skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This will be an interesting inflection point for humanity.

Though, call me jaded, but I can’t help but doubt that the _actual_ content creators, the writers themselves, will see any of the money should The Times win or settle the case.
Great point. These institutions are being eroded from within. Some say DEI is a failing practice, I say it's achieving the exact results it set out toward.
Prebuilt Actually Portable Executables for popular open source projects
Good old BSD. Keeps putting out ;)
But that's where you are wrong. I, like many other cat people /live/ for cat affections. My cat gives it only whe deserved or when affection back is requested, and I accept it with enthusiasm every time. Every time she does it, it feels like a gift. Every time a strange cat does it, it feels like the biggest gift. Cat affection (from my experience) is not unconditional, and that's what makes it special. My cats get mad at me sometimes, and they show it, but they always forgive.

Maybe it's co-dependence, and maybe it's the inverse of a human/dog relationship.

I think I might actually like this dog.
> they are not worthy sacrificing the very values all nations agreed to after the horrors of WW2.

I honestly don't understand what you mean.
Why did Europe take so many Syrians (and later on - Afghans, and now Ukranians), was that sacrificing the very values of all nations?
That's the opposite of the values you seem to be talking about. You seem to imply that Palestinians are somehow different form all other groups of people under war like Syrians, Afghans, Ukrainians etc.

It seems to me like the decent thing to do - no one can force anyone to evacuate but you seem to want to prevent everyone from evacuating even if they want to, that's a bizarre stand to take if you care about Palestinians or human rights in general.
New Years Resolution: Software Freedom
I'd recommend talking to a GOOD physician (a neurologist or a psychiatrist) - as a neurodiverse individual - I'm autistic, have ADHD, and have a few IQ points of being considered gifted - my doctor and therapist both told me that it was probably due to attention deficit) who has accomplished much without medication or awareness of these disorders (and giftedness). The tricky thing about being neurodiverse is that it is something ingrained into your brain - you don't know how it is to live without it - maybe you unconsciously masked some of the things.

A few things that are usually comorbidities of ADHD are mental health problems (such as anxiety or depression) and eating disorders (binge eating, anorexia, bulimia) - that you may have, and meds can help you with that (or not). A good doctor can give you the pros and cons. ADHDs also have more propensity for addiction (alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, etc) - so being aware of that can decrease the risk. Also, ADHDers can have low self-esteem (which is something that psychotherapy can help you overcome).

Despite being expensive (a few thousand dollars), one thing that could be a good idea is a neuropsychological evaluation that can give you more awareness (and data!) about your brain.

Medications should be part (and they can help a lot!) and not the whole of your therapeutic process: a psychotherapist specializing in cognitive-behavioral therapy (usually called CBT) can help you immensely. I also invested in occupational therapy (I'm a bit clumsy, and my handwriting could be better) and speech therapy to help transform and present my ideas into words - speaking with a doctor could be a good idea to help.

You certainly have a different history: my advice is to discuss it with your doctor and find the best tools (therapy, medications, adaptations to your work environment, etc) to overcome these challenges. Some medications can also have side effects - and a doctor must evaluate if - my doctor asked me for an electrocardiogram before recommending a medication)

A sound effect that medication had on me was that it helped me to overcome binge eating, and I felt less tired at the end of a workday (probably my brain was using a lot of energy to make me focus more on meetings).
You're really arguing pretty much everyone who had cable had multiple $10/mo (in the 80s and 90s!) premium channels and pretty much exclusively watched that? So there were pretty much zero people watching CNN, there were zero people watching USA,there were zero people watching Cartoon Network, zero people watching MTV, zero people watching ESPN, etc? Only HBO and Cinemax? Those were the only channels on at every single friends house, always?

> I never ever found a house amongst my friends and family during the 90's that had only basic cable.

Damn, and I thought I had a privileged childhood. Many of my friends didn't even have cable despite many coming from families making into six figures in the 90s. Literally nobody you knew only had or even spent any time watching basic cable channels?

Even for the percentage of those I knew who did have cable, most didn't have the premium channels or would only have HBO or only Showtime or whatever. And no, they weren't paying tons of money to only watch HBO, many of those other channels were often watched.

And by the fact you're scoping it to the 90s and beyond shows you're just ignoring the 40 years of history before.

> I have no hard data to back what I am going to say

You don't have the data because its 100% fiction.

> who I suspect was a plurality of cable users

Not even close. Supposedly in May 1987 it was reported HBO had 15 million subscribers. There were 41 million cable subscribers that year. In 2001 it was reported to have 25.5 million subscribers[2]. There were 66 million cable subscribers in the US. Never, in all of cable's history, have the plurality of cable subscribers had HBO.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HBO
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-05-ca-53541...
agreed. It can seem counter-intuitive with biomass since it's "burning trees", but generally it's a carbon neutral process or far closer to one than burning buried fossil fuels.
Autism and Schizophrenia have traditionally been seen as opposites and I do support that interpretation.

Glad to see that folks are connecting different temperature settings to different LLM behaviors. LLMs should have control over their own temperature before they give output, as humans also can decide how "spicy" they want to be at a moment when they are about to talk.
port 80, its open, there i win
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement
One thing I really like about Verilog is explicit register widths. I want to be able to work at the individual bit level, something that Python (and even C) are not very good at. Is Chisel decent for efficiency?
This is actually about the wall warts the cable could be plugged into.

Otherwise, I completely agree.
> That may be true, but most people don't update their browser every month[

Yes they do? All modern browsers are updated automatically with the OS. It's true that not everyone is on exactly the same cadence and there are always stragglers, but if you look at your second link the time to decay to near zero for any given browser release is almost always two months from the release of the next.
"why they didn't catch on" is sort of false because they were very dominant for many years. It might predate the author but we were doing a lot of CGI with ruby and PHP before the days of nginx or the fpm patch. In a time when Apache httpd lightpd were dominant. When BerkeleyDB was a standard. I think generations post a technology make some assumptions about their popularity given they were never the users of them. I assure you, perl that dominated all server scripting was primarily a CGI based model on the web. Eventually technologies die out to iteration in safety, security, ease of use and generally generational changeover in developers who always opt out of the current model for the new shiny thing. Anyway I'm hoping for the revival of CGI mostly because it just make sense.
You definitely have a point. The author’s motive is either to showcase products they use and are passionate enough about to highlight their longevity, or an attempt at a revenue stream. It could possibly be both, but realistically one motive should overpower the other.
A couple of things to consider. ADHD is more than the lack of focus, it also affects your emotions as well. People with ADHD tend to feel things more deeply and react more strongly. Meds can help.

And if you think: that’s not me. You may be right. But you may also not realize that you’re actually playing life on hard mode and while it may work now, it is unsustainable in the long term. Better to find something that helps now rather than wait until you are in crisis.
I lost faith in academia when I saw so many fudge data and copy pasta. This wasn’t even secret, it was quietly acknowledged.

I once inherited code that “worked” but operated on uninitialized values and out of bounds data unintentionally. I also couldn’t get it to complete a run without crashing. Even when I fixed bugs, I couldn’t reproduce the results. My own mentor told me to look the other way and move on as if this was known and totally usual.

It was also exceedingly hard to reproduce results from papers and authors seldom responded. Few would open data and even fewer would detail enough about their methods in the paper.

I’m sure others saw exceptional levels of fraud and other unethical behavior. I don’t, for one second, doubt that Claudine could have forged her way to the top. In fact, I think it could be the norm.
Ellison, Jobs, Bloomberg, Amancio Ortega were born to middle class or poor homes. Behind every billionaire is a great deal of luck whether rich or poor.

It’s not something one works or outsmarts their way into.

Most people whether born to kings or peasants will not become self-made billionaires. We should focus our efforts on eliminating poverty and ensuring there’s a solid middle class/upper middle class instead of focusing on the 1 in a million people that’ll become ultra-rich.
Somehow conservatives weaponized biden being old to claim that he's incoherent but that's in a world where trump gave these kind of speeches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elhyo-_fR0E
For audio generation I recommend Bark. I am getting 14 seconds of audio that is about a third of eleven labs quality in about 2 minutes.

This is happening on a Windows 10 Dell, with 32gb of RAM, an i5, and an Nvidia 1050 GeForce with 4gb of vram.

I'm also able to decently run local LLMs because of llama.cpp and other libraries that can share models been ram and vram. There are other tools that can help with this as well including Ollama.

I suggest subscribing to r/localLLAMA. I also suggest using Bing Copilot in Edge with allowed access to the page you're viewing. I often use it to find new GitHub libraries and to give me first steps to be able to start using a new framework.
I often find storytelling in games to be a time-wasting distraction. For example, Slay the Spire would be significantly improved if the narrative elements were removed and I could just focus on the duels. I play games to play. If I want a story, I’ll watch TV or a movie.
Operator overloading without name mangling [pdf]
Even by that standard it's a non issue. Just keeping the screen on takes more power. Watching TikTok for a few minutes, playing a game, watching porn, arguing on a social media app... just about anything else a phone does takes more power than rendering a web page. This is literally 20 year old technology we're talking about, optimized to heck by one of the world's biggest and most engineer driven companies.

If we're worried about electricity (and we should be), we should focus on renewables and storage and nuclear, not cell phone usage. It's trivial and totally dwarfed by desktops, TVs, HVAC, light bulbs, cars, just about everything.
More interesting to me is their ROI. Would they be as wealthy had they just parked their money in an index fund?
I don't know, I still find designing user interfaces with text exceedingly awkward. Is there any good (FOSS, offline) drag-n-drop designer like those we had twenty years ago?
No, not really. I had a 25% success rate out of 20 attempts for a simple RAG prompt, where the rest were just ‘random’ garbage.

I wouldn’t expect it to alleviate this.
a lot of people are clinging to this necessarily being a "biological" father

someone handing you a wad of cash and telling you to "make your dreams come true" doesnt necessarily have to be your parent; that person also doesnt have to be named a "father" for having done the act

perhaps "behind every self-made billionaire is an investor with money" would be a more fitting (albeit redundant) hypothesis
I don't even really know what we're disagreeing about at this point. My statement from the beginning has been that handing out direct SQL access to users is not a universal solution. It can work in some cases but there are definitely cases where it is not a valid solution to the problem at hand. I happen to believe that in a realistic production database your solution is going to be significantly more complicated. I have presented a crude measurement for the complexity of my solution, and your response has just been "well, I could imagine it's just as small doing it my way". Ok, I can imagine a lot of things, too.

I feel that your responses have been scoped at just trying to invalidate my most recent response rather than discussing the system as a whole and the pros and cons of various solutions, and that makes me feel frustrated.
It's probably more a desire to be part of a group, alongside shared ideological values, than genuine belief. I also think they have pretty attractive subtle recruiting techniques. Across the street from my university they were giving free real IQ tests out near 24/7. That gets lots of people in the door, and if you scored highly they offered quite lucrative (by university side-job standards) positions. That's more than enough to offer an overall quite positive impression, and probably netted them more than a few otherwise quite intelligent individuals who, some fraction of, likely went on to become full-on members.
That's fine and I would agree - you could share the summary statistic used, or the likelihood ratio between the null and some alternative models.

But you shouldn't share a frequentist parameter estimate or confidence interval if you have prior information that would influence it non-negligibly, at least not without sharing that prior information also.
They didn't say that there is no correlation between penis length and programming ability, so maybe that is something worth looking into.

I would have found the idea that next token prediction leads to the results it led to deeply suspect and silly as well. In fact, I did, until I tried out ChatGPT. A posteriori, that next token prediction works as well as it does suddenly makes sense.

Race is obviously a difficult term, as about any other term that classifies a human and tries to derive socially and economically important properties from it. Basing it on "black" or "white" is indeed silly, as you rightly point out. I really hate forms at the GP where you have to enter things as Caucasian etc as well, because these groups don't really make much sense biologically either.
I've seen my share of docu-minis about them - for better or worse I spent an amount of time on the 'chans back when the whole thing with 'anonymous vs scientology' all kicked off, which is partly why I'm so confounded by its apparent success; at risk of setting off some automoderation or angering xyz group - scientology feels more obviously culty and bs than the other bs cults, but people readily (literally) buy into it wholesale
Sounds like typical whining to appease the hivemind by taking cheap shots at "fun to hate" targets as a way to generate clicks.

Where the author failed is by not including Musk, too.

I especially lost interest when the author added a brief description of what Exxon is: "one of the world’s top oil companies." (When the readership doesn't know what Exxon is, you can imagine what else is in store.)

Then, there's this portion:

> One more illustration: Mark Zuckerberg. His parents’ fortunate social and economic status afforded him the opportunity to enroll at the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the oldest educational institutions in the United States, favored by political and financial elites.

How come everyone who attended Phillips Exter Academy isn't a billionaire?

Let's look at Oracle's Larry Ellison, the fourth wealthiest person in the US. From Wikipedia:

> Ellison was born on August 17, 1944, in New York City to Florence Spellman, an unwed Jewish mother. His biological father was an Italian-American United States Army Air Corps pilot.

That doesn't sound like a wealthy upbringing to me. Maybe his dad had some connections, but it doesn't seem like they were better off than most. This is just one example from a cursory search.
Solar 10.7B
Nobody ever read or utilized President Gay’s “research” anyway, or that of the overwhelming majority of social “scientists.” What’s the point of adhering to some charade about analytical rigor? It’s not like bridges are falling down as a result.
True, though one thing is certain: no one ever became wealthy by whining about those who are. Perhaps the "unlucky" worked their way into nothing more than the upper middle class, but they certainly wouldn't have had they chosen to not make the effort.
IF this is true: Shame on Harvard, shame on Harvard's administration, and shame on Harvard's Board of Overseers, for failing to live up to the University's ideals.

I mean, IF this is true, the implication is that no one at the university ever bothered to perform due diligence with a skeptical eye on Gay's track record.

IF this is both true AND representative of the state of leadership at our leading universities: They need major organizational change to clean up the rot.[a]

---

[a] Stanford's President had to resign for similar reasons: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188828810/stanford-universit...

---

To the moderators: I'm not sure why the OP is flagged. While the author is very ideological and controversial (see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782112), on a first pass the facts about Gay in the OP appear to be accurate. Maybe there's a better, less-tainted link to this story?
Naming variables is so good that it should be mandatory in your programming language.
Who would fork the bill? How would that thing pay for itself?
The original title ("will scaling work?") seems like a much more accurate description of the article than the editorialized "why scaling will not work" that this got submitted with. The conclusion of the article is not that scaling won't work! It's the opposite, the author thinks that AGI before 2040 is more likely than not.
Let's take something like Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem.

I may not know anything about it. I might have heard something vague about it being about "the limits of mathematics". I might know somewhat more specifically that it has to do with statements that are unprovable, but not much more beyond that. I may know that it's about arithmetic. I may know that it's related to the Halting Problem. All of that is possible without remembering the exact wording of the theorem with all its conditions. It would be easy to forget, for example, that Presburger arithmetic is complete and that you need addition and multiplication for incompleteness. Or to remember that Gödel's original theorem requires omega-consistency[0] and that only Rosser's modification makes it work for general consistent theories. And even if you do remember the exact statement of the theorem - would you be able to reconstruct the exact proof (or at least one proof)? If so, in how much detail? Would you remember the exact trick involved in showing that Robinson Arithmetic can describe all mu-recursive functions? And in all of this, are you going to be sure you have no gaps or slight misunderstandings? At which point would you say you "know" Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem?

[0] Case in point, I actually had to use google to verify that the condition really was called omega-consistency. This was the name I remembered, but I was only about 80% sure of it. And if there's any mistake in my explanations above, then that also wouldn't massively surprise me.
Infinite precision is just analog's version of an infinitely-long tape.
Because one of the reasons people don't think billionaires should be held accountable is they think they earned that money (and so, they can earn it as well, just work hard ;). Showing that they almost always just were born into wealth helps these people realize that they have no hope of ever becoming taxable at that level.
So what’s the point?
There are many non-tech submissions on Hacker News.

From the guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Ok.

But I do feel compelled to respectfully suggest that the following discussion lacks much in the way of what I would call "flames".
Author is leveraging mental inflexibility to generate an emotional response of denial. Sure, his points are correct but are constrained. Let’s remove 2 constraints and reevaluate:

1 - Babies learn much more with much less
2 - Video training data can be made in theory at incredible rates

The questions becomes: why is the author focusing on approaches in AI investigated in like 2012? Does the author think SOTA is text only? Are OpenAI or other market leaders only focusing on text? Probably not.
MDN is great as a reference, but also has tutorial-style articles: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_start...
Just read that human memory isn't as reliable as a git commit, and it's all about 'read-and-update' rather than 'write-once'. Makes me think twice about how I 'commit' things to memory and rely on 'aha moments' for debugging code. Maybe stepping away from the screen is the best git push for the brain!
PHP 8.3 released, but 60% still on EOL PHP7
I am the owner of the great Great Pyrenees (several in fact: we use them to guard our sheep from cougars - but one that sounds much like Agnes in temperament), and he would never consider going near people. People need to come to him. In this, like most activities, great Pyrenees self-supervise quite well.
Even the largest LLM has had less "total information" than most humans take in through all of their senses over their lifetime. A single day for a baby is taking in a continuous stream of among other things high quality video and audio and does a large amount of processing on that. Much of that for very young babies is unsupervised learning (clustering), where baby learns that object A and object B are different despite knowing nothing else about their properties.

Humans can learn using every ML learning paradigm in ever modality: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, supervised, active, reinforcement based, and anything else I might be missing. Current LLMs are stuck with "self-supervised" with the occasional reinforced (RLHF) or supervised (DPO) cherry on top at the end. non multi-modal LLMs operate with one modality. We are hardly scratching the surface on what's possible with multi-modal LLMs today. We are hardly scratching the surface for training data for these models.

The overwhelming majority of todays LLMs are vastly undertrained and exhibit behavior of undertrained systems.

The claim from the OP about scale not giving us further emergent properties flies in the face of all of what we know about this field. Expect further significant gains despite nay-sayers claiming it's impossible.