skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://chat.openai.com was definitely down for me (a free-tier user in the EU) for a while today. Now it seems to be back up, but now there's a waitlist for the paid "Plus" membership which gives access to ChatGPT 4. "Due to high demand, we've temporarily paused upgrades." displays on mouseover. [UPDATE: the pause on Plus signups was actually preannounced on the 15th, https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740 by Altman himself: thanks to naiv for this.] But maybe these are things which have happened sporadically in the recent past, too? And by Barnum's Law I imagine it quite possible that the controversy has generated a surge of rubberneckers, maybe even more would-be subscribers.

While we're looking at straws in the wind, I might as well add that the EU terms of use received some changes on the 14th of this month, though they won't become active until the 14th of December: https://openai.com/policies/eu-terms-of-use https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8541941-terms-of-use-upd... . It's not a completely de minimis update, but I can't say more than that.

[EDIT: Unrelated to outages, here's another thing to consider if you're trying to read the signs: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=38353898 .]
You may want to transit the airspace of the US or one of their allies in the future.
By the sounds of it, they just DID.
but in the US you have freedom of movement also most of the US is rural and driving is basically a right because if you don't you're a nobody and can't function. Ironically Japan is having an issue right now with lots of rural grandpas aging out of driving competently and having no alternative.
You might be looking for a different word here. A dark pattern is not fraud or outright lying. These are already illegal. Seeing the total price at the end of the purchasing process is the legal requirement for a sale.

A classic example of a dark pattern is AirBnB. They (used to) show listing prices without all additional fees like cleaning, service fees, etc. So users would end up wasting a lot of time on finding the right offering to only later (yes, before checkout) realize that the total price is actually much higher. Users know how much they end up paying, it's not fraud. But this is still a dark pattern.
Downtowns Are Full of Empty Buildings. Universities Are Moving In
There's a comedian that I'd really enjoy seeing in person. He's only selling tickets via TicketMaster. As a result, I'll wait for his next Netflix or Amazon tour special.
The timing is right. With 2/3 of the company grumpy, it'd be untraceable.
It's apparently holiday for openai this week
IIRC the robots have won against humanity, but then the robots started to fight among themselves for resources. The player is one of those robots who has some sort of amnesia.
Well, this matters as much as the details of the trees in a racing game, in my view.
There is a condition called Sulfhemoglobinemia wherein you blood takes up sulfur instead of iron and your blood turns green.
You need to find a better job.

I wouldn't do my job without pay but I would do it even if my food & shelter expenses were covered by the state.
I think that the dispute is about whether or not AGI is possible (at least withing the next several decades). One camp seems to be operating with the assumption that not only is it possible, but it's imminent. The other camp is saying that they've seen little reason to think that it is.

(I'm in the latter camp).
I don't think I could disagree with the article more strongly.

I've written conditional logic trees like this and they're pretty much always better than some hardcoded OOP/imperative code. I think what the author might have missed is that the conditions are labels for some functional result, usually from SQL as the app checks various fields on the user's database tables. So DDD doesn't actually work with data, but filters on data. The labels are to make the intermediate steps readable by humans, like how Prolog rules/predicates work.

In other words, I don't think that the article has said anything, because functional code can always be transformed to look like functions acting on conditions or conditions resulting from functions. At the end of the day, functional code is still a query composed of queries. The important part is to avoid mutable state, which would turn it back into imperative code which is hard to step through and reason about.
And how do you know LLMs are not "close" to AGI (close meaning, say, a decade of development that builds on the success of LLMs)?
https://archive.li/MqxPV
Can you stop reposting this junk. Thanks.
That's somewhat in debate, the last I saw. The initial report was it affected a user using Firefox, and it didn't when they switched useragents. Since then, there have been reports of users not seeing it in Firefox, but seeing it in other (even chromium-based) browsers. So it seems likely they are A/B testing it, but less clear if they are intentionally targeting non-Chrome browsers.

Their goal, quite clearly, is to prevent (or at least heavily discourage) adblockers. This is one attempt to detect them, and maybe in Chrome they have a different detection mechanism so it doesn't show the same behavior.

It would be a particularly foolish move on their part to push Chrome by punishing everything else right now, while they are in the middle of multiple anti-trust lawsuits. It makes me think that is unlikely to be the intent of this change.
Not knowing if you paid to choose your seat or baggage at the time of checkout is a reading comprehension issue.

There's a valid complaint that they all game what's included/excluded at the listing price so they sort better in the fare compare websites. But once you go through the sales funnel, if you read, its very clear what you are getting.
>Though, not sure how much of a clean room they will have to put everyone in

Why would they need a clean room at all? Part of their investment was almost completely unfettered access to OpenAI IP.
>Tracing is particularly unacceptable in professional settings.

Tracing is a fundamental skill in a professional settings for consistency, speed, and quality reasons. In torepaku it is the paku (pakuri) part that is not acceptable.
Easy to shit on Ilya right now, but based on the impression I get Sam Altman is a a hustler at heart, while Ilya seems like a thoughtful idealist, maybe in over his head when it comes to politics. Also feels like some internal developments or something must have pushed Ilya towards this, otherwise why now? Perhaps influenced by Hinton even.

I'm split at this point, either Ilya's actions will seem silly when there's no AGI in 10 years, or it will seem prescient and a last ditch effort...
Wouldn’t “upsell” be more accurate than “fee”?
Others just sound boring, i.e. all the takeovers of promising startups by the bigger companies with minimal drama and big cashouts for its founders.

There were some of the big lawsuits too I suppose? But those were (relatively) slow burners.
Do we actually know what the issue that motivated sama's departure was?
> I hate waiting for busses or taking the transit options

This is a far easier problem to solve than self driving vehicles
I think algebraic effects usually just compile down to monads under the hood? As I understand it, it’s more like a cleaner interface to model side effects, than some new approach compared to the tools that haskell gives you out of the box?
That was a generic statement - I wasn't implying that such devices don't exist. And yes, fairfone is a good example and we need to support brands like those. I'm currently in the process of gradually replacing old devices with repairable ones.
> That seems like a fool's errand, even before they accepted MS's money, with Google, Facebook, and even Amazon in play.

Agreed; my describing the history of public decision making by OpenAI is not the same as endorsing any of the decisions.

I've never thought closed gatekeeping was going to be an effective mitigation in this space, whether by intrusive government action or a private "benevolent gatekeeper".
"OpenAI PPUs: How OpenAI's unique equity compensation works"

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html
If you are on Kafka already, there is an alternative to schedule a job without PG [0]

[0] https://www.wgtwo.com/blog/kafka-timers/
>Now that's an ahistorical conspiracy theory

No? Where exactly do you think I've theorized about the existence of a conspiracy? Because I've actually said the exact opposite: there isn't a conspiracy and no one is cooperating at all. There's no evil group of developers secretly planning to sabotage everything. It's just the usual bad communication and planning that happens with a distributed team.

>Those diverse desktop environments contributed hugely to GTK, GNOME just didn't use their work

Can you name what any of these contributions were? Because I've never seen them. I've seen contributions here and there, lots of minor bug fixes, but nothing major.

>Nobody is going to fully "kiss the ring" unless they get something out of it

Avoid this rhetoric please. These open source projects are a volunteer collaboration. No one's kissing any rings or trying to get something out of the maintainers, other than the usual: everyone helps each other write and maintain the code.

>but they could have done a lot better than fighting third-parties tooth-and-nail. GNOME should be a proud project that leads the GNU movement

I really don't know what you're talking about here, but disagreeing about technical things isn't "fighting tooth-and-nail". That's a normal part of any project.

Personally I don't think anyone should care about leading the GNU movement, that's been plagued by petty infighting and drama since the very beginning.
If YouTube are going to go down this path, then perhaps Firefox devs should set the user agent to Chrome for YouTube?
They always say “seats left at this price,” and the “lowest fare” is in the context of the current search results, which are individual, not in the context of all searches by everyone everywhere, which seems an unreasonable standard.
UIx, a story behind yet another React wrapper [video]
Ptable renders them with WebGL from the quantum numbers using the Schrodinger equation, wrapping a threshold density of the generated point cloud with a surface.

https://ptable.com/#Electrons/HOAO
Feedback and Suggestions for a SaaS Idea
just wait until they have unshackled AI
I’m currently developing LectureKit, a headless LMS designed for creating and managing online courses tailored for developers. As I approach MVP, I would greatly appreciate any insights or feedback on the page or the idea. Your input would be highly appreciated. Thanks!
My kid went from disinterested in the letters we taught him, to fascinated when he realized he could use them to get special blocks.

Minecraft teaches phonics. Anyway, my 4 year old can read books. He doesnt even practice the homework in his preschool because he just reads the words that everyone else sounds out.
I agree with you, that phrase is misleading. What I tried to express is: The sense of urgency to act upon the climate catastrophe even if it decreases your own quality of life in the short term is somehow “new” or at least only really felt and pointed out strongly by a minority.
I think it's a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. There are vastly different downstream consequences and risk exposure associated with using AI to design and implement functionality for mission-critical infrastructure vs. using AI to draw pictures.
It will be shut down and sold for scrap
Most non-competes are unenforceable by law in California.

Though I believe sometimes some narrowly-defined non-competes are ok when it comes to executive-level roles, so unclear if Altman et al. could be affected by those.

But I also feel like someone with Altman's clout could have avoided signing something like that when he took the CEO job.
I fully agree with your unpopular opinion.
As a UBI proponent, I will offer this in rebuttal. If you give labor additional negotiating power over capital, (the two coarsely defined players in this game) you will see shortages, and capital will lose a lot of value. This includes the middle class, who saved up peanuts and now have to pay people real money to do work. Those people will genuinely get screwed.

Hyperinflation is a real possibility, and UBI needs to be tuned pretty tightly to prevent it.
Agreed. I don't run into most of these issues.

When searching for flights, ensure Spirit Airlines is excluded.

Unless there's a massive price difference, just fly Southwest if you have luggage. In over a decade, it's rare that some other airline is a lot cheaper. Most of them are at price parity or more expensive with luggage. In any case, at this point everyone in the US knows you'll get charged for luggage with most airlines and account for it when searching.

Food: Just don't. They give crappy snacks on planes. Just bring a few along with you. Or even buy them at the airport.

Insurance: Go to https://www.insuremytrip.com/ and get it yourself. Ignore whatever airlines offer you.

Seat selection: Don't bother with it too much. Also, nice that Southwest doesn't let you pick seats.

Priority boarding: Why...? I'd rather sit in the airport than in a cramped seat in the plane. And I've had bad experiences where they've turned the air conditioning off in the plane during boarding and I start feeling sick.

Compared to when I was a kid, flying is much cheaper now (inflation adjusted).
I think lidar is going to get cheaper much faster than tesla figures out vision-only FSD. Consider that solid state lidar capable of scanning a room is integrated in smartphones today.
The problem with “be careful” is that libraries often want to use the very unsafe API and there is no standard mechanism to expose safety. It’s fundamentally a bad API design. It could be good. But it is not.

There’s a reason this problem comes up on HN once or two a year. And don’t even get me started about printf grabbing a mutex for a stupid locale…
Agree with writer, apart from a challenge on the "I get pestered at the office/on slack too much!":

I see this complaint quite frequently about flows being disrupted due to office/slack, having to "mute slack to get anything done", etc. In my experience, those who I have observed IRL complaining about this are, more often than not, those that tend to struggle writing clear and maintainable code, those that struggle writing concise and readable documentation, those that struggle writing up tasks properly, and so on. Equally more often than not, I have found that they often fit into the "Super Smart Engineer Individual Contributor" bin, who are clearly incredibly good at solving very challenging problems, sometimes performing great, field-leading feats of engineering, but fall short on the human side of the job. I know this is highly generalizing and not all fit this description, but it truly is what I have seen.

About me, I have been WFH for a long time, before the pandemic: <2019 60+% WFH, >2019 100% WFH.

* Saved 2,500 hours by no commute - around 100 extra days of life.

* Saved ~15,000-20,000 GBP by no train/car commute

* I'm quite particular about my food and drink, and invest quite heavily in it (some would say too much when it comes to tea and coffee :P). I fear hot drink vending machines, "nespresso pods" (which I disagree with on perhaps a spiritual, even cosmic level), and/or plastic "bag tea". Eeeek D:

* I'm quite particular when it comes to peripherals. My back hates Herman Miller knock-offs, generally any kind of "different" from my at-home setup to be honest. Thunderbolt, in 2023, remains at best a challenge, at worst a mystery for multi-million and a number of multi-billion companies.

* Office equipment in the last ~5 or so years has been on a somewhat downwards trajectory since 2019. Companies don't invest in quality software engineering equipment like they used to (understandable as paying for equipment that few use is a waste). This troubles me often; I fear that the pandemic has sparked a rapidly spiraling, high momentum, positive feedback doom-loop, i.e.:

1) Pandemic --> 2) WFH --> 3) Companies invest less in office equipment --> 4) More employees want WFH for better equipment --> 5) Companies invest even less in office equipment --> GOTO 3
Not to diminish the other sketchy stuff Google's doing, but I think the maps lag issue might actually be Firefox's fault. Whenever it happens to me WebGL stops working across all websites and restarting the entire browser fixes it. It's almost like when Firefox has been open a long time it just forgets how to use graphics acceleration.
They claimed they closed sourced it because of safety. If they go back on that they'd have to explain why the board went along with a lie of that scale, and they'd have to justify why all the concerns they claimed about the tech falling in the wrong hands were actually fake and why it was ok that the board signed off on that for so long
This sounds highly unlikely.

It would be called Microsoft God Simulator 2024
They'll get a raise or other financial incentive for sure, but since they're all so willing to jump ship, it's more that they want to get away from the existing one and make a horizontal movement. That said, each and every one that has OpenAI on their employment history is set for their wages for the forseeable, regardless of what they end up doing.
money alone can't build good tech. It's about the passion and drive of the builders, not just deep pockets. You can't just throw cash at tech problems and expect magic to happen.
If staying on the board means that the non-profit is no longer as viable an enterprise as it was then they have a fiduciary duty to resign to support the best interests of the non-profit charter. Fiduciary is not about money.
Not sure how that would make them the bad guys. Doesn't their original mission say it's meant to benefit everybody? Open sourcing it fits that a lot better than handing it all to Microsoft.
I do wish functional programming were more taught. we're getting to a point where I almost think OOP should be taught briefly and the rest of the focus on C/C++ for low level stuff (OS, data structures, some algorithms), and something functional or pseudo-functional for high level stuff. Most of the newer codebases in startups now require functional concepts to understand what's happening. For example, try writing modern JS without understanding .map, .reduce, et al, and function passing, etc.

Regardless I think it's important that students get exposed to more than just Python, which seems to increasingly be the only thing students come out knowing.
Ask HN: Best investment/finance advice you've ever received.
What's the best investment advice you've ever received that also worked out for you and if you can tell who gave you the advice?
This is an indication that there is some kind of either:
1) artificial suppression of the value of the low wage job
2) artificial inflation of the value of the CEO's job
or, more likely: 3) Both.
It's more about tricking HE machines. Instead of the Smart Water setting, use the large. Always use the Deep Fill setting (if the machine has one). Always use the double rinse - gets rid of the detergent residue.

I've not tried hacking one, but given the relatively simple controller, it doesn't seem all that hard.
Why is a simple modern art piece necessarily one of the worst and examples?
Microsoft is not just any huge, lumbering company, though. It has probably the best history of research of any pure software company (leaving aside IBM etc): Microsoft Research funded Haskell behind the scenes for years, they had a quantum computing unit in 2006, and already in 2018 were beating the field in AI patents and research:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2019/01/06/micros...

Believing that OpenAI is MSFT's sole move in the AI space would be a serious error.
I mentioned he's Canadian because he's not American. He doesn't live in Canada though and I think it's been a while since he has.
Similar approach here: we have a lot better things to do with 400 after tax dollars than spend them to collapse to zero the chance that we'll sit separately in an airliner for a few hours. If that happens, we'll enjoy $400 worth of dinners out way more than sitting together anyway...

I find we usually get assigned seats next to each other anyway unless the plane is completely checked in full for aisles and windows even without asking.
I would say given the stock's performance lately, Mark has been handling business pretty well.
Draining the Data Lake (part 1 of 3) – Problems
> Another thing I have noticed is that after takeoff, they now care where you sit.

If the plane is empty enough that you can move seats, it's often a weight thing on why they don't want people moving around. Otherwise, I've never had an issue moving or swapping seats with people. Then again, almost every flight is full nowadays.
Fiduciary isn't about money, it's about the best interests of the non-profit they are governing. If staying on the board means a harm to the goals of the non-profit charter, then they have a duty to resign.
OpenAI is a big marketing piece for Azure. They go to every enterprise and tell them OpenAI uses Azure Cloud. Azure AI infra powers the biggest AI company on the planet. Their custom home built chips are designed with Open AI scientists. It is battle hardened. If anyone sues you for the data, our army of lawyers will fight for you.

No enterprise employee gets fired for using Microsoft.

It is a power play to pull enterprises away from AWS, and suffocating GCP.
The kind of people that are born on third base and think they hit a triple are at the top of basically every american institution right now. Of course they think the world is a better place if they share every stupid little thought that enters their brain because they are "special" and "super smart".

The AI field especially has always been grifters. They have promised AGI with every method including the ones that we don't even remember. This is not a paradox.
Roc uses perceus, which is a reference counting model that allows for opportunistic in place mutation if it is safe to do so. HVM is more like a fundamentally new evaluation model that is parallel by default. They are both very exciting, but HVM is much more radical and probably needs at least a few more years until it starts to be seriously practical.
Yeah it's true, I believe I get throttled after 1TB now though, haven't hit the limit in a long while.
I know I’m not qualified to make that observation, but what exactly makes you think you are? Can you share what information you’re using to make such a confident determination?
Yeah, I paid extra recently to buy higher-tier tickets that allowed me to choose my seats, so my family could sit together. I go to actually choose the seats and then it wants to charge me an additional fee per seat, per leg. There were no seats that didn't have a fee. Ugh.
Standard ML (sml / smlnj)

The instructor is clear, energetic, has a decent flow in the first lecture e.g. emphasizes the important points with vigor and repetition, switches media every 10 or 15 minutes, has a conversation with students. Slides are relatively noise-free and are informative; terms to know are highlighted.

I haven't watched a full functional programming lecture series yet, but I'd gladly audit this one.

As a "new" instructor (as in, not a TA anymore) he's got a bit of teaching talent. I hope he keeps a tight feedback loop and improves every year and continues publishing material.
What we need is a modernized toolchain for Asymptote[0] that can run in the browser in realtime like MathJax, it has much nicer syntax than TikZ.

[0] https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/