skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hate it when scientific publications too started focusing more on creating fear and uncertainty rather than explaining what is going on. This has been the case for a while now.

In this case, there are possible explanations as to why this is happening. [1] explains some of them. I don't understand why Wired chose to omit those. This Wired article just states that ocean temps are high, without going into causes, anomalies or even reasons or theories. Going by [1]

> But there's an immediate cause too: the rare triple-dip La Niña is over. During this cycle, cooler water from deep in the ocean upwells to the surface. It's like the Pacific Ocean's air conditioner is running. But now the air conditioner is turned off. It's likely we're set for an El Niño, which tends to bring hotter, dryer weather to Australia.

> When you run your air conditioner, you're masking the heat outside. It's the same for our oceans. La Niña brought three years of cooler conditions, while global warming continued apace.

I don't mind an article with details of what is going on. Obviously that is important. But as a science journalist, there is an equal responsibility to help try and explain it. If not anything else, contextualize it. Thousands of people will read it and share it.

[2[ is also a better coverage of the same story before the follow up with reasons. As a direct comparison, notice the difference in tone, and how they contextualize what is happening.

[1]: https://phys.org/news/2023-04-hot-ocean-temperatures-hottest...

[2]: https://phys.org/news/2023-04-earth-hot-sudden-ocean-spike.h...
Our company is the maintainer of the excellent work from hagen1778 and we've also bumped into the fee issue even with pure open source work. Grafana has gone back and forth on their policies over the last few years. At this time there do not seem to be problems with open source plugins to open source products (e.g., ClickHouse) and we don't have issues posting new releases.

One thing that does seem to have changed was that it was formerly pretty easy to see the number of downloads on Grafana plugins regardless of source. The last time I saw this data it was something like 8M downloads for the aforesaid ClickHouse plugin. I can't find it now, so it's possible Grafana has changed their policies on this. It makes it hard to judge the popularity of community plugins.
Why? I don’t think managers use Slack if they know that these messages are readable by everyone.
Depends on what is mean by "rapid" and "self-improving" and "AI".

AGI is a flying car mythology.

Narrow AI is improving and the rate is accelerating. The current speed (1st derivative) is unimportant, but there is a differential equation-like feedback function to it and it will accelerate (2nd derivative): speed proportional to the amount present.

People and technology form a coupled system that is somewhat a super-organism. That cycle is amplifying in a way that is not necessarily obvious (it doesn't happen in public) or continuous (or discrete for that matter). For the foreseeable future, technology does not yet constitute a self-assembling or self-modifying closed system. It is still entirely dependent on human effort. What is happening is that people are relying on and exploiting the efforts of AI that had not happened previously. This is one change, more visible than most, that is leading to more efficiencies, more changes, and more technological advancement. Fully automated factories, software development, systems engineering, and chip design may not happen anytime soon but they are both possible and probable due to the forcing function and Tragedy of the Commons of human greed.
My grandfather was a young writer living in Spain a long time ago. At one point he wrote that he saw Hemingway sitting and working in a cafe, but didn't go up to him since he didn't feel he had proven anything yet.
There was a product in the 90s called "Internet in a Box". I remember seeing it at a store. It appears to be a way of selling Compuserve. https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/the-web/20/408/20...
If a CPU isn't "central" to much of anything shouldn't it just be referred to as a PU?
The Only App Which Does Not Specifically and Precisely Suck[tm].

I don't know whether I should be grateful to Termux for making Android remotely bearable, or vexed that it's enabling a platform I despise.

But on its own merits, Termux is amazing, profoundly useful, powerful, and a breath of fresh air.

Do install from F-Droid, not Google Play Store, as others note.

And yes, of course it's more useful with an actual hardware keyboard (Bluetooth), as is Android generally. But it's usable and useful even when using the onscreen soft keyboard. (Hacker's Keyboard FTFW.)

You can also run the available sshd service and access your mobile device remotely.

And yes, I mention and advocate Termux frequently on HN: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
"and there are simply no good command line input parsing libraries for Java."

Looks like author missed the most obvious and popular OSS one: https://picocli.info/
Reminds me a bit of Segagaga[1], a Dreamcast RPG where you try to reverse Sega’s fortunes in a futuristic environment.

[1] https://sega.fandom.com/wiki/Segagaga
Pass a law. That will help (not)
That’s a question about relative pitches, not absolute - you can definitely hear if e.g. the third is a little sharp or flat even if you don’t have perfect absolute pitch.

More generally, I think the answer is “pretty high-resolution”. Lots of people can definitely hear the difference between equal and just temperament.

IIRC most people’s hearing is accurate to around 10 cents (a tenth of a semitone). Wikipedia suggests musicians generally tune to within 12 cents, and the “just noticeable difference” is 5-6.

You’d only need absolute accuracy better than 50 cents to be able to correctly name a note on the piano. I’d guess most people with perfect pitch are more accurate than that, likely around the same ~10 cents mark.

Anecdotally, I have a musician friend with perfect pitch who finds it annoying sometime, as they find it unsettling when music is tuned slightly sharp or flat; so I think their sensitivity is much finer than a semitone.
Things "I really should do someday."
Sometimes it feels like this fear mongering over AI, at least in part, can have the practical consequences of convincing the general public to over estimate what today's SoA LLMs are actually capable of.
"Serverless" has been a standard term in industry for at least 7 years. Sometimes words don't map perfectly onto the subcomponents that form them. For example a "mailbox" isn't always a box, and doesn't always contain mail. You just have to learn to use the words and not worry so much about the etymology.
A Critical Review of "Build Your Own Lisp"
Seattle buses, trains to get detectors to study how fentanyl smoke moves
Have you ever seen those brochures and flyers in the waiting room (and sometimes even the exam room)? Those are almost entirely supplied to the practice by pharma reps. Every U.S. doctor's office I've been in for the last four decades has been full of them.
And the source of course: https://github.com/dmotz/emdash
Again, I agree with most everything of what you say, but how it connects to inflation. Printing money only leads to consumer good inflation when it circulates and gets into consumer hands.

If you print the money and put it in the incinerator, you have no inflation. If you put it in a mattress, no inflation. If you print money and put it in APPL stock, no inflation. However, When you pay nurses, construction workers, software devs, and other workers, then you get consumer goods inflation. The problem with printing money is the trickle down effect.

Like you said, it is supply and demand. AAPL corp or Jeff Bezos are not walking into a grocery store and buying all the butter. Prices go up when your worker is willing to pay more for butter.

For some reason, many people think that if only we taxed the rich and gave it to workers to spend, then the price of butter would go down in the market. This is insane.
Seattle leaders propose ban on public drug use, but others oppose the idea
I guess more blog titles than actual papers, but:

“How I learned to stop worrying and love the X”.

“The X is dead, long live the X!”

Edit:
One more- “X part 2: Electric Boogaloo”
I think you may have missed a little humor being committed
How many complex machines (or complex anything) are going to work first time?

Most things require an iterative loop of testing, fixing and refinement.

The trouble with landing on another planet (with different gravity, atmospheric density, etc) is that there's no real way before you get there, therefore first attempts are extremely likely to fail.
CDJs still are the go-to thing for 90% of DJs though.

The difference is, being a digital thing with some sort of basic computer in them, they keep updating them.

So your CDJ1000’s with no support for USB drives are worth very little. Pioneer realise they’ve a nice racket and will keep releasing newer models with slight improvements to make the older ones “obsolete”. But CDJs in general are still very much sought after.

Whereas your 1210 is just as useful as it was back when you first got it. Also the fact they stopped making them helps.
A lot of the arguments made in this article are based on debatably true assumptions. For example, I don't think most advances in AI in recent years has been driven by increases in compute and data, but more so by refinements in how we train models.

Active learning would be useful at creating a superhuman AGI, but I don't see it as a requirement. As soon as AIs can iterate on future models and produce increasingly useful training data for future models, then models would likely continue to grow more capable at an exponential rate.

But I'm not even convinced active learning is that difficult once you have fairly capable AI programmers...

My AI professor once said, "all problems are search problems". And this suck with me because the world looks different when you start seeing all problems as just iterations of different optimisation problems. So long as you have a good heuristic and enough compute, eventually a suitable solution for any problem will be found. This is what makes generalised learning algorithms so powerful.

The author states that, "active learning with neural networks are uniformly terrible", but this just reeks to me of a search problem in need of optimisation. So as long as we can tell GPT5, "I want you to iteratively write code which improve on existing state-of-the-art active learning algorithms", then eventually you'll get there... GPT5 like humans might not get very far in the beginning, but assuming it can iterate faster than humans and future iterations faster still, then breakthroughs will eventually be made and progress should accelerate exponentially.

Of course, this also assumes that humans don't get there first. And honestly given the amount of investment in AI and rate of progress in AI right now I just wouldn't bet against a significant advancement in active learning coming soon.
Are you really thinking about the hardware when thinking about the GPU? For instance, if you use pytorch to write a NN, don't you kind of expect it to execute on the GPU without needing to get into the gritty details of it?
It is not intelligent if it halts
It also makes it really difficult to play out-of-tune instruments. The piano in our local pub is a whole tone flat and it confuses the hell out of me... there's a mismatch between what my brain thinks I'm playing and the sound that's coming out.
It’s the combination. Either factor by itself might have been ok, but when 80% of depositors are not insured and the bank has a liquidity crunch, it can spiral out of control quickly.
Do you really think Spacex required no permission at all for this? It certainly required approval from the FCC & FAA to launch this so I think you could say that US government gave him the right to do this.

Then you could ask: "Why does the US government have the right to do this?" I think the answer to that is probably the Outer Space Treaty which is signed on by most countries including all major spacefaring nations.

This may have been stopped (and still can be) if there was major uproar among the US populace or by other countries. I don't recall hearing much about that.

In any case, I'm not sure there is a sufficient reason to stop it. The biggest issue that I have heard about is the potential for a negative impact on ground-based astronomy. That's obviously not good, but I'm not sure it's a sufficient reason to stop this.
So don't help these people directly but fund large projects instead?
Your statement hinges on the definition of "fully".

I'll simply counter by saying that the value created by these AI technologies is immense and given that value it will likely be intergraded into society very quickly.
What I've observed is that the success of the latest generation of LLM's, Diffusion, and other models has dramatically increased the number of people moving into the space (ie: gold rush phenomenon). The LLM's in particular are allowing developers to gain increased insight and efficiency in improving existing models and creating new models.

From an external perspective it's as if the AI is self-improving by leveraging human agents to assist the process. Not to say there is any 'intent' behind it, but rather to view it as an emergent phenomenon.
Fentanyl smoke smells like a "mixture of engine oil and peanut butter."
The ”Executive summary” isn’t, it’s an abstract.

There is zero actionable information there, it’s just describing the article. I was hoping to get a recommendation for which provider to use for which kinds of workloads. I guess I have to read it all then :/
The point is that the patients is neither compete nor consistent.
SQLite does have an optional "user authentication" extension, though I've not personally tried it out:

https://www.sqlite.org/src/doc/trunk/ext/userauth/user-auth....

The widely used Go SQLite library by mattn says it supports it, if that's useful:

https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3#user-authentication
I don’t understand how these small companies can compete with the big clouds ofer time. They aren’t offering anything fundamentally different than each other or the big clouds themselves.

At some point, Lambda will offer GPU’s on their instances and there are plenty of serverless offering right now that have GPU’s.

Fly.io at least is differentiated with their “run your compute closer to the user” with zero hassle. Though even that doesn’t seem super sustainable in the long term.
…which is also unsolved by any other system or by humans. It’s a fundamental constraint of reality.
Either way, it's not like you can't export your data and shove it into something else like redis.
Search routinely doesn’t work lately. Wrong results and/or extremely slow. Just my anecdotal experience but corroborated by others.
The same thing that keeps them from doing that now. Banks are required by regulation to keep enough liquidity on hand and have restrictions on what kinds of assets they can hold. They don’t do it out of an abundance of common sense anyway.
Sounds like you need to hire better magicians. :)
Kim Stanley Robinson cutting it a little too close here...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future
It's a stupid misnomer. "Cloud" is still another.

Perhaps "distributed scheduling and execution" is too straightforward than marketing wank.
You can totally tell the difference between sea salt, Himalayan salt and table salt.

They change the flavor profile of many foods drastically.

Even though table salt is probably better for you sure to the iodine content, pink salt is just so much better for the taste buds.
AI philosophy is its own academic discipline. Has been since around the 1970s. A lot of early academic experiments involving AI, e.g. ELIZA, most ALife research, Prolog-based expert systems, etc., can be best categorized (retroacively) as research into AI philosophy. No novel Computer Science principles were being explored; rather, what was being explored was the impact that certain novel applications of existing CS principles would have upon the world.

AI philosophy wasn't a very popular / widely-researched field, though, until recently, when AI ethics (ethics is considered part of philosophy) — and a specific subfield of that called "alignment research" — became something that a good number of philosophers became very concerned with.

Now there are many AI philosophers, employed not just in academia, but also in think-tank-like arms of AI technology companies like OpenAI (mostly because the AI tech companies know they're perceived as being irresponsible with how quickly they're iterating toward more-powerful AI, and so use employing AI philosophers as something like carbon credits to offset that perception.)

There is a lot of very good work done in AI philosophy; with many of the insights from alignment research specifically, being incorporated into the work that the AI tech companies are doing.

But none of this really "surfaces" in articles about AI that you might see floating about, because alignment research is really high-context — it's not really something you can write a fluff piece about; it's all stuff that requires knowledge of both philosophical (e.g. linguistics, decision theory) and computer science concepts to understand. Instead, all the normal articles about AI philosophy, are written by people doing amateur AI philosophy — usually resulting in them badly retreading the same ground that was already thoroughly explored in the 1970s.
Ironically, I specifically have a Google Pixel so that I can mod it and gain more control over my phone.
> For many people who supported FEE financially and intellectually, any policy whose stated objective was to reduce inequality was per se unacceptable. Saying that one pro-equality policy was better than another was to give away the game, because the real principle to be defended was a moral imperative: respect property rights. The problem with rent control wasn’t inefficiency; rent control was a violation of the freedom of property owners to contract for any price they could secure in the marketplace.

This bit feels like a damning indictment of most libertarians, yet it didn't feel like the author meant it that way.
On the self improvement part they are not likely to reach super intelligence by software alone, how will they improve hardware without human+capital in the loop?
What would directly help people in a heat wave on a timescale that matters to them?
Just anecdata from a very simple user. I typically only read the following tab, in Firefox with uBlock and have seen zero difference in functionality or reliability and actually enjoy not being tricked into the algorithmic feed anymore.

Then again, i don't use DMs, bookmarks, or any other advanced features. It feels more or less the same if not better. I do distinctly remember though that there were plenty of voices, also here iirc, that definitely predicted a faster decline than what is mentioned nowadays. I have no horse in this race though... Just eating popcorn and watching the show :)
I do. Multiple times I've asked it to summarise plotlines for TV shows and when it doesn't know (if for example the show isn't super popular and there isn't a lot of discussion about it on the internet), it'll just make stuff up outright and give me something that sounds absolutely reasonable based on the name of the show but is actually entirely hallucinated.

Similarly, today I saw this [0] comment and in an attempt to help the user went to ChatGPT.

Prompt:

> User
I remember in the 2000s, there was some site using a decimal IP address (as a single number, not dotted quad) that had hacking/crypto puzzles. Something with a "Alice in Wonderland" theme. Does that ring a bell for you?

Response:

> I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I don't have personal experiences or memories. However, based on your description, it's possible that you might be referring to the website known as "Project Wonderland." It was a website that featured a series of cryptographic puzzles based on the story of Alice in Wonderland, and it used a decimal IP address (203.208.46.147) as its URL. The website was active in the early 2000s and gained a cult following among enthusiasts of cryptography and puzzle-solving. However, the website is no longer active today.

I got really excited to have found an answer until through Google and the Wayback Machine I realised that ChatGPT just made this all up and no such website existed at that URL.

I tried starting a new chat with ChatGPT to ask it about this "Project Wonderland" website and it had no idea what I was talking about.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35748714

(I am using ChatGPT 3.5 (March 23, 2023))
Maybe your missed the tone of their comment?
In undergrad, I wrote a Gulp plugin (a Node build tool) to run shell scripts. The added value was the ability to connect the script's stdin/stdout into the Gulp pipeline.

I wrote it in a weekend, just as a one-off while I was learning Node and procrastinating my other studies.

Today, it gets just under 30k weekly downloads. Which isn't a ton, but it shows that it's still being used.

After I got a real job, I found it in an internal third-party repo. Apparently some contractors built a site with it years ago.
It's excellent. Get it at the library before buying.
LLMs currently have this problem where they will give confident-sounding responses to prompts where they are lacking enough context. Humans are built to read that as accuracy. It’s wholly a human interface problem.
We've learned that Shell, at the very least, knew about the effects of climate change since the 60s. It's not suspicious at all that whether or not climate change is even real has been debated for decades. Shell definitely wouldn't use the billions of dollars at their disposal to protect their industry from existential threat by shaping discourse.
Right, but what graphics are they processing in a serverless context or when it’s mining bitcoin?
That is a very interesting constellation of symptoms. Thank you for sharing, and I feel for you. I have much acute sensitive hearing response than the rest of my family and friends and it’s a hard thing to explain with no one else notices.

For me however it’s a largely positive experience. I am hugely grateful for things like the sounds of frogs, birds, voices I like, movie soundtracks, and for cleanly processed digital music.

On the other hand, musicians playing or singing out of tune, gives me a visceral response, and I have been down to leave clubs when a musician is having a slightly off night.
First thing I looked is if someone would mention it in the comments ;-)
It comes from the magical thinking of having too many marketing people and not enough engineers who actually build shit.
I think we are talking strictly the Chromecast with Google TV here, which is a full Android TV stick.