is that my own line of work (accounting) was top of the prediction charts and I have yet to see even a hint of AI so that too was entirely wrong (for now)
Link to previous post + discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507172
What an incredible article

> But imagine a person who collects the boxes from every McDonald’s order he’s ever made, who’s yapping with excitement about the new McDonald’s partially hydrogenated soybean-canola oil blend, who can’t wait for them to release the McBento in Japan so he can watch video reviews all day, and who acts incredibly smug every time McDonald’s posts its quarterly earnings and they’re growing faster than Burger King’s. You know exactly what this person looks like. A total failure of an adult human being.
What other general intelligence have we seen other than human? We know, of course, that animals have intelligence, but they do not appear to talk. How are we measuring general intelligence now? By IQ, a human test through words and symbols.
Nothing proprietary in Spanner but I believe no other vendor has an atomic clock similar to what Google has. Hence they are not able to implement the paxos global transaction lock which requires that all servers participating in the transaction be perfectly synchronized. This is what one of the comments above refers to I think.

So while the spanner paper is open to be implemented by any vendor, they don't have the proprietary advantage that Google has - the atomic clock. So Yugabyte, CockroachDB don't rely on atomic clocks. I tried to get to the ground level basics of this, but I haven't understood this matter completely yet.
one thing AI won't be good at for a long time is hand jobs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24yjRbBah3w