skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the "Hacker News readers" and "People who like dithering" Venn diagram has converged slowly over time. I'm a happy resident of the overlapping zone.

A classic visual explainer from the team behind Myst and Riven (who had to balance image quality and disk space) is archived here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20230415173939/http://cho.cyan.co...

Obligatory link to Obra Dinn's fascinating dev log post, regarding the challenge of spatial and temporal coherence when dithering realtime 3D (for aesthetic reasons, ie. deliberately noticeable to the player):
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...

Lately I've been attempting to add the original dithering from Excel 97's easter egg to my online reproduction. In the era of indexed-color graphics, developers had to dither efficiently to reduce banding. Compare these two rendering techniques of the same subject, one with 16 shades of gray and dithering, and the other with 256 shades of gray:

https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg/?shadingOnly=true&l=...

https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg/?shadingOnly=true&l=...
CS gets way closer to "car free" than anything but the original SimCity (where you could just use rails instead of roads everywhere) - you need to use the Parks and paths and some pretty sneaky design, but you can get upwards of 80% using walking/transit. Takes a lot of work, however, and some mods.
> Who decides what constitutes hate speech

Governments do.

And Reddit being a global site needs to abide by the laws of places like Germany which have specific rules around what content is tolerated.
How low is it? 60-70k is normalish where I live. It's a hughly developed country with a relatively low Gini, so that might be the reason.
I have googled the bucket on the door too and the author is right, it is nowhere on the Internet to be found. How Chomsky this get could so wrong?
I think they're serious but they have a particular definition of "left" which includes anti-work and late-stage capitalism. When you think the left isn't left enough, everyone else is to your right.
'Temperature' would probably already be close, which controls how much GPT takes low probability (could reasonably be interpreted as confidence?) into account.
Sometimes being wrong is wrong. It’s hard to talk about conservatives in a neutral tone sometimes because stating just the facts can sometimes sound negative. Remember how all the media outlets were “anti Trump” because they all described the voting scandal as being “without evidence”? That’s because there was none.

You couldn’t report on that and simultaneously be on the side of reality without also being against the Trump campaign.

Also, is alt right a slur? Cause woke isn’t.
Sure sure, that's true. The highly controversial subjects Reddit is not good for. I assumed he was talking about something like lawn care or something.

It's definitely not the place to go for neutral political organization.
The word "attention" has been stretched pretty far to explain what is happening inside a transformer.

What's actually happening is that every token embedding interacts with every other token embedding before it and as the product of this interaction (dot product + softmax) it takes a fraction of every other token embedding and adds it to itself. Technically, it's different transforms/functions of the embedding.

You can view it as every token embedding mixing information from other embeddings into itself. Done ~100 times in parallel ("attention heads"), ~100 times in sequence (layers). As per GPT-3 model (175B).
> Your point, correct me if I'm wrong, is that software is more the commodity and sales is differentiable?

At this point in time ... well, yes.

Just about any software that a business needs is, at this point in time, already written, with few exceptions.

For almost any MVP, at this point in time, you can gauge market interest using something that already exists.

> I wonder how this stacks up against other software that yielded massive public utility, like UNIX, or the internet.

Those were different times, and even those different times things like UNIX were mostly differentiated only by sales-efforts of the hardware vendors.

There was a time when people had to be sold on the idea of the internet being at all useful. It had to be sold.
That was a wonderful read
To put some real numbers on it. An average React developer in London would charge around £650/day as a contractor. In a second city like Manchester they would charge say £500/day. In Eastern Europe it would be like £220/day.

Yes there are trade offs, but wage arbitrage hasn’t gone away.
Can’t wait to never have to interact with one of these tech fucks again.
Small-to-Medium Enterprise

3-letter acronyms are the worst
I wonder if this will mean increased or reduced latency.
I’m on the edge of my seat, hoping a similar article will appear featuring Mountain Dew with real sugar
The search code appears to be hand-written though. You can find the commit history for the core search functions here: https://github.com/buddhist-uni/buddhist-uni.github.io/blame...

It's kind of neat that they did hand write it in a way. A fun project I'm sure. And they even made it run in a worker to keep things even more quick and responsive.
> In an office I can walk around the block with you and chat. In a remote setting I have to schedule some time

This is exactly what I love about remote work.

Being able to schedule activities ahead of time and avoid my flow being interrupted makes me so much more productive.
Quite a lot has changed in objc since the nextstep days! And a lot more changed as Apple learned from that and built swift. My guess is you don’t know these languages as well as you think if you’re not clear about these differences.
how are you organizing thing online? how do you contact people? how do you choose policy? How do you support people who aren't being paid due to a strike?

What is it you think unions are doing, that they don't need to do now?
According to some light research, and as is common in science, the answer is “yes, but…”.

The trailing “but” being that it all depends on proper utilization and the project in general. While biochar is carbon-negative, if there is enough carbon-positive emissions in a project it could offset the biochar, for instance.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fa23/220228abece8782396d287...
> Transformers et al would have been figured out in no time had we had the sort of data tools we have today.

I disagree. Even things that seem obvious in retrospect, take some time to be figured out.

Resnets, batch norm, dropout, etc are examples of this.

And I don't think transformers are obvious.
Ok so Europe can ban me from operating in Europe, why would that stop me from serving data archives to the rest of the world?
Congrats on your game launch. The game is really addictive.
Already got one (3qt), love it.
i wonder if this concept has implications for careers of remote workers
To me, the plugin model allows two things

1. single point of entry: you don't need ten different apps to achieve ten different outcomes. You can do it all right inside ChatGPT

2. Since I can have up to three plugins active inside ChatGPT (as of today), I can express more complex workflows than if I had one app each with no trivial way to stream data from one app to the next.

It's like Zapier for your ideas. You talk to ChatGPT > it extracts data from a plugin > you prod it along a bit more > it talks to a second plugin to do X > more chat > talk to third plugin etc etc.

Zapier itself only lets you flow data from one app to the next, not act on that data.

I expect that as the LLM evolves and matures, they will allow more plugins and start eating up different industries. E.g., why do you need a Google Drive when your ChatGPT can also store files for you?
I hadn't thought about that before, but that might be one contributing reason why online communities are moving into discord chats instead. A subreddit or forum has its most toxic posts visible until they are deleted. A discord chat almost moderates itself because anything older than a few days is a pain to retrieve, and doesn't show up on Google.
well, it's not another GPT thread at least.
This is the future of learning. You have a skill in it, learn to monetize it. Will benefit both of us, as you are more incentivized to do it if you can make money
Why it can be a good idea to say “Thank You” to ChatGPT
> If your concurrency strictly can't involve parallelism then sure, no data races, but also then your performance is miserable on modern hardware.

Often worth it when that hardware is battery-powered though. Using those extra cores isn't free.
You are 100% correct. I know of hordes of people being banned for the most ridiculous reasons. And it's always a power-hungry mod. And it would be fine if they were just banned from a sub, but I've seen guys get banned completely for the most stupidest reasons.
I think it's just unusual to have enough information to be able to plan up front. There are two aspects:

1. Do we have all the information to make the right product decisions now?

2. Do we have all the information to scope all the technical work?

Both are unusual and the second requires the first. It's not that it never happens (A nearby team in my org did it over the last six months) but this has become harder to achieve as the complexity of software has increased.
> I mean, Ghislaine Maxwell was the head moderator of /r/news.

The conspiracy theory claimed that Ghislaine Maxwell was a moderator of /r/worldnews, and the evidence supporting this is extremely weak.

> The “evidence” shared by conspiracy theorists is that the user in question, u/MaxwellHill, has the word “Maxwell” in their name. The conspiracy theory's architects claim that gaps in the user’s posting history are tied to what they believe to be significant events in Ghislaine Maxwell’s life that apparently would have precluded her from posting links to articles about climate change, insects, Bitcoin, and a host of other various general news, as the account has dutifully done since 2006. They also have glommed onto a 2011 Gizmodo article in which MaxwellHill mentioned they were "busy with a potential business venture."

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3zbaj/incoherent-conspiracy...

> However, despite multiple Reddit users quickly jumping in on the investigation event to the point of conducting a stylometric analysis, it appears that maxwellhill isn't actually Maxwell. Already on the same day as the thread went viral, [edit to add: after the real Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested] /r/worldnews moderator hasharin posted screenshots of maxwellhill commenting in the subreddit's backroom and a chat between them.

https://knowyourmeme.com/news/reddit-power-user-suspected-of...
... the structural issues the USA and the world faces are probably literally endless, but the free movement of IT work is not one of them.

the claim that it's gonna hurt the US in the long run is almost certainly false, because ironically the long-run US economic and foreign policy goals are constantly hindered by its own protectionist policies.

these policies are the same ones that lead to countless fuckups when it turns out that the US is both "too big to fail", but also still smaller than the world (Puerto Rico, Jones Act, name a more iconic duo; oh right, subsidies forced quasi-monopoly for baby formula and only 3 factories nationwide; oh right, granting WTO MFN status to China without requiring and enforcing reciprocation)

long run America is forced to deal with a lot of unstable allies because they are not integrated economically sufficiently. no shared fate no shared interest, etc.

... of course it's unlikely to "solve" geopolitics in a 7AM HN post, but worrying about offshoring IT jobs is like trying to cordon off the best seats on the deck on the Titanic as the water rises.
What if you work in a warehouse and need to pee twice a day?
I’ve learnt that every religion is a framework (school of philosophy) and even as an atheist I have benefitted from learning some mental models a few religions offer.

I would never brand myself or be a part of the cult though (claiming that one is better than the other or that everything said is holy). Even though one of things religions are good at is to also be to give people a sense of belonging to a community with similar virtues.

One of the mental models that has been particularly beneficial for me is the EightFold Path (also called Dharma Chakra or Dharma Wheel) that comes from Buddhism.

It basically says have the right view, thoughts, words, concentration, effort and action. Practising this keeps me in a virtuous cycle and makes feeling good feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> Comparatively, the role of a software engineer is rather limited.

Ouch, what exactly does this random, contrived distinction seek to do? In my opinion, a software engineer is a living concept that captures system engineering. It is like what, the new “general practicioner?” Only to be collected on your way to “platform engineer”

Pshh, whatever.
> Tech workers on the other hand, say engineers, can easily get a high paying FAANG job without a 4yr degree

It is prima facie absurd to say that tech workers can "easily" get a job at FAANG; if it were that easy to work at FAANG surely the 50%[0] of Software Engineers who make less than $121k or 75%[0] of Software Engineers who make less than $152k would simply do so.

[0]: https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope...
I'm personally a fan of Pickle and Cucumber, completely unrelated naturally.
The best bit:

any sentence consisting solely of the word "buffalo" repeated any number of times is grammatically correct
IMO tensors & other large binary blobs are fairly edge-casey. You might as well treat them like video files and video file servers also don't store large videos in databases either, and most devs don't have large binary blob management experience.
"Founder of Neoplatonism" might not say much to most people nowadays. A perhaps more apt description follows later: "The theological traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all, in their formative periods, looked to ancient Greek philosophy for the language and arguments with which to articulate their religious visions. For all of these, Platonism expressed the philosophy that seemed closest to their own theologies. Plotinus was the principal source for their understanding of Platonism."

Still, the content of his teachings is largely Greek to us now (pun intended).
Welcome to Volume 6 of Xoriant Spotlight: Weekly Roundup

Happy Monday Readers! In this week’s roundup, we will cover:
Navneet Taneja Joins Xoriant as SVP - Global Head of Alliances & Partnerships
Transforming Tenant Operations Using Integrated Web Platform
Latest Trends and Best Practices in Security Automation
Let’s dive in.
This is super valid. I grew up with these games, and I have heavy nostalgia for them, but they were heavily limited by the hardware of the time. I think some series have had really good modern translations, like the New Super Mario Bros series which has a play-style very akin to the originals, but in a modern format and graphics. I would also consider Mario Maker an example of this as well. But these examples are generally rare and more often there has been a full shift to 3D gaming (Mario Galaxy/Odyssey etc) and side-scrolling is a thing of the past, because a lot of those traditional NES game styles are kind of limited and garbage compared to modern games. I still have my NES, and it still works, but I don't exactly find myself breaking it out all the time to play as opposed to playing a modern game in a modern format.
It’s kind of interesting that Louis Steinberg does not have a Wikipedia page
"Proletariat" is too head on. When you say "means of production", at least some percentage of people don't know what you are talking about so an effective tribe signal.
Objectively, people are seemingly being forced back to the office at least part time, and there are less WFH opportunities. Those in favour of WFH are losing the standoff.
Non-Negotiables That Make Remote Work Work
It means increasing food prices specifically for foods that require extensive irrigation, and are likely ill-suited for the region they are being grown except for water subsidies, e.g. almonds in California. So it means shifting agriculture towards more sustainable crops, increased prices for some specific foods, and likely reduced water prices for the average consumer.
I want free-form zoning, where it's not tile based; CS can do something kinda like it but it's still just tiles in the end, with empty space between.

Emergent paths would be fun, too; if you don't make the sidewalks and paths good enough, people start cutting across empty areas.
Other ants have to look after their disabled a[u]nts and antkle-biters. Others still brighten the nest with their antics and antworks.
Nice article! I think you nailed it. The dismissal of AI reasoning and world modeling from famous technologists who should know better is such a disappointment.

I have a general suggestion to avoid these word puzzles, because someone is just going to claim that they are analogous to something that was in the training set, even if not an exact match. Better to just remove the possibility. I think four points would make the argument slightly stronger:

(1) If you write a small (for example) Python script, using variable names and strings that are generated using randomness and performing operations on those random data, and ask GPT-4 what the Python script will output when someone runs it, it will tell you, while describing what each line does. This is not possible without reasoning, and GPT-4 does not have access to a real Python interpreter. The only way it can answer the question is by simulating a Python interpreter from its own knowledge of how the language works. It will likely make small mistakes if you ask for too much calculation before it outputs any tokens in the answer, but the fact that it often succeeds should be seen as a proof of reasoning ability that I think is stronger than the examples in your post.

(2) If you take another similar script and call `dis.dis(script)` on it, and feed GPT-4 the compiled bytecode only, it will (a) decompile the bytecode back to source code, and (b) tell you what the bytecode will do when executed. This is wild, and even more impressive than (1).

(3) "But transformers are just functions?". No, they are generalized function approximators. Anyone familiar with neural nets from decades ago should already be well aware of this from gradient descent and backpropagation. The fact that they are general function approximators is not a reason that argues against them being able to learn algorithms they were not trained on. It's the reason they can learn algorithms they were not trained on.

(4) "All GPTs set out to do is to predict the next token. We just update their weights to optimize for this. Therefore they can’t think". I think this is another case where the putative criticism is actually the correct intuition to explain why it works. The next step is to think: what does "predict the next token" mean, anyway? Or more importantly, since we're performing optimization: what does it mean to "get better at" that? If you're a model that's predicting the next token as best you can with surface statistics, and another model is doing better than you, what's going to be different about that model?

The answer is that you can always get better at predicting the next token. The next token could be the answer to a math problem, or a riddle requiring a nuanced understanding of language or humor, or a stylized rap song requiring merging creativity with constraint following. To improve at next token prediction, LLMs have clearly -- if you agree they have a world model -- started predicting not just text, but the causes of text. The text is a description of the world, and that description is being studied, all so that we can have a slightly better prediction of the next token each time.
For a lot of people, me included, foreign wages may be much higher than local wages.
That’s not really an answer.
These comments are so reactionary and low effort. A daily standup, plus 20 minutes a week, plus putting in the effort to be available as the manager is helicopter management?
reproducing the english TTS demo resulted in very underwhelming quality.
Exactly this - the "how do I not keep going bankrupt" part of the game is relatively short (similar to the "how do I not starve the first winter" in Dwarf Fortress) and with a bit of care you have so much money rolling in you can just do whatever you like.
This isn't surprising. Amazon said that they were going to support remote work indefinitely and then changed their minds even though people have moved away from the main offices. Then they pull every back in the midst of massive layoffs and it really comes across as intimidation and manipulation. It doesn't matter if that's what it is - it's very very easy to perceive it that way. From what I've seen, older generations tolerate this sort of treatment better than younger generations. I don't mean that as a dig on younger folks and it being a commentary on maturity - I think that the younger generations have a different view of how things can and should function (to inject my opinion here - I tend to agree with them...things are really really broken and we have to change).
Can we use 3090 or nvidia gpus in general with mac? do people generally have their windows dekstop for the gpus?
Yea everybody knows that if you’re not capable of living frugally and/or have mastered the art of personal finance you couldn’t possibly have any specialized skills or technical abilities.
Ah, right, that’s pretty recognizable from my gameplay, thanks :)
Case closed I guess?
When things are good, “we don’t need collective action, look how good things are.”

When things are bad, “I can’t afford the risks of collective action, look how bad things are.”

When things are borderline, “We shouldn’t make any important decisions about collective action now, look how tenuous things are.”
Nobody is banning you. You are risking to be fined if people in the EU complain their PII are being shared or processed without their consent.
Ask HN: Share your favorite one-liner/bash function
I just came up with this bash function for inspecting a file using `git diff C1..C2 -- filename`, where C1 and C2 are two consecutive commits.

,git_inspect() {
if [ "$#" -ne 1 ] ; then
echo "Usage: $FUNCNAME filename"
echo "Example: $FUNCNAME main.py"
else
git log --oneline --reverse --no-decorate -- "$1" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs | ruby -ne '$_.split.each_cons(2) {|pair| puts pair.join(" ") }' | fzf --no-sort --tac --preview-window=top,90% --preview="git difftool --extcmd icdiff -y {+1}..{+2} -- $1"
fi
}

In other words, that command do the following tasks:

- Create a list of commits IDs using `git log` and `awk`, example:

commit_a
commit_b
commit_c
commit_d
commit_e

- Flatten the list into a single line using `xargs`:

commit_a commit_b commit_c commit_d commit_e

- Create pairs of commit IDs using `ruby`:

commit_a commit_b
commit_b commit_c
commit_c commit_d
commit_d commit_e

- Use `fzf` to select a pair of commits and run `git difftool commit..commit -- filename`.
Just making sure we’re clear that speech is anything short of a threat of force.
Programmariat, overworked devs aren't famous for having large families
It's not an age-based bias. These games couldn't expand on graphics, so they expanded on the logic of the game. That made them interesting.

Very few games do that today (EU4, a favorite of mine, for example) but the trend now is to confuse the user with graphics while giving really little in term of content.
Yes. The iPhone was expensive upfront, with an expensive contract to top it off.

They did cut the price relatively early.
Almost familiar: one more Karpathy lecture to go. Thanks!
Only "more than 600k". I would have sworn it's much more than that.