skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Eliezer himself didn’t believe that staggering advances in AI were going to happen the way they did, by pure scaling of neural networks. He seems to have thought someone was going to discover a revolutionary “key” to AI. That didn’t happen; you might say I was right to be skeptical of it.

It’s interesting so many people in the field thought neural networks would not lead to AI. Back when I started working with them around 2013, I thought we’d have AGI by 2030 (which was an especially quacky view back then that has now become an only slightly quacky view), but I also believed there was absolutely no way neural networks would be the approach that got us there. They seemed like fancy regression or curve interpolators—good perhaps for approximating molecular energies in an efficient way but not capable of having a conversation with me.

The “magic” that I thought neural networks were missing was algorithmic capability. Sure, they are universal function approximators, but that’s a bit of a hack theorem, and I didn’t think there was a realistic way to make use of that mathematical oddity; how could one practically train a neural network to compute a SHA256 hash? In fact, I still don’t think NNs can do that. But what I failed to realize, however, is that perhaps they could write the code to generate the hash. In retrospect, it seems kind of obvious, because of course the human brain can’t compute a hash function either—we just write code to do it as well.

Computer programs today seem to fall into one of two categories:

- “soft”: statistical learning or iterative linear algebra (NNs, SVMs, spectral methods, Monte Carlo, embeddings)

- “hard”: rigid, algorithmic, discontinuous (cryptography, mathematical proof systems, discrete optimization)

While most processes that occur in the human brain are probably characterizable as “soft”, I thought the uniqueness of human intelligence was due to a small but powerful amount of “hard” processing—and that we required a breakthrough in this area to achieve human-level AI. The release of GPT 3 immediately killed this viewpoint for me.

That said, while I now believe we may be able to achieve AGI using “soft” computation alone, I still think that achieving optimal AGI will require extremely “hard”, algorithmic computation. Optimal AGI would be that which performs better than any other computable algorithm on a very general problem space given some reasonable objective function. It’s quite possible there are many different starting points (non-optimal AIs) for getting there—neural networks being one of them—but as these systems recursively improve themselves, my guess is that they all end up converging on one universal, algorithmic, optimal AGI.
Surveillance tech? Factory tech? Voice recognition?

And this is just a few non-transformer machine learning approaches!
> after a certain point it just becomes a blur of people being awful to each other.

I suppose the internet is a fairly accurate reflection of human history. What a depressing thought.
fork in the browser is functionally impossible unless you mean some sort of 'damaged fork' where only the native wasm heap is mirrored and not everything else, which would be effectively useless.
Do any of those actually run on "bare metal"? Seems that term is used (confusingly) as an euphemism for "operating system".
Very valid point - Doggerland comes to mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
Ortholinear dvorak keyboard user here :'(

But, RISC-V, yummy (did not check it was a 64bits CPU).
I'm so tired of the phrase 'late stage capitalism' as if someone can just throw it out on the table like it's a reverse-uno card and it ends the discussion.

There's so much more to this topic than just 'late stage capitalism'
> the way we create art, get creative review, find and consume large documents have suddenly changed.

I disagree for your first two points. I do use generative AI to create image for my SWADE/DnD campaigns, but this is not art, this is illustration. There is no story behind the style, there is no story behind the color choice, or the meaning of the portraits.

AI was able to imitate Art since at least imagemagik. Kazimir Malevich's art, at least. Music is the same. Unless you think a DJ mixing up without mods or adding anything is an artist, in this case you might consider AI music art. I consider it entertainment.

Never got anything creative from ChatGPT, even when i was paying for it.

Bing chat (and copilot) is great to replace google, scaffold a lot of my code, and definitely boosted my productivity somewhat. But there's a reason why i don't use it to write my scenarii (still use it to spellcheck and syntax check), and even dialogs i have given up on (faster to prepare it myself in the end).
It's unrealistic to expect these chips to compete with modern manufacturing standards. Still, it's very impressive the progress RISC-V has made in the last few years. It's actually a viable option for many projects now.
You can get reliable stack dumps without frame pointers.

Removing needless instruction and register pressure that 99.99% of users don't rely on in any way and the rest don't need if they fixed their tools is not premature optimization but simple common sense. Which is why its on by default in the first place.

Calling 1% or even 0.1% optimizations that apply accross the board "premature optimizing" is a great example of the culture of wastefulness that has made computers less responsive even though hardware has gotten a million times faster. These things do add up.
Automating security with Blink cameras and Home Assistant
Or building things that help retain current customers vs acquire new customers so sales has something to sell.

The bigger problem as I've seen it is engineers that don't see themselves as part of the business, either because of the culture or personal choice around lack of focus on soft skills.

All too often engineers spend zero time understanding the market and customers, and scaled agile, as it's typically implemented and managed, definitely doesn't help.
That's assuming you can't profile without frame pointers which is simply not true. If some tools have issues then fix them.
Article was probably written by AI
Guess what you need to develop 4nm (spoiler, it’s a lot of money). There are many applications where 22nm is a good tradeoff.
Ublock is more convenient and i don't need to pay one subscription per site.

In the past, it was about selling convenience. Netflix, for example has beaten conventional torrent sites because it had almost all movies you'd ever want in a single place, steady connection and a good UX. Now there are a dozen different services to juggle, each with a constantly changing library and torrents became more convenient again.
The report that came out was about Cruise. Waymo didn't have the same "unsatisfying amount of human input behind the scenes".
I kinda like the hill chart but TBH it shouldn't look like normal distribution, but more like a half-circle. In my experience, most (SW) projects (at all levels of granularity) are S-curves (and not straight lines like in burndown chart). You're slow at beginning, because you're learning the domain and finding good abstractions. You're slow at the end because you're working out the kinks and fixing little details. The fastest progress is in the middle. So if the hill chart is supposed to show the difficulty in progress, it should look kinda like a derivative of inverted S-curve.
The issue with the singularity, and why it is a problem, is that the mathematics break down when a particle reaches the singularity, which it does after finite (proper) time, so we don’t know what happens to the particle after it hits the singularity. Physical objects falling towards the singularity get ripped apart, so their constituents reach the singularity at different times. We don’t know what happens at the respective moment they individually reach the singularity, but since there’s nowhere else they can go, we kind of assume that they’ll necessarily accumulate at the singularity, which therefore would be infinitely dense. But really the problem is that we have no functioning theory that tells us what actually happens at the singularity.

In quantum mechanics, particles aren’t singular points, and instead have an extent corresponding to their wavelength. In that picture, it’s not possible for a particle to hit a singularity even as a limit.
Do you feel less like a “world citizen” now?
To avoid 32/64bits RISC-V CPU fragmentation, the real fragmentation which hurts, manufacturers should eat the bullet and pay the 64bits silicium real estate.

"Write 64bits RISC-V assembly once, run everywhere-ish!"
They know the risks, if they choose to be idiots that's on them.

Invest in some good PPE that doesn't get in the way. I have an air-fed mask I use when spraying lacquer, I do woodworking as a hobby. My small shop is set up with two different filtration systems to keep dust and VOC out of the air. I refuse to use isocyanate catalyzed compounds because of the health implications.
I'd imagine many people would be willing to pay for such a product.
why do you assume that the brain is quantum? it seems very obviously not? on stuff the size of neurons quantum effects are already negligible at anything except near 0K temperatures which the brain isn't at, right? as this ever been shown to not be true. have we ever seen quantum effects on warm super-mulecular sized structures?
"Freedom Visa"
"The Freedom Visa is a fast track to the Salvadoran passport for you, your spouse and children under the age of 18, at the cost of 1,000,000 USD in BTC or USDt. Your investment will contribute to El Salvador’s economic renaissance program to fuel the country’s growth."
Some interesting bits:

Total is fracking in the middle of residential areas, drilling sites hidden from view by portable walls, protected by police from investigations of air pollution, while asthma rates are over twice as high as in the rest of the country.

"They [Total] don't get to go everywhere they want to go, but we have a great relationship so I'm happy with Total" (Arlington mayor after revealing a new fountain sponsored through oil and gas revenue.)
> Capitalism is only maintained through state power exercised by the capitalist ruling class.

Your confusing Capitalism with Government Aided Corporatism :)
You mean that you think it is essential for developing AGI?
how much would be 'shared'?
Those links say 70% of all security bugs, but since my bc/dc does not have the ! command (to spawn processes) and only reads files, not writes them (except stdout), it’s hard to actually turn a memory safety issue into a security bug, even if it’s possible.

Is this quote assuming ASLR, non-executable stack, stack canaries?

I don't really understand what writing files and forking have to do with the security of system? Unless you mean it limits the attack surface from a ROP gadget?
> This article is absolutely pointless.

Not at all, but maybe you didn't read far enough to get to it.

> The statement was from 2009. Back then, neither side had any real evidence in favour of their argument. Deep learning and AI were still purely academic experiments, with zero practicality.

That's exactly what the article says:

I was explaining that there was no trend you could knowably, reliably project into the future such that you’d end up with human-level AI. And in a sense, I was right.

and then it explicitly states the point:

The trouble, with hindsight, was that I placed the burden of proof only on those saying a dramatic change would happen, not on those saying it wouldn’t. Note that this is the exact same mistake most of the world made with COVID in early 2020.

I would sum up the lesson thus: one must never use radical ignorance as an excuse to default, in practice, to the guess that everything will stay basically the same.
JWTs are complex.

Encrypted session cookies are a proven solution, widely used, and easy to implement yourself using only core libraries (http, crypto, JSON) without introducing security flaws IFF you are an experienced programmer and don’t deviate from the norm.

JWTs are complex. Too complex to implement yourself, so you need to introduce dependencies. Dependencies are usually huge, and each line of code introduces risk (even if that line is for a configuration you don’t use!). Using JWTs at all is far more risky, even if you are an experienced programmer.

If JWTs provides immense benefits over session tokens for your use case, that risk might be worth it. However, for most web apps, session tokens are good enough.
Just like TSA pre screening, lawmakers, the rich, and the powerful will be able to buy their way past it as well.

If it is so critical to have in place, why not start with government issues vehicles first, like say police cars ambulances and fire trucks. Oh right they will of course be exempt for "reasons".
Just a small question about that: If we train a generative AI on AI text, is it becoming better, worst, or the same? Because if GenAI2, trained on GenAI1 production, is less useful or as useful as GenAI1, we can be pretty sure it isn't creating anything.
I created Alas - the most powerful tool to plan your life and work - with a single text file - https://www.hackberry.dev/alas/.
Interesting question. Given n stars/whatever at varying positions, is there always at least one point where the gravitational forces cancel out? Or is that just a solution to the simple cases of two bodies or a single body in the form of a sphere or shell?
You can also see them as light bubbles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuWvJXZT5vQ
Excellent! 200 years ago escaping poverty was not possible, 100 years ago it took a couple generations and now a mere 20 years.
Not sure it counts, as it’s a single 60-pin DIP module holding the two pieces of silicon. Indeed, one could see the J-11 as an early chiplet design.
Open Web Docs attended the W3C workshop Secure the Web Forward. The workshop was held virtually on September 26-28, 2023 with the goal to drive developer awareness and adoption of web security standards & practices.
That is indeed a fun read, but nothing in it contradicts what I said.
Then the real innovation that we’ve lacked since the Concorde is quiet (and probably economical) supersonic flight.
Supporting C11 and C17 by definition doesn't require supporting C99 features made optional in C11.
I would love to see a clear roadmap from the EU (not been successful searching)

My take on this is

1. this is less about competitiveness at the cutting edge and more about security and economic on-shoring

2. building chips on-shore at the 40-20nm level massively reduces risk, increases the likelihood smaller states can build locally and solves for most chip needs

3. chips we need are rarely the cutting edge AI stuff. The vast volume of chios will go in as controllers on screens, USB connectors and so on. Building plug and play alternatives will give local manufacturers choices, and incentives will help.

4. the big win is security. Does the CEO of sensitive company, the head of security services and the general in charge of procurement use keyboards, cpus motherboards and monitors made from open source chips manufactured in a trusted nation? What is the BOM for the challenger tank - how many chips in there that are made by whom and ...

the process is long and arduous and the risks are huge.

But we make tanks from steel other materials made in "favoured nations" - surely the same applies to silicon?
This was novel 10 years ago. Maybe you were still doing it but hardly worth mentioning.
> I think it's the revelation that a shared culture and experience whose existence you took for granted really never existed. You feel untethered.

I’d hazard a guess that many British felt that same feeling long before Brexit, and that’s part of what caused Brexit in the first place.
This would seem entirely adequate to me:

> We discussed how to translate the pluscal in Setup, but as a refresher, it’s File → Translate PlusCal Algorithm in the menu (Ctrl+T/⌘T by keyboard). This puts a translation below the comment block:

Also, if it’s an easily-missed step and something just mysteriously doesn’t work if you miss it out, that’s not a documentation bug, that’s a design bug. (I’m not familiar with it.)
If people keep bringing up something you wrote in 2009 and called you a dumbass for saying what you said 14 years ago, wouldn't you put out a statement saying they're being dumbasses today?
> I will say there’s pretty much nothing they taught me that I couldn’t have learned myself. That said, school focused my attention in ways I wouldn’t have alone, and provided pressure to keep going.

I have a masters degree in computer science and took a fair share of ML graduate courses. That pretty much summed up what I was thinking. They basically forced me to sit and learn something I wouldn't have alone.

Now-- I'm not saying you need to go to grad school. You could buy some ML textbooks and force yourself through them and go from there... but how many people have that grit? I wouldn't have been one of them :)
But of course, that's the undercurrent worldview you can sense from Tanakh. Losing (a temporary) home once more and wandering about, having nowhere to return to.
Only if by Lisp you mean Lisp 1.5 language report.
Olaf Stapledon is the most underrated sci-fi author of all time
I've already seen one company adopt Paseto tokens as though this is some sort of magic bullet.
Someone hasn’t read up on the sawstop lawsuits and suggested laws in the area.
If it helps, it's not for you.

Execs can't do this themselves because they don't have the information they need, and are trying to be predictable and compete in a market. So think about it as an ELI5 exercise where you're infantilizing up, or as it's more commonly and professionally referred to, managing up, or more plainly, helping the business make better decisions.
True enough, though if Trinity could jump between skyscrapers and run against a wall before disarming 5 machine gun totting henchmen, i imagine she could have enabled transparency in her Xterm in Enlightenment.

But in more general terms, the representation of computer interfaces, with avatars walking rigidly in 3d pastel coloured surroundings (as presented in a variety of examples, my favorite being the corporate network in the TV Series Profit) sort of fizzled out post 2000, when everybody got to owning a desktop and laptop and realised that the internet was just text in fact, and 3D environments were not so easy to navigate (remember Second-Life).

That is, of course, if your online life did not involve being an elf in World of Warcraft, or something.
From the preprint [1] it looks like it is not meant for consumers.

This way, Sargantana lays the foundations for future RISC-V based core designs able to meet industrial-class performance requirements for scientific, real-time, and high-performance computing applications.

1. <https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/384912/sarga...>
"You have taken a heroic dose of MDMA."
You almost guessed it though. There was a (since removed) secret combination of buttons on driver console that magically unlocked the train.
>> AI doesn't act by itself

> It can be made to quite easily.

Not really, no. You can of course create an acting-by-itself bot but it will run into limits very very soon, because the world model and planning parts of AI are in their infant stages, if that.
When I was at school they told us people learn differently. Through examples, through listening to loud reading and by doing (e.g. applying things). I for one can learn fast through examples and visual representation. A wall of text can be very frustrating so I personally like screenshots when appropriate.

I support the author's points, that screenshots must come with a description what or why something has to be done. Not just "click this and that and you will be done". I also strongly support the remarks about automation of screenshots. Outdated screenshots are the worst.
Show HN: HN but Bigger
I've replaced my iPad with an Android tablet but I've run into an issue that I can't really read HN anymore - the text is tiny.

Firefox does not have any useful accessibility controls so I got a chance to use uBlock filters (which I recently learned about somewhere on HN).

! hackernews zoom for android tablets
news.ycombinator.com##html:style(width: 50% !important; transform: scale(1.59) !important; transform-origin: 0 0 !important;)

Add this line to "My Filters" in uBlock Origin and reload HN.

At first I tried scale(2) but for some reason that left me "zoomed in", so you may have to adjust the 1.59 for you device. No idea why.
Sincere doubt: is it really needed after MGLRU?
Same experience here on Firefox stable on Android. The file editing portion of Github is unusable for files more than a few hundred lines.
So an in-order core that is slightly faster than rocketchip in their benchmarks. That doesn't seem all that exciting, except for the vector extension, although they only support a small subset of it. Thats sounds similar to spatz [0] and given their numbers is slightly faster.

[0] https://github.com/pulp-platform/spatz
Yeah, real world is messy.
Also, the contribution/influence of ancient state in softmax is something the controller can learn, especially with a task-suitable position encoding.
Though I'd not be surprised if what's IIUC called polynomial attention (essentially truncated Taylor series "FIR", just truncated later than the traditional linear convolutional time-series filter) where you do bounded-exponent non-linear (but IIUC still FFT-based, or at least, similar) response rather than infinite-exponent softmax, turns out to be more suitable.

And beyond that, a hierarchical controller: exploit tight feedback loop with a small controller, supervised, controlled, and managed by the big one that has some inference latency and would like to be batched somewhat (e.g., think a casual transformer trained to predict more than just one token into the future).
Well said. It's amazing how often people dismiss computer visualization in media (< ~2005) as "unrealistic."

That's not the goal!

It's intended to be representative of the process of interacting with a computer, not the interface itself. At a time when most viewers had little or no first-hand experience with a computer.

If you showed a CLI then, maybe 1/20 people would understand it, and they'd be bored because they used it everyday at work.
Yes indeed, I was attracted to learn of GRAP because I have been such a huge fan of gnuplot for my needs, which is incidentally quite well described here:

https://edg.uchicago.edu/tutorials/pretty_plots_with_gnuplot...

Quite a lot more palatable to my eyes, but also GRAP is fun. How things have changed/stayed the same/etc.
Transformers are synonymous with scaling as it was the first model that kept improving both by adding more and more layers and throwing more training data at it. All the previous models like CNNs, ResNet, LSTMs etc. hit some depth/training size where no progress was happening anymore as gradient was unreliably flowing down.
Amazing. All these developments in robotics over the last few years after decades of stagnation really make me want to return to the field (my first job after school in 1997 was designing robots for nuclear reactors).
But they will keep the Marenostrum 4 in the chapel this time, instead of replacing the old generation with the new version :).
Reading their official statement it's hard to not get the impression that it wasn't even consulted with their attorney - they deny specific allegations in a way that just begs further investigation.

I mean, I'm Polish and worked for such people in the past. The statement reeks of an approach to business that I wish went extinct already, but apparently you still see pockets of it here and there.