skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The really disgusting bit is not the favt of being carried up a mountain, it is the neglect of giving the local guides the credit they deserve. Last time i bothered to look, Sherpas held all Everest records: number of succesfull ascents, speed, you name it.

That Sherpas, just to pick prominent example as locals in other regions share the same fate, don't get the recognition they deserve is not the people going on paid expeditions. It also the press and media not giving them credit. Basically all succesfull Himalayan expeditions, before Messner started to go full solo, relied on Sherpas or other local groups. Not properly mentioning those incredible mountaineers has a long tradition. One extended, too a much lesser degree, to guides from former Russia (looking at ypu, Krackauer). The Chinese alpinists, and to a lesser extent the Indians as well, defy that fact somewhat by virtue of simply being rich.
My solution is to eat a heaping spoonful of peanut butter.

No idea why it works but it does.
Are you saying that the internet at large could pose a 'legitimate risk to human life such that we would go extinct in the near future,' or do you disagree that AI, when used as a tool by humans, could pose such a risk?
I agree that a postal carrier would be criminally liable for knowingly delivering a live bomb, but I think you’re wrong on the end part. There is no legal obligation to try to stop crimes you know about. In most cases there isn’t even an obligation to report them.
> the first 90% takes 10% of the time, the last 10% takes 90%.

Is the second part of that statement necessary?
While I'm not on this "who's-who" panel of experts, I call bullshit.

AI does present a range theoretical possibilities for existential doom, from teh "gray goo" and "paperclip optimizer" scenarios to Bostrom's post-singularity runaway self-improving superintelligence. I do see this as a genuine theoretical concern that could even potentially even be the Great Filter.

However, the actual technology extant or even on the drawing boards today is nothing even on the same continent as those threats. We have a very vast ( and expensive) sets of probability-of-occurrence vectors that amount to a fancy parlor trick that produces surprising and sometimes useful results. While some tout the clustering of vectors around certain sets of words as implementing artificial creation of concepts, it's really nothing more than an advanced thesaurus; there is no evidence of concepts being weilded in relation to reality, tested for truth/falsehood value, etc. In fact, the machines are notorious and hilarious for hallucinating with a highly confident tone.

We've created nothing more than a mirror of human works, and it displays itself as an industrial-scale bullshit artist (where bullshit is defined as expressions made to impress without care one way or the other for truth value).

Meanwhile, this panel of experts makes this proclamation with not the slightest hint of what type of threat is present that would require any urgent attention, only that some threat exists that is on the scale of climate change. They mention no technological existential threat (e.g., runaway superintelligence), nor any societal threat (deepfakes, inherent bias, etc.). This is left as an exercise for the reader.

What is the actual threat? It is most likely described in the Google "We Have No Moat" memo[0]. Basically, once AI is out there, these billionaires have no natural way to protect their income and create a scaleable way to extract money from the masses, UNLESS they get cooperation from politicians to prevent any competition from arising.

As one of those billionaires, Peter Theil, said: "Competition is for losers" [1]. Since they have not yet figured out a way to cut out the competition using their advantages in leading the technology or their advantages in having trillions of dollars in deployable capital, they are seeking a legislated advantage.

Bullshit. It must be ignored.

[0] https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
This longtermist and Effective Altruism way of thinking is very dangerous. Because using this chain of argumentation, it's "trivial" to say what you're just saying: "So what if there's racism today, it doesn't matter if everybody dies tomorrow.

We can't just say that we weigh humanity's extinction with a big number, and then multiply it by all humans that might be born in the future, and use that to say today's REAL issues, affecting REAL PEOPLE WHO ARE ALIVE are not that important.

Unfortunately, this chain of argumentation is used by today's billionaires and elite to justify and strengthen their positions.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying we should not care about AI risk, I'm saying that the organization that is linked (and many similar ones) exploit AI risk to further their own agenda.
Not well. Very few updates since then.
https://github.com/keybase/client/graphs/code-frequency tells the story well.
I wonder if this is a good opportunity to incorporate some form of LLM built in? Could be a killer feature.
Full screen Vimium-like mouse, powered by opencv library (experimental)
Mozilla cornering the market: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/StatCoun...
That might be why Sam Altman signed it but why do you think that all the academics did so as well. Do you think he just bribed them all or something?
Purism Librem Server v2 Announced: $2999 USD for a 9th Gen Core I3 with 16GB RAM
I agree it's a fallacy when the probability is like 10^-10 but in this case I believe that the probability is more like 1%, in which case the argument is sound. I'm not trying to make a pascal's wager argument.
Yeah, that was wrong. I meant there are very few serious projects implemented in C++ for µC that are restricted memory wise.

Yes, AVR has a C++ compiler, but I could imagine it doesn't support all language features. If it does it would still be discouraged to use dynamic memory allocation, which is pretty essential to leverage many advantages of object orientated languages.

Of course embedded systems aren't restricted to that anymore and you are perfectly fine to use C++ for the average ARM system that isn't as restricted memory wise.
I am saying there is no distinction. If AI is a risk to humanity, then the internet in general must be as well.
The problem is that the government loves cracking down on crime through the financial system - terrorism, drugs, IP issues, firearms, etc, etc. It's the one tool they've used again and again...because it works.

So they'll never give financial institution carte blanche immunity, because they rely on them to choke off the money for illegal activities. And even if they did give immunity, you know they'll turn around a say "well, we didn't mean you could just ignore blatantly illegal activity" and the banks will fall into line.
It seems like in your experience, either UX did it's job and came up with all the wrong solutions, or UX wasn't involved and all the gripes you listed would have been alleviated by true UX professionals.
I'm reading this book right now. It's really great so far!

I've been working a lot with Trees in Clojure, and have been hitting serious limitations of my understanding.

I also found this YouTube video from a Clojure conference that reviews some different strategies for tree traversal in Clojure: https://youtu.be/YgvJqWiyMRY

I thought that learning a Functional Lisp would make it really easy to traverse trees, since that is that the language is doing to actually execute its code.

Turns out all the stuff I want to do is simply hard.

Functional data structures are really awesome though, it just seems to take a bit of up front investment.
I signed the letter. At some point, humans are going to be outcompeted by AI at basically every important job. At that point, how are we going to maintain political power in the long run? Humanity is going to be like an out-of-touch old person on the internet - we'll either have to delegate everything important (which is risky), or eventually get scammed or extorted out of all our resources and influence.
Definitely. South korea makes great use of it with sweeping and draconian national security laws, torture, spy agencies trying to rig elections, political parties being abolished, internet censorship, etc.

It's just that in the case of south korea the "giant evil" is a country with a military budget comparable to that of the LAPD, which would be "invading" (lol) over the most mountainous and well defended border in human history.

I don't think north korea will shift military budget away from defence as the region is getting more and more dangerous. The "liberal" Moon administration embarked on south koreas largest ever military buildup and Japan is re-arming and, for obvious historical reasons, is very hostile to north korea. Also, I don't think the North Korean government is all that competent.
Show HN: GlueSQL – Breaking the Boundary Between SQL and NoSQL Databases
Hello HN, I'm the creator of the GlueSQL project.

I'm excited to be able to announce it on Hacker News for the first time. I hope you find it interesting!
you are laughing but I've found a matrix that is called an elimination matrix [1]. Are you still laughing now?

Are you absolutely sure that an elimination matrix with 1 Petazillion of elements will not become sentient in a sort of emergent way?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplication_and_elimination_ma...
The entire site is in italics with a serif font, this is going to be rough
It's not "I don't want to learn my tools."

It's "I don't want to learn and debug _everybody else who may possible want to build this otherwise portable C program_'s tools."

When those tools change how they do this unportable thing every couple of years in subtle and incompatible ways, which require #ifdef's to handle the different ways those linked against symbols can be accessed, multiplied by dozens of different platforms, then yes, I'm going to compile an 8MB literal.
Can someone please let me buy actual tiles shaped like this? I would like to renovate my bathroom
I'm the comment I'm reply to said "What matters more than happiness?".

The point is, plenty of stuff matters more than just happiness.
Learn EC2 using a sandboxed environment
The ETF seems to be a bad idea because of how it's run. That's different from people who advocate "Always bet against Cramer", who say that as a strategy and on who the ETF is based.
yeah, I like the vibe of these shops too but maybe there’s a bit of japan fetishization for a kind of commerce that anywhere else wouldn’t make sense to have.

One of the reasons for the Japanese economy’s stagnation over the last 20+ years is a lot of government spending on things that are not contributing to a healthy economy. I’m thinking about huge infrastructure projects but I’m sure this extends too many other aspects of how the economy is run.
It depends, hens and birds in a field will prefer the tasty bugs & insects over the cultivated plants, many animals are happy with what they find themselves. A spider or lizard would also make a great pet, just like a plant

Choosing dogs or cats as pets is probably the worst choices in terms of sustainability

The total weight of pet dogs is higher than all other wild mammals, this is just shocking https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/environment/weight-respons..., not even talking about livestocks which are 10 times higher mass than wild animals, and serve for 20% to pets food. The amount and type of pets is pure destruction and nonsense
> lots of dubious claims, opinions, and non-academic sources thrown around

Can you expand on the issues with that article, please? As a non-Finn, I don't have the background to critique the article content or understand what's wrong with it.
That's fair and we do plan on doing that... but to clarify, my fear is not losing patent litigation, it's going bankrupt just from the court fees even if I win.
How do this people go to bed with themselves every night? On a bed of money I assume
This already happens with cents. Your tax frequently comes out to a fraction of a cent, and it gets rounded to the nearest cent.

The US used to have a half-penny coin. It stopped being minted in 1857.

The purchasing power of the half-penny at the time was about as much as a quarter has today.

It wouldn't be crazy to get rid of all coins worth less than 25¢ and round all purchases to the nearest quarter.

Obligatory CGP Grey: https://youtu.be/y5UT04p5f7U
It doesn't matter who wrote it, it got picked up, had a good argument and affected market opinion. The execs now need to respond to it.

Humans also don't grasp that things can improve exponentially until they stop improving exponentially. This belief that AGI is just over the hill is sugar-water for extracting more hours from developers.

The nuclear bomb was also supposed to change everything. But in the end nothing changed, we just got more of the same.
Compared to 2019 they’re pretty high in n America as well.
I never understood why we never popularized a comparable metric measurement. A quarter-meter perhaps?
The government should be increasing the size of bills to keep up with inflation.

In 1934 gold was $35 per ounce, and a $100 bill could buy 2.86 ounces of gold.

In 2023 you'd need about $5000 for 2.86 ounces of gold. There "should" be a $5000 bill to match the status quo of 1934 but the government has never created bills larger than $100.
What would be in it for a more intelligent agent to get rid of us? We are likely useful tools and, at worst, a curious zoo oddity. We have never been content when we have caused extinction. A more intelligent agent will have greater wherewithal to avoid doing the same.

'Able to play chess'-level AI is the greater concern, allowing humans to create more unavoidable tools of war. But we've been doing that for decades, perhaps even centuries.
Deepfaking it: America's 2024 election collides with AI boom
>"I actually like Ron DeSantis a lot," Hillary Clinton reveals in a surprise online endorsement video. "He's just the kind of guy this country needs, and I really mean that."
Modest Proposal: Just as governments in the Days of Yore had their own armories, arsenals, and shipyards, to ensure a ready supply of quality weapons, ammunition, & warships, modern governments should operate substantial food-supply infrastructure. Have it managed by people who grew up rather poor (to at least cut down internal greed), and run it at a fixed 10% profit margin (to undercut the angry protests of greedy capitalists). Then, if food prices go up, it might be fairly obvious which corporations are profiteering, and by how much.
You Can't Remember That Taylor Swift Concert All Too Well
There's also a nice addendum on cstheory.stackexchange, "What's new in purely functional data structures since Okasaki?" - https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1539/whats-new-...
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Ad absurdum then you can program in assembly just fine, right? Can I dump you chrome’s assembly output? It’s all trivial, just movs and whatnot.
I didn’t mean to say that a court shouldn’t be able to order a payment processor to not service a customer or a particular transaction. What I meant was that the payment processor shouldn’t be the one identifying the crimes.
>NK are specifically prohibited from launching ICBMs under international regulation

What regulations specifically? It seems doubtful the DPRK agreed to those regulations?

Edit: I looked it up, it was some random security council resolution, which are usually toothless.
I go back and forth on this argument when it comes to codegen. Like, you could make the same argument that protobuf shouldn't output C code. It should output an object file that you can link into whatever compiled language you want. C, fortran, C++, rust, who cares. As you say, the linking model is simple and works well.

Why do we generate big C/C++ strings instead, and compile those? Because object files have lots of compiler/platform/architecture specific stuff in them. Outputting C (or C++) then compiling it is a much more convenient way to generate those object files, because it works on every OS, compiler and architecture. Even systems that you don't know about, or that don't exist yet.

I hear what you're saying and I'm torn about it. I mean, aren't binary blobs just a simpler version of the problem protobuf faces? C code is already the most portable way to make object files. Why wouldn't we use it?
Noodl is going open source
If the right wing latches onto an idea, does that prove the idea is false?
France : €30,000 a year
I think in order to use the plural form you really need to have two examples.

Sam Altman is of course the least convincing signatory (except for the random physicist who does not seem to have any connection to AI).
It’s $399 for the same headset now with the price increase, and it’s still the better overall deal.
Discord really isn't acceptable as long as they require a phone number to sign in.
ChatGPT make me a Tetris game but with Sand Physics for the browser
I dunno, a quarter meter sandwich seems just as natural as a quarter pound burger.
Once Mighty Intel Struggles to Escape ‘Mud Hole’
Not saying they were, but it's not that expensive, looks like it starts at $50,000

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
As Spider Robinson observed in a Callahan story, if you have another column in your life spreadsheet labelled 'satisfaction' then it all adds up.
I know my way around my devices and I still open 24 hour timers all the time. It's 100% reliable and a temporary solution. I can't really say the same for various 'caffeinate' programs I've tried over the years.
Without paywall: https://archive.ph/zWRxh
I feel like they are.. not so awesome: they are grossly inefficient due to all the pointer chasing and are pretty much guaranteed to be slower than the alternative since they trash your cache.
Whether cash is on it's way "out" (as opposed to contracting a bit and settling to a certain niche level) is -- as the article indicates -- far from an obvious, final matter. And in my view quite doubtful in fact.

Either way - do as you like, and nice chatting.
I agree that the second question is way more interesting, and I'm glad there's a lot of ongoing discussion and debate about it. And you have some insightful thoughts on it here.

But I disagree with you that this is clearly what the NYT article is about. There is a significant focus on the "industry leaders" who have been most visible in - suddenly! - pushing for regulation. And that's why people are reasonably pointing out that this looks a hell of a lot like a classic attempt by incumbents to turn the regulatory system into a competitive advantage.

If Sam Altman were out there saying "we went too far with gpt-4, we need to put a regulatory ceiling at the gpt-3 level" or "even though we have built totally closed proprietary models, regulation should encourage open models instead". But what all the current incumbents with successful products are actually arguing for is just to make their models legal but any competitive upstarts illegal. Convenient!
I am pretty certain I've seen linkers routinely writing 0 instead of symbols' actual sizes so getting the actual size of the embedded binary blob is not very pretty.

Also, you argument sounds exactly like those that the author of https://thephd.dev/finally-embed-in-c23 has been fighting against for 5 years straight.
I wholeheartedly agree. I wish it would work for me, though.

In fact, I dislike browsing Reddit and HN on my mobile, as even though Reddit Is Fun (for Reddit) and Firefox (for HN) are excellent for consuming, I'm in it for participation, so I'm limited by touch keyboards, which universally suck.

At this point I've pretty much given up. During my HN-satiated moments, I can't devise a plan that my HN-deprived self won't overcome. Case in point: the last thing I ever posted on my blog, three years and five days ago, was about setting up a HN block at a router level. I was so happy with my trick that I had to share it with the world. Guess how long that trick worked? Less than a week after publishing the blog post.
So if there is no distinction, by your own words, can you take yourself seriously or not? That is, by your own words, both AI and the Internet either pose a risk or they both do not; 'there is no distinction.'
The idea of a superintelligence becoming a bond villain via freelance software jobs (or, let's be honest, OnlyFans scamming) is not something I consider an existential threat. I can't find it anything other than laughable.

It's like you've looked at the Fermi paradox and decided we need Congress to immediately invest in anti-alien defense forces.

It's super-intelligent and it's a super-hacker and it's a super-criminal and it's super-self-replicating and it super-hates-humanity and it's super-uncritical and it's super-goal-oriented and it's super-perfect-at-mimicking-humans and it's super-compute-efficient and it's super-etcetera.

Meanwhile, I work with LLMs every day and can only get them to print properly formatted JSON "some" of the time. Get real.
Examples of more recent work for us non-specialists?
I'm astonished at how much UX seems to be universally despised among the commenters here.

As a big believer in design, I think the field of UX has collectively allowed it's value to be tarnished by not guarding who is skilled at UX and who is not.

We developers got to be gate-keepy for a long time with the ubiquitous "CS Degree" requirement. Obviously with the ultrademand for programmers, that requirement is vestigial at best. But we have a very established bar for quality of engineering.
Halton Sequence
There is this footnote on pg 2:

> We might call this the "vampire einstein" problem, as we are seeking a shape that is not accompanied by its
reflection

Also the glorious

> Lemma 2.1. There exists a Spectre.
This comment suggests otherwise:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/89#issuecomment-122118...

Although I'm not sure the "self hosted compiler" is the same as "llvm free backend".
The reason the standard doesn't guarantee constant evaluation of constexpr is that it would be hard, because of the as-if rule, to specify it in an good way other than a non-normative comment. Remember that as long as the sequence of side effects is preserved (and even that, concurrency introduce non-determinism), any translation is compliant (even no translation in case of interpretation).

In practice you do get guaranteed evaluation wherever the result is required at compile time (for example as a non-type template parameter or as an array size).
Human Experimentation in the United States
I think academics are much, much more naive than we like to think. The same trick that pharma played on doctors is being played here.

Just because you can do fancy math doesn't mean you understand how to play the game.
2023 and still no good epub reader for Windows. Such a shame Microsoft removed it from Edge.
I take it this is for A.I. projects in the future and not the current ones that are basically just advanced predictive-text models?
Decades of research in every field being sponsored by corporations haven't made academics' interests clear for you yet?
Graphics Programming weekly – Issue 289 – May 28st 2023
Example from the top of my head: some pretty "niche" (in the days of Galois, say) number theory is now the critical component in a large proportion of digital processing, cryptography and communications (e.g. forward error correction).