skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I very disagree but have an upvote for a well-argued comment.

>> The question is, does an LLM in the course of modelling asymmetric correlations, develop something analogous to an explanatory model. I think so, in the sense that a good statistical model will intrinsically capture explanatory relations.

A statistical model may "capture" explanatory relations, but can it use them? A data scientist showing a plot to a bunch of people is explaining something using a statistical model, so obviously the statistical model has some explanatory power. But it's the data scientist that is using the model as an explanation. I think the discussion is whether a statistical model can exist that doesn't just "capture" an explanation, but can also make use of that explanation like a human would, for example as background knowledge to build new explanations. That seems very far fetched: a statistical model that doesn't just model, but also introspects and has agency.

Anyway I find it very hard to think of language models as explanatory models. They're predictive models, they are black boxes, they model language, but what do they explain? And to whom? The big debate is that (allegedly) "we don't understand language models" in the first place. We have a giant corpus of incomprehensible data; we train a giant black box model on it; now we have a giant incomprehensible model of the data. What did we explain?

>> But this is in the solution space of good models of statistical regularity of an external system. To maximally predict the next token in a sequence just requires a model of the process that generates that sequence.

Let's call that model M* for clarity. The search space of models, let's call it S. There are any number of models in S that can generate many of the same sequences as M* without being M*. The question is, and has always been, in machine learning, how do we find M* in S, without being distracted by M_1, M_2, M_3, ..., ... that are not M*.

Given that we have a very limited way to test the capabilities of models, and that models are getting bigger and bigger (in machine learning anyway) which makes it harder and harder to get a good idea of what, exactly, they are modelling, how can we say which model we got a hold of?
Google is cutting unnecessary spending across the company (including firing long-term, high-productivity employees) to save money. If Google doesn't want to sell trash robots, why fund this (expensive) work? Why not just shut down this division and instead, keep your programmers who work on ads, search, gmail, and other projects that bring money to google?
RDS does have the underlying native extension that is required to install user defined packages (pg_tle) from database.dev. It doesn't currently have support for the extension that is necessary to make the in-database client work to install packages directly from the registry.

That's great feedback though: We'll add a new page to the website for each package that provides the snippet you can run on an RDS instance to load the extension and then run `create extension`.

We're also in talks with RDS team and experimenting with a few options that would allow users to query the registry directly. The most promising one we have found so far is using AWS Lambda with RDS's aws_lambda extension to do that http part, and pass the contents back to the database. Still a WIP though!
This article reads like meta-virtue signaling. The author criticizes his neighbours' yard signs, but he too lives in what is presumably a rich, homogeneous and exclusive neighbourhood - I've only ever seen those types of signs in those areas, rarely in a working-class neighbourhood. The author projects an image of a virtuous champion by calling out others for not doing enough, but as a beneficiary of exclusionary policies, how would he feel if his quality of life declined as a result of the values he champions in this article?

I agree with the general sentiment about "front-yard politics" (aka virtue signaling), but instead of facing the reasons why people tend to shy away from substantial action, the author advocates for doubling down on counter-productive (and discriminatory) programs that disfavour working-class people. I question the author's honesty. All those words don't strike me as much more convincing than a sign in one's front yard.
> you don't have to prove anything, strictly speaking.

Strictly speaking, you do have to prove things (if you have the burden of proof on the specific issue), and the standard of proof is usually “preponderance of the evidence” (though there are a few other standards that apply to particular issues/circumstances in the civil justice system.) “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is a different standard of proof used for conviction in the criminal justice system, but it is strictly not correct to call proof under other standards something other than proof.
Great commitment shown by the Athelete, (especially around the no communication whatsoever rule , even when death in family , wow) the article however never goes into the details on the motivations for taking on this challenge in the first place, but good to know science can lean on the experience and learn more about the human mind and the circadian rhythm. It was also surprising to me that the previous record for being trapped underground was those children from Chile and Bolivia stuck after the mine collapse in Chile in 2010.
Part of me wonders if some of the prisoners have others write book reports for them.

Kind of like an Con(vict)GPT of some sorts.

It's a very interesting idea - allows the prisoners that really want to improve and change their lives the opportunity to lower their sentence and get out quicker.

Also has the side effect of becoming more educated potentially.
Partially correct, this doesn't work with RDS as you can't install pgsql-http (a requirement for automatic install). However all the extensions listed are "Trusted Language Extensions for PostgreSQL" which was developed by AWS to enable installing extensions written in "Safe" languages. So I believe that all the extensions listed could be installed manually.

https://github.com/aws/pg_tle

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Postg...
Even if we take copyright in its most limited, original conception, why would all value from creative works accruing to generative models that train on them ever encourage anyone to create these works?

IMO, what LLMs are demonstrating are the fundamental contradictions of Capitalism, where now being a capital owner with a bunch of GPUs is supposed to give you exclusive returns on the sum total of human intellectual and artistic labor. I have a feeling that people aren’t going to take to that too kindly, so we’ll either see robots mowing down the masses of unemployed, a Butlerian jihad, or various states assuming control over their productive capacities and redistributing the return in the form of greater safety nets.
The word "no" can be very effective. Remember that you control the type of work that you take on.

I have a small side gig building "controllers." By controllers I mean devices that are typically arduino controlled and use peripherals in the arduino ecosystem. They span a very wide range, but are typically very feature-limited. e.g., I have a client who is converting massage chairs to be pay-per-use.

As you noted, it's not easy to keep a service-based business from growing to take over all your time. I manage it by keeping the feature set clearly specified and working on fixed price.

Want to add a feature we didn't discuss? That's another charge. My niche is taking on very small projects that are too small to move the needle for a full-blown engineering services company (I've worked for two) and I always work fixed-price, so I need to be very aggressive about scope creep.

Project scope keeps growing? Either tell the client that it will be a while until I have time to complete it, or, more frequently, that they will need to find someone else. This is pretty easy to say because as mentioned above I'm clear about only taking on small projects.

I've had people who basically want me to be their engineering department. That's a hard "no:" I simply don't have the time.
> What is it with all these companies using the same UX patterns EVERYWHERE.

any guesses?
To be fair, I had a lot of fun last year asking various LLMs to play Skyrim, imagined as a role-playing adventure with a human game master, and watching as they break sooner or later
https://www.palimptes.dev/ai

With ChatGPT-4 though, I haven't yet got it to make something that dumb, though I had to remind it not to hallucinate the part of the story that traditionally is governed by GM.

Could it be what your demo is doing behind the scenes?
Cool idea for an extension!

I had a whole set of comments about concerns about doing this to a large table in prod, and statistics and such - then I read about hypopg.

What a neat package, learned something new today.
Linus Torvald's first interview (1992)
I'm surprised they don't do (steganography-style) watermarking when a TS doc is printed. Put random little dots on the page just like they do on currency bills. Color them in a manner that it looks like imperfections on the paper.

Or change the spacing between words ever so slightly.
Short documentary on the subject here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ5dM-uRPPo (english subtitles)
Incredible piece, what exactly was Richard Walter doing in that 10 year gap do you think? Prison time??
Oh hey! Thank you for developing this, it's a great resource!
Association between hearing aid use and all-cause and cause-specific dementia
Discord gave the FBI his home address.
The climber, a woman, spent those 500 days alone inside the cave voluntarily, as part of an experiment.

It takes a special kind of person to volunteer for that and follow through with it.

I don't think I could stay alone in a cave for 100 days and emerge with my sanity intact, forget about 500.
> The return on investment of this acquired startup is exactly $0.

negative, far below zero.
Show HN: Natter – Anonymous Chat Rooms
Recommend two nice books on this: the ancestor's tale by Richard Dawkins and Otherlands by Thomas Halliday. Both absolute page turners!
> shift to wetter climate makes Amazonia transition from grasslands to jungle (2k years ago)

Wait, so all those forest species living there...did they migrate from further north?
Uses cases that comes to mind are data distributed across nodes and things like distributed training of machine learning models (which is getting more and more focus as models get bigger).
Panda CSS: CSS-in-JS Without Runtime Overhead
Excited to share my latest blog post!

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As a web developer, I'm always on the lookout for new and efficient ways to streamline my front-end development process. Panda CSS offers a unique approach that eliminates the need for runtime overhead, making it a game-changer for Chakra UI enthusiasts.

Though still in experimental mode, Panda CSS shows immense potential, and I'm excited to share my insights and findings with the community. Join me in exploring the future of Chakra UI with Panda CSS!

Infinum is also hiring React engineers (ZAGREB, VARAŽDIN, LJUBLJANA, PODGORICA, SKOPJE, REMOTE)https://infinum.com/careers/react-engineer/
But you generally can use a low power battery with a high power tool within the same brand. My 2Ah battery fits in my Dewalt 20V chainsaw. I'm guessing it has drastically less power and drastically reduced runtime (fewer cells -> more series resistance). And this would reflect entirely on the brand, except that people generally know enough to understand that using a much smaller battery than what came with the tool might result in a problem.

Marketing comparisons across brands is a matter of regulation (as opposed to say letting manufacturers post blatantly fraudulent specs like they did for shop vacs for the longest time). Or the market will adapt and it will just be common knowledge that "4Ah" in Ryobi land is more like "3Ah" in Milwaukee land (I've no idea if that's the case, just making up an example).

Overall yes, companies will come up with a myriad of reasons why they need more control in the name of "helping" people, and some reasons may even have some legitimacy. But ultimately they want that control to further their own self interest.
Not knowing what your technical abilities are, a potential place to start going down the rabbit hole is https://www.coinbase.com/learn

The Bitcoin Standard explains the philosophical underpinnings of why this isn’t a big Ponzi and there is real material value to stateless money:

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking https://a.co/d/bC6XZqm
Nice! Especially liked this one:

> When he was consulted on how Spartans might best forestall invasion of their homeland, Lycurgus advised, "By remaining poor, and each man not desiring to possess more than his fellow."
Yup. By his logic, if a thief holds someone at gunpoint and takes their property then they now own x. Furthermore, if they are then caught, by his logic, that property shouldn't be returned to the victim because the thief now owns it apparently.
That's a good point, and a good tip for when Firefox doesn't prompt it automatically. I'd forgotten entirely about reader mode on Desktop, I do use it all the time on mobile though.
> It is not.

Then you can present the other pieces of evidence made public at your leisure. I don't doubt they exist - but this granite splotch is so far the only one actually presented by anyone.
I’ve been asked for proof of my graduation exactly one time, and that was when I took a job at bank.
The staff are a bit a let down, there's this one human spieces person who keeps mumbling on about how he ruled something called Twitter back in 2023 AD.
Yes, it was bootstrapped from a minix install. The earliest filesystem was in fact minixfs, to share files with the development host environment.
One thing that I keep thinking about are those "I make $XX/hour working from home" spam/scam messages that have been plaguing comment threads and message boards for as long as I can remember. They are very transparently scams, yet they keep getting posted which means that they must be working on someone.

The templated, borderline nonsense messages in these scams provide as a baseline "minimum viable scambot". Now think about how much better an LLM would be at generating those prompts -- the number of people that will get tricked will be orders of magnitude higher because the simple heuristics for spotting a scam are gone (look for weird formatting to circumvent filters, look for messages that completely ignore the context of the thread they're in, etc).

This will suck for the people that get scammed, obviously. But there will also be second order effects once it's clear that the cost/benefit of running scambots has increased: spam filters will stop working, nobody will trust anybody in online fora, social platforms will adopt onerous verification rules, etc
>almost 3 digits of profits

I hope this is a typo, because $99/mo is nice to have, but I'd honestly consider the SaaS I'm building a failure if it made less than 4 digits a month.
At KotlinConf today I gave a talk on designing apps with two-tier architecture, where you implement your entire app without the web stack appearing anywhere at all. Instead you publish desktop and mobile apps that connect directly to an RDBMS like PostgreSQL via its native protocol, and use server extensions for any logic that is inconvenient to do with SQL.

This approach might seem horrifyingly outside-the-box but has a lot of advantages, and some of the reasons we didn't do things this way historically have been solved in recent years.

Because it was KotlinConf the demo uses PL/Java, which is pretty nice because there's such a healthy ecosystem of stuff based around JDBC and because deploying JVM stuff doesn't require any sort of cross-compilation. PL/Java also supports (for now) trusted extensions using sandboxing, although of course the sandbox can just get in the way and normally you trust your own server anyway so this is a double edged sword.

The demo code can be found here (it's a prototype and nobody reviewed it yet so be gentle)

https://github.com/hydraulic-software/bugzino

I'll write up a blog post version of the talk, but for now I had to mention that DBaaS providers don't actually enable this sort of design because they like to wall off the full power of the RDBMS behind custom APIs. But in two-tier design you really lean into the database and use all of its features. So, it'd be nice if:

a. database.dev were to support PL/Java extensions.

b. Supabase were to allow direct connections, as the native DB protocol supports a lot of features that otherwise have to be sort of hacked on top of HTTP. Ultimately, HTTP is designed to fetch hypertext whereas the PG native protocol is designed to work with data, and that difference shines through in a bunch of ways.
yeah, exactly. pgxn also houses native extensions, some of which may be TLE compatible. database.dev is trusted language extension specific

We've reached out to David, who runs pgxn to see how we might collaborate and allow pgxn to be used as another registry that users can install TLEs from
Interesting that people voluntarily pay. Write-up of bloggers doing the "buy me a coffee" button suggested to me that nobody pays like that.

I guess software is a bit more tangible than a blog post even if both have value.
You might also like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567026
It reminded me of Michel Siffre, weird that there are no mentions of him in the article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Siffre
I stand corrected then. Always assumed that the Ural lied on border of two plates.
I don't know about a lotbof CSV schema defs, but I found the column definitions in SQLLoader's control files quite intuitive.
How'd you discover Walter, and what led you to write a story about him?
> Chinese have begun using ChatGPT to do their ideology homework for the local Communist Party cell

rofl
There seems to be an ever-present high-level of defensiveness from the Ruby community over JS/React. Rails has had a profound impact on web development, promoting fast starts and shipping quickly. Companies like Shopify and Twitter benefited greatly from this. But the framework is 18 years old. The web that it was created for has changed significantly.
Thanks for noting that. I've updated the title since so many people (not unreasonably) seemed to jump to the inclusion that "investigators" meant "police".
Even aside from the good point Gigachad also made, it's not really under Apple's control to make web and app developers be more efficient. People just develop and scope for the power envelope the hardware can provide. It would be great if they optimized for cutting bloat, but they just don't and there's nobody with the ability to dictate that they do.

App review processes are already opaque and inconsistent enough with fairly straightforward rules around what is and isn't around. I don't think devs are going to like it if Apple starts getting opinionated about how you're doing indexing on your SQL.
It goes back to the moment you last listened (minus a couple of seconds) by default. Spotify is a decent podcast player, not AntennaPod but OK.
Svix (YC W21) is hiring Rust back end engineers (US remote)
Had he an eagle and a snake as companions?
For sure, I was responding to the idea of "concrete proof" and why it didn't need to be "concrete proof," but I'm sure you're right. Thanks for keeping me honest.

I've edited my comment to reflect your correction.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/14/fbi-used-d...

It's all here in the court filing:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.255...

The FBI isn't posting all of the evidence on twitter, because it'll be presented in a court room. The legal system is always slower than speculation by journalists.
No. gcc and clang development do not occur on github and likely never will. Gcc didn’t even use git until relatively recently (not in 2014).
You can go look up the mailing list archives - this repo predates nothing.

> helped incubating said containers and distro support over the years?

Tool chain build scripts for gcc and clang have existed for as nearly as long as the respective projects have been around - which in the case of gcc is over 30 years.

Also see https://crosstool-ng.github.io/

Distros like Debian have been packaging cross compilers for decades with their own tooling, long before 2014. MSYS has existed for I can’t remember (long before 2014).

As someone below said - this is a “very solved problem”.

Not that this repo isn’t useful - but I think posted here out of context clearly it is conveying the impression that it is bringing something novel to RISC-V which isn’t the case.
> do you have anything to back that up?

OP said:

> plainly programmed algorithmic systems

Compare that to a human brain which is not a linear, 1D algorithm.
> A work that is protected by copyright - which most works are by default in the majority of cases - is by definition not in the public domain.

Every single piece of idea is public domain from their inception. Actually, all ideas already exist, we humans just discover them. Ideas are information, information is bits and bits are numbers. All numbers already exist, and all "creation" is merely discovering those numbers.

Any assignment of ownership obviously happens after the fact and are completely ineffectual, especially in the 21st century, the age of information and networked computers with infinite ability to copy bits at negligible costs. The technology really exposes that sham for what it really is and it's a shame how everyone reacts by trying to destroy the perfectly good technology instead of fixing the fraud that is "intellectual property".

> Wouldn't you then see any natural wrong in sharing my work with others or even the broader public, regardless?

I'd see it as a very rude thing to do to you personally. Simply because you asked me not to do it and I generally try to be nice and respect people.

A natural universal ideological wrong though? No. Plenty of people publish the private communications they receive. It's just information. Publishing it might hurt my social standing with you buf I personally don't believe in anyone ever going to jail over it.
I’m glad you posted this, that never would have crossed my mind.
that's fine, we can use copyright law to go after everyone that's ever used or operated a AI model that was built on unlicensed works

my work has been ingested into copilot, so every line that copilot has ever output is an unauthorised derivative of my work

if the fair-use question is settled in the way I think it will be: I personally I plan to go after every single person/entity that's ever published code using copilot

$150,000 an infringement, isn't it?

(and if it isn't, well that's the end of copyright entirely)
Oh ok, My bad! The wild thing to me is the picture on wikipedia shows its not a small island. All the nesting made me think it would be quite small.