skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apropos of a posthumous collection of his unpublished writings, there was an interesting book review of Kuhn's life and context around _Structure_: https://archive.is/Yr4B9 It was all quite different than I had expected, and sorta illustrates the challenges of intellectual theorizing when it goes 'viral', so to speak.
I'm fascinated by linguistics, and once attempted a degree in Deaf Studies, so yes on the sign language (it's not a language, by the way: it's a class of languages, alongside spoken language, which is another class of languages), but the idea that basic arithmetic is worthless is completely alien to me.
Translation from gibberish to english for you:

> I am aware that there exist a large number of tech executives who would like to try out non-Nvidia hardware, if anyone makes non-Nvidia hardware that is truly competitive.
There's no reason to assume that of owners of other car brands are reporting 100% of issues, so relative comparison is still valid.
The sound when missing the note is repugnant.
Really hoping we start to see 100Gbit/25Gbit start getting more available/affordable on ebay, for the servethehome crowd in particular.
It seems the person who resigned here was on the Rust core team, and had been involved in Rust for quite a long time (https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/announcement-jonathan-turn...).
Social Security, pensions, and traditional IRA/401k withdrawals are all taxable.
This is so much better than trying to format the string you want into the `title` channel of some other mark.
i feel like this entire .txt was drafted by GPT. it contains enough of what a LLM would already know about knuth, wolfram, wolfram alpha/language, etc.

am i missing the actually new thing?
Thank you, I tried to report it from the search page. I clicked on the 3 dots menu. The options were not perfect for this kind of scam reporting but I selected something close enough. Then it took me to another page where there was a huge form to fill out.

It should be easier to report scams or phishing sites from search page, imo.
I agree with you about his descriptions, they certainly give off the exaggeration feel. I am just saying that I also wouldn't be surprised if someone actually tried to swat him (among other things). I've seen him several times start a fight for practically no reason and continuously provoke it further, swatting really isn't that far down the line of provocation when it comes to the internet sadly.
I created my own streaming site, a mashup of Spotify and YT
Hey everyone, after months of programming and banging my head against a wall, I bring to you moodplaylist.com ! It has so many cool features, from uninterrupted listening, play in the background, crossfade between songs and so much more. Just enter your mood and we'll create the perfect playlist for you.
LOL metaverse "news" site desperately flails to explain why all their predictions weren't bullshit, by spinning a whole new set of "B2B IS THE WAY TRUST ME BRAH" nonsense
The blog post states that the author will no longer be speaking at RustConf 2023 about a possible future for compile-time programming. The decision came after a call with RustConf organizers, during which the organizers informed the author that their talk had been downgraded from a keynote to a regular talk. The author initially thought the change was due to scheduling or finding a better fit, but later realized that it was because the organizers did not want the talk to be endorsed by the Rust Project.

The author explains that they had not initially submitted a talk for RustConf 2023 and had to register their talk after the deadline because they had not planned to give a talk until 2024. They were nominated by Rust Project Leadership to give a keynote about a Rust-related topic based on their previous work on compile-time reflection. The author emphasizes that their talk was meant to explore possible future directions and that the ideas presented were their own, not representing any official endorsement.

The author expresses confusion and disappointment at the sudden decision to downgrade their talk and the lack of direct communication from Rust Project Leadership. They feel that the decision reflects non-transparent decision-making and unprofessional behavior. They decide not to play along with the situation and choose not to give the talk in its downgraded form or negotiate for a keynote slot, expressing their disagreement with the behavior exhibited.

The blog post concludes with the author stating their choice not to participate in the conference and to refrain from playing along with the situation.
My question is whether what the AI startups are selling is fundamentally snake oil or not. Essentially they are all in some way pitching a story of applying what people see in ChatGPT in some way, but usually based on some in-house LLM, custom training or tuning etc, nearly always at vastly smaller scale.

Which all begs the question, how much of what people are seeing is result of the sheer incredible model sizes in ChatGPT - 170b parameters for 3.5 and people are saying it could be 100 trillion in ChatGPT4. If network sizes of that scale are fundamental to achieving the kind of results people are expecting then all of these startups are going to fail.

The most interesting discussion in the post to me is about nVidia. I am curious why, or how long, it will take for what happened with crypto to happen with Transformers - that is, why don't we have custom training hardware yet? Are we just too early? Or is it because the operation is fundamentally so memory intensive that the economics are totally different to crypto, where it's all about the computation and not about storing massive amounts of state?

If it's true that the fundamentals of this are such that custom silicon can't help, nVidia looks to be a huge winner. Who knows which of these AI startups are going to win, but they are all going to buy GPUs from nVidia (or rent them from the cloud). nVidia is going to be the arms dealer in the coming war.
> GDP doesn't count all "economic activity."

Right, which is why the insult in the post I quoted is getting things very wrong.

> GDP only considers the value of the final consumed goods and services, and rent is a consumed service. If you're a homeowner, they estimate your rent and use that instead.

I understand that but it's a notably flawed way of going about it. Prices in general can have a loose coupling to value but with rent it's extra bad. A small change in housing stock can trigger a massive swing in rent and GDP even though the service being delivered doesn't change.
I can buy 5 phones or an iphone mini… and the iphone mini doesn't even support 2 sim cards.
I'm not American, and would like something pseudonymous.
The exam questions are likely simpler than an entire application would be; using AI to write bubble sort is trivial but getting it to understand the full context of your application is much less so.

ChatGPT can solve most LeetCode questions, but I don't think most people here are ready to replace their junior developers with it.
> My income can be hard to predict but I expect to pay myself a salary of 70 - 90k this year.

This is actually pretty low for a software developer.
Reminds me of the (very) old Woody Allen joke:

"I cheated on the Philosophy exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me."
Obviously yes. Ignore the question of whether this is entrapment (legally of course it isn't, morally idk).

He's intentionally spreading misinformation online to save himself time writing a new exam. How could this possibly be ethical?
Thanks!

(It didn't really give a lucid summary in my view, but sincerely thanks for doing the work)
LOL. Thank you. Guess that’s why I’m not making the big bucks.
Sadly, this is no longer true. At least, not for modern laptops.

It's possible to achieve what you wrote, but the complexity of doing that is borderline impossible. Need to set up group policies, or use custom software, to block installation of specific hardware devices, and specific Windows updates.

Example: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Q...
Yikes. But yeah I guess you're right.
> Golf cart sized air vents create what really gets subconsciously recognized as natural wind, not artificial blowing. It was so pleasant that I’ve become determined to replicate it in my home someday.

Maybe a ceiling fan is a good starting point. A 4 foot fan at low speeds generates something approximating wind, and in principle you can mount it on a wall instead of a ceiling to get a more natural wind direction. At higher speed you'd probably have to mount it in front of an opening of similar size as the blades to get wind instead of turbulent vortices though.
Make the equivalent of an an LED strip light that is just a bunch of cell phone cameras at regular intervals and a controller that can trigger and capture from each treating them all like a single camera independent frames.

Strip light can then be put into any flexible pattern you want and strung pretty much wherever, or taped to pretty much any location. Whole thing could probably have almost the same electronics size as one of those common color changing LED strips.
I use cloud to avoid exposing my home IP address.

This matters when you're an op in an IRC channel and someone joins the channel, starts spamming racial slurs, so you ban them, and they respond by DDoSing you.

If I had a dollar for every time it happened, I'd have $2, which isn't a lot of money but it's pretty annoying that it's happened twice. The first time, they only ran the attack for a few minutes. The second time it happened, they ran it for over an hour. Releasing and Renewing my WAN IP didn't stop the attack, because I still got the same WAN IP. I had to call my ISP support and spend way too long on the phone trying to talk to someone who knew what I was asking for to get a new IP address before I was able to dodge the attack.

Using AWS, I can configure security groups so that my VM never even sees the packets from a DDoS if I've configured them to only allow connections from my home IP.
Note that this was not a commentary on the convenience -or not- of buying the stock two months ago after it had more than doubled in a few months. It was intended to put the "stock hadn't spiked yet with the rise of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion" quote into context.
> So you don’t have to worry about an evil and selfish dictator by definition. How nice!

Exactly. 'dictator' is a word loaded with negativity, so it's an attempt to balance that. Someone who still has a comparable amount of authority while being limited from becoming a tyrant.

> First of all, democracy working cannot be judged on whether people make “educated” decisions: it works if people have the power to choose.

I disagree. It can be judged by the results it garners, and looking at how bad the US is doing at the moment, I would say it is not working. Simple because things could be substantially better than they are, but the current democratic system is preventing that.

> Yet this “democracy only works” line of thinking reeks of this attitude.

You call it arrogance, I call it confidence and common sense. When half the population are voting based on belief and out of spite instead of science, fact and empathy, then they may as well be spiteful children.

> Politics is almost always about self- and group-interest. This is not an exception; the “educated” will wax poetic about the virtues of an “informed public”, but most of them just want more power for themselves.

This is a bug, and something that can be solved by patching the code (legislation).
You missed the part where the answers on the fake test were obviously wrong, such that anyone familiar with the course material should spot them.

Well, your argument is nonsense generally, but you have a fine future as an ethicist.
Fond memories of that recession special, with fresh squeezed orange juice...
Truly the power of AI is amazing to behold: it has discovered that HOTEL ROOMS frequently contain CHAIRS and DESKS!
California’s cliffs are crumbling as climate change reshapes the coast
Accurately modeling your personality with GPT-4
You might also end up waiting for a Cybertruck to charge.
That was what I thought you meant. And yeah that was pretty much exactly what I was thinking.

If the current was pushing against the rudder in waves it would also make a rhythmic pitch change that went along with the water movement.

If the whales hit the rudder it makes a "whine"...which is what an animal might do as well.
Yes, that is why I say 'if they had'. No way they have that many now but amoungst my associates many are still just starting to purchase the payed subscriptions.
For me it's usually for some automation task to gather a list of IDs for some cloud environment to build infra things.
They do need a court. Subpoenas are issued and overseen by the judicial system, any gay order has to be signed by a judge. The FBI can't unilaterally censor you.
>but usually based on some in-house LLM, custom training or tuning etc, nearly always at vastly smaller scale

Many of them are much simpler than that: merely modifying/enhancing the prompt and managing the back-and-forth with an LLM and then structuring the output. There's lots of use-cases that you can achieve with just that, but easily copyable.
> Likewise, I hesitate to call docker's default of running as root safe since it means anyone with access to the docker socket immediately has root on the host.

I never got why this is commonly used as an argument against Docker, TBH. You just don't give out access to the Docker socket to anything untrusted. Doesn't pretty much everyone know that by now?

I feel like people always say Docker is awfully insecure, but then the proofs-of-concept include flags like `--privileged`, or the socket is mounted, or / is mounted, or --net=host is set... etc. Docker by default always seemed pretty good to me, but I'm not very experienced in that realm, so I'm just wondering what I'm missing.
Yep, from SAT. Edited. Guess I typed that too fast :)
It was an April Fools Joke
Heavy metal poisoning is only going to drive up the crime too.
induction is never as efficient as direct contact
Lots of great suggestions here.

I'll throw out a recommendation for The Little series of books (e.g., The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer, The Reasoned Schemer, The Little Typer, etc.)

The first book is all you need to grok recursion. You can just toss a copy at any student who struggles with it.

The second book ends with some really non-trivial CS stuff.

They're fantastic examples of the power of good pedagogy to explain interesting and difficult concepts normally relegated to drier texts.
The Poisoning of ChatGPT
There are a lot of land scams online and West Texas has plenty of them. You can buy loads of cheap land in Hudspeth County and there's no mention anywhere in the marketing materials that said land used to be the dumping site of New Jersey sewage trains. Basically there is no land worth a damn that needs to be marketed online. If it was good for anything it would change hands immediately.
I'm still bent about Assange's complicity in the 2016 election interference. It's believed that both the DNC and RNC servers were hacked, but conveniently one side was omitted.

Yes, I do believe in transparency and have no love for the DNC, but that asymmetry had significant consequences. It's widely believed that the other dump was used for blackmail purposes.
As a person who has done FAANG technical interviews, I would be kinda weirded out and questioning if the person is a culture fit.

If they are wearing a suit, how familiar with the industry are they?

That's also ignoring that suits are the uniform of finance, politicians, sales, and business. I view suits in the business context as nearly synonymous with corruption. A suit is like a giant billboard saying "I am/want to be corporate," "I want to increase shareholder value," "I only care about next quarters profits," "I want to participate in the dominance hierarchy."

FWIW, cultures are very different. On the west coast dark jeans and a collared shirt is being dressed to the nines (hyperbole). I'm led to believe that suits are kind of an east coast thing.

When reading these answers, I would be very careful about understanding that the answers are a function of the answerer's culture. This question is likely to have wildly different answers between the west coast, east coast, India, japan, Europe, etc. Even the companies themselves have dominant cultures. If you're interviewing for Bloomberg, you should probably wear a suit. If you're interviewing with a company that isn't a tech company, you should probably wear a suit. If you're interviewing in the valley, a suit probably isn't the right choice.

Also if it's very clear you are from a different culture (having any kind of accent), I think wearing a suit would be seen as you being from a different culture and greatly discounted as a meaningful signal than if you are from the same culture (no accent) and wear a suit, which means you understand what the suit represents in the culture that is judging you.

At the end of the day, if you nail your technical questions, it won't matter.
It strikes me as odd that the prof picked 1/100 as the threshold for accusing students of cheating. That seems far too low for a class of 96 students. It's very possible that one or more students were falsely accused. I get that they tried to pick the "worst" answer as the cheated one, but still.
Gold Rush! by Sierra still does exist but you can't easily buy it. It will work in scummvm or you could use an emulator. Unlike books it is much harder to access and use older computer programs.
At replit every repl is indeed a docker container, but that is absolutely not the primarily isolation mechanism. Here’s a comment from CEO @amasad to that effect in 2019 (so, even more secure now I am certain) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215175
I don't mean to disparage other people's experiences but I find a massive disconnect between what other people are feeling and how I feel about this game.

Actual AOE is still alive and kicking through the Definitive Editions and now AOE4 with a very active online community and developers. While 0AD is great and fully opensource, I still don't find it comes close to the Experience of the actual AOE titles. Maybe I'm biased because I don't mind paying for proprietary software and I sometimes use Windows. I do however definitely agree how great of an achievement 0AD is and it is definitely a great game when considered in isolation.
In no way defending the sloppy conference planning or how the former keynote speaker got screwed here, but...unless I'm missing something it seems pretty disproportionate to completely leave a community you've invested over seven years of your life in over sloppy conference planning, doesn't it? I feel like I'm missing something.
It would be really cool if they simplified an NPCs world to include GPT prompts for an RPG-like experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_...

Started off as an April's fools joke, people liked it enough to keep it in.
Three strikes actually seems pretty lenient
Had to think of https://yourmom.zip
Agreed, thank you and the parent comment here for the mention of it - looks great, works great with the little bit of experimentation I've done so far.
Yes! We’re trying to make it easy (convenient/fast) to make readable visualizations. If it’s tedious to add a tip, then you won’t do it as often, and you might miss an interesting observation.
Gaming might be their worst business from a growth and narrative perspective. Wall street in general doesn't really care about gaming, just see how those companies are priced.

Enterprise compute has been and will continue to be NVidias bread and butter going forward, and they have been betting on this for the past decade. Whether enterprise compute will be for AI, studio graphics, simulation, FSD, etc. those are all more lucrative and imo more interesting from a growth perspective vs their gaming segment. b2b companies have much higher ceilings than b2c.
Thanks that one is very interesting. I especially like how GPT4 performs worse (zero shot greedy decoding) than ChatGPT on those questions. I wonder have you thought about how it relates to 'inverse scaling' (https://github.com/inverse-scaling/prize)? As I was reading it I was thinking how that kind of 'hallucination' is exactly the problem that beam search (as opposed to greedy decoding) is designed to solve, and I see this was addressed later in the paper - unfortunately you guys didn't have access to it on the API and also no access to other things like log likelihoods.

A related question I had, is to decompose the blame for the problems these LLMs were having into two parts: (1) the weaknesses of the model size and data size and architecture caused for example by parallelism tradeoffs versus (2) the inherent problems of greedy token prediction. For example I could imagine that even an 'oracular' (kolmogorov or solomonoff or whoever absolute minimum theoretical perplexity) single-token-at-a-time-predictor could have related errors purely as a result of greedy decoding, which would be in no way attributable to any kind of size issue or architectural property or parallelism property of the model. As I guess you already know, the reason is just that 'the most likely next token of the response' isn't necessarily the same as 'the next token of the most likely response'.
Resigning over someone else’s talk being bumped into a different slot?
All seems overly dramatic.
Tl;dr they got invited to talk, the organizers didn't look to closely at the talk, and the talk was rejected or downgraded at the last minute. There is some speculation this was deliberate but I did not see it substantiated. Might have just missed it, though.

Is the blog author the same person as the tweeter? My impression is phantomderp on twitter is the blogger, but the quote tweet is another account.
For what it’s worth, reading about one of the first true 3D RTS games (after Ground Control) at the time was really cool. Even if I never actually played the game.
Women Mapping New York City’s Halal Food
Key to understanding the whole thing is this: “the group that built, conceived, and directs the Biosphere project is not a group of high-tech researchers on the cutting edge of science but a clique of recycled theater performers that evolved out of an authoritarian—and decidedly non-scientific—personality cult”
How does [person A choosing not to speak at a conference] connect to [person B leaving the Rust project]?
I really doubt this is the sole reason. It’s likely simply what broke the camel’s back so to speak.
Reading a copy of a previous test is not considered cheating.

If the site had copies of upcoming tests that would be cheating. But previous tests might as well be considered public knowledge.
If the tweets get deleted: that post was made by a different person than the one who resigned, but it seems the latter's resignation was prompted by it.
Allegedly this isn't the first time something like this has happened[0].

Just feels like more open source drama tbh.

---

https://twitter.com/__phantomderp/status/1662235332375347202
Nope, every repl is running in a docker container on a GCP vm, with various other security measures. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215175

I believe the very first version of replit was all in-browser, but no longer
> Can I ask what’s the point of testing students in a scenario where they don’t have access to AI tools?

So that they can tell when the AI tools get things wrong. Which is always.
They have the stigma of bringing up veganism out of the blue and proselytizing people about it when it isn’t the subject being discussed.

Like, uh, the comment you replied to.