skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can answer any specific questions anybody has but basically, I landed in the industry by chance and got good at automating the collection process. I never had the backbone to strong arm people so I played the numbers game. Technology was my advantage.

Meanwhile, all of my peers were getting rich running unlicensed agencies and lying to debtors. I was getting sued constantly for following the rules. I'd win the lawsuits but it would cost me as much as $30k to fight them.

I employed over 500 people over about 8 years, many of them stole from me, overdosed, or ended up in jail because debt collectors tend to be troubled people. I shifted my focus to building software for the debt industry and went through a startup accelerator. That's when I fell in love with software and sold my agency.

Other than that, I'll answer any specific questions.
> Where

We have oodles of room. Every human - not families, but individual humans, including children - can get their own massive house, with a big back yard.

Here's my math:
Back yard size: 15x40m = 600 sq m.

Public amenities per person = 300 sq m. (very generous)

Total space per human = 900 sq m. = 9e-4 sq km.

Number of humans = 8e9

Land required for this most ultimate of suburbs: 7.2e6 sq km

Surface area of Canada: 9.98e6 sq km. USA: 9.83e6 sq km.

In my absolutely absurdly overprovisioned scenario, we all fit in 72% of the admittedly very large Canada. ALL of us. Leaving plenty of room for every holiday-worthy place on earth to have all the AirBnBs and apartment-hotels needed.

> It's expensive

Investing public money to create amenities for tourism is going to be an economic no-brainer. Tourists, visitors, and locals will all benefit from it.

> Character will change

Everything changes all the time. The history of the world is a story of the character of things changing, whether happily or otherwise.

In a time of great change, desperately trying to slow it down isn't the way. Rolling with, and even initiating, the changes in an authentic way is much better.
I think this is the difference between the theoretician and the practitioner. You see your interpretation is the obvious one for the former. But as any practitioner can tell a regular expression can't even parse a regular language!

See, normally the whole point of parsing something is to get data out right. And the way a regex gets data out is through capture groups. But herein lies the issue, a capture group can only capture one piece of information!

Consider a simple regular language: a non empty sequence of comma separated positive integers. We would like to get the integers out. An attempt

(\d+)(,(\d+))*

The first group captures the first number, the second group is just something we introduced for the purpose of writing the regex, we don't care about the value. The third (inner) group should ideally capture all the subsequent numbers separately. But it doesn't! If you try to run that regex on 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 you will find that group 1 matches 1. And group 3 matches 9. Where did all the other numbers go?!

So really, you have to give the regex some outside help, maybe an outside loop, maybe splitting on a regex rather than parsing with one. Even for this simple language!

And when you are already doing that, why the step to giving it a bit more help, perhaps a stack, is quite small.
Yeah that's not surprising... to move many would have to give up a 2-3% mortgage. Unless the pay bump from relocating covers the extra I'd be spending per month with 6% interest rate and then some, it doesn't seem worth the risk.
You guys are cracking me up lol most comments here must have the smartest damn 5-year olds in mind!

“It’s simple ! Just tokenize the context and allow differentiated hash maps to best map the embeddings matrix. Duh!”
> But you couldn't reimplement podman in a few hundred lines of code.

You don't even need a few hundred: https://github.com/p8952/bocker

And then there's 'dokku' which IIRC, started as a bash version of Heroku.

> Not all ideas have the same quality.

They really do. I've heard all kinds of things in my career, but almost none I would want to dedicate a portion of my life building. Not because they are bad ideas or won't work, but because of the person with the idea or it just didn't interest me. Those people went on to be moderately successful (like hundreds of millions worth) but I'm glad I wasn't on that ride.
You think WOTC couldn’t have found a friendly judge if the guy didn’t comply with their thugs? The judiciary in the US is just as corrupt as the police.
I'm not a ML expert but I know a bit about math.

It's "differentiable" in the same way that e.g. the "jump function" (Heaviside step function) is differentiable (not as a function from real numbers to real numbers, but as a distribution). It's derivative is the "point impulse function" (Dirac delta function), which, again, is a distribution, not a real function.

Distributions are nicely defined in math, but can't really be operated with numerically (at least not in the same way as real/float functions), but you can approximate them using continuous functions. So instead of having a function jump from 0 to 1, you "spread" the jump and implement it as a continuous transition from e.g. `0-epsilon` to `0+epsilon` for some tiny epsilon. Then you can differentiate it as usual, even numerically.

Similarly, hash table lookup is a dis-continuous function - the result of `hash.get(lookup)` is just `value` (or `null`). To make it continuous, you "spread" the value, so that nearby keys (for some definition of "nearby") will return nearby values.

One way to do this, is to use the scalar product between `lookup` and all keys in the hashtable (normalized, the scalar product is close to 1 if the arguments are "nearby"), and use the result as weights to multiply with all values in the hashtable. That's what the transformer does.
But I'd say LLMs produce content faster than I can read or write it, because they can produce content which is really dense.

Ask GPT-4 a question and then answer it yourself. Maybe your answer will be as good or better than GPT-4's but GPT-4 writes its answer a lot faster.
We already get spammed and hammered by bots without ai so? Did we manage to somehow regulate away existing systems to stop this? No, so why put ai behind a bunch of regulation.
Maybe in a dystopia we have ai judges...wait he already have judges using shitty software for sentencing.

You want to further regulate what I can build in my basement?
I will close down the company instead.
Ah, I've hit this several times in the past few years, with quotes and minus not working as expected, I wasn't aware that was a bug, thanks for pointing this out.
YouTube’s Like icon does not render unless you allow scripts from gstatic.com
This is curious because other than that, the website works perfectly fine without allowing any additional script domains.
This article leads a lot of people who want to break into the industry to reach out to me and I turn everyone away. Once I tell them what they can expect they're rarely still interested.
If you eat bread, you must also eat shit. If you don't, you're a hypocrite.

It's astounding how many people are incapable of making judgments except along artificial lines given to them by sophists.
I wonder how much this can be explained by Google having a larger sample size of outgoing clicks to measure.
The tragedy here is usually that you don’t recognize you’re in one until it’s long sense past and you find yourself nostalgically remembering how it was and wondering why it changed so drastically and for the worst.
Even the title is absurd: the atmosphere didn’t become breathable — life evolved to breathe the atmosphere.
In the documentations sections describing the REPL, I wanted to nicely typeset keystroke sequences with <kbd>...</kbd>. The result is that there two macros:

.key foo

foo will be typeset as a keycap, with spaces around it, and:

.keyn foo bar

foo typeset as keycap, immediately followed by bar (no intervening space) by regular bar.

The macros are defined in three ways: one for man2html, one for nroff, and one for groff:

.\" keystrokes
.ie \n(M2 \{\
.de key
.M2HT <kbd>\\$1</kbd>
..
.de keyn
.M2HT <kbd>\\$1</kbd>\\$2
..
.\}

That's for man2html, detected by the M2 variable being nonzero. (This elicits a warning out of groff, due to that variable not existing.) We use the .M2HT macro for inline HTML. I think that didn't exist in man2html; another thing I added.

.el \{\
. ie n \{\
. de key
[\\$1]
. .
. de keyn
[\\$1]\\$2
. .
. \}

Else, for the other two: first nroff for man page viewing. Here the
strategy is to use square brackets, so .key Ctrl becomes [Ctrl].

. el \{\
. \" Box macro from Groff manual with $2 added
. de box
. nr @wd \w'\\$1'
\h'.2m'\
\h'-.2m'\v'(.2m - \\n[rsb]u)'\
\D'l 0 -(\\n[rst]u - \\n[rsb]u + .4m)'\
\D'l (\\n[@wd]u + .4m) 0'\
\D'l 0 (\\n[rst]u - \\n[rsb]u + .4m)'\
\D'l -(\\n[@wd]u + .4m) 0'\
\h'.2m'\v'-(.2m - \\n[rsb]u)'\
\\$1\
\h'.2m'\\$2
. .
. de key
. box "\\$1" ""
. .
. de keyn
. box "\\$1" "\\$2"
. .
. \}
.\}

For groff PDF output we use a .box macro to put a box around the keycap material. The macro is based on something in the manual.

Not sure why the box invocations are indented funny.
He might be convinced of his own discourse, but this is strangely aligned with the interests of his own company.

We should remember how "open" OpenAI really is. The funny business started at this point.
> Build as many vertical farms as are needed

In this case I'd argue that number is zero. Regular farms are altogether superior and vertical farms would increase food prices, reducing availability in the end.
Sounds like there could be an opportunity here for a GDPR noncompliant analytics product. Personally, my customers are in the United States and I don't want ambiguity in my analytics because of Lawyers who reside outside of my jurisdiction.
FYI the FAQ page gets a 404: https://beepberry.sqfmi.com/docs/FAQ
Generate Compilers from Hardware Models
> Everyone in the world masking (with effective masks), distancing a bit, and using standard sanitary practices edit to add, because I forgot - for two months, and a few with immune compromises spending some more months isolated, would eliminate a significant chunk of all contagious respiratory illnesses, not just have stopped this single one from spreading.

This is delusional. China did far more than this and still was not able to control Covid. And even in a fantasy world where you could actually stop all human-to-human contagion, many respiratory viruses have animal reservoirs, making the entire exercise pointless.

It's comforting to think that it's all just a collective action problem and if people could be a little more self-sacrificing, we could make it go away, but it's simply not the case.
Considering interest rates, if you own a home who can blame you? Right now, I owe about $265k on my current home. If I move, and even into a home where I only owe the same amount, I'm looking at a mortgage payment of roughly twice the price. With the ability to work from home for the type of work I do, I'd be crazy to move right now.
It's been said that if the automobile or airplane was invented in the present day, regulations would prevent them from coming to market.
I didn't say they had to bloat their game. They can also choose a different method of distribution. Steam takes a one size fits all approach and an overwhelming majority of the market isn't on paid games with content that lasts under 2 hours.
Generally, heating and cooling are a lot cheaper in USA (thank you cheap natgas, and solar if you can do it).

Cleaning… a lot of the space goes unused or just stores stuff so it doesn’t get too dirty or people don’t care as much outside core areas. Central HVAC helps keep the dust down a bit vs. dead air and radiators.
I thought it was an interesting read and it would be interesting to hear a summation of why you left the industry.

It also made me consider the possibilities for a sort of vertically integrated debt collection company. Someone that's had a debt sent to collection is possibly a good candidate for financial literacy education, credit rehabilitation, debt consolidation and refinancing etc. Can debt collection serve as a sort of loss-leading subsidiary for a bigger business that provides financial literacy and services to people that need it?
Actually, yes. For the first half of the pandemic, much of the medical community was unsure if COVID was airborne.

Examples:

- https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-reverses-agai...

- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7

- https://archive.is/wPD2D (Tweet from WHO)

Note that "airborne" has a specific meaning in medical literature. Everyone agreed COVID could be transmitted in the air by respiratory droplets. But to be truly "airborne" means the virus could be aerosolized and float freely, without being attached to a larger droplet.

Both droplet-based and aerosolized/"airborne" spread allows viruses to be transmitted in the air. But a truly "airborne" virus can travel much farther.

It's the difference between needing 6 feet and 20 feet of distance to prevent spread.

(To put it bluntly, it's the difference between avoiding spittle, or avoiding the equivalent of cigarette smoke. Two very different threat models.)
It's the scale of it.

"Here is a vaguely understood problem, that might take 2 hours to solve."

"Here is a vaguely understood problem, that might take 2 years to solve."

Though if you're used to the latter timescale, you might not consider the former as all that "vaguely" understood.
That has nothing to do with her husband, who was the person at question here.
How do you think search engines detect manipulation, down, fraudulent content, etc, if not by judging the content? Content is all a search engine sees.

An article about a Nigerian prince who needs money is likely to be a scam. An article about how Ukraine is really just a rebellious Russian province is likely to be state-sponsored propaganda.
I do it for the lulz. I do it for my audience. Thank you for taking my comments in the spirit they were offered!
I probably have. I've been out of the industry since 2019 and I tend to create a lot of content. Since that is currently how I align I'd be surprised if I haven't done that somewhere.
Probably the green space that would be created by doing the same project by removing streets to plant orchards would be pretty effective at removing inputs to those deaths. Green spaces that are only available to a few and don't displace streets I'd be less confident in.
> non-shitbags to get into the industry and replace them

I don't think this really works in this case. Much of the debt being purchased by the shitbags is unlikely to be affordable by the debtor and the collector usually ends up unsympathetically ignoring the financial situation of the debtor to shotgun-harass (contact 20 people and hope 2 answer) them in an effort to make a profit. The non-shitbags realize that this is the only winning strategy and choose to do something else.
You don't need to hold Option. Just hover over the green button. Option doesn't appear to have any effect.
Thanks for sharing. How big of an advantage did the technology end up being in percentage terms?
I'm excited about this. I signed up. Are there docs somewhere?
The only thing keeping me from immediately jumping ship from GA is that it's free.
This year there's a good chance we will see the El Niño weather event, which has a warming effect on the global temperatures. Just recently we had the opposite cooling La Niña event, so I'm really not looking forward to how hot it will be this Summer.

Edit: just to be clear, not trying to dismiss the effects of climate change here. Rather, I'm thinking El Niño combined with thus far accumulated CC is not going to be pretty.
I see two possible motivations:

1) he is truly scared AI can become dangerous and try to distribute the responsibility to more people
2) he anticipates that there will be some regulation anyway, and when that's the case, it is better to be involved and act friendly.
Isn't DDG a Bing front-end? So did Bing improve recently?
> Even if researchers are wrong initially, because of lack of data, they are still acting in good faith.

A researcher or other "expert" should have at least some sense of when the data being used are limited, flawed, or even unavailable.

Under such circumstances, the only way to act in good faith would be for such a person to say something along the lines of, "I don't know" or "It's not possible to say at this time."

Such a person making some other authoritative pronouncement (even with caveats attached), especially if it turns out to be incorrect, should not be seen as "acting in good faith".
Whilst this article isn't (it's at least 2 years old based on wayback machine or 3 years old based on copyright notice), it's interesting to see that people are increasingly questioning the source of content.
The LLM hype has kinda poisoned the front page for me. Pretty much any time I look about half of the stories are about LLMs.

I just don't care. AI and ML is boring as fuck. Neat tricks sure but ultimately extremely dull for me.

I expect this to die down again soon though so I hang around a bit.
Very exciting stuff! Will be following this page with great interest.
I mean there was a very sizable group that saw the mistakes in real time. Not necessarily the medical mistakes but the censorship mistakes. I’m not sure how anyone can know what to do in an uncertain situation like that but being unable to question authority isn’t good for most societies.
I use DDG for almost everything except local results. It works but I would feel better if they reduced their dependency on Bing.
The common thread between all your examples is that they are not the latest technologies, just the latest variants promoted by large, monied interests, that have highly prescriptive visions for how said technology can be used.
I've been here for over a decade, it's more or less the same. Instead of AI, we had #nosql, and instead of Substack hot takes, we had Medium hot takes. The only thing that's really changed is the velocity of posts, and volume of comments. Also, there used to be significantly more tech articles than there are now.
Exhaustive pattern matching and tagged unions (sum types) are both great. Haskell's had them since its inception.
What home button?
I can't find any reputable sources that confirm he was a white supremacist. Can you post one of the links you have?
Dear Substack: Quit Sending Me Your Corporate Propaganda
How to blow $1M (when cryptocurrency meets hubris)
Things You Didn't Know Markdown Could Do
just curious - is there a real world scenario where a company has 1k "javascript" developers and can also lay them off without crippling their position in a given market?

follow up - what market and which company(FAANG counts but must be a single org)?

edit: down votes. look i get the math but who laid off 1k js devs?
They also gave no reason to believe the "most" claim. What actually are the things that were proven to be true that were censored as misinformation?
I don’t know your definition of credible.
But the Swedish institute of health (my translation) still has articles of it being spread by droplets.
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/smittskydd-beredskap/utb...
>Wouldn’t it be easier to regulate the quality of software used in critical products?

Sure, but who is responsible/accountable?

Often times I bring this topic up to have a bunch of people looking for gotchas in my overly broad wishful thinking. I don't want Engineers to be a requirement to work in software as a whole. I don't even think being an "Engineer" makes you better in any functional way than your peers. But I do believe in ideas of accountability, responsibility, ownership, and all the legalese involved with taking that seriously.

If the software is holding people's personal info, say to the point where a leak would constitute real risk, I want a Software Engineer stamping the security design to show they follow best practices and the company isn't taking shortcuts. If the software is controlling a robot that could maim someone, I want to know that some intern wasn't the one signing off to say its safe.

We aren't there yet. And there's lots of work that needs to be done to get us there. I recognize that. But I want to keep putting the bug in people's ears to have that thought for the years that come as we watch more software glitches cause harm to people, to the environment.
> However, ChatGPT was not designed to identify content created by artificial intelligence — including its own. There are several other programs, including Winston AI and Content at Scale, that are able to do this.

That claim to be able to do this.

This arms race has barely gotten started.
>manipulation

This seems to be the case being argued here

>explicitly illegal content

Illegal according to who?

>fraudulent content

Fraudulent according to who?

These things you name are an editorial decision and are not unbiased
This would be the interesting thing to know: if debt is being sold for pennies on the dollar, how can we pay off our own debts for the same price?
We have precise user location that is still anonymous to us (by sending a nearish location based on the browser location). Have you tried turning that on? More info at https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/an...
Google's search results have become pure garbage by now, so anything not-Google should be #1.
1st problem: Scan gun for home center materials did not work as the system was momentarily down.

2nd problem: 2 barcodes on the product.

Not sure which one of these is a "me" problem. You also misread my comment.

Sounds like you just want to throw around low-effort personal insults instead of addressing anything I said. This is HN, you can do better.
This is just more openAI marketing at work. ChatGPT is a chatbot, and it’s good at language for sure, but it isn’t some huge breakthrough that people were expecting would take a century. Its literally just a fancy RNN which we’ve had for awhile
Which would be great. Now we're rapidly travelling down the hundreds of thousands of dollars lawsuit path. Anything the cops do, apart from siding with the land owner (never mind buyer), would have an extremely high chance of being a constitutional violation.
> Would this be the first illegal algorithm?

Not by a longshot. See cryptography before the '90s for the most recognizable example.
It's a legitimate need, it's just a corrupted industry because of misaligned incentives. We need some form of debt collections otherwise credit couldn't exist. The problem is that regulations are absolutely inconsistent and don't incentivize people to operate ethically. It's a regulatory problem.

An interesting fact is that a lot of agencies buy debt for about 1 cent on the dollar and liquidate around 2%. Collecting debt is actually very hard and the success rates are super low.
Maybe but in the meantime, I can still install Android 12 on a Galaxy S4 and use it everyday whereas the iPhone 5 is now just ewaste.
> I employed over 500 people over about 8 years, many of them stole from me, overdosed, or ended up in jail because debt collectors tend to be troubled people.

I owned a bar/night club for about 5 years. Most of the staff had (or gave me) the same problems.
> The thing is, this likely is true for him.

It's true for basically everyone. Smart people, "rationalists", et c., fall for scams, nutty scientific or conspiracy theories, advertising, romantic political or economic ideas, cults or scam-religions, and other crap all the time.
I've followed the project since the 6.x days and I am still impressed that they managed (with the help of some really sharp win32 people) to get their fork-per-client model working on Windows.
Since the movement of Langton's Ant is entirely deterministic, it would be possible in this scenario to make the Ant go wherever the adversary pleases.
The initial settings of the pixels can be carefully engineered to facilitate any arbitrary pattern of motion.
The ant's movement can be easily calculated ahead of time to help with getting the initial pixel colours right.