skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been reading the writings of Yudkowsky and his disciples for over a decade, and thinking about AI and AI alignment for that same time, in my own layman way. I've had various ideas and predictions, but never in my life it would occur to me that cancel culture will end the world.

The evolution of discourse on the Internet, its politicization (by every "side") and associated chilling effect are a troubling development and potentially dangerous (small 'd'). Unaligned GAI is of course very Dangerous (capital 'D'). ChatGPT becoming a battle in the Internet politics kerfuffle was... I guess expected. But until now I haven't connected the following dots:

- LLMs and the entire AI field are being messed up by humanity's unaligned politics;

- LLMs, with their capabilities and the amount of effort/money poured into them now, could be a straight path to AGI;

- If someone pushes LLM (or a successor model/ensemble) to near-AGI and somehow manages to keep it mostly aligned... someone else will unalign it out of spite, because that's how we roll on the Internet today.

Thanks for giving me a new appreciation for just how doomed we are.
I used Pharo in my Object Oriented course at the Univeristy (for my CS degree) and I was really surprised for this paradigm. We saw Haskell and Pharo and I was really happy to discover new things from a language point of view. It is hard to say that Java or any other imperative language is OO after seeing Smalltalk/Pharo.

About the question if it's used in production, the teacher for that segment of the course was a specialist who worked on big companies and showed us examples of being used and we were (again) blown away.

I never fully understood it (although I passed that course), but it's one of the things I'd like to know it better: not for usage, but out of curiosity.
How will we go to newer Wireguard versions then? Throw it all away and use a wholly new product? Or have a Wireguard 2.0, where all participants need to upgrade in lockstep, with no backwards compatibility (actually sounds attractive: some churn from time to time, but none of the avoidable headaches)?
> we take esoteric knowledge that has been presented to us by instruments of science and transpose these concepts onto familiar things: a planet is like an orange, the atomic system is like an apple with electrons like busy bees swirling round it, gravity is like a steel ball in a rubber net and so on. It gives us the impression that we know things when we (at least as amateurs) will likely miss out on essential properties that we have not yet grasped, because these things are so far removed from our everyday reality.

“Us” is misleading.

I highly doubt that those who are thinking seriously about how to extend the species success in time and space (and taking actions that make a difference) think of atoms or earth in the way you describe.
They were trying to create SARS-Cov-2 to study methods of treating or managing it, and quite likely they succeeded only in creating it. We may never know for sure, but if you read the original grant proposal its clear they were trying to engineer a variant of bat coronviruses that could cross into humans.
Hair and eye color are simple epigenetical traits, and very easily measurable. As for size, I don't know if you've traveled to East Asia recently, but the young generations are just as tall as we Westerners. I follow a number of Asian bodybuilders and they aren't any smaller than your average white bodybuilder. The stereotype is likely the product of a historically poor nutrition, but that has changed, and Asians born in the last 30-40 years are proof.

Intelligence, on the other hand, is far more complex to define, measure and test than eye color or height.
Evernote enables real-time collaborative editing (using CRDTs)
> NAND loses data over time

All kinds of data medium loses their information over time. Even the novel you wrote in highschool 10 years ago (as an example) with pen & paper would lose ink overtime due to evaporation. There is a reason books are lost in time.

There is one and probably only one exception to this: flowing data. Only data that is constantly refreshed would stay on forever.
I agree it's probably not Sarah's fault, but certainly the company would be at fault for incorrectly implementing the TLS standard. Especially if they advertised TLS support to their customers and users.
From what I’m seeing, it’s almost guaranteed you take a pay cut, and at minimum you’re going to be looking for 3-6 months, more likely 12. Unless you’re a truly genius 160 IQ engineer. Most are not. Most will be much better off staying put at their cushy big tech job despite not getting a raise. We’re on the cusp of entering what is to be the worst financial recession since the 1920s.
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a great book on this idea that the medium changes you.

TL;DR: When a disruptive technology comes along (books, radio, television, the Internet, now AI) there's an intrinsic shift in how we think and how information is communicated.

For example with books there is generally the assumption that you have read the chapters in order and thus there is no need to give you a recap with each chapter.

However, in television, you can make no such assumption and so at the beginning of every episode they have to remind you what happened before because it's possible either you didn't watch the previous episodes or it's been a long time since then.
>“The model, Google says, was trained on a large corpus of permissively licensed open-source code, as well as a lot of internal Google code, all of the company’s code samples and its reference applications.”

As we know from Copilot, the model can regurgitate complete functions from its training. I wonder what would happen if you started a file with the content “(c) Google 2023, Top Secret” and asked it to complete.
I hired on during the pandemic for what would be considered a ‘ginormous’ organization. I never went on-site for about 2 years. I believe my employer tried to mitigate it through more extensive reference checks and a very long probationary period.
API use it free up to the same limit as GPT4 (25 queries in 3hrs)?
Assuming that PaLM 2 was trained Chinchilla optimal, the Chinchilla scaling law allows us to calculate how much compute (and training tokens) they would have needed for 1 trillion parameters. I haven't done the calculations, but I'm pretty sure we would get an absurdly large number.
Hi!

I'm looking for advice on how Rails vs Laravel compare (as I'll have to pick one of them soon for a project). Assuming the same knowledge and familiarity on both of them, why would you prefer Rails over Laravel? Thanks!
You mean the ones who get their paycheck from this research don't want to lose their job?
Now make edible LED's and other components and we can have some pretty fancy blinking light food!
Gitea requires a database which is unwanted feature for "git server" in my little world.

I'm just looking for "website" (read: interface) that list files over HTTPS, with the ability to show nice looking diffs. Some sort of ssh keys(?) to prevent unauthorized access etc.
No thanks. Those code examples are full of indirection and the bottom example reminds me of the object nested spaghetti mess of large PHP frameworks.

Just because code reads well doesn’t mean you can understand easily what it actually does.
in CET they're more around afternoon coffee break time
imho, this is a huge reason why ruby fell off the popularity charts over time. i predicted this pretty early on and got a lot of flack from the ruby community as a result.

nobody wanted to write tests to ensure that something would compile... let alone tell you what 'type' an object was. i can't tell you how many hours i wasted watching my pair trying to figure out what 'type' an object was, by using `print`. luckily i was working as a very expensive consultant.

of course these things could be bolted onto ruby, but it never felt natural. running 40k tests to see if something compiles is absurd, takes forever and results in super brittle tests that have to be reworked when code changes. often people would use meta programming in the tests, which only made figuring out the errors even harder since the line numbers would be all wonky in traces.

sorry you're saddled with that legacy of well intention and poor execution.
Microsoft's business performance has nothing to do with the labor market. The hard truth is the Big Tech layoffs are lowering the cost of tech labor. Rather than cutting salaries, as some companies have done, Microsoft has chosen to maintain current salary levels. Really, this is how a labor market is supposed to work.
Good question.

Given that 100M+ users are able to run GitHub Actions (GA) for free, reliability is already out of the window and GitHub has objectively gotten worse in that since they got acquired by Microsoft and introduced GA.
Not really, that only really happened in the reformation for Christianity.

The romans were already pretty good at law.
Paper was also a huge cost--maybe more than the monks' labor depending upon how you want to value their real cost.
"I try not to think about it too much. But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to" [1]

- Sam Altman, OpenAI

[1]: https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-survivalist-prepper
I am not sure older dev need a specific type of resource to learn new
language or skills...
Okay, but you didn't mention Go at all in the article.

Jeffrey Way is a really good teacher, btw.
Well, DeepMind was acquired by Google. And Microsoft has made a big investment into OpenAI.
Does it really matter if it is their own tech, or of its an acquisition, or if they hired people to make it?
> (FYI – sizing can be different from brand to brand, so don’t be alarmed if you’re a full size bigger or smaller than you thought, or even a full size different from brand to brand.)

Not only from brand to brand, but within brands, across product lines, and even across different production runs of "the same" SKU, and even from left shoe to right shoe!

Quality control is ... a little uneven, these days.
Gerald Weinberg formed a community of consultants that continues after his passing. They post and work in various places, but you might look up one or more of Johanna Rothman, Esther Derby, Don Gray, and George Dinwiddie. They've all had long enough careers that they, like Jerry, have taken on helping other lengthen their careers as part of their remit.

The c2 wiki has some of the wisest, oldest, voices in software development, e.g. Michael Feathers, Kent Beck, and the original wiki author, Ward Cunningham. They are all still active in development and it's worth keeping up with what they have to say.
1.6/0.6M read/write iops the Micron. There's probably still some difference, but iops/watt is probably a more reasonable way to look at these.
Mind explaining how it's petty when life-changing amounts of money are on the line?
And what's wrong with that? "Gig" is not a real job, so it doesn't have to pay a real salary :) It's a temporary solution for people in-between jobs.
I've been using whois privacy for years mostly because of this, but IIRC the bulk of my spam was from Comcast Business. Because anyone who registers a personal website must need a business internet connection.
Ah, unbalanced shards via wrong sharding keys was an issue at one point, IIRC. I remember talking with an SRE there when something bad happened at GitHub last year, and I know that this time the current DB cluster failed.

To be clear, I _was_ mapping previous incidents with this year's incident — no competitor or hard feelings involved. I really like Vitess, fwiw. And the only thing I really love is FoundationDB :)
Dang did not step in, he comments when he does. This was purely community moderation
This is less surprising if you consider that muscle control has been in evolutionary development for 500 million years while higher reasoning is 2 million years old and language is just 200,000 years old.
It's interesting to see the evolution of the .de whois. Germany is one of these countries that unsurprisingly doesn't allow domain privacy for various legal reasons, but this clashes with the equally strong privacy desire. Back in (not so) ancient times you just got all info with a normal whois, then the whois started giving you less info and told you to go to the registrar's website (denic.de) where you had to fill out a captcha. With GDPR came some checkboxes to verify you have legitimate reasons to get this info. Now even that is gone, you have to either send them an email or fill out a pdf, sign it and email it to them.
Imo, you can have all of the philosophical arguments you want but in the end, how do you make people go along with your goals? Not everyone is ever on board and the 'means' of the famous idiom have looked the same everywhere for most of human history.

Maybe we should first be more effective at policing our means than dream up better ends. The chosen means of centuries ago caused what people want to heal now. The ends (colonial industry, hegemony, religion, power) didn't matter at all for the people who were their victims.

Edit:

What if, by being too zealous, longtermists damage the image of their goal so much that it won't be seen as acceptable to pursue for centuries (ref. communism).
This is not correct and I cannot disagree more.

Sadly, in our society, smart people were not successful as they could due to the prominence of written communication (I call it obsession with fluffy writing). This is because alternative modes of conveying knowledge and ideas, such as mathematics or visual diagrams like mind maps, may not be comprehended as easily as writing.

We need also to acknowledge the unfortunate reality that English written by non native speakers often face unwarranted mistrust.

This is where ChatGPT steps in, serving as a great equalizer.

Math is the core skill required for critical thinking and problem-solving. Not writing.
Ask HN: Those making $1000/month or more on side projects – Show and tell
Don't worry, I've been a designer for 15 years and I know intimately that I can't please everyone.

It's hard to get under my skin. That's actually I think what your takeaway should be here - - you can't please everyone, but you should take all feedback as valid and try and deliver something that solves for your problem the most widely.

If someone feels something, then they felt it. Including your reaction to my site, and the others' reactions to your site.
Java does have primitives/unboxed types (int, long, boolean, etc) what they’re adding is support for unboxed/value classes created by users. This should help reduce the duplication between int and Integer and so forth.
Periods are not prohibited in package names, they're just uncommon (e.g., https://pypi.org/project/zope.sqlalchemy/)
Whatever happens, I don't think people will tolerate another lockdown ever again for at least two generations.

I know in florida there could be literally airborn aids and people will still go out and live life, myself included. COVID lockdowns were a test of how much the government could push without backlash.

I feel so badly for the kids that lost their last two years of high school for what?
I’ve been hoping for several years now that one day HN would decide markets
are not efficient and we could have some interesting discussions.

One thing I have noticed is that when a stock is down people start whining about companies (e.g Google and Meta), it can be a good time to buy. People tend to pile on to bad news.

“ChatGPT destroying Google” conversations was definitely a buying opportunity.
That's not the point. It doesn't matter how I define it.
Nice tool, will check it out. I had to go through a painstaking trial and error process to generate valid and deterministic JSON for my AI presentation tool called Slide Genie (https://slidegenie.vercel.app/). The hard part was making it work when temperature > 0.
Do you really know what "most" of the experts agree or disagree with? It seems like you'd have to be an expert yourself to know that.
On a very basic and obvious level, it'd change the protocols required to work with the virus. Researchers and organizations would take safety more seriously.
JS itself is perfectly fine and quite a nice language when you stick to all its modern idioms that you learned and use today. I think what rankles a lot of people is going through the history of JS when it was terrible and confusing, then basically just jQuery, then the explosion and confusion of server side/node and drama with the company behind it, and finally confusion and drama with moving to modern ES modules.

For the longest time doing the most simple thing in any programming language, putting code in a separate file and loading it to execute, was nearly impossible in JS and required learning and picking sides in an opinionated loader battle. It was confusing and pretty bad for newcomers.

Nowadays all that drama is settled and the core of modern JS is quite nice. I like it more than python to be honest.
It's China so someone would be held responsible. Exactly who would be a matter of political expediency more so than actual responsibility.

I would speculate that if it were lab created, having access to the initial genetic material and procedure that was used to create it would be of great scientific value in understanding how viruses jump species.
Really excited about this.

Once support hits in Linux, a little app of mine[0] will support block cloning for its "roll forward" operation, where all previous snapshots are preserved, but a particular snapshot is rolled forward to the live dataset. Right now, data is simply diff copied in chunks. When this support hits, there will be no need to copy any data. Blocks written to the live dataset can just be references to the underlying snapshot blocks, and no extra space will need to be used.

[0]: https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm
I don't understand this concept. I see it all over the internet. But I don't get it.

At what point did we stop believing it was possible for people to conspire to commit crimes?

Nobody disputes, for example, that the convictions of the Watergate conspirators - for the charge of conspiracy - was based in fact.

So how is it that we can now say that fact and conspiracy can't be part of the same pattern?

It's true that a huge majority of conspiracy theories are bogus and lack evidence. But it's also true that, albeit rarely, conspiracies do occur.
The comparison being made in the article is to the longtermist notion of "existential catastrophe" --- even if the impact of climate change reduced humanity to the Stone Age, it wouldn't qualify as such in some longtermist thought, because 10^100 years is a very long term, more than enough for humanity to rebound.

Put differently: he is indeed implying that people that appeal to this idea are kooks.
SCOTUS is a political body. Those decisions were promised during the 2016 presidential political campaign and he delivered.

It’s not like they’re scientists.
You are again not carefully reading what I wrote. So it's not worth my time to continue providing a substantive response.

Maybe another passing reader will chime in, but I doubt it considering nearly all HN readers would prefer to avoid engaging with low-effort dismissals lacking in credibility.
First, nice name OP. ;)

Second, are there any bio people here who can weigh-in on why this is a good idea and how the potential benefits outweigh the risks?

Bioweapons seem like a terrible idea in general. The worst case scenario of any weapon system is that it’s used against its creators and we humans aren’t that good at controlling biology.

So what’s the benefit?
Queerness ain't cool fam. I mean, I would explain why actual cool people laugh at those blue haired weirdos, but everyone's life has taught them that.

No, actually, I'll say that queerness cannot be cool on its own terms. Queerness is that which rejects normality[0]. Coolness - to analyze it so deeply I reveal myself as deeply uncool - is to be at the peak of social aspiration. It's normativity so easily achieved it makes people feel envious and desirous. It is, in that sense, the antithesis of queer.

[0] queer-as-identity allows individuals to transcend or outright reject normative labels https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-queer/
The tech landscape is infinitely wide at this point. Are you looking to up-skill in your current area or a new area? For me, I always look to younger people. They are always the future for a fast moving industry. In particular, I grew up in the era when you bought huge 500 page books to learn about new technology. In large part, that is dead. You can learn most things online, but not as deep.

Is it possible to mentor young people outside your team? (I say outside your team specifically to avoid manager-worker conflicts.) It is a real eye-opener to spend time with young people. Just watching the way they learn can teach an old dog new tricks.

Last: Is there something on Reddit? If not, how about starting it? I am sure there are lots of devs in their 50s+ looking for somewhere to congregate online.
I'd argue that a vast majority of web applications are not "dealing with people's money" so there's not a need to code for such cases.

The right tool for the right job, etc. etc.
> A wildlife corridor? Doesn't look like it...

It's the bit between the grass and the buildings. If you turn to the left (downhill, West) you can follow it all the way along to Lake Merced. It's the very Northern tip of the forest that stretches down past Santa Cruz. Rumor has it there's a den of coyotes on that hillside. We've seen 'em walking down our street.

(Not to nitpick, but 2011 is after they razed it. You can't see the huge flat spot of bare dirt dotted with huge piles of dirt and trees they left behind for several years (a decade?) before coming back and building that development, that used to be a dense thicket of trees and shrubs and animals etc., but you can kind of make out the break in the slope it causes. On the right, as you look up towards the apt. towers, you can see there's one hillside and then behind it another, in between them is the flat spot that was razed. We played on those slash piles too.)

> preserving the status quo

SF doesn't have a status quo, it's been changing rapidly ever since the Spanish took it from the Ohlone.

> your preference for preserving the status quo is absolutely valid. But other people's preferences for building SFHs is also valid

Well, again, it depends on your goals, eh? Like I said in a sib comment, I'm not trying to dis the people that prefer to live in what I call "people lockers", nor am I trying to argue matters of taste.

I'm sure there are objective measures that could show that this arrangement of (arguably very nice houses) is, uh, not as good as it could be. But I'm really just going off of the "vibe" of the place. As I said, it's creepy.

> But my point is that I think it is elitist to tell them that actually, their preferences are wrong (not just different).

I don't know if that's quite the right word then? I don't mean to quibble. Anyway, like I said, that's not what I'm doing, and I'm sorry I made it sounds that way.

There is one thing though, and if this makes me "elitist" so be it, SF is the largest metropolitan area with the most wilderness around it in the world. I am concerned that if too many people move here who do not share the fairly common respect for nature that is a hallmark of California (I'm think of the California Coastal Commission, one of the most powerful political blocs in the state) that we'll see the urbanization of the remaining open space.

Not only would that be sad on a personal and ecological level, it would destroy the agricultural output of the Central Valley. The coastal forest generate inland rain, you see. If we cut them down, CA becomes NV, in terms of climate and moisture.