skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the examples you name aren't what pg has in mind. It's more like saying "God doesn't exist" in the year 1800. It was highly taboo to say something like this, and doing so would immediately damage your social standing.

The other point is: he doesn't argue one should ignore expert opinions in general. He just says that what is sayable in public likely has important blindspots, to which any expert is subject to as well.
Big US Airlines Fight over Safety of 'Travel Hack' Charter Flights
> but I do know that colocated teams have a better culture and perform better.

Citation needed. I work on a remote team, we see each other once every other month or so, and we get along great. It's one of the best teams I've ever worked with. I don't know what this "culture" companies keep trying to foster is, I'm not building a civilization, I'm not trying to "change the world" I'm showing up to do my job and get paid. I'll do my job to the best of my ability, I'll be considerate and polite and try to get along well with my coworkers. But at the end of the day I'd rather see my wife and kids than spend more time with my coworkers.
>If remote work truly is equal to or superior to in office work then you should be able to out compete in the long term using this competitive advantage.

This is an oversimplification in three different ways:

1. One can be a proponent of remote work without claiming that it is "equal to or superior to in office work". Remote work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. In-office work is better for a subset of people and a subset of jobs. The most common fallacy is that we must go all-in on one or the other. Having multiple people in a company, even on the same team, at different points on the all-remote to no-remote scale does not have to cause the mutual hindrance that leadership portrays it as doing.

2. Remote work has value for mental health, societal health, and work-life balance, which are things that may, abstractly, in the long-run, make a company more competitive, but it's subjective. The point is, "business absolutism" is a fallacy (i.e. the idea that a business must do whatever makes it the most money with no qualifications to that statement).

3. Disregarding #1 and #2, even if remote work was superior by business-benefiting metrics, the successful rise of all-remote companies would not be a prerequisite of nor a sure-sign of that statement. You would need controlled experiments, which are impossible in the business world. You can never, by the laws of reality, have a reasonable sample size of real-world businesses that are identical in every way except for remote work and "success".
This is actually a very lucid way to frame this. People love to complain that "Google is useless now," but it's pretty clearly not the case if you look at how most people use search.

What they usually mean is "nobody can find my interesting hobby projects and I can't find theirs." And that definitely tracks. As a person who poured a lot of energy into completely free, non-commercial educational content, it grinds my gears that there are 2-3 pages of derivative blogspam peppered with affiliate links - and increasingly, LLM-generated drivel - ahead of me.

What I think we get wrong is demanding that others fix it for us, though. Yeah, it's the cool part of the internet, but it's a commercially insignificant one. What the article is trying to do - pick a specific practical solution and lead by example - is probably better. Even if it's a rehash of what we tried in the pre-Google days.
Ask HN: What's the Trend on Offshoring?
I'm a software developer, recently laid off, and the job market feels flat.

I've been to a conference and a couple meetups and a common theme I've heard from employees and founders is that their companies are increasingly hiring from outside the US.

I'm thinking this is going to continue - especially with the advent of AI-assisted coding. Fewer software developer positions in the US.

Maybe startups who need that faster iteration loop will keep the team smaller and together?

What does this mean for US-based software developers?
I agree. I'm not, at this stage, tremendously worried about Microsoft finding ways to use its control of Github to get its own way in some kind of conflict.

I am worried about what happens if, or when, Github's owners decide it's time to stop caring about having a good reputation and instead squeeze it for as much profit as possible (what we seem to be calling "enshittification" these days).

Pointing git remotes somewhere different shouldn't be a huge pain, but all those issue trackers are a different matter.
As far as I can tell, the CDC is also stating an is-a relationship:

> an initialism is an acronym that is pronounced as individual letters
Toxic positivity is what the cool kids call it. Overtly positive, happy and encouraging comments that feel so manufactured and fake.
I think the biggest thing about GitHub being widely popular with OSS is that public repositories get free CI/CD.

I do not know of any other platform that gives you completely free CI/CD, there is either a usual limit or its a paid feature.
I'm not so relaxed about how easy it will be to move to a new issue tracker.

When you're moving from a self-hosted system to a proprietary system, you can do the work yourself to make sure there are redirects from the old URLs to the new ones.

That option isn't likely to be available when you're moving the other way.

I observe that github is happy for you to "bring your own domain" for github pages, but AIUI issue and PR URLs are always under github.com .
The photons have emanated in a sphere from point of origin with a radius of 13.5 billion light years.

The radius of the universe is irrelevant.
One line of code change to move from Open AI to Astra Assistants API
A fundamental property of money is "is a store of value". If it expired, it would cease to be "money" and would need to be called something else.
You say "buy out" like it's a bad thing. Presumably that's a huge win for you if you started (or have equity in) the company - and if not, you can just... not accept the buyout offer?
Just came here to express gratitude to simonw for documenting all this in real time, and all the cool tools (llm cmd line etc) he's been building, helping make all this more accessible and understandable.

I was also failing to get the retrieval API to give me proper citations, thought I was doing it wrong, so good to see I'm not the only one.
50% would be a lot. I don't know what the optimum number is, but 0.02% (0.0002 rate) is just not plausible.

One way to resolve this is to not have secret courts. Then we can judge the merits of these warrant applications in the light of day. If National Security is an issue, then delay the publication of court records by some fixed amount, and require an onerous process to keep the ongoing stuff sealed for those rare cases where it's needed.

But in practice, you or I or anyone else should be able to pull up all the warrants issued in 2016, or 1994, or 2021. We should be able to assess the quality of the supporting PC, we should be able to track the success rate of these searches (How many ultimately went nowhere? What was the FBI focused on in a particular year? Etc.)

All of this is a bare minimum requirement for a free and open society. Instead we get secret courts and a single statistic (99.98% acceptance rate). That's basically the same as a North Korean approval rating, or the electoral performance of a dictator. It's just too perfect to pass muster.
> Custom instructions telling the GPT how to behave—equivalent to the API concept of a “system prompt”.

Something changed with custom instructions in vanilla GPT4 a week or two ago. I have put in something like "I have got a pure white British shorthair cat called Marie.", so that I can refer to her when generating images. Worked like a charm. Until it didn't.

Now I have to always specify that I want an image of a cat, not a woman. Especially since stuff like "Marie sitting on the lap of someone" gets policy-blocked when ChatGPT thinks it's about a woman.

Now I've created a GPT, put a variation of that instruction in, and ChatGPT knows what "Marie" is. But it is kind of stupid to have a special GPT just for making cat pictures.
Here's a couple of plausible ways.

One is to make the condition for the backdoor trigger based on multiple (unlikely) instructions in sequence. This bug was triggered by a single instruction, so it would have been a pretty easy case for fuzzing. If you need a sequence of 10 specific instructions in a specific sequence, with no kind of observable side-effects for getting just the first 9 right so that nobody can do a guided search? That's not going to be found just by random chance. It doesn't matter what those instructions are, as long as they're not something that would get generated by real compilers on real programs.

The other is to make it dependent on the data rather than just the static instructions. Like, what if you had the SHA1 acceleration instructions trigger a backdoor iff the output of the hash is a certain value? You could probably even arrange for the backdoor to get triggered from managed and sandboxed runtimes like Javascript, rather than needing to get the victim to run native code. And somebody triggering this by accident would be equivalent to a SHA1 preimage collision.
Is this really an "AI" story?

Aren't existing weather forecasting models, already a form of "AI"?

I'm no AI/ML expert, but isn't the real story here is that a new model (like GPT-4.0) is better than the previous/existing model (GPT-3.5).

It's just grabs way more attention calling the new model "AI" (vs not referring to the old as such).
Hardly. They trained on the output of numerical simulations, so it's basically a method for summarizing approximate dynamics of numerical simulations themselves.
That's currently impossible. It requires the component model[1] to be figured out and that's taking a ridiculous amount of time because as anyone who has tried this before (and many have) this is really hard (languages have different semantics, different rules, different representations etc.).

If they do manage to get it working somehow, it will indeed be very exciting... but I've been waiting for this for several years :D (I was misled to believe this sort of modular thing was possible : but that's false unless you generate lots and lots of intermediate JS to glue different modules - and then all "communication" goes through JS, nothing goes directly from one module to another - which completely defies any possible performance advantage over just doing pure JS) so don't hold your breath.

[1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model
I'm fortunate in that I can control my office enough that I can simply eliminate the distractions. For the rest, there's pihole, Brave and Ublock. ;)

I may try this, as an experiment, but going into it, I'm expecting a fail.
If I do try it, I'll follow up.
According to the aria-label in the page: Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, SQL, and TypeScript.
Isn't that highly subjective to where you live? Because I moved to Scandinavia and the forecast here is so incredibly bad, compared to central europe.
https://archive.md/84p6C
I've also been eagerly wanting to know more about how openAI implemented the RAG their "knowledge base" feature is based on... but details are sadly lacking. It's hard to figure out what it is doing, and how to consistently get results.

In contrast to simonw though I've had some luck, I uploaded all the text on grugbrain.dev and got a very passable grug brain to talk to..: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-GhXedKqCV
Amazon promotes employees? I didn't know that.
I’ve always been partial to borrowing a bit from Perl and renaming .expect() to .or_die()
Elsevier and OpenEvidence partnership aims to help doctors harness AI
I would like to quickly share this through my social media channels. A sub-page with pre-made material to spread the word would do it. For example 2-3 Instagram story templates, something for X/Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, …
It's been good for me; I think it'll be great soon. AMD support on Linux is the biggest issue.

The upgrade experience from the Intel 12th gen to a Ryzen 5 took about a half-hour, doing only the mainboard and no display or hinge upgrades, and I was already familiar with the internals from assembling it as a DIY. It's not trivially easy, and there were a few frustrating moments that aren't unique to the Framework (ok, I'm just talking about the goddamned wifi antenna connections), but I've had a harder time upgrading or repairing just the RAM or storage on some ultrathin laptops.

The firmware limitations on ports imposed by AMD are frustrating in concept but less so in practice; for me it meant just swapping expansion cards from the rear slots to the front slots. I can imagine for people who had very specific setups it could be more disruptive.

But the OS experience was sloppy, and I'm not surprised that Phoronix waited until Fedora 39 left beta. AMD GPU issues necessitated kernel patches that wouldn't land in Fedora 38 by launch, and I still hit GPU-related memalloc issues with the updated kernel _and_ the BIOS update that Phoronix also waited for.[1] I've also hit the wake-while-lid-closed problems specific to the AMD mainboard that have onerous udev workarounds.[2]

The weird power supply limitations for using the board standalone, requiring at least a 100W supply for still less than full performance unless any battery is attached, also limits the flexibility that makes these boards attractive outside of the laptop case, whether bought for that intent or as a post-upgrade reuse.

1: https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-graphical-corruption...

2: https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-framework-amd-ryzen-...
> For the "you get food poisoning at home all the time and don't know it / its just like flu" crowd.. I'd argue you maybe have not had the most severe, rapid onset forms that you can get from a restaurant.

People who have had botulism know that isn't real food poisoning..
We don't know each other personally, but I fall in both groups. Don't regret it, and woupd do it again at the same point in my career. Because you learn more there in a year than you do in at least 5 elsewhere.
During Covid in many locations in France, it was both illegal and mandatory to wear a face-covering.
Cyprus lit up with flurry of oligarch transactions after Russia invaded Ukraine
No worries, Google does tend to do a good job of monopolizing attention in whatever they do and Epidemic Modeling is... complicated. Probably much more complicated than pretty much any other kind of modeling since people have the bad habit of thinking and acting in whatever way they want (sometimes with the explicit purpose of breaking your model :).

Now, if you want to see the real-world state-of-the-art epidemic modeling on a global scale, checkout GLEaM/GLEaMViz https://www.gleamviz.org/ (full disclaimer, in a previous life I was the lead developer).

And if you're interested in a basic intro, you can also checkout my (somewhat neglected) series of blog posts from the pandemic days: https://github.com/DataForScience/Epidemiology101 </ShamelessSelfPromotion>
Collison brothers interviewed on the Social Radar
Appreciate this perspective, Google certainly doesn't seem to get enough credit for it's wins. Ultimately I think this is because of the inability to take those successes and convert them into a number in their financials that investors care about.

Maybe it all boils down to a failure in comms though, Apple is just as much 'the iPhone' company as Google is 'the search company' when it comes to profits, yet Google can't shake the stigma that they can't innovate and deliver.
Forward Health launches CarePods, a self-contained, AI-powered doctor's office
That sounds fair to me.

On the other hand, pre-COVID I quit a job and took a pay cut to get a fully remote one, so it's a trade-off I'd personally be willing to make.
Seeing this and submissions from (the tongue-in-cheek) "bad software engineering practices" remind me of an exercise from David A. Levy, Tools of Critical Thinking: Metathoughts from Psychology (1997):

---

In the broader social context, the principle of considering the opposite can be utilized to increase one's understanding of--and empathy for--other people's point of view. As an exercise, select three specific issues (whether political, ethical, moral, legal, cultural, professional, familial, or intimate) about which you feel particularly strong.

Now, for each issue, take the perspective of someone with the opposite attitude or opinion, and write out, as persuasively as you can from their vantage point, the reasons, arguments, and feelings pertaining to their position.
It really does strike me that every publicized 'plot' from foreign 'terrorists'/their sympathizers has mostly read like they found someone with some grievances but not the inclination or means to act on them until the FBI gets involved.
> I used to be worried about face scanning. But sometimes I wonder if it's an inevitable evolution of technology.

The cat's out of the bag. But you can still exercise caution. I remember when that app FaceApp was trending, and everyone wanted to see what they looked like when older, oblivious to the ulterior motives behind the app. Essentially they were building a FR database from user generated content. So, don't feed the beast and don't upload your faceprint to apps every chance you get.
> not knowing what greentext is

> could have been one of the lucky 10k

> get's obtuse greentext reply instead

yfw
Also if you want a well supported precuse stylus on a phone or tablet, there is not really a choice as far as I can tell.
Luckily as a pro-paradoxian, knowing how I lose the time war is the first step in winning the time war.
What I don’t understand is why car dealerships haven’t jumped at this opportunity by giving up some parking spots for charging stations. They already have a lounge areas, have displayed cars for folks to consider, and many have some kind of snack bar. Add a cut of the charging fee and you a consistent revenue stream.
If workers don't organize [1], they will always be beholden to whomever was lucky enough to make it to the top and uses their emotions to drive organizational decisions. It's not just about comp, it is about not having agency. I totally get that this is frowned upon by a lot of folks who surf HN (call this whatever mix of bias you want, survivorship, confirmation, Dunning-Kruger, etc), but the stats tell a different story [2] [3]. People under 30 are very pro union (obviously! the US labor force dumpster fire need not be enumerated as a wall of text here), and older leadership or "thought leaders" [4] [5] will age out eventually (average CEO age is 59) [6].

Note no emotion or politics in this comment, because it is unnecessary but also unproductive. These are facts derived from first principles. If you as a worker wish to continue to suffer, status quo. If you want to not be treated like a disposable cog to be extracted from until tossed (whether out of the need to meet the quarter's earnings target or what feelings someone in leadership has), see above. My position is that the current deal is a raw deal, that it could be a bit more fair, and there are levers to pull to enable that. This isn't Marxism, this is "could we be a bit more kind to the people generating the value?" Life is short, and your exposure to the work/labor market during that lifetime should not be brutal.

[1] https://code-cwa.org/

[2] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230831-the-gen-zers-l...

[3] https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release-gen-z-is-the-...

[4] https://fortune.com/2023/04/23/remote-work-bullshit-real-est...

[5] https://apnews.com/article/sam-zell-real-estate-billionaire-...

[6] https://www.kornferry.com/about-us/press/age-and-tenure-in-t...
Being fossilized and found by future archaeologists a few thousand years down the line sounds like one of the better ways to end up. Too bad I will never know about it.
Between types or classes or generations of websites

I’m suggesting that we link all websites that exist in a unnamed class that includes the attributes of websites published prior to 2003 (as an example criteria based on when wordpress launched).

What would you name such a class other than Web 1.0 or old web or some such
The problem is that the "emotionally intelligent" baboons got really obsessed with people and culture lately, so they need some actual people around in order to inflict the fad-of-the-day on them.
This is a great post. I have about 10000 links saved in Pinboard over the past 10 years and to figure out how I could share.
Renaming database fields is ureasonably hard
Yes, driven by local data collection. More tightly packed ground stations and the availability of atmospheric measurement at various altitudes will improve accuracy.
The Aging Wheels channel on YouTube has done a good field test between a Polestar 2 and a Tesla Model 3: https://youtu.be/92w5doU68D8
Indeed that is an interesting philosophy question.

For humans though, their capacity is limited by biology. Some are for sure expert manipulators, but if the coming expectations are correct, even the most talented human will be like an ant pushing an elephant at ability with AI. Even just in volume today an AI manipulator could work on millions of people at a time, even coordinating efforts between people, whereas a human is much more limited in scale.

But yeah, it would be nice as a listener to be able to see every speakers biases up front! Horrific privacy implications though, particularly since we aren't really in control of our thoughts[1].

[1] Robert Sapolsky's new book "Determined" is absolutely incredible, and I highly recommend it
I have to admit, you had to have seen this coming. In terms of corporate structure, it never feels good to see managers enjoying a "benefit" that their employees don't. Imagine a remote manager in Florida who manages a team of people who are expected to live in and commute to Seattle every day? It just doesn't bode well for morale or team-building IMO.
Japan seeks new way to collect taxes on overseas mobile games
But they aren't investigating a crime!

The reason for allowing them to spy on foreigners isn't because foreigners are criminals. It's because we believe surveillance of foreigners might provide some protection for us. They are trying to prevent crimes, not solve them.
Goes to show that there’s a use case for unions in tech. Having access to high compensation and mobility during boom times doesn’t mean the companies still have the power to dictate policy even when a majority of their employees disagree.

Beyond the remote work issue, ask yourself: when has a modern tech company permitted their workers to work in cubicles, let alone offices, instead of open office floor plans?
yep I just talked to one of the climsim guys and included the project in my writeup of this news:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/14/courtesy-of-ai-weather-for...
Congress didn't earmark billions of dollars for "Countering Chinese Influence" just for companies like Apple to pull out of the scheme. Unfair!
> Humanity has already paid too steep a price learning why some truths and ideas must be rejected.

Honest question: When is it ever advantageous to reject truths? I always remind myself of the Litany of Gendlin:

What is true is already so.

Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.

Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.

And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.

Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.

People can stand what is true,

for they are already enduring it.
What makes it analog?
Sure, one of my former team mates made it from level 2 before joining my team in 2015 (?) to level 5 as of earlier this year. And they absolutely deserved that, Amazon being the only place I know something like that still happens to people without academic education.
Looking over another story on this at https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-unveils-first-ai-chi..., Cobalt seems to be a general purpose ARM CPU.