skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is anyone else noticing a lot of outages today?
I've tried before to gaslight GPT4

Why?
> Perhaps some day this will also be possible for Guix, but I don't think it fits the ideology of Guix since MacOS isn't free (not as in beer).

I just wanna note here that the hesitation to invest in macOS support in the Guix development community is technical as well as ideological. macOS is a difficult platform to support for third-party package managers, and developer interest in macOS support is a difficulty within the Nix community, too. There's a lot of breakage on major macOS upgrades as well as some fundamental portability and hermeticity problems on the platform.

That said, (as an outsider) I think it would be awesome if Guix ran on macOS, just like it's ultimately a good thing for the world and for GNU that Emacs runs pretty well on macOS.
Is there a legal reason why they can't just scrape reddit and forget about API? It would be the app users doing the scraping.
> In Berlin, most are also silent, but sometimes a dude with a trombone casually joins the train and starts blasting on a normal tuesday. :P

Can confirm, buskers on my previous commute, somewhere on the Ringbahn near Landsberger Allee.
Not at all - if anything, this opened the door for more premium Reddit apps that charge monthly - with billing being in-line with Reddit Premium.
Another Mozilla requirement is reproducible builds. This enables the to verify that a build from the supplied sources matches the release bit-by-bit.
That's alright. Byte's articles aimed more at connecting the state of the art, both academic and commercial, to actual problems being solved. You didn't read Byte for first-hand review of products but for insights on the computing world as a whole.
How I Got My Attention Back (2017)
This seems like an even more egregious act, it's like attempted character assassination of a developer beloved by the community. This app got shouted out in WWDC and Spez's decision shortly after is to concoct an alternate reality where Christian is a villain and present it as fact, and then get caught almost immediately.

It seems apparent Spez is burdened by a serious lack of ethics, and I think that burden is now compromising Reddit as well much more than before. As far as I know, going to IPO with a crook at the helm usually only works if they haven't been caught multiple times first.

Edit: Really, what an especially awful thing to do to a developer whose full-time job your policy change has just shut down - tell the world they're an extortionist liar from your comfy office.
You should read the post, he addresses this in it.
Seems like things are currently migrating towards smaller, more closed communities. Things like Discord servers, any of the various services that popped up when Twitter went bad, invite-only chats on any of the various chat services, even web forums are still hanging around. Honestly can't say I'm sad about this transition, I tend to think smaller communities are healthier.
I could see this as a Digg moment for reddit. They've made no effort to put out quality software of their own and will kill some of the best experiences for using Reddit.
It’s possibly his first offense (no knowledge on that). What I was trying to say is that folks rarely get caught their first time doing something nefarious, which makes stiffer penalties important in my opinion.
What did everyone think of that call?

I'm not a client-facing person (a developer) so I might have been tongue in cheek myself as well. Not sure how any of that sounded threatening though...
> They’re so much nicer than the plastic type

Unless you have kids or pets, or live somewhere especially humid, in which case you will regret not getting nylon.
What is Apollo ?
From the linked post:

> We are open to postponing the API timeline to launch mod tooling, if mods agree to keep their subreddits open. We will discuss this in the Council and Partner call tomorrow

Is that a threat, lol?
Here's my non expert explanation, take it for what it's worth.

Tokens solve the following problem: the first layers of the neural net(s) are a big array of numbers, where the size is a hyperparameter (a parameter that can be used to change the size or behavior of the network). A typical size for a big model like the GPTs is larger than 50,000. You have to somehow encode language as a sequence of assignments to this array of numbers. How do you do it?

The first and most obvious idea is characters. You could assign each unicode code point to one of the slots in the input array, and then use what they call a one-hot encoding where every number is zero except the character. You can do this, but it's not very efficient because virtually all the training text is written in Latin languages and so almost all the slots will be unused.

A better way is to start with a big pile of text that you're going to use, and then iteratively assign the slots to sequences of characters based on how common they are. This makes it easier for the network to learn and reason. These sequences are tokens. For example "and" is very common, and so would "ing" (from the suffix), so those should get their own tokens. SuperGoldMagiCarp isn't so that really shouldn't - it should be represented as a sequence of tokens instead. There are algorithms that figure out the most efficient assignment of tokens to character sequences, which you can think of as the model's vocabulary, and then to convert text into a sequence of these token numbers. OpenAI's software is called Tiktoken and is written in Rust for speed.

The output of the network is likewise also tokens, and so you run the process in reverse at the end to get text back out of the array of floats that the network produces. Or more accurately, the network produces a set of probabilities for each token in its vocabulary, and then you can pick the most probable (oversimplification - in reality the way you select the token is more complicated than that as otherwise you get bad results).

The problems here are to do with bugs in the training process, but are no less interesting for that. Some character sequences that are very rare and should really be represented by many different tokens in a row have somehow ended up being considered important enough to be given their own whole token. The most common cause of this seems to be cases where the token vocabulary was computed on text that contained garbage highly repetitive text like debug logs from video games, hence the prevalence of obscure game characters like Leilan, and Reddit threads are clearly over-represented. But then GPT struggles to work out what these tokens actually mean because they hardly appears in the training set, and so these tokens seem to float together in space and get easily conflated inside the model, also they end up representing very vague or abstract concepts.
The "backdoor", if any, would only be the rubber stamp courts that allow pretty broad warrants for plenty of dumb things, but that could absolutely be fixed if half the country didn't totally buy into "I have nothing to hide" bullshit, and were as militant about defending the 4th amendment as they were the 2nd, but I guess the inalienable right to privacy just isn't as cool as putting a hole in a steel target 100 yards away with a machine.
So the bad guys are not the ones making an alternative client that makes money off of Reddit while not displaying their ads? Oh, okay.

Those 3rd party apps are leeches that are playing surprised_pikachu.jpeg when the blood supply is cut.

The simple fact that this guy has to reimburse 250K of subscriptions shows the insane amount of money he made off of the back of Reddit.
The quest to engineer climate-saving “super trees”
I used to head down to UCSD's library when I was in grade school to read tons of their military magazines that most public libraries couldn't afford. Jane's Defence Weekly, Aviation Week etc.
I know. Many of us have the photos app show us things we didn’t really want: dead pets, dead relatives, exes, etc. I think most rational adults can handle that and turn it off instead of getting super dramatic about it. Are these people similarly traumatized when they open a desk drawer or photo album and happen to see an old photo that evokes sad memories? Or so they only seek the dramatic trauma points when writing about tech on the internet?
It would be a cheap shot for me to just say "you didn't read the post, did you?" but he does explain it.

Spite is how humans enforce social norms. In this case, they lied to him, slandered him with easily falsifiable things they even admitted he didn't say.

The relationship is broken.
I think sparkling water is a great alternative, but I'm skeptical that all the fake sugars will turn out to be much better in the end. We seem to have a habit of replacing known bad things with things that we just haven't found out are bad yet.
How often did this happen this year already? 4 times?
A new Earth-sized, volcanic planet is a good candidate for harboring life
What's the reasoning? Instead of an IV? If I was in extreme pain, I would by default opt for an IV, which would be the fastest way to relieve it.
I've listened to the voice call [1] linked in [2] and I interpret it the same way that Reddit staff apparently did -- as a veiled threat.

Here's why: Christian is saying during the call that if Reddit wants Apollo to "quiet down", then to "make it easier" on everyone, Reddit should pay Christian $10 million dollars.

I agree that there is ambiguity to the conversation, but if you listen to the exchange in context ... it sure sounds like Christian's offer is for Apollo to "go away quietly", as in he personally won't make noise about it. I'm not honestly sure that there's another sound way to interpret this.

Listen to the audio yourselves and consider: what exactly is Christian offering in exchange for $10m? It's not the cessation of API requests, because Reddit already has it own their power to make that happen unilaterally. Therefore it must be something else.

This 'clarification' that Christian provides afterwards, stating that he means API utilization will "go quiet", doesn't make sense, because Reddit doesn't need to pay for that. Again, he must be referring to something else.

What is Reddit buying for $10m? The answer that "Christian will shut down the app and go quietly" is the only answer that makes sense in context.

We should also keep in mind that actual, intended threats aren't necessarily going to be communicated explicitly. If you imagine a lobbyist threatening, say, a congressperson, would they say explicitly: "Vote for our initiative or else we'll stop funding you and fund your opposition"? No, almost certainly not. They'd say something that communicates the threat but requires reading between the lines -- as is the case here.

Even without the need for threats, Christian has a reason to be unhappy with the API change, and voice his criticism of it publicly. It might be what he was planning to do anyway. So perhaps he's offering for Reddit to buy him out in exchange for ceasing his public criticism. It's not precisely a threat because regardless of the offer he might have been planning to criticize Reddit publicly. But it sure would feel like a threat to Reddit. "Buy me out or else I'm going to cause even more public fuss about this". The way that it's communicated, it lands as a threat from my perspective, because the payment will not be for anything besides his silence.

[1] http://christianselig.com/apollo-end/reddit-third-call-may-3...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...
> Nobody has ever been victimized by my code.

You don't know that. Actually all code that is inefficient is victimizing both the user (via performance) and the environment (unnecessary energy usage). I'm not saying you've done anything wrong, I'm just saying we all don't know what we don't know. I'm sure my inefficient code has had many users and electric bills as victims. I released software before that subsequent versions where I had better CS techniques improved 100 fold in performance. I wasted my users' time before I learned how to do it better.

> You've learned more than I do, so you have more tools in your bag. The only thing that sets us apart is that I won't be advancing the industry or publishing anything on arxiv anytime soon. Outside of that, you're going to struggle with quantifying how you're better than the self-taught without resorting to speculation or guild/union mentality (gatekeeping).

You made a lot of assumptions about me without knowing my background. I was a self-taught programmer as a child/teenager and my undergrad degree was in economics, not CS. I went back to school to get a masters in CS which was difficult coming from a self-taught background. I did programming both paid and hobbyist for over a decade before that more formal education. And I write books read largely by self-taught programmers.

Saying a full software development education includes binary and the fundamentals of CS is not gatekeeping, it's a low bar if we don't want inefficient software wasting users time and sucking energy. I'm not saying you have to start there, I'm saying it should be part of your education as a programmer whether self-taught or formally taught.
I'm aware it's a private company. Employees have been issued stock options and/or RSUs as part of their compensation package for years now which would make them shareholders.
I mean Discord, and Slack still need to run on non-Apple devices.
> Is spez (Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder) going to lose his job over this?

He might be looking to quit, I figure. Taking care of unpopular stuff on the way out would make sense.
> The information they did provide however was: we will be moving to a paid API as it's not tenable for Reddit to pay for third-party apps indefinitely (understandable, agreed), so they're looking to do equitable pricing based in reality.

So far so good. Speaking facts, no opinion, no bias.

> The price they gave was $0.24 for 1,000 API calls. I quickly inputted this in my app, and saw that it was not far off Twitter's outstandingly high API prices, at $12,000, and with my current usage would cost almost $2 million dollars per month, or over $20 million per year.

No bulk discount?

I guess it's in Reddit's best interest to have people on the official Reddit app in the first place.
At the most charitable minimum that wasn’t the spirit of the convos internally though. These were the points of why aws didn’t think k8s was a great idea, even for customers, if they’re customers of aws rather than gcp. Aws makes money if you use them using k8s or ECS, and once you use any stateful service or spend the time to specify the eks infrastructure, you’ve got a switching cost no matter what.

My thought in this space is go with whatever is the least effort. There is no meaningful portability between cloud providers using anything right now. But if you don’t make your stuff baroque it’s also not hard to port between one provider and another from an infrastructure specification point of view. I think the “lock in” at the specification of infrastructure is a canard. Lock in happens to a much deeper level at the integrations between dependencies inside the customers own infrastructure and the stored state. Having 1000 services across an enterprise integrated inside (aws|gcp|azure|oracle|on prem) makes it hard to switch anywhere else from a basic connectivity, rights, identity, etc level - so hard that it degenerates into why “hybrid” cloud infrastructures basically fail. But that means switching is either all or nothing, which is impractical, or you bite off this integration problem, which is apparently impossible or at least absurdly hard. Then you’re also left with stored state, which is heavy and difficult to move, let alone expensive, but also the challenge of moving the state over with the state managing services without downtime or loss of data is also pretty hard. Hard enough that you can’t expect every team owning the 1000 services can do it.

So, you can pick k8s and run an abstraction on an abstraction, or not, but when it comes time to break your lockin, k8s won’t buy you anything.
Not only do the receipts contradict the Reddit CEO, but even if they didn't, the Apollo dev is well within his rights to offer an ultimatum that either Reddit acquires his app, or he shuts it down. If he has enough leverage in that situation for Reddit to feel as if that's "blackmail," then it actually means that Reddit is the one blackmailing him with the pricing changes.

On one hand they claim they need to increase pricing to cover their costs, but on the other hand, if he offers (or threatens, according to Reddit) to remove all those costs, they consider it "blackmail" - meaning they're losing something if Apollo shuts down. So why can't they either buy the app or provide discounted API rates or some specialized payment schedule that derisks Apollo's costs instead of forcing a $50,000 bill on them in thirty days?
> Do you guys really expect a for profit company to offer free API access to 3rd parties, that offer a better experience with no ads, bypassing their revenue stream, and making their own site and apps look terrible in comparison?

I certainly don't expect this, and if you read the linked article, Christian didn't either. His primary issue was that he was only given 30 days to find a solution, which wasn't a reasonable timeline. His secondary issue was the pricing of the API access. Having a paid API in the first place didn't make his list of concerns.
> I’m hesitant to even call this moving the goal posts. Intelligence has never been solidly defined even within humans (see: IQ debate; book smart vs street smart; idiot savants).

> It’s unsurprising that creating machines that seem to do some stuff very intelligently and some other things not very intelligently at all is causing some discontent with regard to our language.

I think I agree about the language.

I don’t have a definition of intelligence. I don’t work in one of those fields that would need to define it, so my first attempt probably wouldn’t be very good, but I’d say intelligence isn’t a single thing, but a label we’ve arbitrarily applied to a bunch of behaviors that are loosely related at best. So, trying to say this thing is intelligent, this thing is not, is basically hopeless, especially when things that we don’t believe are intelligent are being made to exhibit those behaviors, one behavior at a time.

> I see a whole lot more gnashing of teeth about goalposts moving than I do about people proposing actual solid goalposts.

I might not see a ton of explicit “here are the goalpost” type statements. But, every time someone says “I’m using the term AI, but actually of course this isn’t intelligence,” the seem to me at least to be referencing some implicit goalposts. If there isn’t a way of classifying what is or isn’t intelligent, how can they say something isn’t it? I think the people making the distinction have the responsibility to tell us where they’ve made the cutoff.

Maybe I’m just quibbling. Now that I’ve written all that out, I’m beginning to wonder if I just don’t like the wording of the disclaimer. I’d probably be satisfied if instead of “this isn’t intelligence, but I’m going to call it AI,” people would say “Intelligence is too hard to define, so I’m going to call this AI, because why not?”
The conspiracy is that masks are dangerous to wet, don’t play dumb.

The first study in that list shows masks REDUCING micro plastic inhalation risk on their first use. The second is about UV degradation and weathering in the environment. Did you read any of these studies?

I’m talking about the bullshit conspiracy mongering you engage in across a ton of threads.
How true is that honestly?

The more I talk to people the more I feel like people just like to party/waste money more than work.
oh the irony...

"Explicit is better than implicit."

;-)
I hate Reddit, Reddit Admins, Reddit Mods, etc more than most people. Especially how they love to gaslight you and subtly screw you over/sabotage you, as we saw with their attacks on the_donald.

BUT if you take the edits in context, there was nothing wrong with them. Dozens of people were talking shit, and he responded by very lightly and very obviously trolling them. There were still a lot of old school internet users/4chan types running the show back then, so they should have been able to deal with a tiny bit of counter-trolling without losing their minds.
What happened to Buchheit's plan for COVID? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24241786 the linked page is completely gone. At the time it seemed like another example of "computer guy tries to do medicine, fails miserably"
If you give it a try, it would be great to get feedback.
My feelings exactly. We're all stuck with the official Reddit and Twitter clients now. They're not even good. We know they're not good, but they're now the only place to experience Reddit and Twitter. It's like enterprise software for a whole social network.
Here's the take by the mentioned AskHistorians: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/142w159/askh...
There's no hand to overplay here anymore - the app is shutting down, and the author made it clear that is the intention. While the verbiage could've been different, that doesn't really matter. In these kinds of conversations Reddit folks could've asked for clarification, not assume bad intent (which they did, but then misrepresented).

Apollo's leverage was "We help keep power users on your platform, and keep them happy." And, as it turns out, while their numbers are not necessarily large, they are also some of the loudest and with most influence (see how many subreddits joined the blackout). What the outcome of this will be is to be seen, but it's a very shortsighted take from Reddit, in my own humble opinion.
Apollo made business decisions, that turned out to be very short sighted. Apollo sold access to someone else's system, for next to nothing, and now is caught having to pay for that access like any reasonable business would expect.

We can debate if the API fees are reasonable or not - but at the end of the day, Apollo chose a model that doesn't work unless Reddit continued to favor them and apps like them. Foolish, is one word that comes to mind.

Given the popularity of Apollo, and the public outcry over the news it will be shutting down - I see zero reason Apollo couldn't switch to a monthly billing model - even if it requires refunding old subscriptions which they are already going to do.

This is a self-made disaster for Apollo, a failure to be forward thinking and control risks.

The founder started Apollo as a university project - but somehow forgot to become a real business along the way it seems.
A lot. I've watched both the keynote and also the Platforms State of the Union and not only did I hear it by name in the keynote, I've seen its icon in the background in both the keynote and the PSotU.
I don't disagree, but I also didn't mention low sides at all so I'm unsure of what you're trying to express here.

My point is that a high side is what happens if you lose and regain rear traction, landing you in an unstable death wobble that immediately flings you out. It's possible to regain traction after losing it in a corner and not high side, you just get some wobble which you (more, the bike's suspension) can hopefully correct for. It's a matter of degree.
Some of this is wrong: It can be started anytime and it is then prorated. Pretty sweet. In the HVV Switch app it's also a process of under one minute (if you already have an account). Haven't tried it in other apps.
No (to the question in the title), this is someone trying to sell a magic solution. You do not need to fight climate change, we need to stop it. And the first thing that needs to stop is the greed of the superrich. Unless the seaweed gives a conscience to the superrich then no, seaweed cannot help.
That is one perspective. Another is that it creates wider value than it costs by freeing up travel options for more people.

I don't know what the right balance is, but I do know it's not necessarily as simple as asking if all transport costs are met at the point of travel.
Installing it now!