skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of things I really loved about Last Jedi and a lot of things I really hated about Last Jedi. It was such a mixed bag.

I hate the way it threw out the Star Wars universe's physics - because it took me right out of the universe. Yes, the Star Wars universe never had realistic physics, but it did have reasonably self-consistent physics and Last Jedi threw them away. It had bombs falling in space (as opposed to being projected as missiles), it had turbolasers arcing (not something it ever had before), it introduced hyperspace fuel in order to make the finale escape make sense (they could have just used an interdictor instead). It was maddening.

But they almost did something really cool with the force, throwing out the dark/light dichotomy and replacing it with balance. They could have had Rey and Ben actually see eye to eye and both become grey Jedi after dispatching Snoke and finally obtaining the prophesied balance in the force. That would have opened up all kinds of interesting new places to take Star Wars and new stories to explore. But they chickened out at the last second.

And then yeah, the whole last half of the movie with the slow space chase, escape plan, side quest... none of that made any sense in terms of its writing.
Contrary to fread(), getenv() does not copy data. It returns a pointer to memory that might be invalidated by the following setenv(). In other words, it can't be really made threadsafe -- it's fundamentally a thread-unsafe API.

What could be done is offering an alternative, thread-safe API that takes an RW mutex on get/set, and get reads to a user-provided buffer. However, that would be complicated as well because the user can't know the size of any envvar, and getting the size before reading the var is racy. So maybe there needs to be env_lock()/env_unlock() and getenv_unlocked()/setenv_unlocked(). Or a version that locks and strdups() the var. But that still leaves the problem that existing software does not use this API.

And really, why would you set envvars instead of global variables? Seriously? A data structure that is a list of KEY=VALUE formatted zero-terminated string pointers? Just don't do it. Use setenv() only at startup and after fork() and before exec(), done.
Hmmm, just what are you willing to do for API access?
I have experienced similar delays when clicking links from google search.
Watching this all unfold in the public is unprecedented (I think).

There has never been a company like OpenAI, in terms or governance and product, so I guess it makes sense that their drama leads us in to unchartered territory.
He was on the board that took the decision to fire Altman and also is the new President of the OpenAI board of directors
More importantly to me, I think generating synthetic data is OpenAI's secret sauce (no evidence I am aware of), and they need access to GPT-4 weights to train GPT-5.
Talent exists in a market too
> All due to one word: Greed.

I would say it's due to unconventional not-battle-tested governance.
On the contrary, the best thing about RSS is that it works on a completely static HTTP host. All these "modern" syndication protocols require you to run some kind of specialized software/script on your server which makes things needlesly complex, resource hungry, hard to scale not to mention a potential secruity issue. RSS keeps it simple, that's a good thing.
Sexual misconduct. Ilya protects Sam by not letting this spiral out in media.
> Microsoft can easily afford to offer them $30M of options each

But it doesn’t have to. And the politics suggest it very likely won’t.
You know, this makes early Google's moves around its IPO look like genius in retrospect. In that case, brilliant but inexperienced founders majorly lucked out with the thing created... but were also smart enough to bring in Eric Schmidt and others with deeper tech industry business experience for "adult supervision" exactly in order to deal with this kind of thing. And they gave tutelage to L&S to help them establish sane corporate practices while still sticking to the original (at the time unorthodox) values that L&S had in mind.

For OpenAI... Altman (and formerly Musk) were not that adult supervision. Nor is the board they ended up with. They needed some people on that board and in the company to keep things sane while cherishing the (supposed) original vision.

(Now, of course that original Google vision is just laughable as Sundar and Ruth have completely eviscerated what was left of it, but whatever)
The only library I've seen to use env vars is libc, which uses them to decide how malloc should behave for example.
I don’t even care who just as long as it’s two. But yeah one google camp one Microsoft camp.

With a bit of luck Amazon too. This space just really can’t become a monopoly
If the board had any balls they'd call them on their bluff. I'd love to see it honestly, a mass resignation like that.
All of the employees work for (and many have equity in ) for a for-profit organization which is owned partially by the non-profit who controls everything and Microsoft. The non-profit is effectively a shell to overview the actual operations and that's it.
Maybe they found AGI and it is now controlling the board #andsoitbegins.
None of it makes sense to me now. Who is really behind this? How did they pull this off? Why did do it? Why do it so suddenly, in a terribly disorganized way?

If I may paraphrase Churchill: This has become a bit of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
"if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you’re gonna have a bad time"
"I doubt it was all planned: it would take an extraordinary mind to foresee all the possible twists."

From our outsider, uninformed perspective, yes. But if you know more sometimes these things become completely plannable.

I'm not saying this is the actual explanation because it probably isn't. But suppose OpenAI was facing bankruptcy, but they weren't telling anyone and nobody external knew. This allows more complicated planning for various contingencies by the people that know because they know they can exclude a lot of possibilities from their planning, meaning it's a simpler situation for them than meets the (external) eye.

Perhaps ironically, the more complicated these gyrations become, the more convinced I become there's probably a simple explanation. But it's one that is being hidden, and people don't generally hide things for no reason. I don't know what it is. I don't even know what category of thing it is. I haven't even been closely following the HN coverage, honestly. But it's probably unflattering to somebody.

(Included in that relatively simple explanation would be some sort of coup attempt that has subsequently failed. Those things happen. I'm not saying whatever plan is being enacted is going off without a hitch. I'm just saying there may well be an internal explanation that is still much simpler than the external gyrations would suggest.)
Computer engineering degrees already exist, but they're much closer to the hardware.
I haven't see this other than for brief periods during quality switching (it seems to play out the current buffer in lower quality but new chunks are downloaded at the displayed target quality). However for some reason it does often just load at a very low (sub-720p) resolution and I need to manually up the quality or it will never get to the highest quality (I'm watching on a 4k monitor with great internet and hardware decoding, 4k has never stuttered for me).
Fuck you money was always a lottery ticket based on OpenAI's governance structure and "promises of potential future profit." That lottery ticket no longer exists, and no one else is going to provide it after seeing how the board treated their relationship with Microsoft and that $10B investment. This is a fine lifeboat for anyone who wants to continue on the path they were on with adults at the helm.

What might have been tens or hundreds of millions in common stakeholder equity gains will likely be single digit millions, but at least much more likely to materialize (as Microsoft RSUs).
"So yes AI can reduce work, but arguably work that was never required nor beneficial to humanity to begin with"

Hm, just a suggestion, I would be careful with such statements, if you don't want to insult peoples work you know nothing about.

Because LLMs enable a very broad spectrum of work. I don't use them in my current workflow(nor am I that easily insulted), but the times I did use them, they were useful. My problem with them was mainly ChatGPT4 was out of date, but it did produce very useful results for me for WebGPU and Pixijs, which I had not used before and the solutions it gave me, I could not find on the internet. So for my novel work, they don't help me in general, but they do help me if I need a new custom part, without having to reinvent the wheel.

And then of course there are people who greatly benefit from them, who did not study CS, like a friend who is ecologist and all he wants are some custom python scripts, to modify his GIS tool. I think he is doing useful work and with LLMs he is indeed spending less time on his (freelance) work and has more time for his children. Isn't that, what you are also hoping for?
> "In this scenario, I set up my non-profit school-- and then I hire a profitable management company to run the school for me. The examples of this dodge are nearly endless... consider North Carolina businessman Baker Mitchell, who set up some non-profit charter schools and promptly had them buy and lease everything - from desks to computers to teacher training to the buildings and the land - from companies belonging to Baker Mitchell."

https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/07/for-hrc-profit-v...

As far as the IRS, this may be entirely legal due to tax loopholes pushed through by lobbyists and bought politicians, or it may take so many IRS resources to unravel that it tends to go ignored.
There's acquihires and then I guess there's acquifishing where you just gut the company you're after like a fish and hire away everyone without bothering to buy the company. There's probably a better portmanteau. I seriously doubt Microsoft is going to make people whole by granting equivalent RSUs, so you have to wonder what else is going on that so many seem ready to just up and leave some very large potential paydays.
What's odd is this letter was published after the announcement Altman took the Microsoft gig. So are those resignations in yet, or not?
Right, _until he brought up inpainting and outpainting_. And as I already laid out, the audio options made just about as much sense as the art.

I honestly can't believe how committed you are to explaining to me that as the only person who bothered answering, I'm the problem.

I've been in AI art when it was 10 people in an IRC room trying to figure out what to do with a bunch of GPUs an ex-hedge fund manager snapped up, and spent the last week working on porting eSpeak, the bedrock of ~all TTS models, from C++.

It wasn't "obvious" they didn't mean art, and it definitely was not obvious that they want to splice real voice clips at arbitrary points and insert new words without being a detectable fake for a video game. I needed more info to answer. I'm sorry.
In the 70s and 80s we had Cinema 180 and Dimension 360, everything old is new again.
It's extrazordinary to watch, I'll say that much.

I still think 'Altman's Basilisk' is a thing: I think somewhere in this mess there's actions taken to wrest control of an AI from somebody, probably Altman.

Altman's Basilisk also represents the idea that if a charismatic and flawed person (and everything I've seen, including the adulation, suggests Altman is that type of person from that type of background) trains an AI in their image, they can induce their own characteristics in the AI. Therefore, if you're a paranoid with a persecution complex and a zero-sum perspective on things, you can through training induce an AI to also have those characteristics, which may well persist as the AI 'takes off' and reaches superhuman intelligence.

This is not unlike humans (perhaps including Altman) experiencing and perpetuating trauma as children, and then growing to adulthood and gaining greatly expanded intelligence that is heavily, even overwhelmingly, conditioned by those formative axioms that were unquestioned in childhood.
Troubleshooting Your Microservices in Zero Code
At least he consistently works towards whatever he currently believes in. Though he could work on consistency in beliefs.
Yes, that probably was a mistake, it should have come with more protections. But I haven't seen any documents on the governance other than what is in the media now and there is a fair chance that MS did have various protections but that the board simply ignored those.
Maybe the employees of OpenAI should stop a second and think about their privileges as rock stars in a super hyped startup before they bail for a job in a corporation where everything and everyone is setup to be replaceable.
and why is it bad? Global population seems to finally be reaching its peak.
Googling Will Hurd only shows up a Republican politician with a history at the CIA. Is that the right guy? Can't be.
Fwiw, that's what's currently happening with this function, it is deprecated only, and I don't think there's a clear deadline yet on at what point it will officially get removed. So no code will stop working in the near future, and any code that does use this function will simply get a very clear warning pointing them in the correct direction.
OpenAI may just be a couple having an angry fight, and M$ is just the neighbor with cash happy to buy all the stuff the angry wife is throwing out for pennies on the dollar.
Watching all this drama unfold in the public is unprecedented.

I guess it makes sense. There has never been a company like OpenAI, in terms or governance and product, so I guess it makes sense that their drama leads us in to unchartered territory.
> 550 of 700 employees

Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.

It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.
There's no one to fire the board. They're not accountable to anyone but themselves. They can burn down the whole company if they like.
Any journalist covering the OpenAI story must be swearing and cursing at the board at this moment..
Ilya is hard to replace, and no one thinks of him as a political animal. He's a researcher first and foremost. I don't think he needs anything more than being contrite for a single decision made during a heated meeting. Sam Altman and the rest of the leadership team haven't got where they are by holding petty grudges.

He doesn't owe us, the public, anything, but I would love to understand his point of view during the whole thing. I really appreciate how he is careful with words and thorough when exposing his reasoning.
That settles it it has to be the AGI orchestrating it all.
I switched from conda to mamba a while ago and never looked back (it's probably saved dozens of hours from waiting for conda's slow as molasses package resolution). I'm looking at the latest docs and it doesn't look like there's any deprecation messages or anything (it does warn against installing mamba inside of conda, but that's been the case for a long time): https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation/mamba-in...

It looks like miniforge is still the recommended install method, but also the anchor has changed in the repo docs, which I've updated, thx. FWIW, I haven't run into any problems using mamba. While I'm not a power user, so there are edge cases I might have missed, but I have over 35 mamba envs on my dev machine atm, so it's definitely been doing the job for me and remains wicked fast (if not particularly disk efficient).
First, there is no such thing as "galactic RAM".

Second, there are three images of the same graph, each showing how access times aren't linear when they cross cache boundaries. There aren't any transforms and there aren't any aggregate transforms f -> f’.

Third, algorithmic complexity is about abstract amounts of work relative to amount of elements. It isn't about "a series of sub-systems" or "galactic RAM".

This article shouldn't use big O notation because it isn't really about algorithms, it is just about non constant access times.
I've seen a lott of EU tech startups over the years, and in litterally 0 cases regulation was a concern.
This feels like a sneaky way for Microsoft to absorb the for-profit subsidiary and kneecap (or destroy) the nonprofit without any money changing hands or involvement from those pesky regulators.
"I am NOT a BELLBOY!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8oVTKG39U8&t=27s
And honestly regrets it. Someone claimed he is faking regret for reasons, which is doubtful
“Employees” probably means “engineers” in this case. Which is a wide majority of OpenAI staff, I’m sure.
There are thousands of extremely talented ML researchers and software devs who would jump at the chance to work at Open AI.

Everyone is replaceable.
Switch Transformers C – 2048 experts (1.6T params for 3.1 TB) (2022)
I see the licence issue, so hypothetically, if a LLM was only trained on code that explicitely allowed LLM training, would you use that?
I enjoyed it a lot too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aax-ehkRTnQ

Coincidentally I didn't search for it, I was watching a video on how to use FFT on my oscilloscope and I noticed the name "Geerling" on one of the recommended videos on the right hand side and it was this one! And purely a coincidence too, I don't see how YT could have known I was reading this thread.
why would he be decel / safety-over-commercialization as the owner of poe?
In a certain light smartphones resemble the moral equivalent of violating the Prime Directive.

"Here, rural areas and undeveloped nations. Take this crippled, distorted window into the greater internet. It happens to be much better at viewing content than creating it and will surveil you more closely than ever you watch it. The preinstalled software is forbidden to remove. Don't view it more than ten minutes a day or the content recommended by social media algorithms may cause malaise. Like and subscribe for more content."
Oh wow. I’ve been feeling this but had ascribed it to the new ad blocker war thing.

Surely this is straight to court for anti-competitive behaviour?
Then the tests must be faulty. At least, they don't reflect the real-world experience of me and my friends. USB-C has a much higher failure rate for us.
> though the reasons are completely different

For example, but not limited to: there's no point having an AI you're not using, using it — even as an Oracle — involves some kind of interaction with the outside world in the form of what questions you ask and what actions you take in response.
It's the softness of software that makes it hard.

Building a bridge is something where external participants cannot really tell you much about what it should look like. They know you can't just double the number of lanes or add a train track as you're doing it.

With a software project, people can ask for all sorts of stuff, and because it's soft, some engineer will say "ok let me see if I can look at that for you".

Not only that, if you write your software so that it's rigid, that's bad code! You need it to be flexible so that you can cater for future concerns.

Softness also means you have to keep up with trends. You can write your next website with a newer, fancier js framework, and people can make these new frameworks are just sitting at home at their desk. They aren't mixing new concretes.
> The removal came after users widely shared a blog from Texts.com showing that messages sent with Sunbird’s system aren’t actually end-to-end encrypted — and that it’s not hard to compromise it

https://texts.blog/2023/11/18/sunbird-security/
Quick question for some of the folks here who may have a handle on how VC's may see this, but is Microsoft effectively hiring all these staff members out from OpenAI (a company they've invested heavily in) going to affect their ability to invest into other startups in the future?
That should make pure subscription pricing a lot easier to implement.
There was a tender offer for employee shares valuing the company at $87b that was pulled because of this. Those would’ve been secondary share purchases by Thrive but gave employees a liquidity event. Now that’s off the table.
Ask HN: Is it smart to keep building on OpenAIs API?
With everything that’s happened at OpenAI, I’m left wondering if it’s smart to keep building on their APIs. It’s frustrating because they had a really good thing going but now it feels like OpenAI doomed to fail.
Understandable, they were on a strike for a long time. Now that they are back, they are itching to release all the good stuff.
Has anyone asked ChatGPT it's thoughts on the drama?
Show HN: Facets – client-side faceted search
Think of it like Algolia, Typesense, Meilisearch, but done without server - directly in the browser.

Online demo: https://facets-demo.stereobooster.com/
No. OpenAI employees do not have traditional equity in the form of RSUs or Options. They have a weird profit-sharing arrangement in a company whose board is apparently not interested in making profits.
In this case, it means that what happened is: “OpenAI board is incompetent”, instead of “Microsoft planned this to take over the company.”

A conspiracy like the one proposed would basically be impossible to coordinate yet keep secret, especially considering the board members might loose their seats and their own market value.
Well, both things are true. The technological advancement required to make them was immense. Now that we can stand on the shoulders of those giants, they are ~1 order of magnitude simpler to make.
From what I heard non-compete clauses are unenforceable in California, so what exactly are they suing for?

I'm pretty sure Satya consulted with an army of lawyers over the weekend regarding the potential issue.
He is saying that what might seem like a sophisticated, well-planned strategy could actually be just the outcome of basic errors or poor decisions made by someone else.
Wait. Has Ilya resigned from the board yet, or did he sign a letter calling for his own resignation?
'SpaceX' crypto scam using AI voice in progress [video]
Youtube is promoting this video as number 1 in my feed. It looks obviously like a scam to me but it's getting serious upvotes so I presume most are falling for it....
My recollection is that the briefing map shows the equatorial trench (let's call that running west-east although it's arbitrary I agree) and the trench they go down being perpendicular to that. check out https://youtu.be/TOgtj00Rp8s?si=2E5SieRc8-XMzUU5&t=20

(you may have to scrub back and forward a bit to convince yourself either way). The sphere rotates and you see the big equatorial trench and highlights a smaller trench perpendicular to that that doesn't extend the whole way around. The briefing zooms in to show more detail. That's the one they are going to go down.
> People really think many Open Ai employees will give up their equity to get whatever mediocre stock grant their level at Microsoft has? And 1% raises, no bonus some years, and the board forced headcount reductions?

What long term prospects do those employees have of raises, profit-sharing, equity, etc. at OAI if the board is willing to destroy value to maintain their non-profit goals?

I think the whole point of this piece is that OAI's entire organizational structure is built against generating a large startup valuation that would provide a large payout to employees and investors.

OAI has cash from ChatGPT revenue that it could use to offer competitive pay, but also this entire situations is based around the board being uncomfortable with the decisions that led to this revenue or attempts to expand it.
Don't they need access to the models to use them for Bing?
Reminds me a bit of MasterBlaster from 'Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome' - "Who runs Bartertown..?"