skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At least founders team often can't be semi-global. A lot of VCs simply wouldn't bother working with you if some people on your board are not from US and it's even worse if someone live in some developing country. For them it's too much risk.
Rustaceans in shambles
I read this stuff and I feel super cynic about it. I feel like "no way, not on my watch!", and then I realize that all I can do is sign a petition, or send an email to a representative that has zero fucking clue what this means... Same reason it does not matter to my zoomer brother its contemporaneous TikTokers.

People DO-NOT-GIVE-A-SHIT. Because there are bigger problems, like "what the fuck am I going to pay the rent with tomorrow", and more entertaining spectacles, like watching a person pretend it's an NPC for 5 hours straight and give them money for it.

And I feel a lot of the people I have worked with are the same type of individual, used to realizing they are getting screwed sideways, addicted to complaining, but only as long as it's among a very select group of individuals sharing common interests.

It's the most draining type of revolution. Nothing ever gets done, fucks are handed left and right: DNS, JS-fiasco, web neutrality, browserland... And we always just kick the buck and revisit the good 'ol days on another thread further down the line, once no other rights are left be destroyed...

And yet, what am I going to do? reject the PR?
> No matter what I said, the AI chatbots I tried were unfailingly friendly and helpful. You cannot scare them off by talking about weird crap. You can’t bore them. They are always up for a conversation and always so supportive.

Probably because they're all just wrappers around GPT-4. Says a lot about how hard this behavior is to root out of GPT-4, though.
Data has been sufficiently anonymized for decades.
I agree. I remember learning about DNS when I was a teenager. And I've been running my own authoritative DNS servers for almost 30 years now. Remember the O'Reilly book, "DNS and BIND" ? It's still out, those this would've been first edition, around 1993.
Bullshitting always requires a hidden intention to manipulate.
To expand on this: It is extremely common for stormwater and sewage systems to be connected in such a way that a stronger than usual rainstorm causes unprocessed ("raw") sewage to be released into rivers and oceans.

Climate change is driving these stronger, burstier storms.

(Many cities are also working on decoupling these systems, but that is a very slow, laborious process...)
If a n+1 version producer sends a message to the message queue with a new optional field, how do the n version consumers have the right schema without relying on some external store?

In Protobuf or JSON this is not a problem at all, the new field is ignored. With Avro you cannot read the message.
Lowdown on 'e/acc' –Valley's favorite obscure theory about progress at all costs
> That doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about the oracle problem in the context of market makers connecting to nasdaq.

I don't follow, one of us is confused about what the other is saying and I'm not sure who. If the Oracle problem were solved tomorrow, one of the first things that would happen is publishing stock prices to ledgers so that derivatives could be implemented in smart contracts, yes?

Anyway, what I'm saying is, whatever real world data you'd like to have on a blockchain ledger, election results or stock prices or sports scores or whatever, the Oracle problem is specifically the fact that you wouldn't be able to trust it if it were there, not the fact that it isn't there yet.

> A congress who wanted to do so [1] could declare that henceforth the answer on the blockchain _is_ reality

This is a workaround - if the value on the ledger is the source of truth, there is no Oracle problem.
How to Forget the Lessons of the Pandemic
The downside to things that "just work" is that they become magical black boxes where learning how they work isn't a requirement until things really go wrong.
Hinton called them "confabulations" according to this:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/02/1072528/geoffrey...
Great questions and comments! Thank you. I'm going to take a break and return in 1-2 hours.
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Viewers? As my hypothetical has them planning this in the 90's, they would have been aiming for cable licensing fees. TV Land was fairly successful, by 1999 is was outperforming MTV.
Really. Tape media is bulky, expensive, prone to deterioration and the content back then started off low quality, so that deterioration takes a meaningful toll. Sure, a major corporation could afford to archive and maintain all of that material, but what's in it for them? A few thousand hours of repeating commercials and station promos?
In a nutshell, the oracle problem is, where do you get data to make automated decisions and do you trust that data.
Disagree. Avro makes messages slightly smaller by removing tags, but it makes individual messages completely incomprehensible without the writer schema. For serializing data on disk it's fine and a reasonable tradeoff to save space, but for communication on the wire tagged formats allow for more flexibility on the receiver end.

The spec for evolving schemas is also full of ambiguity and relies on the canonical Java implementation. I've built an Avro decoder from scratch and some of the evolution behaviour is counter-intuitive.
Damned if I know! I just remember thinking that if it was this bad inside, how much worse it had to be outside.
Seems pretty obvious because the main/sole purpose of business is to make money. Why would you want a government to act like that?
Are you building your context manually?
Oh, thanks, it works! I didn't think to try that. I'm used to UIs where you click a second time to go into rotate mode.
ecmascript I have to assume
Meanwhile I know people who look at analytics and numbers to decide what sports and activities their child (who is still in elementary school!) should be doing in order to maximize college admissions chances. It's madness. Don't play violin (even if you like it) because there are too many people doing that, you have to do something unique. Don't play basketball, it's too common and therefore too hard to stand out, you have to do something exotic. It's better to be average at something rare and expensive than pretty good at something ordinary.

We ramp up the pressure younger than ever, tell people that their entire future hinges on their success and getting ahead of their peers right now, then we're surprised that people crack under the stress?

(FWIW, the sports that seem to come up on top are rich, exclusive sports like fencing and polo, because they serve well as class signifiers in admissions)
What's being discussed is the release of information directly to the public, not strictly to researchers.
Why hasn't their stock plummeted like Google's?
Wrecking someone's life because of a single mistake is overly harsh, I'd say.
Whataboutism very much?

This is a matter concerning the entire populace, twisting that into calling it "populistic" is very weird.

Big tech is creating new or exacerbating existing social problems. By contorting social platforms into dysfunctional, addiction inducing ad dispersal machines for example. So of course, technical solutions have to play a role, too.

Finance is certainly not the party most culpable for data leaks. That's ridiculous.

Advertisement has very much use for demographic maps.
Yeah. Or here's another way to frame that: stores started punishing you for not providing your information by giving you higher prices.

Or another one: when you use a savings card, you trade some of your data for a couple bucks off.

(While on that note: in many countries – pretty much everywhere I've been, actually – you can just get a new savings card every couple months, or get a few and round-robin them and replace every couple months etc. Just fill out the sign up form with some garbage data and you're good to go.)
Looking back I've never been more active on internet stuff, social media, mindless youtube, the hn loop, than when unable to hang out IRL and do stuff with friends.
Given screens are correlated with mental health issues, the article premise seems plausible.
𝕏 monthly users reach new high in 2023
> `int` that only uses 3 bits.

CBOR approximates this, since it has several different widths for integers.

> an older message that I can use as the initial message to delta encode/decode from.

General-purpose compression on the encoded stream would do something toward this goal, but some protocol buffers library implementations offer merge functions. The question is what semantics of "merge" you expect. For repeated fields do you want to append or clobber?
https://www.theyworkforyou.com/

Has a fair amount of data about current MPs including expenses claimed and voting history.
Unrelated to climate, but speaking of unpleasantness indoors, the Houston airport authorities decided to let a barbecue restaurant open in the middle of the newest, nicest terminal at IAH, with smoke pits and all. It smells strongly of smoked meat 24 hours a day (or so I assume, as someone who has been in that terminal at both 2 am and at noon in the last few weeks). It’s completely intolerable and frankly kind of disgusting.

And I say this as someone who loves BBQ! It’s just too much, too soon, as soon as you step off the plane. I can’t imagine spending a long layover there.
We had a similar situation...broken Defender cabinet...free

A power supply and 3 RAM chips and my kids got to experience unlimited Defender...having 24x7 access to that cabinet like that, you picked up really interesting insights into the code...and the realization that, no matter how much I played, I was never really going to get good at it.
Cophones are running an Android version from e/OS/

You can access the virtual smartphone from a browser running in a physical smartphone. Unfortunately not all smartphones/browsers support it.
> Public institutions have a duty to the public that should be above any “self preservation” to protect itself.

Do you hold the same beliefs for publicly traded companies? Or do you just have unreasonable bars for government institutions only?
Long time ago, I saw this project:
https://github.com/everypolitician/everypolitician-data

I haven't used it, so I don't know about the quality of the data
Why not? Worldcoin is a shitcoin until you prove it has value.
It took a while for people to start linking to Twitter (sorry, X). I'd give it a bit. You can link to stuff though:

https://www.threads.net/@carnage4life/post/CvPrxHdr4Y2/?igsh...
It's clear you won't state your position clearly. It's really simple, do you believe as you said that things are good and that we are on the right track? You said that, then you muddy the water when pressed on it. What do you believe?
I use Tor for everything that doesn't require identification, and I use very few of those services. For example, this HN account and the email for it have never been used without connecting through Tor. Feel free to ask me anything.

>There are sites that I have been unable to get working

This happens, most of the time because of Cloudflare. A solution is to get a new Tor circuit 3-5 times, and then the page will load. If a site simply won't work, like Meta platforms I won't use them. Using alternative front-ends[1] makes most sites that usually wouldn't work, work as well.

>The Tor browser does help here, by not easily allowing obvious mistakes like using http.

This is false, HTTPS only is enabled by default in Tor Browser. It's common knowledge for everyone including users of Google Chrome and Firefox to not use HTTP sites.

[1]: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends
They've really taken off in niche places. If you have a complex model of something, it's dramatically easier to use of of these to build/fit your model than it is to code by hand.

But those cases are still things were you might have just a dozen variables (though each might be a long vector). It's more the realm of statistical inference than it is general programming or ML.

It hasn't "taken off" in ML because ML problems generally have more specific solutions based on the problem. If you have something simple and tabular, other solutions are generally better. If you have something recsys shaped, other solutions are generally better. If you have something vision/language shaped, other solutions are generally better.

It hasn't "taken off" in general programming because PPLs generally have trouble with control flow. Cutting off an entire arm of a program is trivial in a traditional language, but in PPLs you'll have to evaluate both. If the arm is a recursion step and hitting the base case is probabilistic, you might even have to evaluate arbitrarily deep (or you approximate that in a way that significantly limits the breadth of techniques available for running a program).

AFAICT, a truism in PPL is that there are always programs that your language will run poorly on but a bespoke engine will do better, by an extreme margin. There just aren't general languages that perform as reliably as in deterministic languages.

It's also just really really hard. It's roughly impossible to make things that are easy in normal languages easy to work with in PPLs. Consider these examples:

`def f(x, y): return x + y + noise` where you condition on `f(3, y) == 5`. It's easy.

`def f(password, salt): return hash(password + salt)` where you condition on `f(password, 8123746) == 1293487`. It's basically not going to happen even though forward evaluation of f is straightforward in any traditional language.

Hell, even just supporting `def f(x, y): return x+y` is hard to generalize. Surprisingly it's harder to generalize than the `x+y+noise` case.
> Apple does not have a trusted relationship with you, the software developer.

Yeah, they do, because they have to trust the certificates and entitlements that my app is signed with. All I'm asking for is an extension of that same idea to other parts of the app experience.

I just don't think we're going to agree on this, and that's fine. Care to call it a day and we can respectfully both walk away?
I mean, it’s pretty easy to imagine capitalism precipitating the end of the world …
I very very strongly disagree. It's important that researchers get access to diverse data and industry collaboration is often crucial for this. If companies are required to make all their data public they will be far less willing to collaborate with research. It's already hard enough as is to convince corporations that it's worth their time.
So they did have a choice. I don't like the notion that if you want something then you don't have a choice on the actions you take to aquire it
Wikipedia doesn't state that Greta flies, so I assume you're admitting your error.
Playing video games does not count as play, I assume?
Very few governments would.
Frankly I couldn't have put it better myself. Even voting with your feet doesn't work because the platform just moves on without you.
Worth pointing out that now more than ever society is NOT helping
these schools are horrendously insidious, nothing should be kept secret, and all this [tax-payer funded] data should be public to begin with
yeah, so? there are plenty of fat adapted athletes. and 'active' people don't come anywhere close to the needs of a real athlete.
Also, one can only login through instagram login id.
> I'm not sure I comprehend the immediate attacks (2/3 comments now) for, what appears to be, some neat research

I _dont_ have a problem with Roblox. FWIW I never used any of their product. I _dont_ have objection if HN discussed any of their papers published in SIGGRAPH specifically.

I _do_ have an ideological problem about a general blogpost announcing their corporate presence at conference <X> being promoted here on HN. If it was Google or Meta doing the same, my reaction would be 100% the same. Such low effort corporate advertising should not belong here. BTW, Google Meta MSFT all have such posts - and with good judgement (with the company of folks here), HN people don't post them
That headline could just as easily been "Facebook Agrees with Whitehouse Suggestion, Removes false Covid Posts".
I don’t use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because that’s where the people that I like to interact with (mostly writers) are. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk, but what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen. Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed only and the algorithmic feed on Twitter made a lot of people skeptical of that. Throw in the phone-app-only interface and it’s not where my people want to be. It’s a chicken and egg problem to be sure, and I don’t know where the new writer bar is going to be. It might end up being Threads ultimately, but the big challenge is for whatever new platform to get the movement happening.
There are lots of patchy solutions, but the issue we had was that we ultimately needed SMS and calls, inbound and outbound. 2FA only got us so far and wasn't usually the problem, more common was needing to call a company from the number on our account, or receive a callback from the company's support team.

Our ops team had a physical phone for this, but it lived in a desk drawer somewhere and that didn't scale as the team grew and became distributed.

I think what Twilio or others could do is offer non-VOIP, genuine, etc, numbers on the condition that the company and use-case is vetted and the usage is audited. A little like getting an EV SSL certificate, you'd give valid points of contact, undergo basic vetting of the company, perhaps even limit the count of numbers you can contact and require human review for increasing that quota.

Maybe this would be too hard, arguably EV SSL failed because it wasn't strict enough. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding why VOIP/automated numbers are so easy to identify, I assumed it was because they were higher risk in this way and that this sort of auditing would circumvent the need for that, but maybe there's another reason.
Me too. Plug-and-play consumer wi-fi routers were common place by the early 2000's.
A few echos on hearing that’s not quite there
"job interviews are not where you should have false humility I learned"
This is so true, definitely screwed over some of my earlier interviews due to doing this
> I'm not rejecting static types entirely, and yes I was discussing exchanging data here

OK I guess I'm having a hard time reconciling that with:

> basically all static typing
Ben can be short for Bennett?
Don't write to your politicians, write to the appropriate competition authorities. See this recent discussion[1], as an example.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36877310
Sure, but are you maximizing his college admissions chances via skills in carefully selected activities in order to stand out? (mostly joking, but this is how a lot of people approach scheduling these days)
But they'll always give you a new card. You can sign up for a new loyalty program id every time you checkout. But then again... If you don't pay by cash it won't matter as they'll link the sales by your payment method and bridge the multiple loyalties.

Also if they were thinking they could have bluetooth beacons at the registers to track cash users that have bluetooth enabled.

Also they have cameras looking at every checkout line. They implemented them originally to observe when lines got too backed up so they could automate sending out more cashiers. They could move to facial recognition of they really wanted. Not sure if they do that now.
This really hasn't been fleshed out at all, it's more like: "Well, we're built on Cap'n Proto, it'd be really easy to expose it for applications to use. But is it useful?"

Arguably Cap'n Proto RPC might be an interesting way for a Worker running on Cloudflare to talk to a back-end service, or to a service running in a container (if/when we support containers). Today you mostly have to use HTTP for this (which has its drawbacks) or raw TCP (which requires bringing your own protocol parser to run in "userspace").

That said there's obviously a much stronger case to make for supporting gRPC or other protocols that are more widely used.
Provide proof by de-anonymizing one data set from research within the past five years.
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Speaking with GPT-4, it is hard to deny the conjecture that its weights encode an internal world model somewhere.

If so, the difficulty is not that the model has no conception of truth and falsity, it is rather to motivate the model to tell the truth. Or more precisely, to let the model be honest, to only tell things it believes to be true, things which are part of its world model.

Unfortunately, we can't just tell the model to be honest, since we can't distinguish between responses the model does or does not believe to be true. With RLHF fine-tuning, we can train the model to tend to give answers the human raters believe to be true. But we want the model to tell what it believes to be true, not what it believes that we believe is true!

For example, human raters may overwhelmingly rate response X as false, but the model, having read the entire Internet, may have come to the conclusion that X is true. So RLHF would train it to lie about X, to answer not-X instead of X.

This problem could turn out to be fatal when a model becomes significantly smarter than humans, because this means it would less often believe according to human biases and misconceptions, so it would learn to be deceptive and to tell us only what we want to believe. This could have frightening consequences if this leads it to conceal any of its possible misalignments with human values from us.
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When von Neumann probes were proposed, we did not have working AI or 3D printers. They were merely concepts with some proof of concept systems in various states.

We now have those technologies. It is trivial to extrapolate how effective they will be in say 10,000 years if we avoid blowing ourselves up. By then maybe we'll even have a sustainable Fusion reactor, general AI, and atomic matter deposition.

Do you accept that von Neumann probes are a realistic proposition and that they could have easily blanketed the galaxy by now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft

> It has been theorized[3] that a self-replicating starship utilizing relatively conventional theoretical methods of interstellar travel (i.e., no exotic faster-than-light propulsion, and speeds limited to an "average cruising speed" of 0.1c.) could spread throughout a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as half a million years.

Half a million years. How long is that, really, in the grand scheme of things. And how close would we have to be to a civilization who released not one but millions of self-replicating probes for one to have visited us by now.

I am not saying this happened, but please consider it could have, it might have, and what if it did.

What if we are seeing these right now?
Yeah again the same social aspect is the challenge. We’ve resolved to tell our kids to forge their own path but they hear differently from friends, teachers, and other parents.