skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The business degree kids with an idea need to realize the tech cofounders can learn and understand business.

Having an idea is like having a thought.

A startup needs product and distribution. If a tech cofounder builds what’s asked of him and the sales cofounder can’t sell, should the ownership revert to the tech cofounder?
> What about leftover avocado? Any way to keep it from browning? Oxygen is the enemy of avocados—it's what causes them to turn that unsightly brown.

I am very surprised this article nor the comments mention what my wife does: keep the pit inside the mashed avocado. It will stay green much longer!

No idea where she learned this but it works. We always joke to friends this tricks the avocado into thinking it is still complete.
+1 for this proposal. It is just unhealthy to permanently live in a wrong time zone and this proposal would fix that at least in europe.
Who is the ideal customer for this thing? Construction worker? Off roader? Camper? Home improvement person?
> There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements.

Nothing of this sort happened except in very exceptional cases where it's very obvious and clearly intentional, such as Alban Berg (who chose adversarially tonal tone rows). Besides you assume the only benefit you get from serialism is atonality but that makes no sense because many composers used tonal rows too (i.e. tone rows with 7 or 9 pitch classes in the Major or Minor system). Not only that but different composers used serialism for different purposes.

You are however right that Schoenberg assumed 12 tone serialism implies some form of atonality, which is incorrect. Research shows that he had a bias towards atonal tone rows.

Lerdahl's criticism of serialism is also convincing, i.e. the abstract structure of music does not translate to the heard structure of music. It's fair to classify this as the "art" part of writing serialistic pieces that theory is insufficient.

Besides all of this, traditional music theory teaching focuses too much on serialism as a "technique" and not enough as a "structure", which was the main point of Schoenberg. For example, Elliot Carter claims he doesn't intentionally use row vectors or row matrices in his compositions, but his works can certainly be analyzed and understood this way. It seems like for a minor subset of free atonal compositions serialism is the natural structure of this kind of music. This point is often missed.

I firmly disagree with your points about Schoenberg. I think he's one of the two gigantic innovators of music in 20th century: Philip Glass and him. (I understand this is extremely controversial, opinions are mine). It really takes a lot to make artistic statements so profound your works look misplaced in your canon but are still firmly part of it.
> You think it’s just generating plausible random crap that happens to exist verbatim on the internet?
> I mean… read the paper, 0.8% outputs were verbatim for gpt-3.5.

Look at the sorts of outputs they claim are in the training data. Also note that their appendix includes huge chunks of text but they do not claim the entire chunk was matched to existing data — only a tiny amount of it.

The “bug” to me is something about losing its state and generating a random token. Now if that random token is “Afgh”, I’m not surprised it follows up with “Afghanistan” and a perfect list of countries in alphabetical order. I’m also not surprised that appears in training data, because it appears on thousands of webpages.

So it’s not that there isn’t an overlap between the GPT gibberish and internet content, and therefore likely training data. It’s that it’s not especially unique. If it were — like reproducing a one off Reddit thread verbatim — I think that would be greater cause for concern.
> The thing is, customers don't necessarily want a distributed messaging system, they might be perfectly fine with a decentralized one if it supports E2EE.

Maybe! You could argue that basically all the successful messaging systems except for email and IRC (if IRC still counts as successful) are centralized, so there's that.

> You can do it however times you want and it will be easy to do if you have access to one of the few domain experts of the protocol.

In fairness, I don't know how you implement a client/server for a protocol w/o being a domain expert in it. Try building an IRC server, an IMAP server, an ActivityPub server, etc. and remaining ignorant about the details about IRC, IMAP, ActivityPub, etc. This has felt like an odd benchmark to me this whole thread.

> Blockchains are DAGs, they are not necessarily trees.

Eh, I really think they're trees because they're Merkle trees. Each block contains the hash of the previous block, not some random other block as it would be if it were a graph. Even with uncle/orphan blocks, it's still a tree.

> Although Merkle trees are used in the underlying block data structure, this is orthogonal to the blockchain concept and any data structure could be stored there.

Definitely not, because the hashes prove the tree's correctness. You can verify any branch, which you want to do to ensure you're not getting scammed. The Merkle tree concept is essential to the verifiability of blockchains.

> Unless I'm missing something about MLS, you're mixing unrelated stuff here.

Sorry I was a little opaque. Matrix' handling of rooms is suboptimal for lots of reasons, but one is what you pointed out: they don't have great performance and thus desync a lot. MLS has a cool tree-based Ologn algorithm for fixing this. It's a process to get there [0], but I'm excited for when it happens.

[0]: https://arewemlsyet.com/
Indeed, there is none. There is a FAQ though, but it is not supportive of any advantage. It just contains a handful of "But won't it ..." with rather shallow dismissals, but nothing to show an advantage of the proposed change.

And it contains "debatable" statements, such as "For most people, it is not a problem to sleep beyond sunrise." That's not my experience, and they don't offer evidence. It's followed by a worse one: "Having to get up an hour earlier due to DST the next morning, unable to finish your sleep, is what causes sleep deprivation." Yeah, that's one day, perhaps two. Very early sunrise is 2 months.

But if you shout loud enough, you get influence.
Searle's one of the most die-hard materialist philosophers of mind around. It's his materialism that leads him to make his argument. Computers and human brains are both made out of atoms but that doesn't mean they're not qualitatively different. By that logic I"d be no different from a tree. There's qualitative differences between computers and human brains. Our cognition is biochemical and horribly slow, just by virtue of speed we are not working like LLMs. We're not doing tensor math in our heads, we don't have access to terrabytes of unaltered, digital data.

It's because our bandwith and monkey brains are so slow that we're forced to operate at a level of semantics. We can't just make inferences from almost infinite amounts of data the same way we can't play chess like Stockfish or do math like a calculator. The dualism is precisely in the opposite view, that computation is somehow "substrate independent". Searle argues we can have AI that has understanding the way we do, just that it's going to look more like an organic brain as a result.

The important insight from LLMs is that they're not like us at all but that doesn't make them less effective or intelligent. We do have plenty of understanding, we need to because we rely on a particular kind of reasoning, but artificial systems don't need to converge on that.
I've experienced this behaviour. During the middle of the day at an intersection of a side street with a busy street it can take a long time to turn. At night when the busy street isn't so busy, it seems to often turn relatively quickly.

Are you waiting 20 seconds for the cross light to turn amber or 20 seconds for your walk light to come on? Because the latter is always going to take at least ~10 seconds -- the stale green time + the amber time + all-red time.
80% of the features/details for 20% of the code/complexity. Even minor tweaks can have an outsized effect on the final code. A large part of my job is doing this in such a way that satisfies the stakeholders.
This reminds me of The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. I also think if we stopped expecting all LLMs to have an immediate answer, it would be relatively easy to shim some kind of "conscience" to direct the output in different ways. Similar to the safeties already in place in LLMs, but instead of it just saying "NO DON'T SAY THAT" it can dialog internally to change what the output is until it reaches what it believes to be the agreed upon best answer.
I don’t know, I’ve mostly followed this approach over my 20 year career, but it really depends on your surroundings, and honestly hasn’t led to great success.

E.g. If you’re surrounded by yes men who will code whatever without question, product people greatly prefer that, and you end up sidelined.

There’s also plenty of companies who don’t want engineers getting involved with decisions, and product and UX people work upfront and in isolation until you’re handed tiny Jira tickets with Figma mockups attached. Discussion at that point is considered “disruptive“.

It honestly seems like this has gotten worse in the past 5 to 10 years.
Linux Shared Libraries
> If they don't like what is shown, they have full control to change it.

Sure, and then some other news agency that does include more content in their metadata will be shared in the aggregator instead, because it will at least bring in a little revenue. It's a race to the bottom, and the outcome for the original reporter is the same: no payment for their work.

> The real problem is that reporting the news doesn't pay very well anymore

Well, yeah! That is the problem! Google is getting the money that used to go to the news agencies. This is one attempt at a fix.
He almost described prunning :)
Does the deal say anything about the jurnalist pay? Can a high-school make every single student a "full time journalist" and rake in the cash?

Or some other sort of club instead of a school.
Nice I built a similar thing but to render any selected text as an image https://Ebank.nz

I use those latent consistency speed ups but I translated them into quality ups by putting a lot of refinement after the generation.

Now I'm getting midjourney level art come out of it
> Is an MP3 file itself a reproduction of the audio? Or is it merely capable of producing the reproduction?

Regardless, when the MP3 file is played using a program following the MP3 standard, the result will be a sound identical or substantially similar to the sound that was encoded into the MP3 file. The purpose of the MP3 standard is to encode audio into a file (which will be called an MP3 file) which when played using a program following the MP3 standard produces a sound similar to the original audio.

An AI model is meant to be created by aggregating multiple works, but the purpose of the model is not necessarily to produce something substantially similar to any work in the set. In my framing from the previous paragraph, the purpose of an AI model that produces images is to produce an image that can be opened using JPG/PNG/WEBP/AVIF image viewer, where the new image isn't necessarily supposed to be but can be similar to an existing work. If you were to train an AI model on literally only one work, then you would get something analogous in purpose to an MP3 file, since why would you use the model to produce something nonsimilar to the single work in the training set?

Pasting what I wrote in a different comment:

My argument is that similarity of new works (including AI model outputs) to actual works (not to non-existing works, existing styles, or theoretical aggregations of multiple works) is a prerequisite to infringement. From an article about the substantial similarity test in the US [1]:

> To win a claim of copyright infringement in civil or criminal court, a plaintiff must show he or she owns a valid copyright, the defendant actually copied the work, and the level of copying amounts to misappropriation.[1][3]

In order to get an infringing output, the user usually has to include a reference to an existing author or an existing work in the prompt. Sometimes that's not the case (which I've worried about with respect to Copilot), but in order to damn the model as a whole, you would have to establish that in over some percentage of cases the model produces infringing outputs for prompts which don't reference a particular author (whether individual or collective), a particular work, or a style strongly associated with a single or a few authors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity
No coal on my grid (well a tiny amount sometimes but it is being phased out)

https://electricityproduction.uk/in/scotland/

Another thing I’d like to add is that even burning coal it will still break even and deliver less emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle:

> If they drive in Poland, where 90% of the electricity comes from burning coal, then yes, it will take 100,000 kilometers or more to reach parity with a conventional gasoline-powered car.

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/01/21/unpacking-the-electric-...
Does Grammerly hook something in Chrome? If not, then it's still probably a Chrome bug, even if some second-order effect of Grammerly is necessary to trigger it.
Unity announces updates to it's web runtime support
Also they notice yc applications that are taking advantage of tech co-founders or tech team builders with unfair equity structure.
You need to read this:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...

Software does not exist in any spiritual realm, it's just that the word "software" refers to a state rather than a system. There is nothing "spiritual" or "mystical" going on there. It's completely mundane physics. You can't point at software for the same reason you can't point at sleep or death or urgency. It's just a quirk of natural language that we overload nouns to refer to both systems and states.
This is a great post and comments here.

I wanted to mention that there has been quite a lot of work in machine learning and statistics over the last few years as to how to analyze large models with non-identifiable parameters, of which LLMs are one such instance. Given that multiple values of the parameters can lead to demonstrably similar outputs (the non-identifiability problem), an important high-level takeaway is that it is typically more productive to shift the unit of analysis from the parameters to examples/exemplars of the input/output.

In my biased opinion, our startup Reexpress AI has already taken this older line of work to its logical conclusion: Non-parametric constraints for large language models that make a direct connection between the observed data and new predictions.

Our website has a link to our macOS software: https://re.express/

(Aside: Separately, we also do some interesting things to make it fast enough for on-device learning. While the full unlabeled training datasets for an LLM are typically too large to process on-device, the standard setup here for a well-specified task is that there is a rather smaller amount of high-quality labeled data from which we derive the uncertainty estimates, and which can effectively be modeled on-device. Thus, perhaps counter-intuitively, deriving such estimates for the largest models available today is often no problem in practice, because we can just estimate against the available labeled data for a given task. Our software makes it easy to do this by ensembling additional models with our on-device models.)
> you have to keep expanding the size of the model

Can you be more specific here? Expand the size in possible parameters? Expand the size in context? I get what you are saying in theory: what if every GPT-4 instance had 100TB of RAM it could use, what could it achieve then, but I can't think of how/what would fill that RAM that we are limited on today? I thought the more parameters you introduce, the more risk you have for hallucination because it's harder to pick which token should be next given the "more possible outcomes" total.
The decision to sustain products is at the executive level, not the ground level.
this is why: https://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences/cutting_off
Spare tires under normal operation are dead weight which is the costliest possible engineering compromise to make on a vehicle, as it decreases every performance characteristic: acceleration, deceleration, cornering, fuel economy, etc.

Their only reason for existing is to compensate for the historically poor observed reliability of tires. This has recently improved with TPMS mandates and better engineered tires.
Maybe they have the enterprise licence with grammarlys pinky swear that they won't train on your data.
Good point. How far off would you say LLMs are today compared to "human levels of trust-worthiness / perfection / output"?
Can you explain why?

Non-python dev here.
> Using open-source Chromium instead of Chrome did not cause crashes, so we couldn’t see what Chrome code was failing either.

They don't address why they didn't just run Chromium. Or Firefox.

(This is potentially better than the 'solution' they much later ended up with, in which they probably only relieved a symptom of an underlying problem that can exhibit again, and in the meantime is a zero-day exploit waiting to happen. At least, with a different browser, there's a chance that the vulnerability doesn't actually exist, when it's known to exist in their Chrome configuration.)
That's so utterly absurd. So now I know that it's also 20:00Z on the other side of the ocean. Great. But, are they awake at 20:00Z there? Or asleep? Let me subtract the time difference...
probably yeah, the person I replied to needed an ELI5 and I provided that
Waiting for amber takes 20 seconds. Also it’s not a timeout of some case from repeated use. Have to wait even if it wasn’t used for several minutes beforehand.
Neil Gaiman on the future of the internet
Great work! Do you know if it's possible to port this over to pytorch's Apple Silicon/MPS support?
Cixin Liu has a great short story 'Cloud of Poems' in which an alien intelligence seeks to write every possible permutation of traditional Chinese poetry, to show up a human poet.

I didn't bother to check the math on this, but in the story there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way encode every possible traditional Chinese poem!
Veritasium just put out a video explaining this with some good animations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUHkTs-Ipfg
Current trends in local software development job advertisements
I absolutely don't want to play it all the way through but that is irrelevant, love it
> Per the code, the technique is based off of DeepFloyd-IF, which is not as easy to run as a Stable Diffusion variant.

I haven't dug in yet, but it _should_ be possible to use their ideas in other diffusion networks? It may be a non-trivial change to the code provided though. Happy to be corrected of course.
The biggest difference on the surface is the AU law focuses on aggregators providing summaries that remove the need to visit the source, where the CA law targets just references, aka links.
One that's been patched already, though, as they say that in current versions of Chrome and Grammarly it doesn't crash.
So spend life working, building stuff outside of work and then writing about it while I'm asleep?
That's not so much a use case, but I get what you're saying. It's nice that you can find optimizations to shift down the pareto frontier of across the cost and latency dimension. The hard tradeoffs are for cases like inference batching where it's cheaper and higher throughput but slower for the end consumer.

What's a good use case for an order of magnitude decrease in price per token? Web scale "analysis" or cleaning of unstructured data?
Well, he did commit some atrocities. I don't think he should be celebrated as some American hero
This line of reasoning is dangerously close to saying that mapmakers need to pay license fees for your land to be shown on a map because "without the land your map wouldn't be very valuable."
History of the PDF
Can you help me understand how a parameter and a token differ?

> 32k is the vocab size, or list of tokens.

This sounds to me like it is choosing from 1 of 32k tokens when it is scoring/generating an answer.

Where does the 7,000,000,000 parameters come from then? I would have thought it is picking from 1 of 7B parameters?

Parameter != token?
How could you write all this and not post the gif so we can try it?
Life is simple, if all need measures implemented on time. And partially, when you could delegate important things to other people, so you don't have to do all important things yourself.

Unfortunately, some important things have not done by Ukraine, some have not done by West, and now we have this huge mess.
I mean not all businesses need to thrive. If the thing generates significant profits for a while then the founder can retire and either sell it or just let it die. If it's not a publicly-traded company there's no fiduciary duty to do anything more than that.
But accessibility features need to cover all disabilities which often means you have to have more than one.
I opened the link, and laughed at how dumb I am to think this would work in i3
Higher levels of financial optimism associated with lower cognitive ability
If this is correct, do you think GPT5 will be conscious because its training data will include a lot of itself (albeit GPT4 not 5)
I think the question why contemporary music intimidates or infuriates people could be expanded to art as well.

As someone who studied art and film I found that even extremely powerful experimental works of music, art or film will have critics like these. Don't get me wrong: One doesn't has to like every piece of art. But even without liking it one could still respect the expression, the craft, the energy and/or the thought contained within a work. There is a lot of great art that I don't like.

The problem many people have with these modern things is that they think of art as something one can "parse" into a specific intended meaning. So once you encounter unparseable art, chances are you will feel stupid. Or worse, you feel the artwork "calls" you stupid.

But a lot of art simply is, while the intention is completely secondary. Nobody would look at a nice sunset and be upset at the fact that it doesn't have a clear meaning behind it. This lack of meaning is very easy to ignore with art which you think is nice (e.g. a painting of said sunset). For more art-headed people the same painting of a sunset would be boring, or even kitsch — what does the painting show, that I couldn't see better in real and nature? Then I'd rather see something completely unseen, a new painting technique, a motive I have never thought about etc.
Searle's Chinese room is a good example of begging the question.

As for the rest of it, the LLM is basically "raw compute". You need a self-referential loop and long-term memories for it to even have the notion of self. But looking at it at that level and discounting it as "incapable of thinking" is missing the point - it's the larger system of which LLM is one part, albeit a key one (and which we're still trying to figure out how to build) that might actually be conscious etc.
It looks like the desktop Grammerly app hooks into all sorts of things, "An all-in-one writing assistant that works on your desktop and in your browser. Use it in apps, word processors, email clients, and more."
It would have an emotional reaction to certain "thought constructs" and would be guided by that.

Or we could just give them three laws