skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The meme that big corps can’t move fast and that startups are nimble is a stereotype I’ve come to realize not true at all. I’ve experienced this myself, more than once.

What can feel like you’re moving fast is sometimes just churn but it doesn’t necessarily equate to progress.

Culture at OpenAI is probably more consensus driven, which can handcuff any big moves.
I mean it's not cool for board members to publicly criticize the company.
Hey -- I don't see another way to get in touch with you, so advance apologies for the comment spam. In a past comment you mentioned that you used to run the Ricochet modem wikispace and have a bunch of documentation/etc -- perhaps I can host them on the Internet Archive? Particularly interested in the Garage Gateway stuff, I've never seen the code and I have an otherwise working Ethernet Radio & pair of poletops I'd love to get properly running. Email's in my profile if you'd like to get in touch.
People routinely accusing Meta of facilitating genocide in Myanmar, if not outright aiding in it. It's probably a net benefit to society that someone with ultimate veto power over sketchy social media posts takes their job very seriously.
Sam Altman's Actions

- Sam complained that Helen Toner's research paper criticized OpenAI's safety approach and praised Anthropic's, seeing it as dangerous for OpenAI

- He reprimanded her for the paper, saying as a board member she should have brought concerns to him first rather than publishing something critical right when OpenAI was in a tricky spot with the FTC

- He then began looking for ways to remove her from the board in response to the paper

---

Helen Toner's Perspective

- She believes the board's mission is to ensure OpenAI makes AI that benefits humanity, so destroying the company would fulfill that mission

- This suggests she prioritizes that mission over the company itself, seeing humanitarian concerns as more important than OpenAI's success

---

Microsoft Partnership

- The Microsoft partnership concentrated too much power in one company and went against the mission of OpenAI being "open"

- It gave Microsoft full access to OpenAI's core technologies against the safety-focused mission

---

Governance Issues

- The conflict shows the adversarial tensions inherent in OpenAI's structure between nonprofit and for-profit sides

- The board's mandate to act as a check and balance on OpenAI seems to be working as intended in this case

---

Criticisms of Players

- Altman appears reckless in his actions, while Toner seems naive about consequences of destroying OpenAI

- Their behavior calls into question whether anyone should have this kind of power over the development of AI

---

Future of AI Development

- Attempts at alignment and safeguards by companies like OpenAI may be ineffective if other actors are developing AI without such considerations

- Who controls advanced AI is more important than whether the AI is friendly.

- Nationalization of AI projects may occur
What you've written does nothing to disabuse any reasonable person of the notion that LLMs cannot reason; if anything you've explained how LLM's reason, not that they cannot do it.
> Tailwind would be a lot more appealing to me if it was coupled with some system where I could say "class X inherits from tailwind classes A, B and C" and thus have a layer of abstraction over just writing properties.

I feel the same. Give the component a class and then in the SCSS assign the setting there. But inlining each individual CSS setting? I don't get it. Sure maybe great for a quick prototype / MVP. But as a permanent tool? I don't see it.
3. Technically true but it's not always what you want. A lot of startups are often doing rather simple technical work. My last job at an early stage was just writing CRUD routes for form intake. Gets old quick. Just FYI for anyone searching.
> "They accidentally get left in because you miss them."

In my experience, this kind of thing happens much more frequently with large PRs.

If a PR is large enough, things will slip through the cracks. If there are too many change requests, even if they're sensible and make sense, things will slip through the cracks. If there's the need for multiple checks by the reviewer, even more things will slip through the cracks.

Also, breaking up PRs in frontend vs backend is not the best idea. Build the feature iteratively if possible.

EDIT: Since the grandparent is talking about reviewing by commit: if those are more reviewable, just use those as the way to separate PRs instead, maybe?
Ridiculous article. Gossip and no way a multi-billion dollar company came to its knees due to pretty pronouns. Remove this gossip it has no place here. Better suited for a gossip site.
I'm pretty sure that any company that has an if statement in their codebase can satisfy that definition so calling anything false advertising is going to be harder than it would have been before this was published.
I agree big time with this.

Organizing by clean commits is definitely important.
So...vendors no sane person would store valuable data on their drives were the only ones that failed. The sound of a dog biting a man...
Doesn’t take much for a story to trend. Also, it’s an interesting topic.
You already get a lot of that lol. The govt can already produce stuff and get it promoted with their corporate partners it happens constantly. Youtube already demonotizes whatever it wants, and what does that privilege? The prerogatives of corporate america broadly via the advertising market.

Doing it democratically would mean that instead of privileging addiction and watch time, we might include other metrics that relate to educational value or public interest and would prevent censorship due to the 1st amendment being directly applicable.

The government is a site of democratic struggle. The corporate world is a group of allied dictatorships.
Defending yourself against several lawsuits can be extremely expensive, not to mention time consuming. While the board members are almost certainly covered by the company's D&O insurance (unless they're not, which would be a ridiculous clown show), there's still a lot of arguing that can happen about which parts are covered by the insurance and which parts may trigger personal liability.

The point is not that these board members would lose the lawsuits - ianal and nobody knows the details well enough - it's that sufficient lawsuits can eat you before you win or lose them if you're not rich. AND subject you to discovery and a huge waste of time.

"I will bury you in legal fees unless you resign" is not a very nice or principled negotiating tactic, but it's a potential one, and it should be weighing pretty heavily on the mind of any board members who don't have a spare million or two to toss in a fire.
"But it is also possible that the Russians would have launched a first strike on the USA if they were unopposed. It almost happened as it was!"

When did a first strike of the Sowjetunion allmost happened? I rather think it was the other way around, first strike was evaluated, to hit them before they got the bomb.
Multiple reports in the Twitter thread that this also happens for server-grade HDDs.
yoghurts too
Helen Toner has done a huge amount of work slowing down capabilities research in China. That's why she lived in Beijing for a year, she is a big part of why there are a lot of Chinese researchers from various AI labs signed onto the CAIS statement, and it's what her relationship to the Pentagon is all about. I think she is probably the individual person who knows the most in the world about the relative AI capabilities of China and the US, and her career is about working with the Pentagon, AI companies in the USA, and AI companies in China to prevent an arms race scenario around AI. It's the sort of work that really, really doesn't benefit from a lot of publicity, so it's unfortunate that this whole situation has put her in the spotlight and means someone else will probably need to backchannel between the US and China on AI safety now.

I don't know why she chose to publicly execute Altman, there just isn't enough information to say for sure. It probably wasn't a specific, imminent safety concern like "Our new frontier model was way more capable than we were expecting and attempted a breakout that nearly succeeded during internal red teaming", according to the new CEO it wasn't anything like that. The new CEO has heard their reason, but is putting a lot of pressure on them to put that reason in writing for some reason. I don't know why, we just don't have enough information.

But basically, she is a very qualified person on the exact topic you are concerned about and has devoted her career to solving that problem. I wouldn't write off what she's doing or has done here as "She didn't consider that China exists".
Allegedly. Out of 700+ employees?
It does not sound like what she did helps advance the development of AGI that is broadly beneficial. It simply helps slow down the most advanced current effort, and potentially let a different effort take the lead.
The people.
There are some tools that can separate actual code changes from reformatting changes. I am working on https://semanticdiff.com, a VS Code Extension / GitHub App that can help you with this. There is also difftastic if you prefer a CLI based solution. It supports more languages but can detect fewer types of reformatting changes.
Well that sounds like a good read! I've been privileged to spend my 10+ years writing software among pair-programmers, and have never been made to suffer from this "code review" ritual. Maybe it's not so bad? I'd love to read a book about it before my luck runs out and somebody foists it upon me. Just to be prepared, you know.

Seems to me like it just can't work. Show a programmer a 5 line program, as the adage goes, and get 5 critiques. Show her a 500 line program, and get a thumbs up; "looks good!"

Really curious to know what keeps professionals from resorting to that timeless adage. Besides sheer chutzpah, how do folks muster the gumption to tell their peers what should have been tackled? Or, do I have my hat on backwards?
There's (ostensibly) a general current in American politics towards non-interference in business, even where it causes harm, but practical support for intervening in protection of certain groups seen as annointed, vulnerable, etc.

There's no secret to it.

If you're just not down with annoting vets with special treatment, that's fine and I think I'm with you, but your rehetorical question evaporates when you accept that politics is real and done in the open.
Related to the subthread above, and something I've been thinking about - how do you detect when the user has stopped speaking so the bot can respond?
Do you mean to say that if non-solicitation agreements were entirely unenforceable, consulting companies would see all of their best consultants poached by clients?
https://pypi.org/project/pyDatalog/
I strongly disagree it's sexist, casual or otherwise. Is "dickhead" sexist? These types of insults are based on taboo (sex, blasphemy, diseases, things like that). It's completely different than some racial epithet.

You can perceive it to be sexist, but I'm fairly confident that's a minority opinion.
If someone is so arrogant/delusional to think that only they are qualified to be the steward of an AGI, they're exactly the type of person you DON'T want in the role.
Yishan Wong's comment here [1] explains it. (He's the unnamed "young up-and-coming" CEO of the story.)

In short, the plan was to reduce Condé Nast's ownership of Reddit by hiring a new CEO, and convincing that person to demand, as a condition for their hiring, that CN reduce their ownership share. Further VC funding and back-room machinations let them further reduce CN's share of the company, thus eventually wresting control over Reddit back to the original founders. Yishan was subsequently pushed out and Ellen Pao promoted to CEO, which didn't go so well either.

Both Altman and Pao are responding in that thread.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/comment/c...
AI Discovered a Faster Matrix Multiplication Algorithm [video]
Breaking down food requires coordination across dozens of cell types and many tissues — from muscle cells and immune cells to blood and lymphatic vessels. Heading this effort is the gut’s very own network of nerve cells, known as the enteric nervous system...

One of the things being studied is the involuntary contractions that move food through the gut.
> That suggests he cares more about the success of OpenAI than he does upholding the charter.

A board member should care about their organization more than their interpretation of the charter. If a Mozilla board member publicly criticized Firefox for violating their charter of a free and open internet because they're receiving money from Google, while also praising Brave for not doing so, I guarantee that they'd also be ousted.
it's not cool for companies to try to shut down academic freedom of inquiry in scholarly publishing in order to improve their public image

her independence from openai was the nominal reason she was asked to supervise it in the first place, wasn't it
I mean this is mostly just a devops issue though no? PR’s used to take a solid week to merge at my company with a 10 hour CI that had a ~50% success rate when the code worked. But we put a bunch of resources toward build times and ci run time and now it mostly works. Yea, you can circumvent a shitty pr system by just making massive pr’s but wouldn’t it be easier to have the devops team fix your broken system?
Good. So much attention has been given to nebulous concepts like AGI and alignment, meanwhile I’m sure if Nick Bostrom or Stuart Russell were being denied loans, apartments, college admission or surgeries they would understand that the problem isn’t in identifying or codifying human values, it’s that there are multiple competing and mutually incompatible human values (For example: I want my money but my landlord also wants my money) which play out in the political and economic spheres every day.
NASA is a prisoner to politics. Anytime it embarks on something there are 3 possibilities - success, failure and continuing to work on it. The first two end up forcing everyone to move on from a status quo that was the creation of time and effort that made the majority of interested parties happy.
I can't speak for those other people, but as someone who likes MQ (even today!) I think one advantage is its conceptual simplicity. It's literally just patch files; you can edit them by hand if desired. For people comfortable with or used to that, I can see the allure vs. the more mysterious operations occurring in "rebase --interactive" and such. Even quilt, the MQ progenitor, is still used today (at least on Debian).

Wasn't there an option (4): using 'qsave' and 'qpush --merge' to merge two MQ series with 3-way merge support? I don't think I've every really used it, though.

But overall, yeah Mercurial was playing catch-up to Git on that front for a while. Surely didn't help adoption.
Elon Musk shares letter detailing allegations against Sam Altman
We can assume that this happened way before there were 700+ employees.
>Why don’t children leave the house?

Because it's illegal in most of North America (especially when you consider where people actually live) for them to leave the house. That is the beginning and end of it.

If this answer isn't blindingly obvious to you, you are part of the problem. Either you don't notice it because you're more focused on being angry about "suburbia" than you are the objective well-being/freedom of your own children, or you actively encourage it because you think it's a net good (either because you're paranoid, because you're a victim of misinformation, or because you're a concern troll).

Things are safer than ever before yet most children have fewer rights and ways to develop available to them than at any point in recorded history. Sure, there might not be any place for them to go to exercise that freedom, but if you legalize it they'll eventually start coming back.

As for now, keep cheering on the arrests of children playing on their own front lawns. The reason suburbia exists in the first place is because that's the place your kids are maximally safe from this while still allowing you to be sufficiently gainfully employed, and making that way of life slightly more aesthetically acceptable to childless apartment-dwellers will do nothing to fix this.

Karen delenda est.
I know most people will say they transitioned from Digg to Reddit in the 2000s, but I feel like GameFAQs was the spiritual precursor to Reddit because there was a board for every game and even more general boards for most interests.

It had to be one of the most popular Web 1.0 sites around
If the write-cache is reordering requests (and it does, that's the whole point), you can't guarantee that $milliseconds will be enough unless you stop all requests, wait $milliseconds, write your commit record, wait $milliseconds, then resume requests. This is essentially re-implementing write-barriers in an ad-hoc, buggy way which requires stalling requests even longer.

Flush+FUA requires the data to be stored to non-volatile media. Capacitor-backed RAM dumping to flash is non-volatile. When a drive knows it has enough capacitor-time to finish flushing all preceding writes from the cache, it can immediately say the flush was completed. This can all be handled on the device without the software having to make guesses at how long something has to be written before it's durable.
I think you have to do similar things with Baichuan too. Which is also a bit pseudo open source
https://web.archive.org/web/20231121210833/https://gist.gith...

more
Did you ever want to do template metaprogramming on the ggml in llama.cpp? now you can!
So you don't think Elon Musk was one of the founders either then?
Yes but as mentioned most of these people can be replaced.
This inspired me to write an article about how to decipher clues like "three people familiar with the attempt": https://simonwillison.net/2023/Nov/22/deciphering-clues/
nonprofit companies with for-profit portfolio companies are hardly unusual and certainly not doomed to fail. i've worked for two such companies in my high-tech career myself; one is now called altarum, though i worked for the for-profit subsidiary that got sold to veridian
Having the artists tweak it via sniping is hilarious

Usually you would do that by just adding a console variable they can tweak
Yeah that's certainly a debate worth having.

My point is this coup against OpenAI (seemingly) wasn't started by people who want to make AI more open. They want to make it inaccessible unless you're in their club. To my reading, that is more starkly opposed to the charter than anything Sam Altman has done. Commercialization = giving wide access. Not total 100% open source access, but wide access nonetheless.
Navier boats in the bay area has a very high end luxury electric hydrofoiling boat, and this guy took a tour in much rougher waves, with a wife that is easily sea sick. they did fine, since you are no longer riding up and down the waves, more through them. Also, they use much, much less power once they are up on the hydrofoil, since they have much less resistance, just takes a bit to get up to speed first (which electric motors are great for)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQbT4pr5ylE&t=6s

https://www.navierboat.com/
So does he work for Microsoft or not? Or is he as loyal to his new employer as he was when YC promoted him to President and he soon began talking about running for governor of California?
There is a flood of fake SSDs currently, mostly big brands. I've recently purchased counterfeit 1TB. It passes all the tests, performance is ok, it works... except it gets episodes where ioping would be anything between 0.7 ms and 15 seconds, that is under zero load. And these are quality fakes from a physical appearance perspective. The only way I could tell mine was fake is that the official Kingston firmware update tool would not recognize this drive.
Remove your personal information from data brokers and people search sites!
PrivacyPros Thanksgiving:THANKS23 , ThanksGiving 30% off coupon to erase your personal data from the internet!
Certain prominent members noped out, but yeah.
If you work in emerging economy, you will get to do a lot of greenfield projects.
SpaceX might succeed with Starship and it might fail but I don't think we'll be scratching our heads in 10 years wondering which will be case.

SLS? If in 10 years they're still spending money on it to launch it once every couple of years - if it's still in some sort of weird limbo between success and failure - I wouldn't be surprised.
>I’ve interacted with board members with various companies over my career, and everyone on the board is extremely junior.

Yes, you've hit on the thing that bothered me when I read the members' bios after Altman's firing but didn't figure out until reading your comment. It's not so much what they say, as much as what they don't say. There is no greybeard, some seasoned current/former CEO of another company (no, the CEO of Quora does not quality). There is no VC representative.

I realize that OpenAI has this weird nonprofit/profit ownership arrangement which I still don't get, and that the VC board members/observers are presumably on the profit side, but that still doesn't answer the implied question!
Blame your government.
And I don't mean that in a hostile way. People need to temper their expectations when using a product that is in the crosshairs of their government. Alphabet and Meta aren't startups and they have tangible regulatory obligations.
The HN submission title “Microsoft removed a gist from Sam Altman critics” is misleading then, can you update it?
For Qwen there is this the CausualLM 14B model, based on llama2 architecture but with Qwen 14B model weights.
Is there a reason that everyone seems to train qwop RL on the actual game rather than reverse engineering the model? I can't find a single gym which implements the movement itself in python, they all rely on node or interacting with the browser itself. (Even the most feature rich, popular one https://pypi.org/project/qwop-gym/)
You must work at a big tech company. Thats utter insanity.
The question I’m asking is how much faster we could have pulled forward widespread renewables deployment with an earlier commitment to the project. My (non-expert) guess is that a decade might have been possible. Your view is that -2000 years probably wasn’t possible. I don’t think we’re in any major disagreement on those points, so the interesting question is about values in between.
Great question! Right now both ChatGPT and my demo are doing very simple and basic stuff that definitely needs improvement.

ChatGPT is essentially push-to-talk with a little bit of automation to attempt to press the button automatically at certain times. Mine is continuously listening and can be interrupted while speaking, but isn't yet smart enough to delay responding if you pause in the middle of a sentence, or stop responding at the natural end of a conversation.

I wrote up my detailed thoughts about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38339222
> Her job isn’t self promotion

Isn’t she an academic? Getting people to pay attention to her is at least half her job.
> There’s a meme that Git is hard to use but I think it’s conflating the challenges of getting used to version control at all, distributed version control, and any specific tool

That may be the case for some people, but far from all. Many people who started with cvs or even rcs and have moved on to the newer things as they have appeared still find got annoying and unintuitive. Especially compared to Mercurial.

You use it, because it is now the standard, but you are also very aware of how much cleaner and easier other systems have been.
Why would I teach this rather than a FOSS platform?