skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think what a lot of people want, again influenced by sci-fi, is a general-purpose robot that can do everything a human can do and preferably other things beyond that. One form factor that can do everything we do is obviously the way we humans look hence the inclination to design robots that look like us as well.

I could have multiple robots, one for vacuuming, one for doing the dishes, one for gardening, cleaning, renovating, etc. But, if I had one to do all of it any of the purpose-driven forms is likely to fail while the humanoid one _could_ succeed.
People opinions don't come out of a vacuum and they usually do a lot of rationalization when it comes to defending their own prejudices and whatever matches their self interest.

This is HN, lots of people here see LLMs the same way miners saw the gold rush. When you deal with people dreams of richness, you can be pretty sure they would move us all right into a skynet situation, rationalizing every single fucking step towards our demise.
Am I ever doing things because I can and not because I have to? Also, what mechanism determines what things I want to do because I can do them? And isn’t that mechanism then just not just another part of the machine.

Just because it feels as though I do things because I can doesn’t mean that is actually true.
1977 is just a bit earlier than third wave feminism's start in the 90s.
It's the structure/topology.

Discord has a million deserted "servers" with redundant general channels. Peak IRC had a dozen or so large networks that often bundled a lot of e.g. adjacent FOSS projects. The chances of running into someone interesting a la the article anecdote was just higher.

Discord is a massive net negative for chatting on the internet because of this flaw imho.
Oh it’s definitely racial discrimination against Han Chinese, which is to say “racism.” The question is whether racial discrimination is justified in this case.

Many people don’t know this since they think the the USA’s late imperial citizenship model is universal, but the Chinese state claims global jurisdiction over all Chinese persons and they don’t determine who is a Chinese person on the basis of papers issued by foreign governments.
Again, my point I made in other parts of thread - B2B use cases, yes. B2C use cases, no.

Factories have been designed since the days of Henry Ford's assembly line to treat humans like robots. We have increasingly automated/mechanized the assembly line, introducing robotics of various sorts. So sure, a limited-functionality bipedal robot that costs less than high cost union labor, doesn't go on strike, doesn't take smoke breaks, and doesn't need to eat/rest/sleep is attractive.

But as a general purpose home assistant / personal housekeeper we are far far away, and especially for anything remotely affordable even for FAANG types.
Boston Dynamics is trying to produce for the military market. The field doesn’t generally have huge expanses of well-maintained concrete to drive on.
Simplest answer:

Start with a filesystem like this. They all have a root object with an id that is pointing to a tree. The tree is (name, type, pointer to data):

root object 1:
dir1 directory 2
dir2 directory 3
file1 file 4
file2 file 5

You make a change to file1, and commit it.

What it stores is the following:

root object 6:
dir1 directory 2
dir2 directory 3
file1 file 7
file2 file 5

Note that our new root object stores a complete copy of the filesystem, but all we stored is the following:

1. The new root object, which is a bunch of pointers

2. the new file data

That is very fast to store, and very efficient to store and retrieve. It is not slower to access old data vs new data.

The data is all immutable, all you are storing is pointers to which data is named what.

If you had a file in dir1 instead, you would update the root object and dir1. dir2 would be untouched, so you would still store ... just as much as above.

This is how git works at a high level.

In practice, most commits change a small number of files. So you will update the root object, and all the directory objects on the way to your new file, but that's it.

Most source code trees are lets say 10 directories deep max?
So even if you have a thousand directories, you are updating only the directory objects that are parents of your file's path. So maybe 10 directory objects get updated. All others are untouched.

So O(10) changed directory objects to store, plus the root object, plus the new file data.
Everything else is reused.

This is very fast.

The worst case for something like the above is where you change a file in every directory.
It will then have to rewrite every directory object, even for small file changes.

Or you have flat directories with huge numbers of small files.
You then pay the cost of rewriting the directory objects all the time.

But for most source code layouts, the above works very fast.

Even without compression, the total space usage of your repo is O(total amount of changed data) rather than O(total amount of data represented by all root objects)

1 million revisions of kernel, at 4gig of data each, would be 4PB if you were storing complete copies at every revision.

Instead it's like 9 gigabytes or something, total.
(Im)perfectProject(or) Hacking a small WiFi connected projector for fun
Had a lot of fun tearing apart this projector to hack it, unfortunately wasn't able to test the exploit at the end of the day due to some hard lessons I learned!
If you refuse to answer your employer must by law give their best guess.
My problem is that my electric toothbrush makes me less sleepy.

So I have to brush my teeth 1+ hours before actually going to bed.
Construction and implementation of the THETA cycle for synthetic CO2 fixation
>but I’m more so pushing back on the added cost and complexity of human elements NOT required by the built environment

Am I understanding you correctly that you would want something that still had cameras at head height, but simply didn't have the head form factor? And perhaps had 4 arms for some tasks that it would benefit from instead of being limited to two arms?

If so, how many environments are you going to build robots for? And how does your total overall build cost increase with each different model you build?

Doesn't matter if it's simper in the end-design if getting there ends up costing you as much as it would to build a general purpose design in the first place.
Recent threads about this:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38827569 (6 days, 17 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38899120 (8 hours, 9 comments)

This particular thread is odd since it also shows up as a 2 day old discussion if you search for it, but navigating to it takes you here, a 1 hour old thread. @dang, this thread seems like it time travelled, with 2 day old comments showing up as new.
> LLM can’t distinguish out of the box what needs to be cited or not

LLM don’t know that they are supposed to answer questions out of the box either. This is what reinforcement learning from human feedback is good for.

> you need another processing layer

Certainly. For reliability and peace of mind I would implement a traditionally coded plagiarism search on the output. (Traditionally coded as in no AI magic required in that layer) If there is a match you evaluate how significant it is, that most likely is best done with machine learning. For example if the match is a short and simple statement you can ignore it. If it is a longer match, or a very specific statement you need to do something. What you do depends on your resources and risk appetite. Simply supressing the output is an option, it is cheap and very reliable. Rephrasing until it no longer matches is an other, takes a bit more compute and you can end up skirting too close to plagiarism. Rewriting the output to only quote a short amount and provide citation is even more costly, but can be done too.

You can do all of these post processing steps at generation time. And you can also use it to enhance your training dataset. That way the next version of the model will more likely to do the right thing right away, because it learned the correct patterns to quote things.
I noticed this as well. The site is small enough it's not likely to draw enough scrutiny to face repercussions, however there's zero chance this is enough to satisfy various data protection laws.
http://beyondloom.com/decker/
they're only in it for the money.
"Robust", good joke. The purpose of these laws is to do what you're doing: mention they exist. But there is a huge process to actively demotivate the applicant to succeed. I know someone who actively tried to get benefits and was first denied and had to reapply (while she won lawsuit against her former employer). I was there when she did the paperwork. It is huge, and it has large legal ramifications. And it is the same in The Netherlands.

My father had MS, and he was considered a fraud (back in the 70s). Of course, such is easily said if there are no repercussions (I, parent of two young children, have been called a pedophile by my neighbors ...). It is very likely he also had autism, like me, a burden to function in society and a mark on your forehead cause "you're weird".

I've been suffering from a burnout (related to my neighbor's behavior) since start last year and when I applied for benefits because I got fired I've been told I should've reported myself fully healed earlier. I've also been asked questions to which the answers weren't written down because (and I quote) "I'm not allowed to ask that question".

If you apply for any social benefits, society considers you a fraud and you have to prove you're not. This is immense work, more so for people who suffer from disabilities (likely those who rightfully apply).
The comment I replied to was updated to include the second half, it was originally just quoting

> A model that possesses the entire collective knowledge of our civilization is useless
If it’s directly usable at point of generation in time and space. There’s also applications sensitive to energy density of storage (aviation, ships, long distance trucking) that benefit greatly from hydrocarbons. We also have a huge amount of infrastructure built to burn hydrocarbons that could continue to be useful.
I would love to know a little more about your tech stack and architecture?

You say "Everything is saved locally by default", with full office support. Essentially you have built a "local-first" app, or about 10 of them!

I would definitely play on that for marketing, the local-first place is getting quite a bit of buzz. (I'm biased, but I think 2024 if the year local-first is going to go mainstream)

What tech are you using for conflict resolution for offline edits, I'm guessing you have generalised this in some way? Are you using CRDTs? And any particular local-first database tech?

Have you considered adding any real-time multiplayer features? If you've solved the offline edit problems, you are 95% of the way to real-time.
Corporate rights are basically limited to the rights that any collective group of people would have, so self-incrimination doesn't make sense, but it doesn't get around the broader point that the same corporate personhood that allows corporations to be sued for copyright infringement, allows them to use the same defenses that groups of individuals (ie, co-authors) could use for copyright infringement. Could you sue "Alice and Bob" for copyright infringement because they watched a lot of movies before writing their screenplay? Nobody writes a screenplay from first principles. They're all based on all the other movies they've seen to some extent.
In light traffic roundabouts are actually worse than normal intersection. How can it even be disputed? Let's say you have one car per hour, or any number of cars approaching in such a way that none of them gets close to the intersection at the same time. It goes through normal intersection without much slow down. It goes through equivalent roundabout _always_ slowing substantially down. What's here to dispute? If you have cars approaching at the same time then it gets a bit more complicated but the claim that in such a situation you can still always beat normal intersection is just ridiculous, because if the cars show up at exactly the right time some of them still need to completely stop before entering roundabout because there is already another car circling it. Analogously with normal intersection you don't need to always stop before entering it because both cars might be turning into perpendicular roads and they don't cross their paths at all so they both can go smoothly through without stopping at all. I do agree that roundabouts make the intersections safer, that's great, but it's at the cost of throughput but everybody pretends it's not true. Even the claim that the delay is reduced because cars would need to wait on traffic lights is dubious, because you can't just enter or leave a roundabout when there is heavy traffic through it that competes with your 'route' , roundabout is not equal for all entry points and doesn't distribute all of them equally. So you might wait just as long as you would waiting on traffic lights. Standard intersections are worse only if they have dumb traffic lights and the traffic is light, that forces you to stop and wait even though there is no competing traffic. But again, it's a case of fixing the lights and making them sense the incoming traffic instead of installing roundabouts.
'Constantly monitored': the pushback against AI surveillance at work
I remember several iphones suddenly start performing poorly after updating coincidentally when Apple released new iphone models. It happened so much that people refused to update iOS because "that's how they get you."

Apple knew about the complaints, it was very loud. They did this for several update cycles and hit pay-dirt on their sales.
I know the Vulcan Centaur is probably going to be quite an un-impactful rocket given what SpaceX is doing (while the upper stage is sort of surprisingly capable!), it's still remarkable with how little fuss and apparent lack of difficulty it was developed, being all-new with no components reused except the RL-10 upper stage engine (which is of new version, too). Seems like the curse of ever increasing complexity, cost, and development timeline for each new subsequent rocket family has finally been broken across the industry, not just by SpaceX.
> I don't see why software personhood is the only resolution here.

It's not. That was the point of my replies. That it's time to assert software personhood is crazy.

> If we decide that a certain kind of usage of software shouldn't be considered acceptable, then we could sue the user who used it, or the developers who created it, or something.

We can already do that. That's what this article is about. The people are being sued. That's what all of my replies are about. I don't understand why you are replying to my comment with a re-summary of my comments as if it's a rebuttal to them.
I’m not sure how this is possible? Don’t you need to submit accounts every year and pay corporation tax?

Certainly in the U.K. small businesses with a turnover under a certain amount can have their accounts signed off by a chartered accountant and then submitted to companies house.

Over a certain amount accounts have to be audited.

Day to day - cash flow is the most important thing to any business. Can you meet your outgoings, what is your burn rate. Being able to predict several months into the future with some degree of certainty is very useful.

How much cash will be in the bank at the end of each month over the next 6-12 months.

If our prediction is wrong, why are they wrong? What assumptions are we making that are incorrect?

If you are burning cash, what is the runway? How many months before fund raising is needed?
Aren't humans rather inefficient? Long gestation cycle with more complications than many other species. The offspring require long time to be self-reliant at any level. And time to puberty is also significant...

Seems like that even for breeding we could do lot better...
In theory, yes. In practice Is it really though?
Scam? How so?

I believe that thinking your solo work is good enough is hubris. I'm not a fan of pair programming either, but I don't trust my own work enough to not have someone else review it first.
Yeah but the classic lawyer joke in response is, “have you ever met a reasonable person?” More often the “reasonable person” is the judge plus half a degree of leeway.
For sure this is a super-impressive (solo?) effort and I'm certain a ton of work went into this.

Some feedback:

Who is the customer for this? Can you describe what their day looks like and how Nino helps them get their work done better/faster/cheaper? What are the top 5 problems that they face that Nino is clearly better than the competition? Be specific and show the workflows.

Where do they work? Who do they collaborate with? What are they collaborating on? Do the same exercise - SxS comparison with how they do things in existing tools and show how Nino is clearly better than their existing solution.

Finally, don't ever underestimate how difficult it is to get people to change from whatever they are doing today. Today is not 1990 - people have been using solutions to the general information worker problem for decades now. Why will they switch?
... Can we turn CO2 into a physical solid? My chemistry is non-existent but here is a thought experiment: what if harvesting CO2 and using it to press coins was given real monetary value? Just get it out of the air and spend it, however you can figure that out. Would that help? Or is it too easy to synthesize such that the incentive would be immediately gamed?
Airbnb Was Supposed to Save Capitalism. Instead, It Just Devolved into Garbage
What's the SQLite strategy for when databases get too big?
[dupe]

Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856845
Tweet is a noise birds make when they're talking to each other

Toot is a fart
> humans are not machine

Aren't we? Casual chains upon our matter produce emergent behaviors using the same physics and chemistry that our mechanistic creations rely upon.

Certainly those behaviors and results do not produce the same repeatable, predictable results as our clockworks but that is the whole point of the field of AI (as opposed to the marketing corruption/term that is currently in vogue, so GAI if you prefer), to produce system and algorithm structures designed with architecture and patterns more like our own.

Perhaps you believe in the ghost in the machine hypothesis? The magical soul that is more than the emergent evolving pattern produced across time by DNA replicators? That this undefinable, unmeasurable spirit makes us forever different?
I just can't believe they're getting rid of all the things I really like about those laptops

* no upgradable memory

* no function keys

* the keyboard

sad times
steal the example programs, and make them your own.

good performance, good reliability.
> Strangely enough, this dichotomy seems to exist only for the web platform.

> Everywhere else (desktop, mobile etc) the model is SPAs.

It exists for CLIs too, where some projects provide a collection of single-purpose programs (e.g. imagemagick) and others provide a single program which can do many things (e.g. git)
Also not about DEC hardware. sigh
Previously discussed as "Inmos and the Transputer (1998)" [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34948894
These models have no clue how to paraphrase and synthesize asserted facts in a novel way. They're parrots.
No. They are suing the people who made the software. They are not suing the software. You can't sue software. Software isn't a person.
A lot of features you mentioned are actually implemented (role-based permission, cross workspace sharing, domain hosting...) and some that will come (audit logs and other enterprise things).

I get the best-of-breed argument. Nino's thesis is that people will find more value if enough tools are bundled in one place.
I am IT at a factory and we use several temp agencies and this is literally how we handle it lol. Surprise they show. Full time hire by 3 months.
That joke is awesome. I’ve had that thought many times coming from a Muslim country.
I suspect they're thinking of cobalt, the amount of which needed in lithium batteries has been reduced by a lot thanks to advancements in that field. That said, that's possibly offset by the sheer increase in volume of battery development, although lithium is still the main component.
As no one has asked so far, I’ll have to do it, how does this differentiate itself from Lotus Notes?
I'm sure programs like this can achieve the same interoperability with external programs as other applications that already do this. That's a fairly primitive level of integration though, compared to the possibilities that would seem to open once you control both sides of the API.
How Does FreeBSD Compare to Linux on a Raspberry Pi?
Most games are not free to play.
No it's not. The AI isn't the one publishing its works. If I write an article that is word-for-word the same as a Times article, I'm not liable for anything until I make it available to others. The means by which I wrote the article are irrelevant. This is the core of the issue. In this case, the "AI" is basically just a fancy writing tool for the publisher.
Unfortunately much of those optimizations are thanks to taking UB to full throttle.
Anecdote: Coming from the application side i had always thought of C as a low-level language but in one company where i worked with chip designers who only did Verilog, i was gobsmacked when in my conversations with them they said they didn't know higher-level languages like C and cannot program in it.
Thanks for linking the excerpt, I'm simply dying. I would love to have a job dissecting jokes like this.
The US has government provided healthcare as well for people without jobs or with a low enough income level. It isn’t “tied to your work” that’s just one of many ways in which people choose to get healthcare.
Eh, I was being a touch snarky using your mobster analogy back at you somewhat out of context, but other than that, I wasn't really straw-manning much at all.

I guess the root of where we seem to disagree is the extent to which it's reasonable for companies to lobby, and the extent to which we believe it's reasonable to expect government employees to be the last bastion of reason and good conduct, despite everything that might be brought to bear against them.

Part of the case with Boeing and the 737 Max is actually more extreme than this, and also really interesting, as Boeing's financial interest is set clearly and diametrically against the interests of the public who might fly on their planes. Here's a precis (as I understand it): following the two earlier actual crashes of the Max (each killing hundreds of people) the FAA requested changes to those planes, to make them safer. Boeing lobbied against these changes, successfully, resulting in Congress effectively overruling the FAA, via a provision in the recent spending bill. [0]

How does this make sense, in any rational world?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38896095
This Keurig queued up perfectly use case is fundamentally unimpressive because I could expect my 5 year old nephew to pass it with 1 minute of verbal direction or watching me do it once, not 10 hours of deep learning.

Now expand the Keurig use case to the real world.

Present it with a machine:
* filled / not filled with water
* used pod bin empty / used pod bin filled
* pods available / pods in a box on counter / pods in a box in the cabinet
* cup on counter / cup in cabinet / cup in dishwasher / cup in sink

We now have ~50 permutations of even the simple Keurig use case and let me know how many years of training to accomplish even this. All of this to make fairly bad coffee.

We haven't even gotten into your example of actually making real coffee.
Aside from the article, that website is a nightmare on mobile with no Adblocker. It seems fine initially and the more you scroll the more you get bombarded with irrelevant ads and videos you can’t close.