skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't. Our ability to understand problems and validate our solutions for them before even a single part is made is so much more advanced today (in the mechanical engineering world) it would be astonishing to them.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly by the human hours comment, I'm guessing that our advances today are more from low quality, high quantity work then ingenuity? Or something to that effect? I would say that might just be a result of the perception from looking back at a time of rapid advancement, where huge leaps occurred in a short time (and that we only look back at the successful end results, not all the R&D or the failures). Much of the slowness and expansiveness of engineering projects today is due to the increased use of analysis, validation, testing, quality assurance, etc. based on lessons learned from those days. Doesn't mean there is any less ingenious stuff happening, just doesn't stand out in the same way.

As for giving them the tools of today, I doubt they would be able to do much more than the same caliber of people today. In many fields we are pushing the capabilities of materials, analysis, design, etc. to their limits.

I would say the average engineer back then might be better but that's more related to the commodification of degrees than engineering getting worse. In 1970 you had about 9k meche's graduate for a population of 200 mil, in 2015 you had about 26k for a population of 320 mil. A 3x increase for only a 0.5x increase in population. I think the increase is due to alot more people being there for the paycheck, not the passion, which I think was much rarer back in the day.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_325.47.a...

All that being said, the engineering/engineers of that era is/are amazing. I mean they did most everything with paper, pencils and slide rules. Slide rules!
Is there no trace of you sending money from your card to McDonalds ? How do they audit for fraud ?
Well, this sound weird to me in the sense that I don't feel that I think in _words_. I only convert my thoughts into words when i need to speak or write them down; So when I need to communicate them to others, when I need to remember them for later, or when I am stuck and I need to clear things up.

I was actually convinced it was the same for most people, and that for this reason "Rubber duck debugging"[1] is a thing.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
A friend of mine proved (for his PhD I think) that the thing his entire department was working on was based on bullshit. They weren't happy.

That said, putting all your eggs in one basket is often necessary to get anywhere with that basket of research.
We've discussed generating automation code internally a bunch, and what we decided on is to do action generation and memorization, instead of code generation and memorization. They're not that far apart conceptually, but there is one important distinction: The generated output would just be a list of actions and their associated data source.

For example, if Skyvern was asked to log-in to a website and do a search for product X, the generated action plan would include:
1. Click the log in button
2. Click "sign in with email"
3. Input the email address retrieved from source X
4. Input the password retrieved from source Y
5. Click log in
6. Click on the search bar
7. Input the search term from source Z
8. Click Search

Now, if the layout changed and suddenly the log-in button had a different XPath, you have two options:
1. Re-generate the entire action plan (or sub-action plan)
2. Re-generate the specific component that broke and assume everything else in the action plan still works
Do you happen to know why they started hosting content themselves?
This is an observation I've seen a lot around here. Underneath it is the assumption that "if I can't figure out how to get meaningful use out of a tool, the tool must be useless".

OpenAI didn't sign up 100M users without somebody somewhere finding it to be useful. Like any other tool, it's utility is limited mostly by the person wielding it.
What? Why on Earth would you think that? "We are all pretty sure Boeing did it" doesn't meet any actionable legal standard. Deposing this guy and the followups is a critical part of the accountability process that will no longer happen or, in the case of followups, be significantly impeded by the presence of a credible threat looming over their heads. Shareholders (and management) absolutely benefit.
He's been heading up a small health-care startup since 2020. I'd be surprised if he was swimming in cash and liquidity (like he's used too). Companies can no longer write off R&D for the year that they've spent it. Countries like China have major R&D sectors because they allow softare development to be a tax write-off. The US killed this in 2022. Maybe he -- like many of us -- just can't justify spending money on luxury VR goggles given the circumstances.
They're good autocomplete, they can help search for solutions sometimes better than Google (SEO spam), you can use it as a rubber duck, and you can make it auto fill trivial stuff that would take you a few minutes to write out manually, like test scaffolding. I would never use it to actually complete a non-trivial task and I always confirm it's answers. And yeah, sometimes it sucks - it's a tool with a learning curve about knowing it's limitations.

The reason there's so much money and time is that even semi-competant AI is relatively new and the methods are still extreme crude, and yet it's this advanced. This seems like the path to an AGI, and if someone were to even approach that point, it would radically change the world forever and could lead to either really good things or really bad things.

Now, GPT-4 isn't considered the best at specialized tasks. It's a master of many, but there are much smaller models that can do things like incredibly complex symbolic/geometric math proofs, write code, perform translations, etc better. A lot of ideas are on making expert systems using many of those specialists combined with a generalist, like the segmentation of a brain.

Anyway:

> I seriously consider people who use it daily to either be straight up incompetent, or maybe their domain is so trivial that the LLM actually does well.

These kinds of radical lines of thinking about a significant proportion of enthused professionals (in any industry) who aren't showing the same experience as you, is a red flag for introspection. It's so easy to fall into the "enlightened me" trap.

I appreciate you asking for more information!
> What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist.

So if I want to start a small business, say a mom and pop restaurant, the public has to approve it first? You must be joking. Most businesses are small businesses. Hamstringing them is a recipe for disaster. Our regulatory system already disadvantages small businesses in countless ways. Indeed, that's part of the reason why large businesses can get away with so much.

The public already has a way to disapprove a business: don't buy from it. If nobody buys what the business is selling, it goes out of business.

The real oversight the public should be exercising, but isn't, is to vote out of office politicians that allow large businesses to buy their way out of trouble.
I wonder, who decides which space companies are "reputable" and based on which criteria.

It is quite a manipulative word to use.
Thanks to my RSS feed curation, I often hear from friends, "Wow, I can't believe you missed that! It was all over the news this week" and also "Hey, that's interesting! Where do you find all this stuff?".
I'm not sure that more regulation is the fix.

There are users that want the higher speed and then there are users who are content with inexpensive access Even if "slow". Most of the time the two don't go hand in hand.
No matter how much I contemplate about it, there was still no “killer” app that affords me to buy a VR set. I’ve tried them, it’s nice. But it really has no place in my life. And how could this change? Even with better displays etc. the whole idea of disconnecting my main sense - the eyes - from my surroundings is so strange to me that it seems irreconcilable.

Can anybody relate?
Therathon: C++ library for 2D/3D/4D vec, matrix, quaternion, geometric algebra
Check out lint-staged and husky within the node ecosystem.
It's ironic because you were the one harebraining over trivial bullshit.

We have millions of customers to serve and billions of dollars at stake, but you're going to nitpick over this guy's colloquial word misuse?

Come on.
That’s a good point. What’s always been strange to me is why we as a community allow this. We should boycott the Walmarts and Devins of the world. Drive them out of business by voting with our dollars.
Form Auto: Cleaning the Window Crashed Our Software
I had a similar take until about a week ago. A friend showed me his workflow with Copilot and whatever Jetbrains AI assistant is.

Use it as a tool: what if instead of opening up a new tab, searching for the API docs for the library you're trying to find a function in, find the function, re-read the parameter arguments for the 400th time, and then use it, you could just highlight a snippet and say "Paginate the results from S3 using boto3" and the code would just populate?

You have to have the clarity of thought to know what you're doing, but the time it takes to write every line for basic stuff you've done 1000x before can be greatly compressed if it's inlined with your IDE.

I think this is the move for most LLM tools: integrate it with existing tooling. An LLM for Excel for corporate bookkeepers, CPAs, etc will be great. A Word/PDF summarizer that's tuned for attorneys will also be fantastic. Highlight a paragraph, ask for relevant case law, etc.

I thought ~2 years ago the results were... not great. Now I'm pretty happy with it.

SecureFrame (helps with compliance regimes like SOC2) recently added the ability to generate Terraform templates to automatically generate infrastructure that will fix specific platform risks for AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.

It definitely needs someone at the helm since it does hallucinate, but I have found it to cut down my time on mundane tasks or otherwise niche/annoying problems. When was the last time you visited 4+ StackOverflow posts to find your answer? Copilot, so far, has always hit a pretty close answer very quickly.
Yours arent, but other people's are when they agree.
This is an analogy. a^2 - b^2 = aa - bb. This can be factored to (a+b)(a-b). In the first expression there are two multiplies, in the factored version there is only one.

However, from a numerical analysis / accuracy standpoint, evaluating the factored expression can result in loss of precision in the result when a is close to b. This is especially true if you repeatedly and sequentially do a lot of these operations. Loss of precision can be a problem in numeral modeling (like climate simulation) -- long term predictions diverge.

Given that there is a drive to use greatly reduced precision in ML engines, loss of precision might have an effect on how a model performs. Then again, it might not. I haven't read a lot of papers on ML, but I don't recall seeing ones that try to quantify how sensitive a model is to error propagation. (I am making a distinction between tests where the precision is reduced to see where it breaks down v.s. calculating / understanding what the error level actually is in a model)
Some questions we've thrown at GPT-4 recently (real use cases):

> how does torchmetrics IOU work? Does it match gt with detection boxes? or does it do pairwise IOU and average?

> What predictions has Ray Kurzweil made that he got correct and incorrect? Please produce a table

> can you give me a stack implementation with min function in O(1) time

> (A question about how we should solve a UX problem specific to our app)

> What is the best way to return raw image data via a REST endpoint?

> How is Return on Capital Employed (ROCE) calculated?

> Following the email exchange below, write a cross intro email to introduce (X person) to (Y person)

> How do I run this code on TPU in Collab?
Calling a specific diet the "natural way of eating" is either very egotistical or just plain naive.

There are groups around the world that eat vastly different diets than a typical westerner diet. Including ones that are vegetarian, and have been for a lot longer than you might expect.
Tesla is an absolute no-fly zone for me, due to their stupid leader.
Nice little game.

Unfortunate my company already declined my request for Google I/O :(
Base Mistral 7B is hardly suitable for the evaluations, even one team at Intel tried to pull a fast one with NeuralChat in the exact same way https://huggingface.co/Intel/neural-chat-7b-v3#quantitative-...
That's not what I asked. Of course I want them to look into it, but I am not the one who has to weigh my own life against the possibility of holding a big company accountable. Would you choose to risk it?
> curated output of the brainstormy process that immediately precedes it

Daniel Dennett gives a nice albeit more detailed version of your idea in his book Consciousness Explained, could be worth a read
For the vast majority of developers, this is the smarter choice. If you contribute to a very popular project, it might be different. But otherwise keep a bit of privacy.

Companies already tried to get rights to software created in your free time. Why even allow any attack surface here?
This is great, thank you! I've been considering writing something similar for a year or so and never got around to it, this will save me a lot of time and effort. Thank you for open sourcing it (MIT)!
I don't see how a small company with actual know how can protect their trade secrets otherwise. Software patents and other legal means seem much worse to me than trying to obfuscate trade secrets. Going open source is not a viable solution for most companies either.
Well, that last one is basically correct: an odd prime p is a sum of two squares iff p%4==1
Self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor is not 'Satoshi Nakamoto', UK judge rules
You should treat LLMs the same way you treat any other smart entity, human or otherwise: realize that they can be both immensely useful and fundamentally wrong at the same time. Intelligence is not equivalent to correctness.
In my experience most/all academics crave a certain type of attention. It is an occupation where you get promoted in part by how famous you are (how many citations your publications have, which conferences you attended, etc.).
A year after imploding, Silicon Valley Bank tries to make a comeback
yaml.org has gone away
We're definitely planning this.

Skyvern currently intercepts all network calls that gets made -- we save them all as a HAR file for debugging purposes... but never looks at them

A lot lot lot of scraping use-cases become simpler if you can just inspect a search api or a details API and get the information you're looking for. I'll add this to our roadmap!
Is there something inherently difficult or novel about VR operating software that would make it difficult to design or implement controls? I can understand tracking hands is difficult, but I mean the problems you have.

It seems crazy that after investing so much in the 'hard part', the VR hardware and software itself, they'd drop the ball on what seems mundane - basic design of UI controls.
LLM hype and this submission in particular keep making me think of a lecturer I had for Topics in Large Dimensional Data Processing, circa 2016: as I recall he was enthusiastically adamant that the most important thing, breakthroughs etc., in years/decades to come was going to be faster matrix operations. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I recognise FIP (not FFIP of course) from that course.

I wish I could remember his name, I believe he left academia after my year and went to work in industry, I'd just be curious to see what he's up to now. I'm not saying it was a particularly novel or prescient comment/attitude, we may not have had quite such ML hype but certainly 'big data' was all the rage at the time, it's just something that's stuck in my mind. One of those areas I always meant to study more, just realistically probably never had the mathematical chops for and certainly those I did have atrophied.
We know what happens in the brain when you're 'in the zone'
The paper:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002839322...
I feel ya.

Side note, for my sanity, did this article disappear off the first page for you as well?

It's on page 6 for me now.

edit: it's completely gone now off any page.
I'm in the same boat. I have no desire for these. If anything, I'm trying to reduce my screen time and increase my access and accessibility to the real world. This feels like the exact opposite.
>> I worked 6 years in that company. I had to look back at these 6 years and try to put the “correct” titles to each period of time:

>> - Web developer at the beginning

>> - Senior software engineer afterward

>> - Tech lead when I was leading my own product and a tiny team

And here lays the problem. Claiming that title after 2 years is a joke and devalues the whole thing. It only makes sense if you moved to Mexico and automatically became Señor software engineer otherwise you're making a fool of yourself.

I stopped reading after this as it's a mix of ridiculousness mixed with lack of awareness. Should also change the title to "The Curse of the Señor Software Engineer".
Not enough mention of LGBT, especially gay male, scenes, which are the foundation of German techno. Until very recently, Berghain was a gay club that plays techno, not a techno club that supports gay people. Many Berlin clubs are still gay orgies, including the ocassional basement show in Berghain, but more famously kitkat club.

I agree the scene is "dying" though, simply because Berlin is very different than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Robert Henke (Monolake) talks about this: after the wall collapsed, the factories in east Berlin were abandoned, and west Berlin were happily giving permission and even some money to any student who wanted to open an "artistic space" in one of the old factories. So it was easy, you had a very industrial space, you brought some speakers and some beer along, and suddenly you had a club.

This is basically a very rare cultural moment: large amounts of unused industrial space being given away to anyone who wants to party. Berlin is, of course, nothing like this now.
I don't know anyone who doesn't believe he was killed. It's a narrative of the popular culture. eg Clinton's bj in the whitehouse or Xi Ping disappearing people or any organization that does an internal audit to find no wrongdoing.
Airbus has the same structure with feets both in civil aviation and the defense industry, like if nobody could make business without those ties.
The killer app for VR is the novelty of putting it on for the first 15 minutes / first 2 hours (depending on if you suffer from motion sickness or not) imho.
Thiking about it we would have VR predecessors in shape of screens attached to our forehead if this way of using technology was useful. We don't have that though so VR has nothing to replace.

PS: I bought a VR headset to check my bias and I don't use it because it's just uncomfortable to wear.
Facts! Also, they threaten so that you reduce your utilization. Just ignore them. When they do cut you off, get back to us from your local library's public Internet access.
That’s because businesses goals are to make something work, and securities goals are to stop something from happening (or comply with a process with that goal in mind).

Hopefully not the same ‘thing’ being targeted of course, because then it will get really bad, but yes conflict is inevitable.
damn; this is a really great summary of spf, dkim and dmarc. thank you very much!
This is all true, and it's a pain, but the situation is still improved from 20 years ago, when all of these layers were in separately-managed systems with no integration at all. Need to access the database? Well, it's in another datacenter that we haven't added to the backbone yet, so it'll need to traverse the internet. That means you'll need an ACL to get to the outbound NAT -- talk to datacenter team A for that. Then you'll need an ACL at Datacenter B to let your NAT'd IP in -- ticket datacenter B for that, we don't have any of our own people there. Then you can talk to the DBAs to get a username and password -- make sure they lock it down to just the schemas you need, for reasons of least-privilege. At a large org you probably still have to talk to all those teams, but at a well-run one the conversation can be streamlined to a few pull requests against their IaC. At a small org running on one account, you can probably do it yourself in one merge. AWS and GCP (not sure about Azure, but maybe them too) both now also offer relatively painless ways of auditing roles to see what permissions are actually in use, so you can trim them to what is needed. This kind of feature is not really feasible with the permissions spread across 5 heterogeneous systems.

Sure, we could just put everything on one VLAN and hand out . credentials, but you can do the equivalent in the cloud too.
I'm hardly "rich" but I do alright, but similarly there are plenty of toys that I certainly could "afford", but can't really justify.

For example, I would really like a real pinball machine, but a nice refurbished one or brand new one cost anywhere between $3,000 and $10,000. If I wanted, I could save up for a bit and buy one, but it's really hard for me to tell myself that $5,000 for a toy is "worth it", so I never have.

The most extravagant toy that I've purchased in the last few years with the MiSTer, and even that was a little hard to justify.
AI on a real-time app is hard
Same.

The tech is interesting but I am still waiting for the software to show me something that doesn't feel like a gimmick.
I bought their highest end leather couch with a fold out bed a couple years ago, due to time constraints. I was very unhappy to see it was made from chipboard. Of course their shelves and such you can see what you are buying, but I would not trust anything upholstered myself.
Three examples:

1. having ChatGPT generate boilerplate, because I’m lazy;

2. having ChatGPT attempt something I don’t know as a starting point, eg JavaScript; or,

3. having ChatGPT give a reference rather than Google myself, eg of a config option.

ChatGPT makes 1 less tedious, 3 less a game of “what magic phrase finds the right SO post?”, and means I do 2 at all, eg trying out JS features on my blog.

I think it does alright at composition if you break down the task sufficiently, but it struggles with higher order structure — particularly if you’re using multiple responses.

That said, I suspect we need a theory shift to get AI to comprehend higher order structure in composition.
Time to start building the ERCOT of porn! Who's with me?
December 2026, pushed back twice so far. The places that have service have post-launch prices far exceeding that of Starlink (and launch prices matching Starlink). It's "National" in the sense of being funded by taxpayers, but not in the sense of being operated as a public good. Just the usual operation to funnel tax money to politicians' cousins and friends and set them up for life with a revenue stream.

I can't imagine why you'd need 4k streaming. I can't tell 4k from 1080p on my 65" from my chair, and my phone isn't 4k.
Absolutely, and it’s interesting to realize the same was true for the first couple of iPhone versions, iPads and Apple Watch.

As long as those apps come, it could be great
Unrelated to the technical discussion but I was wondering what you made that architecture gif with? Looks neat!
Hardwax.com still has the great picks, I definitely recommend looking there if you want great Berlin techno (and ambient, electro, etc.) that doesn't sound like the stale genre "Berlin techno"
Where I live we still have restaurants that only take cash. There are even two places nearby where you can walk in 24/7, grab what you want out of their fridge, and put your cash in a box on the way out. Cash only can still work.