skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could be fun! Email: crcbos at g mail
E-cigarettes not a safer alternative to smoking, expert says
I think AI systems being able to the real world and control motors is going to be a game changer bigger than ChatGPT. A robot that can slowly sort out the pile of laundry and get it into the right place (even if unfolded) is worth quite a bit to me.

I'm not sure what to think about the fact that I would benefit from a couple of cameras in my fridge connected to an app that would remind me to buy X or Y and tell me that I defrosted something in the fridge three days ago and it's probably best to chuck it in the bin already.
Americans (myself often included) so easily take our insanely beneficial geography and natural resources for granted!
Claude is bad at code and great at everything else, I thought that was pretty common knowledge by now. I second OP where I prefer using it over OpenAI models these days
A Spherical Cow Model of Global Warming (With Data and Code)
This is true, but incomplete, and more saliently, misses the point.

[1] Yes, all the original 3 BSDs support x86-32. But they're not all: quite a few Linux distros still do, including Debian, Alpine, Void, and a number of other lesser-known ones. It's not entirely a legacy platform just yet.

[2] The point, though, is not whether they support 32-bit or not. The point is, do they run acceptably well on ~15+ year old hardware?

This is not about bitness. Linux supports 32-bit, XP supports 64-bit. That is tangential to the discussion. 64-bit x86 systems have been around for 2 decades now.

The real point is that up until about 20y ago, OSes were considerably smaller and quicker than now. Since then all the mainstream ones have got much bigger and much slower with little to show for it.

This is not immediately apparent because hardware has got faster. Not all hardware: CPUs haven't improved much. Raw single-core CPU performance scaling fell off a cliff in about 2007 and it will never recover. That everyone ignores this is one of the big lies of the industry.

But RAM has got much bigger and faster, and disk drives even more so thanks to SSDs and new interfaces for them.

SATA is about as old as x86-64. (Assuming a fresh clean OS -- any OS), put an SSD into a Core 2 Duo, and watch boot times fall through the floor. It's amazing.

But install a Linux from the 2020s on that machine and watch it become a slug.

Try Windows 7, generally agreed as a good version, on a Core 2 Duo and watch it struggle. Then nuke it and put XP64 on it, and watch the same hardware become fast.

I didn't believe it when people told me. So I tried it myself. It's astounding.
>OpenAI filters for a very specific philosophy when hiring, and they don't try to hide it.

Do you have evidence for this? I know two people who work at OpenAI and I don't think they have much in common philosophically.
I agree with the sentiment but it's legally and politically untenable in the US (edit: to use eminent domain)

Singapore was able to build out the HDB because it was a One Party State that didn't take kindly to activists.

For example, when the HDB program was being built out, there was massive resistance by the people living in the villages used to build those HDBs.

Those villagers often leaned socialist (Barisal Sosialis), and that party was largely neutered under emergency acts [0] with trade unionists and party activists being sent to Chaangi Jail indefinitely, along with protests and conspiracy theories about the ruling party burning down Kampongs/Villages to force residents to move into HDBs [1]

While this in hindsight was the right move, the cost is VERY HIGH.

The point is, redevelopment while caring for human rights and property laws is HARD. If you are a One Party State that can jail pesky activists willy nilly and owns all the newspapers, it's possible. But this is not how America works, and sure as hell not California.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Coldstore

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukit_Ho_Swee_fire
For a European person, I wonder if our fellow Americans would bother helping understand the rationale of such laws...?
Back before Covid I seriously considered joining the armed forces in Germany as a side entry OCS candidate. They were looking for people, still do, so the offered package wasn't to bad. Go through basic, go through OCS, get a rank in accordance to your academic degree (with a Master it was Captain for me, no idea how the rest of the service men think about that so) and sign on for 15 years doing something more meaningful than making sure rich people get even richer. Even passed the assessment center.

What turned out to be the deal braker was exactly what you pointed out: despite quite a few military bases close to where we live, bases that had a need for someone with my background at that (so no infantry combat units, but rather hardware and logistics heavy units like fighters and helicopters and the like), they were unable to give a gurantee to serve at the same location for longer than the initial year or so. Having family, a wife with a career and a house, moving every 3 years max just cause simply is a no go. Heck, even 6 months deployment were acceptable, if not ok, for my better half. I doubt so, that the Germany armed forces really understand how much of a problem that posses for recruiting when you need skilled people and not only people anymore. Which actually is a pitty. Funny thing so, this constant shuffeling around of folks even causes serious issues internally because a ton of knowledge is lost (confirmed by ex service members), so offering more stability would solve a bunch of problems. At the same time, they would also offer flexibility, because if transfers are still a thing, military spouses have so much more options pursuing their careers when serving partner can "simply" transfer to another post.
I did a lot of reading about it just now and this I think is the best report

http://energy.cleartheair.org.hk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/...

which I see as pessimistic. Although the plasma torch is using a fraction of the energy output, they are blasting oxygen or air into the reactor so pyrolysis is driven by combustion as well. The reactor is not breaking down dioxins so those need to be stripped. From an air pollution quality it looks acceptable but not great. Heterogenous feedstocks will confound the thing.

This gasification facility is in a class by itself,

https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/Coal/energy-systems/gasifi...

it was not able to pay for its capital costs but after a bail out it has been highly successfully at paying its operations costs. It is highly optimized and it is not just selling natural gas but also nitrogen fertilizer (uses the nitrogen from the liquid air factory that makes oxygen for the blast) and coal tar products and even waste CO2. It has a huge coal seam across the street so it is always consuming the same stuff so the preprocessing and cleanup are all standardized. It was “too big to fail” so people did stay the course and get it spinning like a top.
When dealing with a tech where people have credible reasons to believe it can be enormously harmful on every possible time scale, maybe it would behoove them to not rocket down the interstate at 200mph?
I swipe with my index finder, holding the phone with my other hand, and I find that fairly efficient.
It appears to me that the definition is compatible with the poster's notion 'affordability is not an intrinsic value of a building' in the sense that the definition depends on income as well as the housing itself. Problems could be addressed by increasing housing or by increasing household income, or by decreasing price, or some combination thereof.
But then what if someone steals the back off the phone?!? Apple needs to fix this immediately to prevent theft!
One notable thing, I have linburg-comstock in my left hand, and this is apparently not uncommon (estimated to be around 30% of the population in one form or another, iirc).

This means I cannot curl my thumb without my pointer finger also curling. This is not something that can be stretched or relaxed or otherwise fixed without surgery- my tendons are cross-connected. The result is that typing on a cell phone keyboard ends up cramping my hand very quickly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linburg%E2%80%93Comstock_varia...
Osiris-REx's Asteroid Samples Are Finally Down to Earth
It would hard to be more explicit than doing a demo of multi-modality in GPT-4, and having an audio API that is amazing and that you can use right now, for pennies.

It would be interesting to know if this really changed anything for anyone (competitors, VCs) for that reason. It's like the efficient market hypothesis applied to product roadmaps.
Humans aren't 100% reliable, but talking is still useful.
To anyone at Mastodon reading this, I cannot read this article without turning JavaScript on! Yes, I've read your message to that effect many times.

I can turn on JavaScript but I won't, especially for you Mastodon—because you portray yourselves as an alternative to those services such as Google, Facebook, MS, etc. that use JS for nefarious purposes.

If you were truly acting as an alternative and acting in good faith then you wouldn't enforce the large and slow overhead of JavaScript onto users without also offering a JS-free option. Moreover, JS is also a security liability which makes your action even worse.

Sure, offer JavaScript to those who prefer to use it, and to those who don't know how to turn it off, but to enforce its use is really a form of discrimination—discrimination against those of us who've been arguing for an alternative to Big Tech for years.

The web's been rendered an utter mess because of JavaScript—not because of the language per se—but because of those who've its power to abuse and abuse and disadvantage web users for their own ends—we've now reached the point where many of us find the web almost unusable.

Mastodon, you've let the side that's fighting for a better web down.

Shame on you!
In my experience, LLVMs are not about being provided facts. They are about synthesizing new content and insights based on the model and inputs.

Rather than asking it about facts, I find it useful to derive new insights.

For example: "Tell me 5 topics about databases that might make it to the front page of hacker news." It can generate an interesting list. That is much more like the example they provided in the article, synthesizing a bed time story is not factual.

Also, "write me some python code to do x" where x is based on libraries that were well documented before 2022 also has similarly creative results in my experience.
Developers should take it as a cautionary tale that no matter how much good work you do throughout your career, you will absolutely be remembered, above all else, for a stupid code comment you wrote late one night.

Don't vent in code.
Unsure what it’s like on android but it never fails on iOS. I think both 1Password and bitwarden are great on iOS. My issue is with the chrome and Firefox plugins for 1Password. I never have issues with bitwarden but 1Password I often need to refresh after logging in.
Both I think. I know they all took huge comp cuts. Their new roles don't offer any stock which I think they all undervalued immensely. Plus workload and employer expectations/responsibilities increased.
Imagine how fantastic you are doing, when your biggest user complaint stems from frustration with features they can not use just yet.
You joke, but I've seen phones that bonded the wireless charging coil to the back of the phone, selling the combination as a replacement part. Apple could definitely chip that component if they wanted to.
GDPR is already enforced on American companies serving EU citizens. Only if the American company never intends to do business in the EU can they get away with breaching it.
> I don't pay $20 a month for humans to talk shit to me though.

No - you probably pay more for your internet access ( home and phone ) ;-)

More seriously I totally get your point about accuracy - these models need to be better at detecting and surfacing when they are likely to be filling in the blanks.

Though I still think there is an element of 'buyer beware' - whether it be AI, or human provided advice on the internet, it's still your job to be able to spot the bullsh!t.

ie it should be treated like any other source of info.
Caleb Olson's Baby Sleep Coach [video]
The Baby Sleep Coach provides sleep analysis of your baby, using only a video feed. You can access the sleep analysis via a locally hosted web app, which runs on launch.

https://github.com/calebolson123/BabySleepCoach
I'd like to see them put speech recognition through their LLM as a post-processing step. I find it's fairly common for whisper to make small but obvious mistakes (for example a word which is complete nonsense in the context of the sentence) which could be easily corrected for a similar sounding word that fits into the wider context of the sentence.

Is anyone doing this? Is there a reason it doesn't work as well as I'm imagining?
During my last year in college, my programming languages professor (he was one of two CS professors I had who wasn't a complete boob) asked to have a meeting with me some afternoon. He pitched me on joining his graduate program since I was doing well in his class. I said I was hoping to do something with my skills that people would actually use, and his only response was some university team in another state helped contribute something to the USB mass storage spec. Uhhh no thanks. Left that meeting without another thought. I'm sure academia works for some people, but I wanted nothing more than to be as far away from that environment as possible.
Ridiculous. How dare poorer students be allowed to save money by making compromises on their living situation? All standards must be based on the preferences of the upper-middle class.
It is interesting that these startups did not recognize that the image modalities already existed, as evidenced by their initial GPT-4 announcement underneath “visual capabilities”
[1].

[1] https://openai.com/research/gpt-4
Your solution requires manual entry, this is a right click away (most people rather not spend time fiddling with uBO), also that solution relays on css selectors not changing in the near future, this extension keeps working regardless.
> “We have small employers who don’t even know about the law,” said Kerbein, who predicted there would be “a lot of unintentional noncompliance.”

Fair. But that's not how laws work. I may turn down a road not knowing that it's 35 and I get a ticket for going 45. Not knowing isn't an excuse.
Trying that example, I’d much prefer just going to the Wikipedia page on London Bridge than trying to guess what phrases ChatGPT will respond well to in order to elicit more info. It’s initial response for me didn’t even mention one of the most interesting facts that people lived and worked on the bridge.
> I’m not against using Postgres for this. But I am against the rolling your own distributed task queue.

Good thing I didn't listen to your advice... my DIY background task queue saved my website when Celery couldn't scale. Why are you against rolling your own task queue besides it seeming complicated?

https://wakatime.com/blog/56-building-a-background-task-queu...
The previous iPhone used a steel frame. The titanium makes it lighter, not stronger.
Concurrent is rarely faster than parallel, across almost any language that supports it. If you know that you don't need obscene scalability (1000 connections is pushing the edge of what's reasonable with parallelism) then stick with parallelism. If you overuse parallelism then expect your entire system (OS and all) to grind to a halt through context switching.
I really want to have discussions about technical topics. I've talked to ChatGPT quite a lot about custom encoding algorithms, for example. The thing is, I want to do this while I play video games so ideally I'd say things to it.

My concern is that when I say "FastPFOR" it'll get transcribed as "fast before" or something like that. Transcription really falls apart in highly technical conversations in my experience. If ChatGPT can use context to understand that I'm saying "FastPFOR" that'll be a game changer for me.
The smart people I've seen using ChatGPT always double check the facts it gives. However, the truth is that RLHF works well to extinguish these lies over time. As more people use the platform and give feedback, the thing gets better. And now, I find it to be pretty darn accurate.
An aside but I’ve long thought that if Apple was truly committed to the environment and equipment reuse they’d let us use old iPads for stuff like this. I’d love to make a digital photo frame/day planner from an old iPad mini I have kicking around. They could even integrate Siri etc.

(I know you can get some way toward this with various apps but it’s definitely not the same as something OS-level)
Can you flesh out the scenario that you have in mind?

As far as I'm concerned, if you wanted 250k but the Jr. Dev's range caps at 220k then you can still negotiate to be hired as a Dev.

But if you wanted 250k and the Jr. Dev caps at 240k I think it's pretty reasonable for them to hire you at 250k as a Jr. Dev and just say that when they made the ad they reasonably believed the maximum salary was 240k.

> [1] A pay range must include a minimum and maximum
annual salary or hourly rate of compensation for a job,
promotion, or transfer opportunity that the employer
in good faith believes to be accurate at the time of the
posting.

[1]: https://dol.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/09/p687-pay-t...
A very, very expensive carbon sink..
I have to wonder how much he was payed.
Well they are a private company so you are going to have to evaluate it on that basis, but reuters is generally considered credible.
Navigating ethical challenges presents a significant obstacle on our path to achieving safe Full Self-Driving. Imagine a scenario where autonomous vehicles find themselves in situations demanding quick decisions that directly impact people's safety. Take, for instance, an inevitable accident where the FSD system must choose between protecting its passengers or pedestrians. Resolving these moral and ethical dilemmas is an intricate task that requires the creation of well-defined rules for the system's behavior. Deciding whose safety should come first raises profound questions about human values, ethics, and societal norms, making the quest for secure FSD an ethically complex journey.
Actually, can you expand on this? What philosophy leads one to put the bedtime story example on top?

I’m genuinely curious about the different political/spiritual views that are growing up around AI. So maybe my question was not so rhetorical.
Hi Reddit
What you are saying is akin to saying, "stairs and accessibility are not exclusives". No, they certainly are not.

But there are some people who go to buildings every day who need an alternative to stairs. People in wheelchairs, with walkers, with strollers, transporting something heavy on wheels, and other scenarios I can't even think of right now, all rely on ramps to access areas that others access through stairs, and may find stairs to be more accessible. They are often a relatively small percentage of the population, but they exist, and as a society, we have decided that they deserve access to our buildings.

Similarly, there are visitors to my websites who require an alternative accommodation to JavaScript, such as people with slower devices which don't perform well with JS enabled, people who are concerned about security and privacy, people who are using a text-mode browser, people who are using something like wget to archive the site for later reading, and so on. There are, just like with the ramps, scenarios I can't even think of right now, but that are accommodated by allowing no-JS access.

And I'm going to continue choosing to accommodate them, bending over backwards to do everything I can to ensure that each and every visitor is treated like they are visiting a five-star hotel, not a prison.

Of course, this philosophy is not for everyone, obviously not for the Gmail team, and perhaps not for you either, but it works for me and my conscience.
> “By the time President Trump left office, he had made an estimated 30,573 false claims“

This sounds outlandish, but the repeating and doubling down on every false claim probably makes the math work out.
The Ministry of Defence is offering soldiers to support armed police in London
Testing took a few days and it remained fine in that time.

It was of course behind a firewall the whole time.

Also, the first thing I did was install an alternative browser. So long as you don't let any MS client app talk to the Internet, it's not _that_ bad.

I started with an old version of SeaMonkey, installed from USB, and then bootstrapped to newer browsers from there.

There are current 3rd party antivirus and firewall apps, and even with antivirus, XP is _startlingly_ fast compared to even Win7, and 7 is faster than 8 which is faster than 10 which is faster than 11.
What was behind Microsoft's layoffs of over 20k people in the last year?
If a range spans that many digits I think you haven't really done the work to figure out how much the labor is actually worth.
Ask HN: What level of job should I be applying for?
I am looking to change jobs, and wanted to get and idea of what level, junior, intermediate, senior should I be applying for ?

I have had a career that spans a few different fields so I am a bit of a generalist, making it hard to say where I actually land on the experience ladder.

Also any industries that I should look into to make the most out of my experience.

Undergrad: robotics

Internship (1year): factory automation/ PLC programming

Masters: computer science (algorithms and robotics)

Job 1 (2 years): embedded programming (security and algorithms)

Current job(2 years): backend/infrastructure/ data engineering at FAANG

At job 1 I also did some work that lead to my name being on a few patents. Not sure how valuable this is when determining level.

Thank you
I'm assuming you're referring to predominately the enlisted side? This also isn't a jab at enlisted people in general, just that many enlisted people come from economically disadvantaged positions in life. And, yes, many of them can yield a behavior that is questionably dedicated, but the people who continue to stay in are largely dedicated and others are rooted out in time.
> sign on for 15 years doing something more meaningful than making sure rich people get even richer.

I have some terrible news for you.
Recommend this post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/openai_use-voice-to-engage-in...
I dunno, this thread seems to be a bunch of RTO hardos & CEO apologists. It does feel like some have begun to enjoy the taste of boots now that the job market has turned, but thats just my opinion.
The Open Plot to Dismantle the Federal Government
As a hint as to surveillance in the UK, a poster which appeared on the London Underground some years ago. This is/was not ironic.

https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/collections-online/po...
I've wanted a ChatGPT Pod equivalent to a Google Home pod for a while! I have been intending to build it at some point. I am with you, talking to Google sucks.

"Hey Google, why do ____ happen?" "I'm sorry, I don't know anything about that"

But you're GOOGLE! Google it! What the heck lol

So yeah, ChatGPT being able to hear what I say and give me info about it would be great! My holdup has been wakewords.
That's brilliant.

Some blue states (I would be shocked to see Republicans support this, despite the fact more information is very pro-market) institute this and maybe someday at the federal level as voters warm up to the idea.