skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> how has generative AI had a positive impact on the average person?

Generative AI, for the most part, is a technology in search of a problem. For now. The tech is in a “demos well, productizes poorly” stage. Once you try doing anything at scale and with proper evals of success, you see that real world performance is pretty poor still.

Yes yes we have lots of totally-not-cherry-picked papers where researchers achieved something fantastic. Then you look at the detail and it’s either “we ran this once because expensive” or “it achieved this great result almost 35% of the time so it’s state-of-the-art best-in-class”

> create a techno-utopia, and they may be sorely disappointed when others don't feel the same way

Every techno-utopia I’ve ever seen in movies, books, etc has always been a secretly dystopia. Looks nice and polished on the surface, but achieves this result through aggressive oppression and disenfranchisement of dissenting voices.

Star Trek perhaps is the only one that didn’t follow that pattern. And even then you have groups outside the federation who are not super happy with how the federation does things.
> I need to know how a post get featured on the HN front page

It's mostly a lottery. But if you post regularly and the URL is interesting, expect some of those URLs to grace the frontpage.
If your web app serves dynamic routes (i.e. client only) this helps with SEO because those routes are now directly visible through most crawlers.
No need to add another dangerous animal to the mix.

100 deer would feed a family of 4 for 2 years. Let the hunters off the leash, the deer would be gone in months (lots more than 1 family per section).
2023 Proton Pass year in review – building a modern password manager
I've been patiently waiting for the web app for Proton Pass, and was surprised to read that it's already available in early access:

"Proton Pass on web — while Proton Pass has always had a web extension, a dedicated web app was a widespread community request, and now Proton Pass web is available at pass.proton.me for paid users (it will later be available for all users)."
In the AI era, which services provide up to date information about local queries — like which dentists near me are open today?
I don't think we'd feel comfortable adopting a solution that is predicated on the subjugation of women, Lindy effect or no. We should find another way.
What's the use case? Scrape someone else's dynamic site and serve it statically as your own?
Thanks for sharing this.

There are two main reasons I know people behind the use acceleration for pots in midi controllers:

- increase reactivity (small quick movement to cut frequencies faster for example)

- low resolution of encoders (mostly for step ones) that do not cover the full range (especially 14bits) in a turn or 3/4 of a turn
A minority group reclaiming territory from the people who colonized them isn’t “genocide.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_the_Levant

It’s like Elon Musk complaining about the “genocide” of Afrikaners. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/01/musk-south-a....
Likes, praise, edification, dopamine hit for the reward center of the brain.
Agree with everything you say, except perhaps the last sentence:

> But the difference is that generative AI leaders literally think that they are about to create a techno-utopia, and they may be sorely disappointed when others don't feel the same way.

I would argue it is fairly common for people in tech to speak in messianic terms of the golden age our technologies will usher in. History is littered with this world view. Of course, there are also critics from within the tech sphere, but I would say the dominant mental model is one of naïve optimism that crosses over into arrogance.
That’s evidence that it is _not_ a coincidence.
It is very clear now who is ignorant and who is not.
Just because Taligent failed does not mean everything from Taligent is bad. Just because Google and Facebook were successful does not mean everything they did is worth emulating... such as open floorplans, continuous deployment, everyone-does-everything and other such crap.
We also speak of 'Australia' as one place. But if we let go the pedantry, we understand the idea. Which is, the label is a concept. It's too broad to be taken seriously as a detail in somebody's preferences.
Just remember adults here are also dealing with being diagnosed for the first time, and all of the stigma around how this affects kids affects adults, too.
>> We too often get lost in our tech bubble

A lot of the criticism of generative AI comes from techies though. I am one of them. I know there's plenty of others, on HN certainly, I think also on Twitter.

Personally, similar to your stronger case, I've now crossed a line where I find it more likely that generative AI will crash and burn and leave people shaking their heads at the misconceived notions of "making the world a better place" (the techno-utopias you say).
We've had a year of crazy hype about GPT-4 and I still can't figure out what Gen AI is going to be good for, other than letting people rip off creatives, for fun or a very limited amount of profit; or for flooding academic venues with auto-generated work that will bog down the whole process of science.
Proton Pass Web App (early access)
I was surprised to see this casually mentioned in their 2023 year in review for Proton Pass

- https://proton.me/blog/building-modern-password-manager
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38832689
A "static site" implies HTML rather than a JavaScript app.

With respect to JavaScript apps (React, Angular, etc.):

It's not clear these days because the major search engines don't explicitly clarify whether they parse JavaScript apps (or if they only parse high-ranking JS apps/sites. But 10 years ago it was a must-have to be indexed.

One theory on pre-rendering is it reduces cost for the crawlers since they don't need to spend 1-3s of CPU time pre-rendering your site. And by reducing costs, it may increase chances of being indexed or higher rank.

My hunch is that long-term, pre-rendering is not necessary for getting indexed. But it is typically still necessary for URL unfurls (link previews) for various social media and chat apps.

disclosure: I operate https://headless-render-api.com
The problem with the experiment is that when I’m scanning, typically I’m never scanning and then getting tested on the contents after the fact. It actually took me longer to spot any mention of store in the second example after being told what I was looking for than it did for me to find field_name after being told to look for it. YMMV.
Strong disagree.

Commits are actions and should place actions first.

If you need to find a specific item, that is what `git log --grep` is for.
Awesome, cheers!
Yes obviously it is a metaphor.

And I am speaking from my experience and yours is different.

Just that I have felt lately that the "hit by a bus" card has been played too often close to me and it makes progress slow down.

And I feel that when it does happen, organizations are much more resilient than the worst case that is often painted.

(Changing subject) I am actually pretty intrigued by case 2A in my post, I have seen this often and sometimes it has been me.

What causes someone to step up and more importantly what prevents them from doing so before? Because it means that many orgnanizations have this as an untapped resource.

What should they do to release that resource earlier?
I feel like this varies a ton from company to company, but this feels like how it should work!
Be careful, your racism is showing.
Sure - there are indeed millions of lines of code if you include the operating system, the Python interpreter, PyTorch, CUDA etc.

But... you don't have to write that code. A research group constructing a brand new LLM really does only need a few hundred lines of code for the core training and inference. They need to spend their time on the data instead.

That's what makes LLMs "easy" to build. You don't need to write millions of lines of custom code to build an "AI", which I think is pretty surprising.
Which IM app do the people you know and care about have to install to communicate with you?
jankennpopp again right?
Hotel rooms are the worst for unwanted LEDs! I now carry blackout tape when I travel.
As an exercise in textually navigating the site I have logged on in my antique lynx browser to see if I can comment as well...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
Well done OP! This is the kind of analysis I love to encounter on HN, as this is a question I've definitely thought about before.

> Each player has a different random set of preferences for those gifts, ranging from 0 to 100 (inclusive).

This is my biggest point of criticism with the methods, as it's completely implausible and the excellent results of White Elephant relative to the best distribution are probably at least partially the result of this assumption.

The first problem is what another commenter called "shit gifts", gifts that are relatively interchangeable and aren't at the top of anyone's preferences. For example, two people in my gift exchange this year stopped at the gas station on the way to the party and bought ~$25 worth of scratch-offs. The only way you'd want that is if you disliked almost every other gift. There are also usually one or two novelty items that almost no one wants.

There's also (on the other end) "gold gifts", gifts that are really thoughtful or purchased by someone who ignored the price limit. These gifts will be at the top of most people's preferences, but usually not everyone's.

The middle category of gifts is the one where there is a true mix of preferences, but they are still going to be significantly non-random. Some gifts will be more towards the top of everyone's preferences, but with significant dissenters who don't want them at all. Others will be agreed by nearly everyone to be "middling" gifts. And so on. I think you need to capture something about this complexity in your model of preferences.

One consequence of all this is that stealing lacks some of the obvious benefits it has in the random model. For example, someone who opens a gift and is then stolen from tends to benefit in the random model, because the random preferences of the person who stole it reflect nothing about how the recipient valued the gift. On the contrary (which I have observed in real life), people who are stolen from are frequently disappointed. That's because the preferences of the thief do reflect something about the true value of the gift as measured by the overall preferences of the group. Only the good gifts get stolen, and anyone with a bad gift never gets to steal.

Along with improvements to the preferences model, I'd be interested in seeing more alternative rules explored. I bet there are a bunch of alternative rulesets that generate better results, and also do better by the metric of satisfaction with the game itself, which is harder to measure. For example, I suspect the following ruleset does very well:

1. Choose a random ordering of the participants.

2. Everyone (in order) opens an unopened gift they choose from the pile.

3. Everyone (in order) may swap their gift with another participant's. Anyone swapped with may swap with someone else (and so on) before the order continues. Anyone who has already swapped on that turn may not be swapped with.
Has the bar lowered? Because I'd consider this lingo pretty accessible and 101 for a beginner anno domini 2024.
Looks like there are a few of these threads sadly. Dang is there a way to make a definitive one?

Here are mine:

* Apple rumoured to be working on sunglasses similar to Meta Ray-bans

* Regulation is passed specifically to limit what artificial partners can do. Possible limitations: alignment required, limits in ERP, limits on session time. Best bet is China.

* Stronger regulation is passed to limit unauthorised cloning of people’s voices in one of the major economies. This beyond current weak IP and privacy laws.

* AI becomes a scapegoat in several major elections.

What I got right last year:

- text and image generating AI is hugely disruptive to education and content generation

This was pretty obvious

- Inflation eases, stock market recovers

Less obvious at the time but still likely

- A Twitter alternative breaks through.

Who woulda thunk that it would be Meta with Threads

- One of the big tech companies joins the fediverse (Microsoft most likely)

Once again, Meta for the win with Threads joining the fediverse

Now, nobody look back at all the predictions I made that didn’t happen.

Also, fairly gutted that Reddit hobbling its API was my 2022 prediction. I’m clearly prognosticating too far into the future.
Neurons in the Brain Appear to Follow a Distinct Mathematical Pattern
Researchers taking part in the Human Brain Project have identified a mathematical rule that governs the distribution of neurons in our brains.
I still use Google (and ddg and kagi), so people who want to sell me stuff try to get better rankings in these search machines. I'd also wager that people who primarily use LLMs to answer their questions are only a rounding error.
Please don't stink up HN comments with your fetish trash comments. This is one of the last places online where the comment section is still free from lazy puns, repeated jokes, one-word replies and sleaze.
The issue with generative AI techniques in general is how low the barrier to entry is. Various forms of information that used to be difficult or resource intensive to create have suddenly become approachable and even trivial in terms of resource investment to create.

Overall, in any sort of cost/benefit analysis, the cost is just so low now the benefits don’t have to be much of anything, if anything at all. Entertainment factor alone, boredom, or perhaps a passing curiosity to try something are enough to create and present false or misleading information and push it out to the public, creating noise needed to filter through. There are plenty of other far stronger motives that make the problem even worse.

Misinformation and disinformation were already becoming an increasingly large societal issue IMHO. That is only going to get worse with wide access to generative AI. We already have a high degree of erosion in social trust where we pretty much have to consider motives and driving forces behind every transactional relationship we have these days and we could at least use costs to help sort that mess out: why would someone bother investing the resources to do this? Does it cost a lot to present me with false information and if so, is there enough potential motive behind that to make this information more likely to be false or misleading?

The answer to this is increasingly yes. It’s now far more difficult to start from a position of distrust and move to a point of trust or likelihood of trust and I think we’re going to see that even more in all sorts of aspects of daily life. I now have to assume most pieces of information out there are targeting me and attempting to manipulate me in some way (more than before). I fear we’re moving to a model of free speech that will put more weight on “authoritative” sources more so than in recent past in many cases considering liabilities authorities have when presenting false, misleading, or inaccurate information. Liabilities that in many cases aren’t real liabilities just perceived liabilities, granting authoritative information sources far more credit than is due.
> They don’t care if the rest of the team feels unmotivated from a lack of ownership, at least they got theirs? I don’t understand the mentality.

Because when the "team" undoubtedly fails, it falls on shoulders of the superstar to fix it.
I haven't checked the stats, but I believe the US population growth is supported by mass immigration? The US system works well for immigration, as it gives (or purports to give) opportunities to do well, while spending few resources looking after those that fail.
And to protect tour-leader employment opportunities?
Perfectionism is too positive a word for this (“my greatest weakness? I am a perfectionist.) Fear of failure feels more apt. I hesitate starting/taking the next action because I am not confident I can land the goal all the way. IE - I fear trying to do X and not nailing it more than I fear not even trying it in the first place.

Like many fears it is usually inappropriate and unhelpful. In reality you are almost always further ahead in life if you try even if you don’t get to the outcome you envisioned.
has 0 results: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aarxive.org%20fi...

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fa...

seems to be mostly papers about github itself.
very true, which is why Electronjs still prevails in practice.

In the meantime if your WEBUI is not complex, and you just use the common features that all browsers have, this approach might work fine.
"fortune is of sluggish growth, ruin is rapid"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_effect

Look at how easily supply chains collapsed due to lockdowns, complex systems are hard to sustain and the focus on efficiency above all else has resulted in reduced redundancy. With less people around it will be hard to even maintain things, let alone improve them
Seems to work fine...
Bitcoin and Ethereum are a proof of non-existence of useful quantum computing (in terms of encryption breaking).
Unbroken coastline, shoals, barrier islands, etc, are all unrelated and irrelevant to the lower bound.

For example, the lower bound of the coastline of Canada is the straight-line distance from White Rock to Saint Andrew.
Brilliant! If MSFT had their act together late 80s-early 90s, the world might have looked like this.
Why are superstars seeking employment in corporations though?
I would love if they offered a download option for a file you could just upload to Lulu (or similar service) to have it printed and mailed to you.

Every time I buy one of these public domain books from Amazon, they are invariably shitty, low-quality "printed by Amazon" versions. I miss the time where you could get a high-quality hardcover, but more and more those seem reserved only for the current week's NYT best-seller books.
Sure, that's fine, but that's not something that really needs evidence.

General relativity is something that needs evidence. It EXTRAPOLATES new knowledge from our existing knowledge.

Loosely bound asteroids, on the other hand, are things that are well within our knowledge.

I don't need an evidence that throwing an astronaut off an airlock is going to kill them. We've never tried doing this but that doesn't stop us from being able to pretty firmly say that they are going to be dead pretty quickly.

For asteroids, we know that lots of them are just piles of rock unbound in any other way than gravitationally. We have actually shot them with things to verify it. We have well tested formulas that are not extrapolations that tell us exactly what is going to happen when we bring together a loose pile of rock and start spinning it. We also have formulas that can tell us exactly what kind of forces are going to be acting on a loose pile of rock of certain mass and diameter when it is shot through a gravitational field.

There is very little uncertainty about what is going to happen. Just because we have never saw it happen does not mean we need any further evidence for this. Doesn't mean there is anything wrong about preparing evidence. It just means it is not very interesting.
Our current social structure was built on wrong assumptions, this is what need to be fixed.

This is probably not as difficult as it seems. We talk a lot about the proportion of active / inactive, but we often forget that most population under 20 is inactive and also supported by the active population.
most people would be comfortable with the assertion that armin meiwes is a 'human-abusing asshole', even though he didn't torture brandes before killing and eating him. perhaps you are among the exceptions
> You comment shows that you have no practical knowledge of the web ecosystem

You're talking to a person with 20 years of frontend development experience. But sure, do go on with your assumptions.

Also, no idea what "web ecosystem" has to do with the patently false claim of " the most powerful layouting system and rendering engine.", but do go on

> The reality is that web is fast enough

I never claimed it wasn't. But, again, without clarification of what fast is, or what enough is, it's again nebulous, and wrong for a very wide variety of use cases.

> it is the first choice for building a new cross-platform product and for migrating legacy projects.

I have no idea what this has to do with any of the things in this discussion.

> Your pedantic arguments are not going to reverse that trend.

Java applets and ActiveX also where the bee's knees and the best thing since sliced bread, and drove businesses and brought in billions of dollars in revenue.

All this has literally nothing to do with the technology and how bad or good it is.
Finding the Right People (2022)
Impressive and smooth, however I can't help thinking it's an effort in an opposite direction. We should be striving away from the desktop metaphor, into something built for abstracting tens of thousands of files and folder, something that relieves working memory, that adheres to our brains' spatial recognition patterns rather than offering logical views into file systems.
While population decline I see as a major issue, the more pressing issue is that our social services will collapse. Other comments have said that social services are basically a Ponzi scheme, where the younger generation subsidizes the older generation. It's not hard to believe but then the next questions is: what are we going to do about it?

Eventually the age bell curve is going to start trending up for the older folks and were are going to have vastly more people taking out of the system than folks putting into the system.
Employees can have phases of high and low productivity, tasks they struggle with and other tasks they blaze through. The article and most of the comments oversimplify things.
Once again, the first politician to promise an outsourcing ban gets my vote.
and still getting much NEW interest.
I’ll just stick with `cargo test`, thanks.