skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's pushback due to how AI is being sold as the ultimate tool that will replace artists/programmers/writers/whomever.

Because the technology has been making big leaps over the past couple of years, the comparisons are now being made not with what used to be before, but with what is being promised. And in that regard, things do fall short.

Basically the hype builders hyped things up so much they started hurting the hype.
I don't understand the apparent expectation that AI tools generated perfection, every time.

People don't create perfection. If you hired a graphic artist to create an image and gave them the same prompt, there would almost certainly be things that you'd want changed.

So far, AI seems to do very well with ambiguous prompts that give it enough latitude to "do what it does best". Areas of an image where there is a lot of source images to work from end up great, while areas where there is little - or where there is a lot of variability in the source images - don't do so well.

Maybe we'll get to the point where AI generates acceptable (or even excellent) results the first time, every time. Maybe it'll even be soon, but we're not there yet. For now, AI is a very useful tool that can multiply the productivity of professionals and let amateurs fake being entry-level.

For now at least, there is a huge gap between "entry level" and "professional". Because of that, we'll need professionals for the foreseeable future.
No, better actually means more than hobbyist accounting with publication obligations. While I think it's a cool tool, for proper (German/European) accounting you'd need tax quotas, reverse charge taxation, compatibility with SKR04 most likely (your tax consultant uses that in > 90% of the cases). You'd also need different dates for each journal entry: invoice date, date of service and booking date, booking notes, links to the invoice/contract causing the accounting event (that's mandatory) and a whole lot more.

So I think our requirements are a tad more complex than ledger can support. We are compatible with the German DATEV format. DATEV is the accounting software and we don't wanna replace it. I could write a whole lot about that but I'll spare you that. Let me just say that we have good reasons to have our own format of accounting internally and there's no benefit in supporting ledger. I don't think there's even one person in the world that is a) our target persona and b) uses ledger.
Personally, other than school, (mandatory) military services (I really do not recommend that) and work (well, cannot recommend that either when I come to think of it), it's thruhiking (hiking a trail end to end continuously, usually over weeks or months) where I've really felt like being part of a community (or a tribe really).
Unfortunately, that strength mostly boils down to "you can launder money with it". The idea that it would maintain that property indefinitely seems naiive at best.

"I've made the perfect platform for criminals, but for some reason there are a lot of people using it for crimes and now law enforcement is shutting me down! This is an outrage!"

This reminds me of why there are so few ways to simply send someone a large file on the Internet. All of the easy ways make it too easy to spread copyrighted worked, so they all need to suck in one way or another to avoid being shut down.
If you're going to a "treadmill" gym, yeah, you're right. But a small powerlifting or weightlifting gym is different. You have to have a spotter or partner, so you'll workout with someone while you're there. And if you're doing it right, you have more downtime between sets than time working, so you end up chatting and making friends.
https://archive.is/Q8Mcm
Please share the details of the MySQL ones!

I said "postgres" because I didn't want to say "SQL" and include crazy systems with SQL query interfaces.
I'd guess that a given academic isn't going to face much of a career risk for signing a statement also signed by other very prestigious academics, just the opposite. There's no part of very divided US political spectrum that I can see denouncing AI naysayers, unlike the scientists who signed anti-nuclear statements in 1960s or even people warning about global warming now (indeed, I'd guess the statement doesn't mention climate change 'cause it's still a sore point).

Moreover, talking about existential risk involves the assumption the current tech is going to continue to affect more and more fields rather than peaking at some point - this assumption guarantees more funding along with funding for risk.

All that said, I don't necessarily think the scientists involved are insincere. Rather, I would expect they're worried and signed this vague statement because it was something that might get traction. While the companies indeed may be "genuine" in the sense they're vaguely [concerned - edit] and also self-serving - "here's a hard problem it's important to have us wise, smart people in charge of and profiting from"
It's intended to seem like a serious critique of AGW, while not actually having any factual value. It's more effective the less familiar you are with science; if your understanding of the subject ends with the authorities claimed by the persons involved then it may be as strong an argument as you need. You may also note that the articles the author lists in support of the "diversity of opinion" on this matter are not academic sources, and puzzlingly, one of the few serious works explicitly endorses the "consensus ... that increasing carbon dioxide will lead to a warmer earth with a different distribution of climatic regimes."

The source and person who posted it are unserious and should be disregarded.
It's somewhat ironic that both interviewers are critiquing Camus as ~ colonial-washing Algeria -- in French.

What's the point in bringing up Camus stating he would save his mother over Algeria as something telling about his work?

When I read l'etranger I found the emptiness of the world lead me into feeling the absurdity as an emotion versus a thought experiment.
I'm not aware of any effort to bury those topics or anything similar; but some of those posts did get downweighted by other software filters.

I've sent repost invites for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36062943 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35913168. If you want to track this and notice that either of them doesn't get reposted within (say) a week, you'd be welcome to post it yourself and email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll give it the SCP treatment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). (Btw I suppose I should add that I'm not doing this because I think the topics ought to be better represented on HN, but rather because those two articles look interesting. Interestingness is the only thing we care about.)

People draw conclusions from what they see (or think they see) about posts on HN but the conclusions are almost always wrong because they're so strongly affected by the perceiver's priors and are based on such little data. The main reason why an article X doesn't get attention on HN is because that's the default outcome for any article on HN. That simple fact has more explanatory power than most other explanations people come up with, but has the disadvantage that it's boring.
Different sites running in the same process? Never heard of it but I'm not sure I'd trust that browser...
Neon at least has open-sourced their core offering, which provides a migration path for folks who make bigger bets on their platform. So yeah, there's every possibility they'll go away at some point, but unlike a lot of SaaS offerings, it's all Postgres over the wire and under the hood, so you have plenty of migration options (OSS, another managed Postgres vendor, Aurora, Cloud SQL, etc.)
Yea, a lot (not most) of seniors at Big Tech spend 50+% of their time writing docs that never result in anything or otherwise really did _not_ need a doc, or "generating ideas" and "fielding questions" from someone 3 teams away from them.

The mid-levels engineers are doing a lot more of the grunt work of writing code. At a small company, new ideas are great, but you really need someone that can just sit down and pump out code. Move fast, bias for action.

Source: I've worked at various sized companies from 5 person seed, to 300 person high growth, to Big Tech.
Finland is exporting almost 1GW constantly to Estonia, which means they can ramp down coal and natural gas generation. Progress!

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FI

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/EE
> There are quite a few researchers from Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, Cambirdge, Imperial College, Edinburg, Tsinghua, etc who signed as well.

I know the Stanford researchers the most and the “biggest names” in LLMs from HAI and CRFM are absent. It would be useful to have their perspective as well.

I’d throw MetaAI in the mix as well.

Merely pointing out that healthy skepticism here is not entirely unwarranted.

> We’re talking about nuclear war level risks here.

Are we? This seems a bit dramatic for LLMs.
That's correct; Rust is entirely spun off from Mozilla. I don't think any of the current Rust Foundation people ever worked for Mozilla.
New horror revealed in sargassum blob
How does a legal shield from creditors also apply when you commit a crime? Or are crimes just financial debts?
Lightning in a Bottle was amazing this year. Something about camping in a harsh environment really brings you closer with your friends, and the whole community there is so welcoming and energizing. Music has been bringing communities together for 1000s of years, and festivals like that really show how true that is.
> Time to trot out my pet theory that explains this and the last few decades of politics: By some combination of evolution and culture, many young men feel a strong compulsion to seek out high-risk, high-reward endeavors.

> ...

> This is a generalization, obviously, but I tend to think of young single men like this as the TNT of society: incredibly powerful and useful when applied well, but destructive otherwise.

---

(Bare branches refers to branches of the family tree where there's an unmarried male in a society where the male/female ratio is significantly distorted - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guang_Gun )

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/docum...

> Missing Women and Bare Branches: Gender Balance and Conflict

> We must also examine the reaction of the government. Historically, we have found that as governments become aware of the negative consequences of a growing number of bare branches, most governments are motivated to do something. In the past, “doing something” meant thinning the numbers of bare branches, whether through fighting, sponsoring the construction of large public works necessitating dangerous manual labor, exporting them to less populated areas, or co-opting them into the military or police. One 16th century Portuguese monarch sent his army, composed primarily of noble and non-noble bare branches, on one of the later crusades to avoid a crisis of governance; more than 25 percent of that army never returned, and many others were seriously wounded (Boone, 1983, 1986).

> We find that the need to control the rising instability created by the increasing numbers of bare branches has led governments to favor more authoritarian approaches to internal governance and less benign international presences. In many ways, a society’s prospects for democracy and peace are diminished in step with the devaluation of daughters.
Universities : Engage with professors and ask if they want any free coding done, you'll make friends

Python user groups: I've been to two of them and speak every few weeks (for free) and have made a group of friends there.

Shared interets: I am interested in computational chemistry, so I got on a bunch of science discord channels and started chatting and helping others (again for free), now I have friends in every country, I just got back from the US and I met several over there (they paid for my flights etc)

Find some shared interests and engage with people
Comparable to SF, but unsupported by the easy money.
It takes < 10 seconds to go from no account to database w/ bit.io
It is often said that time is a circle. This seems like a return to more corporate-style media, because it's hard to make money when you're constantly discussing edgy or controversial topics.

When Joe Rogan sold out to Spotify, he claimed to retain full editorial freedom, but he ended up removing tons of episodes and the tone of his podcast definitely started to shift.

All endless entertainment mediums start to become plagued by similar problems, when people start running out of ideas and they've explored all the topics in which they're knowledgeable. In TV-land it was common to have people on as guests to promote their work, and podcasts innovated by allowing those guests to have more time to discuss their ideas.
I wish the crablang people would make it a lot more clear how to contribute to crablang itself. Were I to make any future bugfixes etc. I'd prefer to submit them to crablang rather than deal with the other folks. As it's open source folks would be free to "upstream" should they so desire.

Unfortunately you can't have something be both a long-term fork and also accept contributions, so the crablang people need to decide and then publicize that decision.
Not to mention that developing tech faster can lead to subsequent tech that will help clean the mess.

We don’t talk about climate change as an engineering project, but it absolutely could be.

Think if we spent a fraction of what we spend on war every decade and instead dedicated that to tech to cleanse the atmosphere or oceans, or maybe even fusion.
I might look into OpenSuse later today. Maybe a good moment to switch to it. My first OS was Suse. I miss it.
Reading the comments, I notice a lot of posters seek out tech communities. While I get why a nerd would want to do that, I have a different tendency. Most of my outside-of-work activities are actually not tech related. Sure, I have a bunch of private projects to work on, but I usually do that in single player mode. I picked up a number of "also working in tech" friends over time, and going out with them is still fun and interesting. I also enjoyed the social time at various conferences, meeting likeminded people. But I don't want to spend my after-work-time and weekends with tech folks by default. That is, simply put, too much of one thing. Stepping out of tech is what keeps the dayjob interesting.
I'm noticing a lot of sites using different captcha services, either in-house or a completely different one from Google's, and I can understand using CloudFlare's but I'm not sure what's driving the move. I'm not against it, but it felt like for ages ReCaptcha (or w/e) was king of captcha. Do they charge up a premium for some sites or something?
I’m not American and live in the UK.

Lawyers aren’t chill about anything, and it could be financially ruinous to try find out.
Is crypto a briar patch that will fail or is it an ingenious technology that will kill traditional banking? Only time will tell. More competition is a good thing. Right?
that’s where they started. the permissionless financial system is where this starts..
“Crypto” was started by a paper that suggested solving the two-general problem, a question of coordination without trust, with a very expensive solution and sensitive to a Sybil attack. For every technology, if you ask “What problem does it solve?” and take into account what limits it has, you can backtrack where it’s useful.

Something autonomous, expensive, rugged? Talk to the Army. Something that allows no recourse? Probably people outside of the court system.

Crypto makes sense for people who are doing something the government doesn't like, but that isn’t something three-letter agencies are willing to spend billions to fix. So not support terrorism, but possibly extracting currency from a controlled regime. It’s not useless, but it’s not big money, as far as I can tell.

I have friends who got in trouble with their government (the spicy kind of ecologists). They have an interesting project around Crypto: communication to evade surveillance. I’m not sure there are many others legitimate uses. But it’s not zero.
> though the Java standard library does let you allocate bytes and manage those yourself[1], not sure if you would consider that "more control over memory allocations".

That's interesting. So if you wanted to build a C compiler targeting the JVM, you would just request a big byteslice from the API and implement your own stack + heap on top of it (such that you never actually use the JVM GC)?

> And does look superficially similar to WASM instructions. When WASM gets GC, I have trouble seeing what's fundamentally different between the two, to be honest... even something like (parts of) the Java stdlib will be available to WASM with the WASI API, making the difference too small to distinguish them into different categories IMO.

It sounds like the fundamental distinction is that WASM will have both manual memory management APIs as well as GC APIs while Java will only have GC APIs.
Sincere question: when did you join JW, and what was your immediate reason for doing so?

The reason I ask is that there are a lot of people recommending churches (of various kinds) in this thread, and I take it most of the non-religious among us would very much not be comfortable regularly attending a religious organization's meetings purely for community, while not believing any the things that organization believes. (With the exception of religious organizations that are explicitly accepting of people with any faith, such as Unitarian Universalists.)

To me, it's sort of implicit in the question that what we are looking for is something you can show up to and get involved purely because you want somewhere to show up and get involved, without people side-eyeing you because of that or expecting something more than that (like a declaration of faith) in the months or years to come.
> I joined a gym 4 years ago, and a lot of my friends now I've met through that gym.

Is it common for strangers to actually approach each other in the gym? At least here everyone goes from machine to machine listening to music and making as little contact as possible and the few times I've been approached was just to ask how many sets I have left. I've been surprised just how much that seems to differ from place to place.
Alusus – multi-paradigm, hot-pluggable programming language
> but study after study comes out showing they don’t stop spread

But does it stop individual infection? Studies show that lower quality masks and poor masking rigor may mean it's not effective for a large, lax, population, but do you have evidence that the proper use of an N95 doesn't markedly reduce the chance of an individual becoming infected with COVID?
I am subscribed to 115 different podcasts but just end up listening to Dear Hank and John episodes on repeat. It’s a sad state of the podcasting world. The only other show I found that was really enjoyable to listen to was Hello Internet (actually one of the first popular podcasts) and it went on indefinite hiatus years ago.
In fact, the largest POWER9 CPUs have up to 110MB of L3... and Zen 4's L3 apparently maxes out at 384MB(!!).
For Jehovah's Witnesses specifically, this could not be further from the truth [0], and for Christian groups generally, you beg the question here by ceding one must believe in that religion's concept of a deity/afterlife/etc. Such a belief is extremely hard to come by if not raised in that religion, and even harder if you're attached to reality's cause-effect relationships. Not impossible! But hard.

And you're right; warring religious groups don't use fists...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah%27s_Witnesses_congrega...
I'll just link to my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36129740

tldr: we have quite different requirements and we operate in a very different space. I still think ledger looks cool!
Podcast: “Flipping the Bird: Elon vs. Twitter”
They used to do it...by simply ignoring the laws. That's a measure of the chutzpah of the people running some of these early exchanges, not anything inherent about a distributed blockchain.

In fact e-gold did all that 20 years ago with a simple centralized ledger.
>Predicting a textbook is like writing a textbook

HN AGI discourse is full of statements like this (eg. all the stuff about stochastic parrots), but to me this seems massively non-obvious. Mimicking and rephrasing pre-written text is very different from conceiving of and organizing information in new ways. Textbook authors are not simply transcribing their grad school notes down into a book and selling it. They are surveying a field, prioritizing its knowledge content based on an intended audience, organizing said information based on their own experience with and opinions on the learning process, and presenting the knowledge in a way which engages the audience. LLMs are a long way off from this latter behavior, as far as I can tell.

> The best language models (eg GPT-4) have some understanding of the world

This is another statement that I see variants of a lot, but which seems to way overstate the case. IMO it's like saying that a linear regression "understands" econometrics or a series of coupled ODEs "understands" epidemiology; it's at best an abuse of terminology and at worst a complete misapplication of the term. If I take a picture of a page of a textbook the resulting JPEG is "reproducing" the text, but it doesn't understand the content it's presenting to me in a meaningful way. Sure it has primitives with which it can store the content, but human understanding covers a far richer set of behaviors than merely storing/compressing training inputs. It implies being able to generalize and extrapolate the digested information in novel situations, effectively growing one's own training data. I don't see that behavior in GPT-4
I've experienced this changing the API for a primary memory allocator in a frequently updated code-base. Each location updated was perilous and it needed to be changed in bulk to avoid an endless war of attrition.
This has happened with Wikipedia, and then people talked about it on the news, in social media, and in classrooms for the last decade to the point most people typically say "remember to verify your wikipedia information".
This is a weird comparison.

I don't think either of these are intended for the datacenter? So this would be a price comparison between two gaming / general purpose GPUs?

The A770 is going for $350ish, is manufactured on a higher tech node (TSMC N6), and has a die size of 406mm square.

The 3060 is going for $250ish, was manufactured on two lower tech nodes (originally Samsung 8nm then moved to TSMC 7nm), and has a die size of 392.5.

I'm not sure the description "much larger in size" makes sense here. If anything it seems like pricing follows node-area costs.
It might be helpful if you explained the difference between UX and UI design here. I'm legitimately fuzzy on what the difference actually is.
I was in a pseudo-intellectual club during my undergrad, where the club engaged in public debates at local bars. One of our more engaging and hilariously absurd projects was a satirical rewrite of The Myth of Sisyphus, where it was not one Sisyphus but every software engineer on the planet and who ever lived and who ever will live waking in an afterlife of endless software deadlines and absurd management design changes.

Anymore, I think the purpose is to create meaning, and to recognize that everyone needs support, love, understanding and help. Beyond that, be crazy, but not too deep or you'll never enjoy. Saw a great quote over the weekend: I think therefore I am, you overthink and therefore are never really there.