skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Every new technology and company has plenty of people believing it will fail from the beginning.

And they will almost always be right because most companies fail.

Identifiying companies that will fail is not hard. Identifying those that will succeed on the other hand is very hard.
They pay a guilt tax.
Neri Oxman faces allegations of plagiarism following Business Insider reports
Oops, that was a slip:

> Of course I did not look at merge conflicts

Should of course been "merge commits".

Sorry, too late to edit.
In France there is a law called "dépôt légal" that forces all publishers to send a copy of each new book to the national library for archiving. It's been in place since 1537.

But ebooks are exempt from it. (Ebooks obviously didn't exist in 1537 but they've now been around for decades.)

So unless AI is used to make books published via traditional publishers (which is of course possible, but somewhat unlikely), the situation doesn't change much as regards to archiving books (in France).
Systemd is Godsent for people who have to administer diverse Linux boxes.

I can see how people who want to run their own tight ship on their machine would balk at it. I also sort of hate the systemd-resolv and the fact that it instantly rendered worthless 99% of online guides of how to unfuck your local DNS resolution.
The argument seems to be based on the premise that books are picked up at random from the pool of all books in the world. (As if what constitutes a book is even well defined to begin with.) But his encounter with The Book of the Dead wasn't random. It's a classic. Such a renowned book in fact, filtered by time and intellects, that it could be found even in the library of a small Christian town in Ohio.
https://archive.ph/sqH2w
I guess the average ebook on Amazon written by a human is already pretty close to something a LLM would generate so...
WGSL (the shading language for WebGPU) has something similar[1].

For example, `a + b << c` will fail to parse in a conforming implementation, as will `a << b << c` and `a && b || c`. Note however that `a && b && c` does parse. I find these rules to be well-thought through.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/WGSL/#operator-precedence-associativit...
You should be using https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html which is the exact same thing (arguably slightly better with just one slider and color-coded "good" and "bad" times when the timezones overlap)

See e.g. https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20...
The signal-to-noise ratio in books of any kind was already quite bad. I used to read many books every year but now it's less than 10. And one third I don't like anyway. I got tired long ago of crawling GoodReads and all the forums.
I don't know what is driving a race to the bottom but AI had nothing to do with it. Perhaps the attention span and literacy?

In fact, I hope for an LLM service where I can schedule books as good as 10+ years ago.

Why would I buy some low-quality generic book on Amazon/Audible/etc? AI generated or not.
> This was a problem before "AI"

Yes, I knew someone who was in "publish as remainder", that is publish at a high price then sell in bulk at a discount. Creating the books involved:

1. Think of a subject

2. Get some pictures

3. Find someone to write something which goes with the pictures

4. Repeat

There has always been a market for the undescerning.
This is definitely a case where you are much better served by information curated by enthusiasts and communities. For science fiction and fantasy, there are a bunch of images out there with flow charts and recommended entry points which should help you figure out what you like¹. And of course other actual people often have their own recommendations, as do independent book stores.

1: Here's a blog post reposting an older one with a lot of the common classics: https://blog.zog.org/2017/06/nprs-guide-through-the-top-100-...
There was a very good talk at NeurIPS this year that was comparing LLM training to amount of energy expended in building wonders of the world. I think this would’ve been a good thing to include too.
Neat but many letters get stuck and won't register as being pressed when multiple appear at once.
Perhaps a bit expensive?

If the answer is going to be: we’re a low volume startup and this is as cheap we can make it. And it has to be a premium product so can take a sustainable margin…

…what’s stopping a cheap Asian knockoff manufacturer - if the product achieves any sort of success/notoriety - from selling much, much cheaper clones?

PS: I own a medium-size iPhone case that is a complete, fully functioning, handheld game console with its own screen, keys and speaker. It cost me 12€ on Amazon.
First check its not a Boeing... /s
This is somewhere in "think about the horses" territory.

- AI will raise the floor in a lot of industries, more quickly than it will raise the ceiling. I don't see a problem with that. Less garbage is nice.

- Good writers will make use of AI to be better, much as they (and we in general) did with the internet, and so many other technologies before that.

- If we can not tell good or bad apart, then we should be extremly suspicious in how far it actually matters, specially with everything that is not grounded in physics. Truth is fickle. Feeling ambivalent about things that can not be argued away by way of physics is probably a good thing on average.

- Bullshit detection has always been an issue and will continue to be so. As far as I can tell, we have been getting better, not worse, at this (if you consider the absolutely monumental increase in total bullshit generation that we had to cope with over the past years.)

- In the end, as per usual, despite all claims to the contrary, people will not care how it was made. All that will matter is if it does something for somebody. Note that how it was created might do something for somebody, or, more likely, a certain illusion of how it was made will be good enough and more economical. Over time the sentimental power will fade.
I mostly find myself dealing with None purely as a result of handling optional args in a function. This is largely a product of accomodating Pythons unusual handling of function arguments and their default values.

Interested in hearing of there is anything obvious I’ve missed or am yet to learn that I could use to avoid these situations or handle better.
Self publishing is already 90% trash that you have to wade through to find a gem. LLMs will maybe make it 95% trash. So overall bad for the industry, yes, but not as game changing that people are making it seem.
> It is a software engineer’s job to build quality software. A scientists job is to solve problems. There’s a clear boundary here, where the latter will deliver a concept to the former, who will eventually create a production-grade implementation off of that. Neither does a scientist have to build proper software, nor does a developer have to do cutting-edge research.

Precisely! See my relevant comment from another thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38821679

References:

1) Why science needs more research software engineers - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01516-2

2) Research software engineering - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_software_engineering
I can tell you who is reading books every night that are absolutely terrible and don’t require a coherent plot! Children. My kids and I have been crafting a few sentences of some absurd plot then reading a story about it generated by ChatGPT.

My daughter got so excited that she drew pictures of the Chicken Nugget and Cookie brothers and showed them to me after work, it’s like a choose your own adventure book but you can really actually choose your own adventure.

Personally I find the stories vapid and boring but before I was reading some brain dead story about Ariel using her favorite Dinglehopper to brush her hair, so whatever.

We are also reading Little House on the Prairie which I consider a little more “high brow”, and the girls really like that, too. But kids are easy to please and it has been interesting.
Signs and Portents: Some hints about what the next year of AI looks like
>"systemd runs services as independent users, it solves that!"

It's in a terrible way, too. Not sure it improved but I recall somebody once, at a company I worked at, trying to introduce per-unix-user systemd services (e.g. `graphite` user for running Graphite), and there were some atrocious steps required like `loginctl --enable-linger` and God knows what.

We moved to running everything systemd as root, it's easier (and you can specify which unixuser the actual systemd unit runs at, which is "close enough").
In my experience getting a PhD doesn't require above average intelligence, it does require a lot of perseverance and a good amount of organisation though.

I honestly think most skilled tradespeople are more intelligent than me and my PhD holding colleagues.
With MCAS the MAX is already a flying flight simulator for earlier 737 versions.

Fixing this should be trivial: Fit passengers with VR headsets to simulate there not being a giant hole in the fuselage.
I'm viewing YC HN now from NetSurf. It's cool. I really like it! :)
I can't speak for Amazon's, or any publishers policies, but there is at least one publisher screening submissions to hopefully filter out AI generated stories. That would be Clarkeworld, a science fiction magazine, who was famously overwhelmed with low quality AI-generated submissions, as was discussed on HN last year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35999896
You can do the same in any compiled language, including Java.

Sun's Forte Pro was one of the first IDEs to have such capability for Java.
reminds me of java spring library

and on top of it those DriverControllers and ManagerControllers keep getting depracated
The terminology here is a bit muddled. Git commits represent a merkle tree of commits where the each commit describes changes to a graph of objects (aka files and directories) represented by the ancestor commit (or commits in case of a merge). In the case of a merge, the commit includes conflict resolutions for any lines modified by multiple ancestors.

The way that is stored internally with binary deltas is clever and interesting but not all that relevant to end users. It's convenient that it's compact and fast. But otherwise it's just an implementation detail. From the outside, each commit basically represents a snapshot of the whole system. And that's exactly what you get when you check one out.

It's the fluff in the git porcelain and various Git UIs that muddle the waters by giving us different tools to produce new commits, stashes, staging, tools for flaging and resolve conflicts (two commits modifying the same thing), rebasing, squashing, etc.

That's where diffs, git patches, merge algorithms and other tools come in. Some of that is part of git. And some of it can be added via third party tools, uis, etc. Or even git alternatives that work in a compatible way. But in the end they just help you produce a new git commit.

Most of us just use the stuff that comes with Git and our IDEs. And of course it doesn't help that most git users have not read the manual section on the Git internals, have a poor understanding of how all this works, and generally only know about and use a small fraction of the git commands and options. It's a complicated tool. And it undeniably works very well for extremely large open source communities.
The recent advances in LLMs have made me realize how important a signal well written English was to filtering content by quality. If the first few sentences were on topic, syntactically correct, and grammatically complex, it was worth skimming at least. This was obviously not remotely perfect, but it was pretty good. LLMs are blowing that up. They have not increased the amount of garbage on the internet (plenty of stupid people around to supply that), but they made it a lot easier to make garbage look superficially like it was thoughtfully written by an intelligent person.
it’s not solidly time boxed, sometimes it might be a whole day, if something is yielding positive results, everybody here is very senior so we all have a good intuition for which rabbit holes will yield

Software methodologies for the zany schemes? Not really, I prefer to do exploratory code inside the debugger (I wrote my own which has a bunch of extra extensions) and the others use Jupyter to riff freely, there’s no constraints when exploring

More engineering rigour goes into prod stuff
Well, the new-age has swallowed quantum woo whole. It is a kind of religion or attempt at modern myth making, I suppose. More respectably, a number of eminent physicists have fallen hard for philosophical Hinduism and or certain strands of Buddhism. Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Bohm among them.
Ranking (% obesity by country) - https://data.worldobesity.org/rankings/
As a distinct difference to personal computers replacing typewriters and the internet enabling self publishing, both of which transformed writing, AI is much faster than humans in reading and analyzing books and thus can also be part of a solution to problems from this new transformation in writing.
Contemporary literature is valuable for its insights in the present. I love classics, and much of what I read was published before this century, but I would be missing out if I stuck just with tried and proven titles and authors.
True, I think I might have responded to the wrong comment.
I'm sure they're not extractable at scale, otherwise we'd have heard about it, but they're almost certainly extractable on a one-off basis if you have a big enough budget (one that likely outweighs whatever you'd stand to gain from it). It's just not the low hanging fruit of the system as a whole.

I also expect it not to be the low-hanging fruit of these cameras, but it is still one possible attack vector.
ea fc 24 hacks
I’d want a better source than someone on Twitter summarizing an unspecified report by a financial analyst before repeating that margin claim. That sounds like the people who claim an iPhone has 400% markup because they added up the bulk prices for the major components and then assumed R&D, assembly, testing, distribution, software development, and support all cost $0.
This is actually really similar to something I've been wanting to build for a long time. In my case I've thought it would be useful to have a way to calculate the likelihood for a given change to break things based on the history of breaking changes in the same file or area of the file. Basically a riskiness score for each change. The risk score could be associated with each PR and would provide a signal for reviewers about which code should get a bit of extra attention as well as highlighting the risky changes when they are being deployed.

The tricky part would be tracking the same part of the code as it moves up and down because of insertions/deletions above it which would cause problems for a naive algorithm based on line numbers.

Just doing it at the file level, like this does, might be good enough to be useful though.
No, back then we would use images to make rounded corners. It was… as awful as it sounds…
An LLM seems by far the most likly to be able to write a Hilary Mantel novel to me. May need to be a fair bit biger then ChatGPT-4 but given no living human ever has it dosn't have much compitition.
Aditya-L1: India's Sun mission reaches final destination
Phi-2 Relicensed as MIT
A blog post follow up to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38880713
> I kind of use the effort put into the cover as a way to gauge how much the author and publisher themselves think the work is worth

If only there were some sort of short and catchy idiom that encapsulates some wisdom about the potential folly of judging the interior contents of a book just from looking at the exterior coverings.
Ah yes, the Hugo award, known for such quality and revered works like “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” by Chuck Tingle.

How can I trust any award as a standard of quality that has ridiculous stuff like that getting nominated?
i got the impression that upwork takes a lot of upfront effort to apply for projects, reducing the income. and don't they require invasive monitoring software nowadays so that i'd be forced to use a separate computer to do it? (because i am surely not going to allow any monitoring on my personal device)
"The Amazon algorithm didn't show me the best book in the world as the first search result so I'm never going to read again".

Something tells me you just aren't interested in reading (which is fine) and are trying to find excuses for it.
I've read a number of books from those lists in the past and they're not really what I'm looking for, and a lot of the books I really enjoyed are not in the circles those lists select from.

But I guess more to the point in the past I've grabbed books with interesting covers or titles off the shelves at a library and enjoyed them, and I don't feel confident in that method working today. Or at least, I feel like there was a time when the rankings on Amazon were probably a lot closer to what you'd see in libraries.
What makes professor Wirth a unique geek?

To be a geek of geeks in computer science you have to write an OS or a Compiler and professor Wirth did both. To top it up he wrote the hardware to run it all. Now that’s when you call someone a king of geeks.
>It is a software engineer’s job to build quality software.

I think that most software engineers' jobs is not to build quality software, it is to make money. When you are trying to make money, the goal is not necessarily to make the best quality software that you can. Often, it is to make acceptably good software as soon as possible. A company that writes software that is half as good and ships it twice as fast might outcompete a company that writes software that is twice as good and ships it half as fast. I sometimes wish that my job was to build the best quality software that I can, but that is not the case. What I really get paid for is to make my employers' company successful, to make them money. And it's not that my employers don't care about making high quality software, it is just that if they cared about it too much they might get outcompeted by others who care less about it.
Yes. And the cost of these synthetic datasets is very high. Nobody is sharing. I suspect people are underestimating the amount of hardware OpenAI/Microsoft are using to build massive amounts of synthetic data. I doubt they are just training models over and over with the common crawls and such.
Of course we have a mechanism to filter books: publishers. They

Now ebooks and on-demand printing allow you to "publish" books without going through the quality filter of a publisher. But you won't get into a book store that way, and anybody talking about the trouble of archiving those better already have an archive of the low hanging fruit of the same category: fanfiction.org and friends (and I don't mean this derogatory, there are great stories in there)
The goal of 95% of JavaScript in the wild is as mild as respond to user interactions and put text on screen. Its beyond trivial simple, but almost nobody is well trained to either the language or browser. As a result most people come in with assumptions of how things should work as determined by their education or experiences in unrelated languages and boy are most of those assumptions wildly incorrect. On top of that most JS developers tend to skew extremely young and are wildly insecure about complex data structures.

The result is a complete inability to program. Most people need really large tools to do more than 80% of the heavy lifting and they just write a few instructions on top of it. The perspective then becomes you need more advanced technologies to do cool things, because everything is too scary or mysterious otherwise.
But you could feed the text through the LLM, generate a summary and a list of keywords, characters and locations and search through that the regular way. And as far as I can tell, that doesn't really exist yet.

IMDb has a keyword feature[1], but that's still completely human-curated and quite useless due to that, as it just doesn't have the necessary depths and completeness to discover interesting new content.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/
Anyone else actively avoiding Max aircraft after this, plus the previous two crashes, and the post from yesterday that Boeing were seeking another exemption from safety rules? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882358

(If this means refusing to board after an aircraft swap then at least in my case: so be it, I don't trust Boeing's safety record on these aircraft anymore)
From history, we mainly know that nation scale communism doesn't work when it is run by a totalitarian government and/or is undermined by the embargos or the CIA. We don't have much data on democratic communism that is reasonably free from outside interference.

On the other hand, we know that communism works on the small scale due to the success of various traditional communities and non-profits.

Depending on the specific system being discussed, there's also significant evidence that "more moderate" systems related to communism (e.g. various forms of socialism) work. Part of the problem that I've had in trying to interact with libertarian ideas is that they tend to be purist. In particular, when confronted with criticisms they tend to claim that under a complete libertarian system they wouldn't occur. However, that precludes the ability to consider whether an incomplete libertarian system might have merit.
Same here although coming from multiple languages, so C was only another syntax to do the same things I was already doing in those languages.

As such I never understood what is so hard about pointers, we were already close friends before learning C.
If it was worth a human spending weeks writing the 90% trash. LLM make it economical for 99.999999% to be trash by next year.
That's nothing compared to the amount they spend in employee salaries for folks working on chrome.
I worked at BBN briefly, in the late 90s.

My favorite part, besides the great people, was the collection of classic computing hardware. They had a warehouse that I really should have spent more time in; during my one visit, to rescue a massive hard drive (physically massive, only 1GB capacity), I spotted multiple IMPs and a pallet of early Macs.

The security R&D department where I worked had a Sparc laptop for its demo computer; only time I’ve ever worked on one, or even seen one.

My least favorite part was the huge 10base2 LAN. First and only time I’ve had to deal with those fragile terminators, plus the AppleTalk repeater in a closet nearby that someone would frequently bump and cause a network storm.

And of course we were all using NFS, which at the time was completely unable to deal gracefully with a disconnection from the server (no idea whether that has changed since then).

Fun times. Amazing company and history, and working in Cambridge was a delight; I had a (relatively) cheap apartment in Somerville right outside Davis Square, and could ride a bike to work without much difficulty, or ride the Red Line for just one stop. Not having to drive my car anywhere was a revelation.
Ok, I will benchmark this more when I have time. My gut feeling is that it is impossible to reach OpenBLAS-like performance without carefully tuned kernels and without explicit SIMD code. Clearly, it's not impossible to be as fast as OpenBLAS otherwise OpenBLAS itself woudln't be that fast, but it is very difficult and takes a lot of work. There is a reason much of OpenBLAS is implemented in assembly and not C.
The argument I've seen is that the amount of seabed that has the required minerals is not big and the surface of the earth is predominantly covered by water so as a percentage of what's there the mined area is small.

I would like to know how bad mining that area is compared that to the damage we will do continuing with internal combustion engines if we don't solve the climate issue, or mining the same things on land. To me it seems we're entering a time when no choice is a nice one.
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