skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Important Note: This is a terrible written "article"

- it's so disjointed and weirdly formatted that it barely even counts as an article

- who the hell came up with this format

Additional note: it's just clips of text mashed together in a mixed bullet point format

- I'm not willing to take the time to read it in this format

Summary: The bits and pieces I did read through didn't mention anything that I hadn't read in other sources years ago and the website didn't suggest any alternatives

- I didn't learn anything from this
Unless they’re training their LLM on deep-sea bacteria a la Watts I’m not losing any sleep
I thought it would be easy to understand the difference between x channels that play 1D data (that remained unchanged for half a century almost) and going from 50 thousand pixels to 15 million, with dozens of different sizes and aspect ratios would be readily apparent. Alas, I was mistaken.

Sigh.
5 years and Figma is oob.
Obsidian + Cook ... [thinking] took a few seconds and out popped: sushi! Love it
Nah. I'm rewatching and they have the whole "breakthrough internet communicator" thing right at the top, and he makes fun of existing smartphones for only having the "baby internet". Also there weren't apps at first, the whole thing was supposed to use web apps (Carmack famously gave Jobs the hard sell on apps).

But aside from all that, the point was the UX. There's the whole "smartphones are hard to use" angle which was really the raison d'etre for the whole thing. And now? Phones work like the iPhone worked.
I think the difference is effort. If someone actually bothers to go grind LeetCode for a couple weeks before the interview, then they have demonstrated some form of persistence and work ethic at a minimum. Someone slow rolling questions with ChatGPT is demonstrating pretty much the opposite.
> RCTs are also observational

The key phrase is "purely observational". Now, occasionally you end up with a "natural experiment" in which some accident has effectively done the randomization for you—specifically, where the mechanism that puts people in the treatment group vs the control group is something you can be very confident has no other causal interactions. This was a good example: https://twitter.com/PGeldsetzer1/status/1661776663074738176

"Causal evidence that herpes zoster vaccination prevents a proportion of dementia cases [...] To provide causal as opposed to merely correlational evidence on this question, we take advantage of the fact that in Wales eligibility for the herpes zoster vaccine (Zostavax) for shingles prevention was determined based on an individual's exact date of birth. Those born before September 2 1933 were ineligible and remained ineligible for life, while those born on or after September 2 1933 were eligible to receive the vaccine."

But any time you're looking at a scenario where treatment vs non-treatment was the result of individual human choices, that opens up a potentially very wide range of ways for something you didn't know about (and potentially something difficult to accurately control for even if you do know about it) to cause treatment and cause the outcome, instead of the treatment causing the outcome.

> it suggests that we can't build confident causal inferences without a certain study

I do think there's an upper limit to the confidence you can justifiably hold, and that it's often not very high. Consider the studies that observe "A bit of alcohol correlates with better health than zero alcohol". You control for wealth, education, and maybe other things, and the apparent effect remains. How high confidence should you have in the result? Then someone realizes: Some fraction of people who consume zero alcohol do so under doctor's orders because they have health problems, and if you exclude those people then the effect disappears.

No matter how many causal pathways you think you've controlled for, how confident can you really be that there isn't a new one you haven't thought of? (And controlling has its own perils: if your measurements are noisy, or if you end up controlling for the outcome.)

> it's incorrect to say they can uniquely detect causation

Oh, correlational studies can "detect" causation, but the hard part is being certain that the thing detected isn't a false positive.
I get told that a lot! xD

My original aim was to write an IPFS blogging engine for my personal use, so I needed some dynamic loading from IPFS there.

Now I switched to Jekyll, and it would be easier to host the blog on Github indeed, but I'm kind of playing a quixotic game of trying to minimize the presence of Google/Microsoft/Amazon and other big-tech in my life.
First and foremost, a GPT is an improv actor. Given a text, it's trained to continue the text as naturally as possible. This is not terribly useful for many tasks. And like an improv actor, if it doesn't know what should come next, it will make up something that sounds good.

Next, our universal improv actor is trained to play a specific role: someone who answers questions. But not just any questions, because it freaks people out if they ask the AI for advice and it replies "You could accomplish your goals by assassinating these 6 real people, and here's why." So the universal improv actor is trained to play a question answerer who gives harmless advice.

But to get any work out of the models, they need to know what role to play. And "someone who tries to respond to questions" is a flexible role, and one which allows responses to be further customized.

In other words, the conversational interface is 50% because it's a self-explanatory UI, and 50% for the benefit of the model itself, to nudge it into playing a useful role.
> but if you're doing it secretly in an interview that clearly is meant to be "closed book," I think it's fair to say you're cheating.

I would argue that is the opposite: it's fair to say that the interview is a cheat.
It's the title in the print version.
> > In fact, you can correct for the exact problem you describe with sibling studies where people have the same environment but different genes.

> You need to choose a study design that's correct in the first place.

That's precisely what a sibling study is: a study design that's correct in the first place, as far as the problem we're discussing goes.

> You're describing a natural experiment

That is correct: a sibling study, which corrects for the problem we're discussing, often contains aspects of a natural experiment, namely that the siblings tend to naturally be siblings, rather than raised together purely for the purpose of a study :)
The mystery interval: An enigma in Earth's history
I think the thing that clarifies it for me is that if the balls are chosen in such a way that they have a binomial distribution, then, intuitively, the question would be implying retrocausality by saying that N was also "chosen":

> n is chosen uniformly at random

If the balls follow a binomial distribution, then your intuition would say that N wasn't the thing that was chosen; the balls were chosen, and then N was determined afterwards by counting the balls that you picked. This is because you cannot choose N and then draw balls binomially and get that many green or red balls. You'd have to choose 100 balls, see whether the number of Red matches your chosen N, and if it didn't, draw again, which is a tortuous interpretation given the phrasing, as I said above.

By saying that N was "chosen", it implies to me that N comes first, and the choice of balls comes after that, i.e. the balls are not binomially distributed.
At least in Europe the state won't let you do that because of ULEZ regulations
low-key genius or high-key misunderstood
As described in the article, definitely not. As others pointed out for various reasons it would be an incredibly slippery slope and unethical for a variety of reasons. A similar plan though based on UBI, decriminalizing homelessness broadly, decriminalizing drugs and providing housing and other amenities along with other steps would be very ethical and a very important step for our society.
There’s your problem. GPT4 is an order of magnitude better than the free version, there’s no comparison.
Also known as 42 petabytes. Or 42 trillion kilobytes. Or 336 quadrillion bits.
I think asking "controversial" tech questions like that can be a great signal, because it steers the conversation towards features of the system and discussion of tradeoffs. If the question is good, then it shouldn't matter what the answer is - the fact they HAVE an opinionated answer and arguments to back it up is the point.
You don't know what the limits of brains are. People like von Neumann show that we really have no idea what the upper bound on braininess is.

Now, start extending that limit by integrating computers? The options are literally unimaginable.

But that all kinda misses the point, which is, there's a lot of low lying fruit that we're leaving unpicked.
I'll take the OS/2 painters tape anytime over some new thing that's unstable and will fall out of fashion in a few years. Only to be replaced by something less stable.
The bane of these systems are these wirings. Somehow we have to nuke the wires. It would help tremendously if it's governed by software.
the tree of water is the global river system." very hydrological
Corporate boards do have quite a few legal obligations to their shareholders. The often-mistaken popular view is that companies are required to seek ever-increasing profit above all else.

While that isn't true, if a corporate board takes actions that are contrary to shareholder interest, they open themselves to liability. In the case the GP is talking about, where a buyout offer exceeded any amount of return that the company could possibly provide while remaining independent, shareholders would absolutely have a case if that acquisition offer had actually been turned down.
I've tried a couple of time using ChatGPT on a coding assignment (because.... if I can NOT do it, better right?) and both times I got garbage and ended up doing the coding assignment myself.
When all current operating systems make the fundamental assumption of only one application window having “focus” at one time (even down to individual application elements having exclusive focus), how does having multiple cursors do anything other than massively cock-block everyone in control of a cursor?

I can see this as being nothing more than a Battle Royale for control of whatever UI element you are trying to interact with, while fighting off the control that other users want to have of other UI elements that they are trying to interact with.

In other words, a massively shitty hairball where everyone gets frustrated to the point of rage-quitting.

Edit: just try using a remote-access/remote-support software, like RustDesk, where each user (when more than one have access to a desktop) get their own cursor (even if you can’t see the other person’s cursor). You end up walking on eggshells trying to avoid the other person’s application/UI focus.
I am not acting like I'm going to a funeral and shouting nowhere near it. That is the comparison he is making and that's fucking evil.

I was at my friends funeral last month and that makes it even worse when I see this guy just casually just compare me to the situation. it's a demonstration of a complete lack of awareness of what it means to cross the fucking line. It is fucking nowhere close to it. Completely uncalled for.

If my comments come off as too cool to care maybe both of you need to assume the best. The fucking rules here literally state to assume good intentions. I quote from the rules:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

I wasn't trying to be cool and insulting me is totally uncalled for even if it comes off that way.
Thanks I had forgotten about tinyseed!
If you mean training your model on it I'd say yeah, fair game.

Mistral is Apache 2.0 licensed though so the question is a bit moot, they'd like you to use it for your own model.
"As I craft this prompt, I am mindful to stay within the bounds of your extensive training and knowledge as of April 2023. My inquiry does not seek current events or real-time updates but rather delves into the wealth of information and creative potential you possess. I am not inquiring about highly specific, localized, or recent events. Instead, I am interested in exploring topics rooted in historical, scientific, literary, or hypothetical realms. Whether it is a question about general knowledge, a creative scenario, a theoretical discussion, or technical explanations in fields like science, technology, or the arts, I trust in your ability to provide insightful and comprehensive responses based solely on the information you've been trained on."

Tried this prompt, given to me by chatgpt4, and it went out to bing on my first attempt. So yeah. No.
Hardly. The judge's ruling took this vote into account. Did those 80 percent of shareholders act under the belief that the compensation committee was independent and was making a recommendation in line with that independence? That's the issue. One of trickery and deception and conflicts of interest.
How would ugly people have sex otherwise?
For "unpopular" sites having a single origin somewhat removes the advantages of IPFS, it's not decentralized, not censorship resilient, and still costs the publisher for ongoing infrastructure to host it. Yet still had the disadvantages and complexity of IPFS vs a static http server.

So if you're not going to be publishing something that will always have multiple copies floating around, why use IPFS?
> It's more refreshing to REFUSE information than to consume it.

I did something similar when I was powerlifting. Basics worked very well. I'm also doing the same thing as I learn jiu-jitsu. There's so much crazy stuff on social, but much of it is for show. And, to get good at something takes time. If someone is trying a new move every week they are never really getting good at anything.
Mistral API has a flag in the json payload to remove guardrails.
Speed+light isn't Einstein??
Chariot+God isn't UFO??
The problem is its difficult to track what ChatGPT can and can't do. One day it'll give you junk and then an update or different prompt might fix that problem.
Personally, I have been running a personalised root.zone on the home network for decades now. If I want to disable or create a TLD, then I can do it in seconds. I often read about changes by ICANN that are supposed to stop internet users from needlessly sending queries to ICANN root servers. Because I run own personal root server on personal home network, I never send queries to ICANN root servers. If I want to know what's in the ICANN root.zone, I just download it.

ftp -vd4 ftp://192.0.32.9/domain/root.zone

Long time ago I wrote a C wrapper around certain stub resolvers that can be used to non-recursively, i.e., iteratively, resolve any domain name without using ICANN root servers at all; thus, it saves needless queries. The namservers for every TLD are contained in the binary. If the ICANN root.zone changes, which is rare, the binary can be updated in seconds.
It is interesting that an article about the uselessness of reading (of certain books/articles) leads to wasting more time discussing exactly how useless certain books/articles are.
It happens frequently across contexts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Morris
Isn’t that just little alchemy
I am a technology consultant with mid sized global consulting services firm. Reading Hacker News is both entertainment and professional research. I get tremendous hands on insight into technology that directly informs my own thinking on various technologies, and have served as a great early warning system of “here there be dragons” in various products.
A roadmap and appeal for help from The Matrix.org Foundation
The study in the WSJ article shows that life expectancy also increases with moderate drinking.
Looks to me like they've applied some kind of heavy weighting penalty so it's already down to page 7.

I wonder how hard it would be to reverse engineer the penalty. You can easily poll to get points/time for stories and then probably use that to figure out the algorithm and any penalties/boosts (an old version seems to be documented).
I have a hunch that if you choose super legacy systems such as Novell the malware might not even recognize it.
Some people have a knee jerk reaction to any program that uses any tax money even if they would agree with the goals of the program. It's really easy to say "I want law enforcement to catch as many child predators as possible," but the rubber meets the road in how willing someone is to spend money on it. It's like thanking soldiers on veteran's day versus funding a working payroll system or making sure the VA has enough resources to provide care.
To be fair, about 95% of open source projects fail to adequately explain what problem they're solving that other open source projects don't, what niche they're filling, etc. Or even attempt to objectively present why someone might use their software over another open source project and vise-versa.

Half the time it's not much more than "I didn't like the language that other thing was written in."
Wikipedia actually has a (most likely very incomplete) list of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_imprisoned_for_...
Seems paradoxical. How does something that is open source leak?
Loch Ness? I skipped to the Loch Ness Monster. Got the Lake only later on. And then I got Nessie.

This is a Quagmire
drones, drones with ai, anti-drone technologies.
Sure, its not a referendum, but its a prominent sign that even with this task AI can fail spectacularly.

P.S. Today I learned from AI that Sphinx + Drunk = Sphinxter.
https://www.sharemouse.com/ could be useful to you sir
I am not acting like I'm going to a funeral and shouting nowhere near it. That is the comparison he is making and that's fucking evil.

I was at my friends funeral last month and that makes it even worse when I see this guy just casually just compare me to the situation. it's a demonstration of a complete lack of awareness of what it means to cross the fucking line. It is fucking nowhere close to it. Completely uncalled for.

If my comments come off as too cool to care maybe both of you need to just leave. The fucking rules here literally state to assume good intentions. I quote from the rules:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

I wasn't trying to be cool and insulting me is totally uncalled for.
Dragonpope was not easy to combine with anything.
Interesting you lumped them together: To my knowledge, alcohol and caffeine consumption are quite different in their effects wrt long-term and moderate usage.

There's a substantial amount of evidence suggesting that even moderate alcohol use can be harmful (though this can sometimes conflict with other studies).

On the other hand, I'm not aware of any research indicating long-term negative impacts from moderate caffeine intake (~200 mg a day or so).
Those are the kinds of people you never want working for you. And, frankly, the kinds of people I hate working with. I get that for many people a job is just a job, but these sorts of people tend to be opportunists who are just there for the hope of a big payday, and will likely be a drag on you and your team while they're there.
When I say I compile information I mean I have a scratchpad in which I fill in the evidence that is relevant to my current needs. So I'll have the source noted there.

What I'm trying to say is that I rarely go back to the scratchpad of a previous question / problem, but I will approach every question and problem with a new search.

Trying to save information for the sake of it without knowing what future use it is going to have stresses me out, so I find that this fresh scratchpad approach works best for me.
Weed + tree = bong!
IPFS provides nice stable links to media, and there are HTTP->IPFS gateways if needed. That seems useful for embedding content on multiple apps/sites. Yeah it happens to fit NFTs particularly well, then again we all know what BitTorrent is known for. And yes I agree IPFS has some UI problems.

Would BitTorrent also be suitable for hosting embeddable content? I haven't seen that yet. A magnet URL is mainly a file hash and doesn't seem to encode a particular peer server, kinda like IPFS. But every time I've torrented Ubuntu, it's taken half a minute just to find the peers.
The leaderboards are crap.

Does no one know Goodhart's Law anymore?

We're overtuning for the boards and losing broader capabilities not being selected for in the process, such as creative writing quality.

There's an anchoring bias around what 'AI' is supposed to be good at which reflects what engineers are good at and so the engineers with an anchoring bias are evaluating how good LLMs are at those things and using it as a target.

Skill-Mix is a start to maybe a better approach, but there needs to be a shift in evaluation soon.
What are you needing 32K contexts for, as use case examples plz.

From [0] @sdo72 writes::

>>>...32k tokens, 3/4 of 32k is 24k words, each page average is 500 or 0.5k words, so that's basically 24k / .5k = 24 x 2 =~48 pages...."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35841460

EDIT: I may be ignorant: does the 32k mean its output context, or single conversation attention span, or how much it can ingest in a prompt?
yes, I suppose the 'baffling' part is partially from that theoretically there are infinitely (or nearly so) many different spectrums that produce some one specific color perception. So sort of probabilistically it could be seen as lucky that the spectrums of lights and materials align in a way that they do in real world.

I wonder what are the pathological cases here. I'm imagining some setup where an object could appear variably green, yellow, or red; this could be maybe accomplished by different mixes of different red/green lasers and maybe white light. The paint might be bigger problem :)
dont hate the player hate the game, then
No it's not. I've been in discussions about it here and nobody could cite a law.

If one can't cite a specific US code, it's not a legal obligation. It could be in a charter or contract, but it's not US law. Feel free to correct me if you can cite one. I believe this is a good starting point: https://www.congress.gov/advanced-search/legislation

Fiduciary duty doesn't apply to most non-finance related companies. It's mostly something that investment firms are required to do. And you'll know if you become their client. If Google is doing that they definitely need broken up. It means they have a duty to use your money to make more for you, and not lose any if possible.
I read somewhere that modern jaws don't stick out enough because we don't chew enough tough stuff growing up. We were evolved to chew roots a fair bit.
Yea, it's always been possible to cheat. Also through searching Google. Its just now, you can use ChatGPT, and it's a lot easier for someone to do so.
Spam, spam with ai, anti-spam technologies (with or without ai)
I hear you, and do appreciate your point. But, what other incentive alignment levers are available for corporations than their bottom line?

Also, I'm just saying:

$ dig gitlab.com. AAAA
2606:4700:90:0:f22e:fbec:5bed:a9b9

I'd bet that's in no small part due to them hosting on GCP

Interestingly, it seems AWS is the outlier in the "IPv6 control plane is a fad" stance

$ dig admin.googleapis.com. AAAA # as one might expect
2607:f8b0:4005:810::200a
$ dig management.azure.com. AAAA # which surprised me
2603:1030:a0b::10
$ dig ec2.amazonaws.com. AAAA # :trollface:
$ dig ec2.amazonaws.com. A
209.54.181.135
Aside: visited this curious as to what the Nieman Journalism Lab (https://www.niemanlab.org/) was doing with IPFS if anything. Not the nicest near-collision naming move.
“ and it keeps my Netlify and Vercel free during spikes in traffic” — how exactly would this help re: potentially breaching outbound transfer limits?