skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why would workers immediately quit their job when he has no other company

It is Sam Altman. He will have one in a week.

> It seems like half of the people working at the non-profit were not actually concerned about the mission but rather just waiting out their turn for big bucks and fame.

I would imagine most employees at any organization are not really there because of corporate values, but their own interests.

> What does Altman bring to the table besides raising money from foreign governments and states, apparently?

And one of the world's largest tech corporations. If you are interested in the money side, that isn't something to take lightly.

So I would bet it is just following the money, or at least the expected money.

The new board also wants to slow development. That isn't very exciting either.
I think so. People don’t add value just by being technical. That’s a very low man on the totem pole perspective.
Show HN: A game changer SaaS that bridges between Web2 and Web3 – Postschain
While I'm not a fan of the plot style, I use the xkcd colors from matplotlib.colors.XKCD_COLORS all the time. 954 colors named from the xkcd color survey [0].

[0] https://xkcd.com/color/rgb/
Thanks for the info! Wouldn't hurt to mention that in the project's README...
> Just want to see someone interview him who is as smart as him

Just send the average five year old.
I mean, the cliched answer is "when it figures out how to override the nuclear launch process". And while that cliche might have a certain degree of unrealism, it would certainly be possible for a system with access to arbitrary compute power that's specifically trained to impersonate human personas to use social engineering to precipitate WW3.

And even that isn't the easiest scenario if an AI just wants us dead; a smart enough AI could just as easily use send a request to any of the the many labs that will synthesize/print genetic sequences for you and create things that combine into a plague worse than covid. And if it's really smart, it can figure out how to use those same labs to begin producing self-replicating nanomachines (because that's what viruses are) that give it substrate to run on.

Oh, and good luck destroying it when it can copy and shard itself onto every unpatched smarthome device on Earth.

Now, granted, none of these individual scenarios have a high absolute likelihood. That said, even at a 10% (or 0.1%) chance of destroying all life, you should probably at least give it some thought.
> I also wasn't aware that "unit" referred to an isolated test, not to the SUT.

What the hell are they teaching people nowadays?

But then I do a quick google search and see this as the top result

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/652292/what-is-unit-test...

> Unit testing simply verifies that individual units of code (mostly functions) work as expected.

Well no fucking wonder.

This is like the whole JRPG thing where the younger generation misunderstood but in their hubris claim it's the older generation that coined the term that doesn't understand.

It's the blind leading the blind and that's probably the most apt description of our industry right now.
> it’s very hard to imagine a scenario where we create an actual AGI and then within a few years at most of that event the AGIs are far more capable than human brains.

I'm assuming you meant "aren't" here.

> That would imply there was some arbitrary physical limit to intelligence

All you need is some kind of sub-linear scaling law for peak possible "intelligence" vs. the amount of raw computation. There's a lot of reason to think that this is true.

Also there's no guarantee the amount of raw computation is going to increase quickly.

In any case, the kind of exponential runaway you mention (years) isn't "pandemic at the speed of light" as mentioned in the grandparent.

I'm more worried about scenarios where we end up with an 75IQ savant (access encyclopedic training knowledge and very quick interface to run native computer code for math and data processing help) that can plug away 24/7 and fit on an A100. You'd have millions of new cheap "superhuman" workers per year even if they're not very smart and not very fast. It would be economically destabilizing very quickly, and many of them will be employed in ways that just completely thrash the signal to noise ratio of written text, etc.
Oh wow, she’s definitely taken sides. I wonder if Elon will be paying their legal bills. She alludes to shadowy machinations. This reaches an end, then gets wackier, and repeats.
I genuinely don't remember who's on it, so thanks for the data point. Regardless, my argument is they needn't act in total unanimity.

I presume this Mira person wasn't totally freelancing -- how would this even end up being presented to the board without some direction from someone on the board. So maybe more like 3.5 against 0.5. It could have been a total flip flop, but that's a bigger assumption. I have no problem not assuming grand narratives until the basic reporting shakes out.
Unless the tweet I saw was fake, he's also decided to slow down pace to 1 or 2 on a scale of 1 to 10. Going to run that company into the floor
>why else would they bring a hyper-capitalist like Sam Altman on board

They didn't "bring" a hyper capitalist. Sam Co-founded this entire thing lol. He was there from the beginning.
Yes, on Twitter. Mailing lists are old boomer shit.
What do you do to crack a CD? Play frisbee?

I grew up with CDs and never knew of one cracking. With sufficient scratching it was possibly to get them the skip, but even friends who kept CDs unboxed in piles round the CD player didn't have this problem.
>Imagine having to test an app for its ability to handle safe read-write of OS-level state. I

Also it should be able to handle invariants as modifying multiple variables is not an atomic process, either.
Depends on whether you think heroin is an effective treatment for depression.
Show HN: Dream Generator – AI Art for Fun
Learn to draw quick with AI! It's an Android and iOS app that lets you generate and share AI. Let me know your thoughts!
She was the interim CEO not a board member? Considering was supposedly happened appointing her was the smartest thing to do (from the perspective of the board)
> Inserting a mutex into the setenv/getenv/etc. functions is pointless because applications are explicitly allowed to modify the environ pointer and array directly without any locking.

by that logic mutex themselves are pointless because nothing ever forces you to use them, even in memory-safe languages you can still access /dev/mem and change bytes? It's stil a useful thing to have.
That's because it's not about safety, it's about ego, vanity, and delusion.
They give it stupid terms like “alignment” to make it opaque to the common person. It’s basically sitting on your hands and pointing to sci-fi as to why progress should be stopped.
Alright, cool, they stuck to their guns about being not-for-profit, and they want to be more mission focused than profit/product focused.

Why, then, did they bring in THE CO-FOUNDER OF TWITCH to help them out? Seems like an off-brand thing to do for a group of people focused on "the mission".
Both file extensions and query parameters are functionally very similar.

What I don’t necessarily like about query params for this, is that their usage implies filtering. It’s a cultural assumption but it’s there.

Another point: you might actually have a literal file at a similar path that you serve, typically when you cache responses (managed cache or straight from your app server). Using file extensions gives you a bit more natural affordances. It’s just overal less clunky.
No, this is the proper way to handle accusations from someone who may not be credible. You investigate privately, and only report after, if the accusations seem credible. You don't blast across the media that so-and-so is accused of sexual assault, because then the damage is done, regardless of the truth. Signal boost it enough, and every lay-person's main association with the person will become, "oh, that guy accused of sexually assaulting his sister".

The accusations are about events 25 years ago, when they were children. No one will ever be able to disprove this, so there's no way to undo the reputational damage.
Ask HN: If you built a startup on top of ChatGPT, how worried are you now?
Over the past year or so, quite a few people built relatively successful, small startups on top of ChatGPT. For those of you who fall into this category or who are in the process of developing/launching a startup that falls into this category, how worried are you after the drama that has unfolded since Friday? Can you give insight as to why you are/are not worried?

Just to clarify, I am not referring to people who had existing startups and added a feature to their startup that uses ChatGPT. I am specifically referring to those people where ChatGPT is central to your startup, and your startup would not exist if not for ChatGPT.

The AI startup wave passed me, so I have no horse in this race. I am also not very clued up on all the AI technologies, so forgive my ignorance. To me, it seems that this would be concerning if I had a startup that existed purely because of ChatGPT.
And that's a good thing! Do not hold on to broken cruft but give some time (more than just a few months (Ansible and other culprits) but definitely less tan 10 years (Python 3 transition)) for code maintainers to handle it.
I recently installed XFCE on my Termux and made it look like Windows 95: https://lemmy.nz/pictrs/image/06550c17-1446-4acc-988f-9541fe...
But ironically I always use spaces in my code! ;)
I read her Threads post and do not see the same advocacy you claim here. Just valuable information.
Who among the founders isn't a hyper-capitalist? Elon Musk? Peter Thiel? Reid Hoffman?
I mean, not really convictions at all, just reasonable inferences based on current technology and where it's trending.

Can we generate photorealistic CGI? Yes. Is that likely to become more common and able to be generated on an average to high end home PC instead of needing a farm of GPUs? I believe so.

Can AI currently write scenes and dialogue that, while janky, isn't always bad? Yes. Is that likely to substantially improve over the next decade? Also yes.

What do you get if you combine them, hmm?

> I know "the AI will keep getting better". I guess we'll see about that.

You say I have strong and unwarranted convictions, but I would say instead this seems like unwarranted and unreasonable skepticism.
No? I'm tired and it was way too long since I dealed with Big O so someone will surely correct me.

Your computer being finite is irrelevant. Big O is about growth factor.

Just because you are capped at value X (< infinity) does not mean that every value below X has the same characteristics. If it did, sure, you are O(1). But if it is N^2 it will still be N^2 even if your machine only has resources for N < 12.
> This is actually pretty surprising to me, since a financially motivated person would normally wait until a better deal, and just collect their paycheck in the meantime.

I imagine you need to signal that you want in on the deal by departing. Get founder equity.
Does Ilya think he can slow down Zuckerberg, Elon, Anthropic, etc

Don’t understand his thought process, especially after all the resignations. Does he really expect OpenAI to maintain its position especially with the threat of Microsoft and pretty much all other investors backing off?

Ironically, he might have been better off keeping Sam since he’d have some say in things. But if llama 4 beats gpt5? Zuck won’t even answer his calls.
What a clown show. OpenAI write that they have confidence in the CTO to be the interim and then they immediately dump her for another person?
Honestly, tough shit, they should be required to take them back.
I for one thought Karpathy would side with the core researchers and not the corpos. To me, this whole ordeal is a clash between profit motives of Sam vs Non Profit and Safety motives of OpenAI's original charter. I mean didn't HN hate when OpenAI changed their open nature and become completely closed and profit oriented? This could be the healing of the cancer that OpenAI brought to this field to make it closed as a whole.
The best thing is to use a salt that is a fact about the user that can’t reasonably change (like the user ID). So you can copy the password field, but if you copy the user id too then nothing happens (assuming there isn’t a unique constraint in the db), you are still logged in with the same user id.

However, user ids really only work for UUIDs as numbers are not random (and very easy to create rainbow tables for). If your users can’t change their user name or email address, you could use that as well.
The economic theories of fertility are all semi-plausible to me, but they just don't hold much water next to the "fear of future"/"blood makes horny" effect. When humans are unsure about the future and whether or not they will live to see it, they engage in many risky behaviors, especially mating. The world is very, very safe compared to 50 years ago, let alone 100 or 200. Murder is rare, war and conquest (slightly) more frowned upon than at any other point in history, life-and-death struggle is not an everyday thing. We just don't often face the kind of fear that makes all the blood rush to the loins anymore.
TTS actually allows scope for far more different artists' likenesses to be incorporated. An book can be read with all the characters having a different voice entirely. This is difficult currently and relies on the skill of the performer.
HN, can you help me find a game I played in the early 2000s?

It was a browser game. You had a grid (pretty small), and components to put in like conveyor belts.

Each level had a winning condition, of course increasingly complex.

The goal of the game was, as much as I can remember, teach you some basic programming concepts (like boolean gates).

I faintly remember some red and yellow lights? I might be wrong.

I remember getting addicted to this game, then lost track of it forever.
> essentially what you're advocating is lower wages for some service workers just because the rest are possibly overpaid?

How have you arrived at that conclusion? I am arguing that a) the tip should be included in the price, and b) people should be paid a fair wage by their employer WITHOUT sneaking hidden fees onto customers.

Also, I’ve made it abundantly clear I’m referring to the UK, yet you keep bringing up America. You seem determined to misunderstand me.
Not a lawyer so: “laaaaaaaawyer!”
Commercial use: need a written authorization from the Licensor.

"Our fine-tuned model is completely open for academic research, but please adhere to the agreement and the Yi License."

And in the Yi License:

"If you plan to use the Yi Series Models and Derivatives for Commercial Purposes, you should contact the Licensor in advance as specified in Section 7 of this Agreement named "Updates to the Agreement and Contact Information" and obtain written authorization from the Licensor. When you obtain authorization from the Licensor to use the Yi Series Models and Derivatives for Commercial Purposes, you must comply with the afore-mentioned license restrictions."

( https://github.com/01-ai/Yi/blob/main/MODEL_LICENSE_AGREEMEN... )
In time of Windows, around let's say mid 1990s, people thought Windows is irreplaceable.

Now turns out Linux is the workhorse everywhere for running workloads or consuming content. Almost every programming language (other than Microsoft's own SDKs) gets developed on Linux, has first class support for Linux and Windows is always an afterthought.

It has gone to that extent that to lure developers, Microsoft has to embed a Lunux in a virtual machine on Windows called WSL.

Local inference is going to get cheaper and affordable and that's for sure.

New models would also emerge.

So OpenAI doesn't seem to have an IP that can withstand all that IMHO.
It's majority suicides.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...
The message is that if you do math in your head in a specific way involving Bayes' theorem, it will make you always right about everything. So it's not even quasi-religious, the good deity is probability theory and the bad one is evil computer gods.

This then causes young men to decide they should be in open relationships because it's "more logical", and then decide they need to spend their life fighting evil computer gods because the Bayes' theorem thing is weak to an attack called "Pascal's mugging" where you tell them an infinitely bad thing has a finite chance of happening if they don't stop it.

Also they invent effective altruism, which works until the math tells them it's ethical to steal a bunch of investor money as long as you use it on charity.

https://metarationality.com/bayesianism-updating

Bit old but still relevant.
I started listening to music just after CD-Rs were affordable, so CDs are great. My tapes were off this like the Thomas The Tank Engine audio book, and I remember the problems with them.

Maybe you are 5-10 years older.

5 years younger and it would be MP3s on small players.
The Theory of Interstellar Trade [pdf] (1978)
You can. I remember the ban on sports betting right after it was initially starting to take off online. It had a massive chilling effect and you had to jump through a lot of hoops to make a bet (VPNs, fake addresses, knowing a bookie in person etc.), so people just didn’t do it. Not just sports betting either, it really put a damper on online casino games like poker, blackjack etc.
If I grab something off GitHub, and the license there is GPL, but it was someone else's IP I do have some recourse and for my infraction.

In the case of an LLM handing it to me can I sue MS or OpenAI for giving out that IP, or is it on me for not checking first? Is any of this covered in the TOS?
100% spot on.

The world is filled with Sam Altmans, but surely not enough Ilya Sutskevers.
I wonder if you could work around this by using LD_PRELOAD to load in a shim around get_env and set_env. You'd still have the problem of environ potentially getting mutated, but it very well may solve the problem if it's limited to those two functions.
I live in a smaller city outside of a metro. I can hear goats from a farm next door, but I have 5gbps symmetric fiber.

We have an ALDI here at least.
I wonder if employees can sue and successfully get compensation or conditions imposed on the board due to private market volatility in the price of their PPU’s

That would be fun case law to keep this soap opera going
I don't see many academics indulge in sensationalist doomsaying. That's the real difference here. SETI wouldn't and couldn't seek grants by proposing to contact murderous aliens.

I think academics have a general faith in goodwill of intelligence.Benevolence may be a convergent phenomenon. Maybe the mechanisms of reason themselves require empathy and goodness
Well, Berkeley isn't exactly San Francisco, but joining cults is all those people get up to there. Some are Buddhist, some are Leverage, some are Lesswrong.

The most recent case was notably in the Bahamas though.
The parent post is literally true yet keeps getting downvoted — what a mess HN has become, too
That may provide short term stability, but medium term (which in this field is a few months) how will Azure's offering move forward if OpenAI is in such crisis? I guess it really comes down to OpenAI's ability to continue without Altman and Co. I don't believe that Microsoft's license allows them to independently develop the models? Wouldn't this become a stale fork pretty quickly while the rest of the industry moves on (llama2 etc ..)?
> I like science fiction too, but all of these potential scenarios seem so far removed from the low level realities of how these systems work.

Today, yes. Nobody is saying GPT-3 or 4 or even 5 will cause this. None of the chatbots we have today will evolve to be the AGI that everyone is fearing.

But when you go beyond that, it becomes difficult to ignore trend lines.

Here's a detailed scenario breakdown of how it might come to be –https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/carl-shulman
wouldn’t that mean that they’ll just be left behind and it won’t matter what their goal is?
As far as I can tell, any single noun that's capitalized sounds religious. I blame the Bible. However, in this case it's just a short-hand for the sequences of topically related blog posts written by Eliezer between 2006 and 2009, which are written to fit together as one interconnected work. (https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/sequences , https://www.readthesequences.com/)
https://archive.ph/Berx9
I question if any board in history has explained itself with clarity and honesty. By my cynical lens they would never stoop to engage in virtues other than signalling.
Their code quality in general and application architecture in particular.
> It is Sam Altman. He will have one in a week.

Welcome to Cargo Cult AI.
Lack of sleep is literally unhealthy.
Announcing Real Time Safety Heap Allocator 1.0: A Leap in Memory Management
Hello Hacker News community,

I'm excited to announce the release of version 1.0 of the Real Time Safety Heap Allocator, a project I've been passionately working on for the past months. This release marks a significant milestone in our journey to revolutionize memory management in real-time systems.

What is Real Time Safety Heap Allocator?

The Real Time Safety Heap Allocator is designed to provide a robust, efficient, and safe memory allocation in real-time systems. We've focused on ensuring that memory management is not only fast but also predictable and secure, addressing common challenges faced in real-time applications.

Key Features of Version 1.0:

Enhanced Performance: Optimized for speed and efficiency in allocating and deallocating memory.
Safety Mechanisms: Incorporates several safety mechanisms to prevent common memory errors like buffer overflows and memory leaks.
Real-Time Compliance: Ensures predictable execution times, critical for real-time systems where timing is everything.
User-Friendly API: An intuitive API that makes it easy for developers to integrate into their projects.

Why It Matters?

In real-time systems, the stakes are high, and the cost of failure can be critical. From embedded systems in medical devices to real-time data processing in financial markets, ensuring memory is managed correctly is paramount. Our allocator is built to give developers peace of mind, knowing that their applications are running on a solid foundation.

Get Involved:

Download and Try: Visit our GitHub repository to download the latest release.
Feedback and Contributions: We welcome feedback, bug reports, and contributions! Join our community to help shape the future of real-time memory allocation.

Thank you for your support and interest in making real-time systems safer and more efficient. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences with the Real Time Safety Heap Allocator!
Not enough people understand what OpenAI was actually built on.

OpenAI would not exist if FAANG had been capable of getting out of it's own way and shipping things. The moment OpenAI starts acting like the companies these people left, it's a no brainer that they'll start looking for the door.

I'm sure Ilya has 10 lifetimes more knowledge than me locked away in his mind on topics I don't even know exist... but the last 72 hours are the most brain dead actions I've ever seen out of the leadership of a company.

This isn't even cutting your own nose of to spite the face: this is like slashing your own tires to avoid going in the wrong direction.

The only possible justification would have been some jailable offense from Sam Altman, and ironically their initial release almost seemed to want to hint that before they were forced to explicitly state that wasn't the case. At the point where you're forced to admit you surprise fired your CEO for relatively benign reasons how much must have gone completely sideways to land you in that position?