skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry I should have phrased that as starting in 1990...

In 1990 they poached Brad Silverberg who then spent the next 7 years poaching all of Borland's top talent in the most prominent example of a competitive 'brain drain' strategy that I'm aware of.

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Borland-Says-Microso...
If specific temperatures represent a meaningful problem, your colours should be standardised to show those temperatures, and not be automatically generated out of the whole spectrum of temperatures you currently have. In fact, having the meaning of colours change depending on temperature changes sounds like a pretty bad idea.
The Bluffers Guide to the Mythical Man Month
Do they really believe the path to AGI is through LLMs though? In that case they might be in for a very rude awakening.
Shareholders tend to be institutions whose charter is to maximize profit from the shares. An economic system that doesn't factor in human welfare is worth a thousand villains.
Isn't Microsoft in breach of contract here? Not by the word (parties hadn't forseen such event, and so there won't be anything about this explicity in the contract). But one could argue that MS isn't acting in good faith and acting counter to the purpose of the agreement with OpenAI.

The argument would go something like this:

MS were contractually obliged to assist OpenAI in their mission. OpenAI fired Altman for what they say is hindering their mission. If MS now hires Altman and gives him the tools he needs, MS is positioning itself as an opponent to OpenAI and its mission.
"damn its interesting Sam is raising money in the Middle East, you think he's contracting with Neom?"

"whoops wrong person"
i blame human error
Knight rider was extremely popular you're hitting a nerve there, jawohl
William Cleveland did some research along those lines and he wrote two good books:

- The elements of graphing data

- Visualizing data

The first one is of general interest, the second one more specialized for statisticians.
Amazing to see this on the front page multiple times and reposted every 20 minutes, each time as the highest performer on new. I've never seen such story velocity before.
I agree that is the most pressing need, and the one Microsoft has already started producing like all the other big players. I’d be very surprised if this topic hasn’t come up in conversations with Altman either now or even before the current blowup. But after that, a consumer play would fit so well! Start off with custom silicon for a couple of generations of Xbox and Surface, get DirectX working nicely with it. Then go after the rest of the market. Good use for Microsoft’s cash pile because it benefits basically all their product lines in one way or another.
Mostly integration, for example some library can only be configured via env variables, but a developer might want to configure it from with-in the app it's integrated into and used from.

Also, few weeks ago I found a use for them when trying to pass configuration from Java/Kotlin to C++ library to be used during static constructors (invoked during dlopen) on Android, because at that phase native code cannot call back to JVM.
Being the guy who built AGI will alter the timeline the most, so I think he'll be much more interested in that than being CEO of Microsoft.
Not only Github copilot but the general copilot integrations announced at Ignite for Microsoft 365 and other apps means a much deeper full on assistant integration for whole ecosystem.
"brilliant"

I think "predictable" is more apt.
It’s an official statement from the CEO of a listed company, who would be ill advised to say they hired someone when they didn’t.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/11/19/a-statement-from...
Signaling that they are not interested in progress towards a cliff… is a good thing
The comments point out conversion issues with EBCDIC. You can't use ASCII characters like @ which are not in EBCDIC.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2045#section-6.8 says:

This subset has the important property that it is represented
identically in all versions of ISO 646, including US-ASCII, and all
characters in the subset are also represented identically in all
versions of EBCDIC. Other popular encodings, such as the encoding
used by the uuencode utility, Macintosh binhex 4.0 [RFC-1741], and
the base85 encoding specified as part of Level 2 PostScript, do not
share these properties, and thus do not fulfill the portability
requirements a binary transport encoding for mail must meet.

If you want to learn why ASCII is the way it is, try "The Evolution of Character Codes, 1874-1968" at https://archive.org/details/enf-ascii/mode/2up by Eric Fischer (an HN'er). My reading is contiguous A-Z was meant for better compatibility with 6-bit use.
>I don't see why people want to race to build AGI at all costs.

It's simple: He who wins first place writes the rules, for everyone.

If Microsoft gets the first place win, they (and more broadly the USA) are who get to write the rulebook.

We are already witnessing this with "AI", it's OpenAI/Microsoft and the USA who dragged the rest of the west into the rules that they wrote because they got past the finish line first.
Also, do we mean ATOM in the same way that people insist on referring to TLS as "SSL", or do we actually mean RSS as in actual RSS?

If we could agree that ATOM is RSS 2 (or whatever MAX(version)+1 is) that'd be great.
Timezone bugs are evil and crop up at the worst times, though. The last one I (knowingly) wrote wasn't spotted until the CEO tried to use our software on holiday on the day of a DST change.
Does that not only work long-term with investment?

Unless they get philanthropic backers (maybe?), who else is going to give them investment needed for resources and employees that isn't going to want a return on investment within a few years?
hard to listen carefully when someone is shouting at you and lunging with a chainsaw :)

I'm not saying he is the next Pol Pot, but I'm trying to point out there's not much sense in pontificating over what a populist candidate thinks/plans.

Trump was a registered Democrat until he wasn't, etc.
Will be interesting to see how many OpenAI employees leave OpenAI to work at Microsoft.
Maybe the next move is an open offer to any OpenAI employees to join Sam’s team at their current compensation or better.. call it the ‘treacherous 500’ or something.
Maybe he needs a salary!
Odd. None of my private conversations are racist or sexist. Turns out I grew up in the short period where all racism is bad. I'm thankful for that.
Yep, if you wanted to move to MSFT from LinkedIn or vice versa, you needed to re-interview although finding a job rec and internal hiring manager was easier.
This comment doesn't make sense to me at all. I'm not sure that this is a valid comment at all.

This is not a rumor. The article references a tweet made by Satya Nadella itself. It is an official announcement. The board drama no longer matters here.

By the way, $900k comp with illiquid OpenAI shares means nothing anymore when Microsoft can now hire them with $900k+ in fully LIQUID compensation.

Not only that, OpenAI employees can go join Microsoft to work under Sam and Greg, who many of them seem to support.

This is a pretty big win for Microsoft.
Microsoft Says Altman, Brockman Will Lead New In-House AI Team
This whole saga will be a great demonstration of how much value a CEO does or doesn't bring to a company.

I'm of the mind that CEO's are like parents, an awful CEO can cause a lot of harm but the difference between an ok CEO and an excellent one isn't that big and doesn't guarantee anything.
Well, Thomas Dohmke is officially the CEO of GitHub
I agree that there's 0% chance Nadella would be lying. As the CEO of a public traded company, making false statements about something like this would get him in trouble with the SEC.
A simple way to improvise pub/sub messaging in an early prototype when you don't want to pull in a full message queueing system is to publish a timeline of events in an RSS feed.

The drawback is that when the system grows, you run the risk of going for the lazy default of keeping RSS publishing of events, and now you need to re-implement large portions of a message queueing system to achieve desired reliability of the RSS feed.
Z80 vs. 8088 Speed
Reality is indeed stranger than fiction. I don't have an opinion on whether this is good or bad for whomsoever. But it's entertaining for sure. Best tech weekend I have ever had.
There's no minimum wage in Sweden determined by the government through laws. I thought you had understood that, unsure why you are bringing minimum wage laws in a discussion about the Nordic model in Sweden.
Noticed that. She did soften that stance later. She seemed oddly invested.
Until the battery started to lose its charge, and the music would start playing at a slower tempo.
Satya Nadella must have been eager to get this news out before markets open for the week. As of 3 AM EST, MSFT was up 2% in pre-market trading.
True. You'll find Windows XP based terminals on many industrial machines. Its pervasive but outnumbered where "running the workloads" comea into picture.

The dev bubble is not that small. This very website is I'm pretty sure not served from Windows.

Other than stack overflow or few handful of exceptions, very little is actually served from Windows if I'm not wrong.
Or he planted the idea in Sam's head that he actually wants a for-profit AI.
at this rate no one ever invents anything cause everything is built on math

that some of the elements came out of somewhere else doesn't change the fact that Google came up with an impressive and game-changing piece of tech
I've not found anything that really competes with GPT4, and that's been released for some time.

> Isn’t breaking the strangle hold on AI what everyone wanted with open source models last week?

By other things getting better, not by stalling the leader of the pack.
A lot of techies will be left sleepless tonight and have a bad Monday morning :)
Sam's NW is north of $500 mil, he doesn't need the money. He needs GPU compute and MSFT has mountains of it
Can you put that in precise terms, rather than a silly analogy designed to play on peoples emotions?

What exactly and precisely, with specifics, is in OpenAI's ideas of humanities best interests that you think are a net negative for our species?
Recursion in Python suffers from limited utility due to the lack of TCO and the strict (but adjustable) recursion depth limit. JS, for all its problems, at least includes TCO these days. Shame Python has decided to stay on the worse path there.
These are incorrect priors, especially when the mega-corp in question is Microsoft under Satya Nadella.
For real, as much as I'm annoyed with the change, this is how it should have been

It is kinda like the 2->3 change with strings

And utcnow is a bad name. But the "fix" is none the better
Show HN: We made a tourism bureau site for our village in South Africa
Greyton is a popular holiday village in the Riviersonderend mountain range in the Western Cape South Africa. At the entrance to the village what was once a thriving tourism information office that existed on accommodation bookings commissions was pretty much bankrupt by Airbnb taking over most accommodation bookings in our village. Like many places in the world, houses were being bought by outsiders to put on Airbnb.

Significantly lower income for the tourist office meant it had to reduce its marketing activities for the village, offer shorter opening hours which affected the service it offers providing hiking & mountain biking maps and advice on routes, accommodation & events info & booking and helping many a traveler out who has run out of petrol (there is only one petrol station that is often empty, same story with ATMs)

We decided to make a Wordpress site in our spare time and we're pretty happy with it.

Take a look - would appreciate any comments, suggestions, insults, etc

https://greytontourism.com
Actions speak louder than words, and should give you pause to re-evaluate your trust
Another video from the page showing pose editing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QDPEcVmdLI
Just go for .secrets to get it all in one request.
I certainly hope you're right, but as I suspect I have less knowledge of corporate governance and politics than gpt-3.5, I can only hope.
Yes, when this whole saga is over they will probably absorb the carcass.
If you think Microsoft has a better track record, you'll find yourself disappointed.
It’s only been the weekend, it just feels like a week. The announcement that OpenAI’s board had fired Sam Altman came shortly before markets closed on Friday and as of this writing we’re about 5.5 hours away from when they open again.
Microsoft comp is actually not bad at higher levels, which I assume will be given to all OAI people that will join.
What do you use nostr for? Forgive my ignorance but, does it have uses beyond being a twitter replacement?
I doubt it would be hard for Microsoft to rebuild, Microsoft Research has made many excellent contributions to transformers for many years now, DeepSpeed is a notable example.

I don’t think they’ve had the will/need to have done this but they most likely already have the talent.
not so ludicrous. Some species are more important than the other. In terms of biomedicine, the lack of a single species having evolved a unique substance could change the human history.

Without knowing the list, we can't infer a lot about the impact or lack of impact. Some of those species could be obscure hybrids without real impact, the lack of other could be potentially catastrophic; but the effects would have been forgotten by now and assimilated as "the new normality". This is a glimpse of 1950's.
Nice zinger.

That was a lot of words.

One question - are there any patterns with who is involved in this gang violence?
You're suggesting that if an employee wants to change jobs, they should work in a field for which they have less expertise and thus get paid less. How is that reasonable?
I agree with you. Satya (msft CEO) has stated that sam is joining msft. The comment was a general overtone of the discussions happening online.

>> Now satya stayed up till 2am to secure up to 40 percent of open talent exodus

Are there any official sources for this?
NHS England gives key role in handling patient data to US spy tech firm Palantir
To be clear, he thinks that LLMs are probably a general architecture, and thus capable of reaching AGI in principle with enormous amounts of compute, data, and work. He thinks for cost and economics reasons it's much more feasible to build or train other parts and have them work together, because that's much cheaper in terms of compute. As an example, with a big enough model, enough work, and the right mix of data you could probably have an LMM interpret speech just as well as Whisper can. But how much work does it take to make that happen without losing other capabilities? How efficient is the resulting huge model? Is the end result better than having the text/intelligence segment separate from the speech and hearing segment? The answer could be yes, depending, but it could also be no. Basically his beliefs are that it's complicated and it's not really a "Can X architecture do this" question but a "How cheap is this architecture to accomplish this task" question.
Satya pulls this together in 48 hours from a cold start and gets it signed and over the line before markets open, well played indeed.
i'd recommend ComPressure (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1528120/ComPressure/) and Infinite Turtles (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1952740/Infinite_Turtles/), though the latter still lacks enough reviews to fit the Steam rating requirement.

I'm also not sure on where something like the Poly Bridge series would fit.
It sounds interesting but I use https://hnrss.github.io/

Unless it had most of the features of hnrss.org I would not be able to use it.

A /topic or /category feature on hnrss.org may be nice. They accept some PRs.
Human character doesn't change that much, let's say that in his heart Sam is more of of a move fast and commercialize type of leader and Ilya doesn't want that. Do you think them sitting down and talking about it is really going to change things that much? People are who they are. If anything they've probably had these exact conversations many times already. Not every relationship is fixable, sometimes people are just incompatible.

As for the board's silence to the public, this should be obvious. Talking about their thinking/plans/reasons for firing Sam exposes them to all kinds of risk both legally and otherwise. The safe move is to stay quiet in public and continue talks with the relevant stakeholders (Microsoft, Sam + loyalists) in private
I don't quite get why this is a problem per se.

I mean, the environment is just a chunk of memory made available to the process by the OS. It is no more, no less thread safe than any other chunk of memory.

Why would the libc need to protect it more than any other memory location?
Ilya should just go to Anthropic AI at this point. They have better momentum at this point after all this, and share his ideals. But it would be funny because they broke off of OpenAI because of their Microsoft ventures already in 2019, haha. He'd be welcomed with a big "We told you so!"
RSUs have got to be better than PPUs.
Remember when they did this?

"Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion" -https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/

To then write down their assets?

"How Skype lost its crown to Zoom" - https://www.wired.co.uk/article/skype-coronavirus-pandemic
Or when they did this ?

Or how in 2014...

"Microsoft buying Nokia's phone business in a $7.2 billion bid for its mobile future" - https://www.theverge.com/2013/9/2/4688530/microsoft-buys-nok...

Then in 2016 sold it for 360 million?

"Nokia returns to the phone market as Microsoft sells brand" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/18/nokia-ret...
Volvo Cars was sold to Ford in 1999 when Volvo AB decided to focus on commercial vehicles, there's no financial trouble except the one that Ford went through during the 2008 crisis...

> When the global economic crisis of 2008 threatened the US automakers, Swedish authorities became concerned about the fate of Volvo, should Ford file for bankruptcy. These concerns mounted after repeated mass-layoffs at Volvo. In December 2008, Ford announced that it was considering selling Volvo Cars. Initially, a sale price of US$6 billion was reported.

Your conjecture has no basis in reality, it was not due to unions creating higher costs, it was the mess the USA created for the world in 2008 that prompted the sale of Volvo from Ford to Geely.
https://x.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538
trashing on Israel became a rather common pastime activity ...

I wonder how much of what is written is not fictional, given the misuse of words such as "sterilization".

What's next? testing for christian children's blood in Matzos? LOL
Satya Wins
Satya Pulls this together in 48 hours from a cold start and gets it signed and over the line before markets open, well played indeed.
This is probably the biggest single weekend in tech ever?

And crazy news just keeps on coming…
Precisely why this was all announced into the early morning hours of Monday.
Or just accept that their image is overinflated just because they happened to be in the right place at the right time. Ofcourse they had a hand on building that successful team but do not underestimate the fact that, that successful team was build with the promise of nonprofit, AI for the benefit of all And few of them would have joined Microsoft out of principle.
Except the board made themselves irrelevant with their antics

People will be looking at Sam now, and it wouldn't be surprised if half of OpenAI just migrates to MS now
"Talent secured"
On the contrary - I will now be actively looking for opportunities to join OpenAI, while I wasn't particularly interested beforehand.
How is stability AI still alive?
Source for the below: Worked at Skype before and after the MS acquisition.

MSFT's control isn't as "hard" as you portray it to be. At the senior leadership level they're pretty happy to allow divisions quite a lot of autonomy. Sure there are broad directives like if you support multiple platforms/OSes then the best user experience should be on "our" platform. But that still leaves a lot of room for maneuverability.

Soft control via human resources and company culture is a whole other beast though. There are a lot of people with 20+ years of experience at Microsoft who are happy to jump on job openings for middle-management roles in the "sexy" divisions of the company - the ones which are making headlines and creating new markets. And each one that slides on in brings a lot of the lifelong Microsoft mindset with them.

So yeah working within MS will be a very different experience for Altman, but not necessarily because of an iron grip from above.
This is not Melkor era. It's Sauron.
> You might notice that Microsoft shareholders are also part of humanity and destroying humanity would be highly detrimental to Microsoft's profits

Will nobody think of the poor shareholders?

> I am always bemused by how people assume any corporate interest is automatically a cartoon supervillain.

It’s not any more silly than assuming corporate entities with shareholders will somehow necessarily work for the betterment of humanity.
I live in a village of about ~1300 in West Sweden (couple hours outside of Gothenburg), surrounded by lakes and forests.

There are two art/craft/design schools in town, one of which has been here for nearly a century, resulting in a regular influx of young people with creativity and energy (of which a handful stay in the area) as well as a populace that’s become accustomed to new ideas and new ways of doing things through generations.

I’m a member of a non-profit association (consisting primarily of former students who stayed) that operates a co-working space, which is where I work most days. Working alongside primarily non-tech folks is wonderful—no need to talk tech during lunch or breaks.

It’s not all roses. It’s a poor region with declining population (and therefore worsening quality of municipal services). I think remote work could play an important role in revitalizing the area, but I’m naturally a bit biased about that.
Microsoft: We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI
You can get far by banning private profit from other people's vices.

0r at least regulating it, if private profit complains too much.

The goal isn't to eradicate vice, it's to avoid situations where people create misery for others because they stand to profit from it.
I want the AI to do exactly what I say regardless of whether that is potentially illegal or immoral is usually what they mean.
I am not claiming how right or wrong the final outcome would be, but owning the technology with a clear "for-profit" objective is definitely a better structure for Microsoft and for Sam Altman as well (considering, his plans for the future). I have no opinion on AI risk. I just think that a super valuable technology under a non-profit objective was simply an untenable structure, regardless of potential threats.
I think that if Sam had followed the typical VC/Startup playbook (and he even wrote one), he never would have joined OpenAI, a nonprofit based on totally unproven tech at the time. He was already quite rich and powerful from YC, and decided to take a big risk on AI. I think there was at least some genuine idealism involved.
>They won’t be able to accomplish their mission without external funding

The 10 billion in compute will get them reasonably far (and I don't see how Microsoft legally gets out of this, unless it said "you can't fire sam" in the contract).

That said I also wouldn't be surprised if Elon[1] jumps back into the fray somehow given how close he is to Ilya and that the change towards commercialization was what put him off openAI.

[1]https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1726376406785925566?s=20
you will be eating canned beans, they will ride high as they do now