skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've found that while agents cannot replace anyone, they can sure help with the use of various things.

First, we know these AIs are trained with data from the general Internet, and that data is vast.

Second, the general Internet contains owner manuals and support forums for practically every active product there is, globally. These are every possible product too: physical products, virtual products like software or music, and experience products like travel or education. Between the owner’s manuals and the support forums for these products there is extremely deep knowledge about the purpose, use and troubleshooting of these products.

Third, one cannot just ask an LLM direct deep questions about some random product and expect a deep knowledge answer. One has to first create the context within the LLM that activates the area(s) of deep knowledge you want your answers to arise. This requires the use of long form prompts that create the expert you want, and once that expert is active in the LLM’s context, then you ask it questions and receive the deep knowledge answers desired.

Fourth, one can create an LLM agent that helps a person create the LLM agent they want, the LLM agent can help generate new agents, and dependency chains between different agents are not difficult at all, including information exchange between groups of agents collaborating on shared replies to requests.

And last, all that deep information about using pretty much every software there is can be tapped with careful prompting to create the context of an expert user of that software, and experts such as these can become plugins and drivers for that software. It's at our finger tips...!
>> “don’t trust AI with anything you wouldn’t trust a high schooler to do.”

Then they should be great for making fast food, staffing amusement parks, and seasonal farm labor.

They don't seem to be good for those things either.

[Edit to add: the value high schoolers bring to jobs through non-cognitive abilities, which AIs lack.]
Well you're right about quality baseline, low quality. The likes of Dr Who funded by Disney, and as another commenter mentioned it's unequivocally biased in its news.
On the other hand you have Discovery and History channels, which caters for the education-entertainment niche.
Why should I worry about not having the BBC around? If I'm not watching it already I'm not losing anything (my wife might lose her EastEnders though).
What's an agent based workflow? :)

I use LLMs as a glorified search engine. That was better than web search at some point, I'm not sure the publicly available LLMs are that good any more. Gemini seems to be extremely worried to not offend anyone instead of giving me results lately.

At least it's still useful for 'give me the template code for starting an XXX' ...
is partly to be attributed how reliant on technology vs humans we are now with aviation? practically a plane could be flown without pilots
2FA apps also require me to do many more actions as opposed to SMS as notification. Would be much better if there was some sort of nudge mechanism for phone to display the proper code.
There is probably a business opportunity for an AI company to build private LLMs for large enterprises trained on their own COBOL code bases. They won't find much available as open source, and individual companies tend to have significantly different coding styles tied to COBOL versions and database schemas.
Yeah, he claims because at any point in time there are people redesigning their interiors. I'd say that at any point in time there are people you can convince to give you their money, and if you don't offer refunds, it's not far from a scam.
Rules:

1. Reply to and repost this tweet.

2. You agree that you can only use the key for yourself.

3. The competition ends in 2 weeks.

$1000 of openai credits are allocated
AML is good, no I don’t. My turn to ask the questions. Is there literally any scenario where you'd accept that maybe crypto isn't actually useful and maybe it is just a big scam? Think about it hard, otherwise you'll waste years of your life in an internet libertarian larp. Bro USDC is multisig'd, it isn't decentralizing anything and it doesn't even need a blockchain except to interact with DeFi.
As far as adaptions for the illiterate masses go I thought the series was pretty good. I couldn't personally get past the stink of soap opera SciFi Channel quality acting and writing myself but if you have no plans to ever read the books it's better than nothing. One positive thing I can say is the art design was pretty good especially the computers and their interfaces.
I'm trying to understand how Spinors work - there's a good video[1] that almost gets me there, but gives me clues.

I'm trying to understand how to break an expression down to a graph of bit functions, so I can program a BitGrid. I suspect GitHub copilot can help.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7OIbMCIfs4&t=2710s
I thought it was pretty compelling.
We built a conversion rate optimizing AI Agent and saw about 45% click through rate lift on our own homepage. In other beta testing companies that used it, we saw a similar average and range has been +15%-175%. Agent (AB3.ai) can be tried here: https://AB3.ai
The only person here inciting a flamewar is you. Nice attempt at "concern trolling"

Your trolling in the other comments is the problem that you claim to be against. Everyone else seems to be having a rational discussion without letting their emotions influence their writing except for you.

Be a better person.
That and they lose 50% of the water they pump to leaks. and you can see the depleted water table in the ripple of formally straight row house etc.
Anxiety Drives Wishful Thinking to Risky Levels
Widevine video encryption really kicked my ass the other day. It's supposed to be bypassable but I've yet to find a practical option that doesn't require hours of fiddling.
Curious if anyone can see the difference between #DD2 and #DD3. It was impossible on my 2013 Retina Macbook.
My bike speedometer is the worst for this. It has 3 buttons. Each one can be pressed short, medium (>3 seconds), or long (>5 seconds). Every action changes something on the display, but god knows what all the icons mean. Most actions are statefull, with a surprisingly deep menu structure. If you do the wrong thing, e.g. press long instead of medium, something surprising happens, and you're in hell finding the way back to the main menu and try again. Easy option is waiting 2 minutes until it returns by itself.

It has a gigaton of functions, but I only need 3: speed to not drive too fast, time to know if I'll arrive on time, km driven to know if I need maintenance. All other stuff in there is unused.

At this point, I've given up. In winter, I add an hour. I know the clock is 2 minutes off and I subtract them myself. If I have to spellunk in the dark dungeons of the menu structure again, I might accidentally drop a hammer on the thing.

Apart from that, it's a great speedometer. The worst is knowing I am the official techie and watch DST fixer for half my extended family, and no other clock has thwarted me so severely, ever...
I'm using ReACT for RAG based chatbot & tools which are just different retrievers.
Revenge of the Bootstrapped Startup
Ask HN: Will you complete take home assignments if feedback wont be provided?
As a candidate, will you complete a take home assignment if the employer was known not to provide feedback as a policy?

If the employer had a policy that they would not provide feedback for their take home assignments, would you still complete the take home assignment?

Also, I'm wondering whether we could create a separate post or a subreddit where we can do reviews of take home assignment if the employer refused to do so? Would that be useful to any of you?
Gent is shilling his book about passive income or whatever. Sure I believe his numbers.
I do. I use assistants as containers for different conversations for my GTM work:
An assistant for marketing and copywriting
An assistant for customer support
An assistant sales conversations.

These agents aren't super smart: just few PDFs for context plus a few sentences system prompts.

I do get what I want in 80% of use cases (not measured, just a feeling).
Tangentially related: Dark. 3 seasons of sci-fi parallel-world-travel intensity with a satisfying ending.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5753856/

Westworld season 1 & 2 are pretty spectacular too if you missed it. Same producers made the Peripheral, and their adaptation of Fallout is coming in 2 weeks which looks fun.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/V-mugKDQDlg?feature=shared

I loved Severance so much and I'm not sure anything else better will be along for a while, but there is plenty of good stuff out there to pass the time.
OpenAI deems its voice cloning tool too risky for general release
I use one that reads my RSS feeds writes a radio DJ voice over and uses an elevenlabs API call to generate the voice (their Santa voice from last year works really well). Combines it with one of my Spotify playlists and gives me a 45 minutes radio show for my commute... pretty much changed how I consume news and content like hn.
With malware popups, just like the original!
Disagree.

SMS is not perfect for security. But SMS is better security than no 2FA at all, and for many (most?) situations, more-secure alternatives aren't viable. The deprecation of Authy or loss of keys has left me permanently locked out of a few accounts. YubiKey and similar aren't ubiquitous enough or usable enough for many users. I've experienced these problems personally and I'm likely in the most technical 1% of users you're likely to encounter. SMS is ubiquitous and users understand it, and is secure enough for many situations.

If you're running a service that requires a high level of security, fine, force users to use TOTP/HOTP or something, but be aware you're going to be excluding some users and adding to your support costs by doing that.
Can the community aspects of FOSS survive a Spy vs Spy environment though?

I don't know, but the answer is irrelevant to whether we are in one (we are).

I shudder to think what lurks in the not-open-source world. Closed source software/firmware/microcode, closed spec/design hardware; and artificial restriction of device owners from creating replacement code, or modifying code in consumer and capital goods containing universal machines as components; are significant national security threats and the practice of keeping design internals and intent secret in these products produces a cost on society.

I propose that products which don't adhere to GNU-like standards of openness (caveat*) get national sales taxed some punitive obscene percentage, like 100%. This way the government creates an artificial condition which forces companies to comply lest their market pricing power be absolutely hobbled. If say your company makes five $10MM industrial machines for MEGACORP customer and you're the only game in town, MEGACORP can pay the sales tax. Brian, Dale, and Joe Sixpack can't afford $2,500+ iPhones and Playstations, or $70,000 base model Honda Civics (yes this should apply to cars and especially medical devices/prosthetics), so when Company B comes around making a somewhat inferior competing fully open product then Company A making the proprietary version loses a huge chunk of market share.

(*But not the GNU-spirit distribution rights, so the OEM or vendor is still the only entity legally allowed to distribute [except for national emergency level patches]. Patent rights still apply.)

This is the most direct and sane way to address the coming waves of decade+ old lightbulbs and flatscreens. It has fewest "But if" gotcha exceptions with which to keep screwing you. Stop sticking up for your boss and think about the lack of access to your own devices, or better yet the implicit and nonconsensual perpetual access vendors maintain to universal machines which by all rights only you should have sovereign control over (like cooking your own microcode or tweaking Intel's [but not distributing your tweaks to Intel's])!
Show HN: 15 Slide Puzzle
> You need a licence to watch streaming services like Netflix or Prime. You don't have to be watching it live, you need a licence to record or timeshift.

This is wrong.

Do I need a TV Licence to watch Youtube?

If you are watching a TV programme live on YouTube, you need to be covered by a TV Licence.

A licence is not required to view user generated content, clips and videos on YouTube. This includes live streamed content that is not part of a television broadcast. Or being broadcast at the same time by other means.

---

Do I need a TV Licence to watch Netflix?

You don’t need a TV Licence to watch on demand programmes on Netflix.

---

Do you need a TV Licence to watch Amazon Prime?

If you’re watching TV showing live on Amazon Prime, you need to be covered by a TV Licence. You don’t need a TV Licence if you’re only watching on demand programmes on Amazon Prime.

---

Do you need a TV Licence to watch Disney Plus?

You don’t need a TV Licence to watch on demand programmes on Disney Plus.

Source: https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/cs/ContentServer?c=Page&childp...
when talking about the scale of the US federal government, I don't think average (non-wealthy, non-politically connected) US citizens have any more say than anybody else in the world. I would bet wealthy citizens of other countries have a lot more ability to affect the US federal government than average citizens. A tiny, statistically non-existent vote is entirely meaningless. Basically just symbolic of democratic ideals.
At least in the US, most states are single party consent.

The whole thing's a mess, but it's funny to me that people would get indignant over a user letting another party intercept analytics data. "Hey, that's my data from spyware! Get your own!" As if their "consent" to collect the data in the first place were any less flimsy than Facebook's.
Except the debug environment isn't _quite_ like the production environment, is it? Now you've got it working on the debug environment but weirdly broken on prod still..
His robots are just automated scripts which do the bulk repetitive tasks unlike the agents that comment OP thought.
HN isn't your personal whinging service.
Agents and tooling around LLM’s can probably make some small number of applications viable, but for the most part we need better foundation models to deliver on the hype.

We’re definitely in the “wait” phase of the wait calculation. Everyone is expecting GPT5/q* to change things but really we won’t know until we see it.
Unfortunately all the interpretations of Yahweh at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh#Periods fall under the Zeus/Cancer/Aries timeframe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574 ...

> Whether a monotheistic God is unary, binary, trinary, etc...

In particular, Arianism would've allowed a supernatural of characteristic zero, while trinitarianism demands characteristic two.
I feel like you're making three statistical mistakes at once.

- First, we're not discussing the English level of the general Chinese population, but specifically of the group that's also good at programming. That conditional probability is much higher.

- Even if we did speak of the general Chinese population, that is a lot of people so something rare in that group is true for many people still!

- It's not like everyone in the US has great English either. (Though open source maintainers are again probably more likely to.)
Good thing they disabled the check that would have broken the build/tests in this case eh?
So many things are obvious once pointed out. I never would have thought of pressure gradients but once you did it's obviously a very uneven surface and you don't do that in anything contending with a lot of drag.

How do you see this as a SWATH? This is a catamaran that combines buoyancy and propulsion. I do agree it has a high center of gravity, but that's a relative term--what counts is the ratio of height to width. And a catamaran or SWATH has a much wider base than a typical ship.

Wikipedia says SWATH ships require complex control systems--why? Yes, they're very load sensitive because the small contact at the surface means a lot of vertical movement to compensate for weight changes, but couldn't that simply be handled with some pumps and tanks? Make the ship always weigh X--take on water or pump it out as needed to maintain that X.
I’ve tried that many times and it always ends in a wadded up ball of sheet, and tears.
I think there are some they're good enough at today. Auto generating meeting notes + AI context, auto responding / following up to emails, filling out forms (we do that pretty well at Skyvern with high accuracy)
Why polarise things even more like this? I agree with you (in partperhaps) and think it’s often fine to like 70s and 80s films for what they are without ignoring the fact that values and mores have changed. 1970s attitudes to women at work or sexual violence against women were really different. It’s not woke bullshit to think things have changed for the good. If your point was that ahistorical readings of literature can be killjoy then more people could probably get on board.
This exactly. Looking at the safety record to make predictions about airline safety in the future is like making a bet in 2006 that subprime mortgages should be rated AAA because the price of real estate is always increasing. The real characteristics of what lies beneath the numbers matter.
Just like many here have said already, GPT4 is being useful for coding for me. It is an amazing parser, specially, and save me precious time. Of course it's not able to do anything on it's own or without supervision, but is has been better than looking up to examples on Google.

I also have been experimenting with it to replace the intention classifier part of Google's dialogflow. We use it at work for our chatbot. Earlier, we used Watson and it was amazing, but became very expensive. Dialogflow is cheap, but it is as innacurate with complex natural language as it is cheap.

Mixtral (8x7B) has proved extremely accurate in identifying intentions with a consistent JSON output, giving it a short context, so i assume a simple 7B model would do the job. I still don't know if it is financially worth it, but it's something i'm gonna try if i can't fix the dialogflow's intentions. But in no way the model's output would directly interface with a client. That's asking for trouble.
Extrapolating on your legal comment, copyright is the current issue.

Right now the USCO says if you use a large model that used copyrighted material to train it, you cannot copyright the generated art. This applies to not just art but might be for code as well. So I wonder what the legal liabilities are say for a publicly traded company to use Midjourney to generate content that is also copyrighted.

ex) it is possible to generate movie characters that we instantly recognize if you use non-english words which pretty much nail in the coffin for safe harbour status granted under DMCA
You don't need a super agent, you just need two LLM-based systems with errors that aren't too correlated.
It depends on what you test for.

I am from the C64 demo scene and in this regard ChatGPT is pretty useless. VIC tricks, raster timing - nothing a LLM can help with at the moment judging from my experience with ChatGPT 4.0 so far.

Same goes for Amiga and simple blitter access for scrolling.

LLMs will be very limited here unless they receive sensory feedback repeatedly.

Pure algorithms like sorting for example may be doable by GPT, but the mentioned machines are very creatively used to come up with effects.

Here are techniques reused, not so much code itself, which gets modified and optimized for every demo and often times recombined with other techniques.

Most techniques for the VIC are pretty well documented, but the timing as well as recombining them is the heavy lifting.
Yup, one track economies fail repeatedly if they don't diversify.
I think the biggest problems come from single points of failure. This wouldn't be as problematic if _everyone_ didn't use the same libraries. I guess you could argue that's similar to trust.

In any case, I agree technologist aren't thinking about it because the only way to extract massive amount of wealth is by centralization/monopoly. Hard problem though, the appropriate amount of redundancy is hard to know.
I’ve found impel (https://tryimpel.com) to work extraordinarily well till now
Your link is the old/abandonware mpc-hc, here you'll find a more recent version

https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc
Socials:

- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/1bsgnf5/tc39_pr...

- X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/nullvoxpopuli/status/1774496900915327100

- Masto: https://mastodon.coffee/@nullvoxpopuli/112191605019758002

- Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/nullvoxpopuli.bsky.social/post/3koz...
what makes it slow? is it because they throttle your api key?
> If I were a chinese hacker trying to do something evil, why on earth would I use a chinese handler/username?

1) Why not?

2) You'd likely want a relatively common-sounding name, I suppose. Chinese names are relatively common-sounding.
Agents are largely an attempt take the Human-LLM pair and and use the LLM to replace all the work the human finds trivial but which the LLM is terrible at.

Trying to get more inference value per-prompt is a good thing. Starting by trying to get it to do long-chain tasks per-prompt makes no sense.

I'm a huge fan of LLMs for productivity, but even small tasks often require multiple prompts of build-up or fix-up. We should work toward getting those done in a single prompt more often, then work toward slightly larger tasks etc.

Plugins and GPTs are both attempts at getting more/better inference per-prompt. There is some progress there, but it's pretty limited. There's also plenty of people building task-specific tools that get better results than someone using the chat interface due a lot of prompt work.

So there is incremental progress happening, but it's been fairly slow. The fact that it's this much work to get incrementally more inference value per prompt makes it very hard to imagine anyone closing the whole loop immediately with an agent.
How to display circles on top of zoomable images without getting flickering is an interesting problem. (This comment does not refer specifically to displaying a tree map)

I noticed that painting the circles on top of an overlay with OpenSeadragon caused flickering [1]. However, when painting circles on top of the pyramid image tiles that OpenSeadragon loaded, there was no flickering.

This was my conclusion in 2016 when I created a web viewer that showed circles on top of a microscope photo [2]. Architecture: single file format containing an index, pyramid image tiles and measurement data for circles.
To make this work, I intercepted the function call that OpenSeadragon usually uses to download an image tile. Instead, I provided OpenSeadragon with an image tile that already had the circle painted on it.

[1] https://openseadragon.github.io/examples/ui-overlays/
[2] demo: https://eriksjolund.github.io/osd-spot-viewer-webpack-build/...
(The demo only worked on Linux. I'm not sure if it still works)
source code:
https://github.com/eriksjolund/osd-spot-viewer