skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot of great (meta-)criticism that tools like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (the videogames relative of RT) by trying to treat reviews as simply scores and then trying to synthesize those in a frappe of a blended metric have been some of the worst things to happen to criticism and critical thinking. There's so much signal lost in the noise of review scores. There's so much subjectivity and nuance lost just jumping to the thumbs up/thumbs down without hearing the reasoning behind any individual review, that it becomes increasingly harder to fathom why people put any weight behind the metrics that scale that data loss up to such incredible volume.

(ETA: It gets worse too, because then you get companies gaming these meta-metrics and reviewers that feel uncomfortable giving scores below certain thresholds for fear of their jobs or other punishments, so even the truthfulness of individual reviews starts to be questioned how much they are just doing for "the algorithm".)
Ask HN: Would Julia be a good scripting language for a text editor?
And in particular, would it be better than scheme for that purpose?
Scientists invent double-sided solar panel that generates way more electricity
My pet-hypothesis is that part of the problem isn't the tech per se, but that office workers do parts of jobs that would have been the specialty of several different people before, say, the 1980s. And not only that: they switch between those, and aspects of their own job, much faster than before.

A person who had two kinds of tasks to worry about in a given day in 1975, might have twenty today—technology didn't so much eliminate work, as allow it to be more concentrated. Someone's still doing the work, it's just five people instead of twenty-five, and none of them as is focused or specialized as before. Everyone's a secretary now, in other words—plus whatever else they do. Everyone is the mail room. Little bits of jobs like project management or plain ol' management get devolved down to ordinary workers. And so on.
Living in the SF area, I'm still considering one because you can bring it inside a lot easier than a bicycle and theft is a huge concern here. It would be a good compliment to BART, I think.
they are freaks poisoned by money and we should take it from them for the common good
You just pay attention longer. It takes effort but that's all you really need to do. For example, go observe and pay attention to a plant for 45min. Think of it like a workout, it's uncomfortable and a PITA but that's all there is to it.
Disagree. Article titles on the web are often very bad. Often this is for clickbait reasons, but also frequently just because the author was not writing for the HN front page as their audience. Almost always, I prefer the rewritten headlines on HN. However, this seems labor intensive to accomplish, and there is usually a delay before the edited title appears. What I wish is for article submitters to consider the use case, and rewrite the headline to conform to HN guidelines on submission.
Yeah, but it lacks the most important test: results. He hasn't actually tried it, he just thinks it will work.

For such a simple change to the softmax it wouldn't take long to verify. It's really embarrassing to not do that before publishing.
Thank you for developing and offering the self-hosting capability. I use spreadsheets for my planning at the moment but self-hosting makes this a serious option.
I use cash so rarely that I end up at the bar (or wherever) with a stack of 20s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/magazine/celine-chanel-gu... (Inside the Delirious Rise of ‘Superfake’ Handbags)

> This led me to a Reddit community of replica enthusiasts, who traded details about “trusted sellers” capable of delivering a Chanel 2.55 or Loewe Puzzle or Hermès Birkin that promised to be indistinguishable from the original, and priced at a mere 5 percent or so of the M.S.R.P.

> ...

> What was once a sly novelty has bloomed into a gigantic market. In 2016, a Virginia woman was sentenced for buying $400,000 worth of designer purses from department stores, returning high-quality knockoffs and reselling the real bags for profit; the stores went years without catching on.
That ... is an excellent question.
> The Eternal Return is another Ancient/Pythagorean concept that has been hotly debated over the past 2600 years. Short of popularizing the concept, Nietzsche has not contributed much to the debate, and his words on the topic are far from definitive.

I think what Nietzsche is doing beyond popularizing the concept is establishing its strange relationship to nihilism ("Das ist die extremste Form des Nihilismus: das Nichts (das „Sinnlose“) ewig!"[0]) and its life-enhancing qualities: It is life-enhancing because it is impossible to live with it. This may sound strange, but this is the essence of Nietzsche's "pessimism of strength" concept.

[0] NF-1886,5[71]
> It’ll be ok. The technology for “dangerous” AI doesn’t actually exist.

Nobody's worried about the tech that exists.

> The near term risks we face from AI are constrained to the realms of spam and privacy.

Define "near term".

> World ending super-bots are science fiction.

Science fiction has become science fact before. Where's the knockdown argument that won't happen in this case?
Maybe this is why billionaires and hundred-millionaires are the ones so concerned about existential risk. A collapse of consensus in our current and historically not-that-old system of property rights is an existential risk -- to them.
I hear that chickadee call all during the Spring/Summer, was surprised when it meant "danger."
I know that HN is maybe not a place for such comments, but I strongly belive we need to make "attention span overflow" a thing
You can listen and understand faster than you can read and understand?

I am far quicker at reading than listening.
Grizzly Bear Selfie
WormGPT already exists. These will only become more dangerous as the tech evolves.
Well, at the time of the pandemic, our prime minister tweeted important changes to policies to have effect in the next few days.

Whether or not that was what the platform was meant for, it was what it was. And as far as I heard, our country was not the only one where this was happening.
Just went from my unmetered symmetric gigabit for $90 to unmetered symmetric 10gig for $49! Sonic, SF Bay area. Considering I'm in the middle of silicon valley it sure took a long time to actually get fiber (2019), but now I'm not complaining.
Nice job with the map! It was great seeing your presentation at symposium!
I think you missed the parent's point - your USP is real-time replication. So everything you're proposing makes it not real time. Your USP is now worthless (in that context) and you're competitors are numerous.
I think it is related but not the same - instant gratification is what leads to our brains to shorten the attention span. I could see it happen to me in the last few years. I sort of stagnated in almost every endeavor because I was picking low hanging fruits if you will and did only the things that I could easily see the end result for…

Until I started training for a half marathon. Not having run seriously in my life, I challenged myself to join my friends for a 10K last year. The training was an unexpected lesson in humility and thought - I could not go for the 10K regardless of how motivated or pumped up I was. I needed to train myself to get there properly… 2 KM on day 1, 5KM by day 15, and 10K by day 30 or so. With enough rest in between. I could do the 10K last year happily.

This year I am training for the 21K. I’m practicing for 3 months slowly improving my pace and endurance.

I’m not what one would call athletic. I’m still doing it and it makes me incredibly happy.

The analogy I went for is - the same applies to learning anything new, or mastering something- it takes time, and continuous effort. Not instant gratification. It sounds very logical and simple in hindsight, but I had to learn it as an adult now.
I wonder if there is a way to stimulate the vestibular system externally to make it feel like actual locomotion and perhaps improve on the motion sickness.
It would be an amusing find if "Black Swan mega-activations" actually but yet unintentionally made the model smarter...
But Chromium is open source. Opera and Microsoft, among others, contribute frequently. Igalia is a consulting firm that takes commissions for Chromium browser work. So the correct statement would be that anyone with enough time and/or money could make this work, not just Google.
Yo dawg, we just need to figure out what x converges to as you apply transformer() infinite times and then finally attention will no longer be all you need:

transformer(transformer(transformer( ... x ... ))) = ?
It's unlikely to be seeded to indie devs working from home. Even massive companies are only going to get 1 or 2, and those are going to be locked in a room in the office.
I see no need for it. Living in Germany, any kind of power outages are exceptionally rare. I remember one in the last 10 years for a few hours and that was very local. If I am in a situation where a power outage occurs, i'll listen to my battery radio for a while and be fine. I work on nothing and rely on nothing that would actually require a UPS.
Apache has been defaulting to event mpm for over a decade.
But AI CAN animate a character, they've animated a bear riding a skateboard, or dolphin surfing, etc.

Albeit it's kinda shitty and imperfect but the proof of concept is already there, it's basically stable diffusion at the pre-prototype stages. Given 2 years it'll be able to churn full videos.

I've already begun creating a Youtube shorts channel fully made of videos created by AI + CC licensed images and videos.

I consult companies to do similar things, etc. There's a whole world out there that is going to change overnight. I'd say AGI is 4-5 years away tops. At that point, all bets are off the table.

The reason I consult in AI? Contingency plan, if AI becomes the last major industry. I've got a family to support (that and I'm obsessed with the novelty and exciting things I can do with AI -- in the same way the scientist in Independence day is "excited" when the aliens come because all the stuff turned on in their captured spaceship - i.e. it's cool, but maybe I shouldn't be so giddy since it could spell our eventual doom).
I wonder if you would mind when this happens to you: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/1/18246297/china-transportat...

Or maybe this: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...
Don't rush to retrain yourself: consider whether things are enjoyable, or just engaging, and give it time.
It's like an 80 year old book written with an archaic style of English. It wasn't even popular when it came out.

Most media from the 1930s to 50s isn't popular anymore. Taste move on. Idk if you can simplify this to attention spans.
>an expert model will always outperform a general purpose one, even if it's a metatransformer

It's an interesting question as it begs questions of conceptual "boundaries."

The sense-plan-do process requires a search and filter process for task switching, assuming an agent can do more than one thing.

So assuming you have a robotic/autonomous agent that is a collection of systems (locomotion, dexterous gripper, visual perception, etc...), if each system could be represented as an "expert module", say for example the dexterous manipulator, then so long as a discriminator can appropriately switch states using the sensor/system inputs, then it's conceptually possible that there is a canonical "expert module" that everyone uses and therefore "general purpose" would apply to the agent as a whole while expert model would apply to the dexterous manipulator.

You can walk that reasoning up the abstraction layers then to conclude that (as usual with these turtle stacks) the distinctions come as each sub system/module specializes more granularly for the environment they operate in.

I think that it's probably forever and always true that any system designed to explore/exploit a bounded environment with comprehensive observations, will always outperform a system that is required to adapt it's sense-plan-do components to the bounded environment without similar observations.

A system would either have to generate different observations than the native agent, or change the boundaries of the environment in a way that is unavailable to the native agent in order to outperform it.
That's why I think of it as more of reading a motivational quote that will inspire me to do something that day. I try not to take it too seriously, but my conflict with astrology is that I don't want to believe it, but I can't shake the fact that the moon affects the tides on Earth from my brain.

That makes me question if the moon can affect humans. The whole personality prediction and things like that I'm not a believer at all, but the moon affecting our mood? I can buy it.

We are made up of a lot of water, especially our brains, and I'm not confident enough to say it's impossible the moon can affect us. Mars and Venus are a lot more kooky, because even though we don't know how gravity works we're pretty certain it doesn't have a strong effect for small masses over long distances.

I will admit I'm more willing to say astrology is a "maybe, who knows" compared to the existence of God. For me the existence of God is a firm no and I'm pretty confident in that.
I think it's more a matter of investment vs. payoff. I read TLotR from beginning to end once and I liked it, but it's such a time sink for so little payoff that I wouldn't do it again. There's so much else I could do with that time instead. I'd rather put the movies in the background while I do something else over the course of nine hours, or maybe reread a specific bit I liked. It's not about instant gratification, it's that we're no longer constrained in our media selection. 70 years ago you might have reread the books right after finishing them because you had nothing else to do. That's not true today.
these are all very good points, very accurate and a common experience.

1) anyone who knows anything never runs accuracy tuning tool.
2) apparently user profile degrading is greatly reduced in version 16. Don't really know because I haven't migrated yet.
3) electron is a flocking abomination. I blame JavaScript and the HTML Dom.
4) I would not entirely blame the browser plug-ins. There is a boatload of JavaScript out there that does everything it can to fark up dragons need to look into a text area so can decide how to make things work.
5) that sounds more like a Windows, may be hardware problem. I haven't had a Dragon related crash (15.61) for more than a couple of years. Windows is a piece of shit but it's crash rate is also dropped.

re: wisper oh I would love to have a good whisper environment on Linux that's a reasonable approximation of Dragon. What that means is ability to dictate into any window anywhere, the ability to edit the content in the window, and an extension that lets you add a grammar for commands (preferably based on Python)

then I would be able to ditch Windows and tell Nuance to fark off
> The capitalist system pursues frontier technologies and profits, but companies like Huawei pursue scalability to the forgotten people of the world. For better or worse, it’s San Francisco or Shenzhen. For many countries in the Global South, the model of development exemplified by Shenzhen seems more plausible and attainable. Nobody thinks they can replicate Silicon Valley, but many seem to think they can replicate Chinese infrastructure-driven middle-class consumerism.

Is the San Francisco model sustainable, even in the west? The USA has maybe a half century left before its 20th century infrastructure is entirely deprecated and it has to stop pretending the real world is made of bits.
pl/SQL has good support for inline SQL.
It would be fun when once in the future someone finds a bug like this, merges the PR, and BAM! Singularity.
The average person in 1926 didn't and wouldn't read Hemingway either. The first print run of Sun Also Rises was 5000 copies. Most people didn't read much and a significant proportion couldn't read at all, and I suspect most of the silent movies of the time would seem quite trivial compared with much amateur YouTube content today

I suspect that in 100 years time, bestselling books particularly popular with today's tech addled brains will also be considered a bit dry and hard to relate to by the average reader.
> if you factor in the cost of the admins and moderators

It is not possible to factor that “cost” in. They're volunteers: they're donating their time, and their time has no market value. Electricity, however, does.

> Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because

Every other month there is a big website going offline. A big social group disbanding. This is the normal way of things: human social structures don't endure like friendships do.
I think we need history classes in programming, and possibly comparative literature classes but for code.
Model Candidate
I never read lord of the rings. I read the hobbit though.

The Tolkien work I struggled with was The Silmarillion. I understand it’s not much like the others and was a posthumous publication, but middle school me struggled to stay interested enough with the way it was structured.
Yeah, and creating specialized "agents" in an AI "lab" discussing solutions could solve most of the problems in a day that take actual political scientists a year to just end up at a stalemate, or impasse because of no concensus.
It's fairly colloquial english to say you have "some of something", I think this matches the ocaml language convention pretty nicely
What do you want to "script"?
Real ID and TSA facial recognition cameras and TSA body scans are government in USA. At least the startup in the article is a private voluntary experiment which is not mandated for travelers.
I agree with everything you say. Though papers really are a bit too hard to read sometimes, but I'd argue it's often not for an overly technical tone so much as writers cutting out a lot of background material for brevity and assumed familiarity.

>What should be encouraged is for academics to blog about their research as well. It would even help when recruiting and onboarding new members. Right now the sociological and economical incentives don't promote this at all.

I will add onto this that a lot of journals have been pushing for video abstracts and "plain English" abstracts. For the most part I don't see these too often but when they're there they're appreciated, and I vaguely recall that someone found that citations go up when they're used (specifically plain English, I don't think anything has been on video abstracts).

There are a lot of good blogs for computational academic subjects (ml, bioinformatics, comp neuro, etc) but I see less for bio and non-software engineering. Math and physics seems to have some really notable blogs, but beyond what gets posted to HN and linked further on those blogs, I can't comment.
Do you know if Ventana Veyron and Tenstorrent Ascalon will be available to regular consumers? I mentally lumped them in with andes from which I haven't seen any vector cores available anywhere, even though they "released" them a long time ago.
> and adding a parameter is tightening the contract

If a function took 3 parameters, and I've added another optional 4th one, how is that a tightening? All old callers are still using 3 parameters, their contract has not been broken.

Of course, adding a required 4th parameter is an incompatible change, if you meant that. I wouldn't call it strictly tightening though, since it's incompatible both ways. But yeah, excuse me for being vague, I meant adding optional parameters.

Similarly, adding a field to a struct which the caller does not have to initialize or mention at all, is, in my opinion, also not a breaking change and does not tighten. Since all callers don't need to change their code or semantics.
Zig helped us move data to the Edge. Here are our impressions
Libreoffice

I really like being able to write a letter or work on a spreadsheet in a commonly interchangeable format on various outdated PCs.

I don't have to wonder how many PCs I can install a boxed copy of 'home and student' on, I don't have to use a trial version that expires, I don't mess with cracks that might be malware. I really really don't want to pay a subscription.

I don't want my stuff in someone else's cloud. I don't want any nagging. I don't want the save-as button to start defaulting to "save to oneDrive" when an update gets installed.

I accept that some people think that Libreoffice is inferior to Microsoft Office and they may be correct for their use case. I mostly just want to make lists and add up numbers in a spreadsheet.

I have the portableapps version on a USB stick.

I sometimes want to shove a small old laptop worth $40 and some clothes into a rucksack and go somewhere for three days.
Do you think children should be in a classroom? I tend to believe that children should be outside personally, with very little indoor activity. Even if it's snowing. I learned way more by doing my own thing, what ever that is, then I ever did stuck inside of a class room having a teacher read word for word from a textbook.

I think there are varieties in the aspect of learning to be considered, some don't learn the same way of others. And that should be considered as well.

But generally I don't think attention spans have anything to do with classroom. People were not paying attention in classrooms WAY before cell phones were invented. The problem is the "room" part of a classroom in my opinion.

Reading I do agree with though.
This is a submission to a [contest](https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/01/01/mysterious-mysterie...) SMTM are running, so the author is very likely not the normal authors of SMTM.
Or to foment one of his own ;)
Real and complex numbers of arbitrary precision aren't computable. Physics doesn't need such arbitrary precision as precision is always limited by the uncertainty principle [1], which is why physics is computable.

[1] Peter Shor, "Because of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, the value of a physical constant can't be defined to more than 60 or 70 digits. And any finite-precision number by definition is computable.", https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/16889/non-comput...
If you are looking for other books, I’d also recommend “Normal Accidents” by Charles Perrow which is focused on what kinds of systems lend themselves to catastrophic malfunctions. From bakeries to nuclear reactors. It has a huge focus on how unimportant (and predictable) “human error” is to causing systemic problems and catastrophes.

Once you start seeing systems in terms of how coupled, complex, and the catastrophic potential they have/are, it gives you a new insight into how things work and function (at least it did for me)
> We're clearly at the transformer limits imho

GPT-4 did not scale up substantially in depth, going from 175 b to 220 b per transformer.
The Twitter Files have demonstrated that political operatives have used and abused Twitter in order to force the removal of content deemed inappropriate (such as the story about the Biden family laptop prior to the 2020 election). Before and since Musk's takeover, the corporate press have decried Musk as "dangerous" or "racist-aligned", because they now lack the opportunity to kill inconvenient stories about various political agendae. I have supported Musk as a more conscienscious and pro-human CEO than the previous leadership, though I have zero interest in his Neurolink project and find it dystopian.