skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Full disclaimer up top: I have been working on agents for about a year now building what would eventually become HDR [1][2].

The first issue is that agents have extremely high failure rates. Agents really don't have the capacity to learn from either success or failure since their internal state is fixed after training. If you ask an agent to repeatedly do some task it has a chance of failing every single time. We have been able to largely mitigate this by modeling agentic software as a state machine. At every step we have the model choose the inputs to the state machine and then we record them. We then 'compile' the resulting state-transition table down into a program that we can executed deterministically. This isn't totally fool proof since the world state can change between program runs, so we have methods that allow the LLM to make slight modifications to the program as needed. The idea here is that agents should never have to solve the same problem twice. The cool thing about this approach is that smarter models make the entire system work better. If you have a particularly complex task, you can call out to gp4-turbo or claude3-opus to map out the correct action sequence and then fall back to less complex models like mistral 7b.

The second issue is that almost all software is designed for people, not LLMs. What is intuitive for human users may not be intuitive for non-human users. We're focused on making agents reliably interact with the internet so I'll use web pages as an example. Web pages contain tons of visually encoded information in things like the layout hierarchy, images, etc. But most LLMs rely on purely text inputs. You can try exposing the underling HTML or the DOM to the model, but this doesn't work so well in practice. We get around this by treating LLMs as if they were visually impaired users. We give them a purely text interface by using ARIA trees. This interface is much more compact than either the DOM or HTML so responses come back faster and cost way less.

The third issue I see with people building agents is they go after the wrong class of problem. I meet a lot of people who want to use agents for big ticket items such as planning an entire trip + doing all the booking. The cost of a trip can run into the thousands of dollars and be a nightmare to undo if something goes wrong. You really don't want to throw agents at this kind of problem, at least not yet, because the downside to failure is so high. Users generally want expensive things to be done well and agents can't do that yet.

However there are a ton of things I would like someone to do for me that would cost less than five dollars of someones time and the stakes for things going wrong are low. My go to example is making reservations. I really don't want to spend the time sorting through the hundreds of nearby restaurants. I just want to give something the general parameters of what I'm looking for and have reservations show up in my inbox. These are the kinds of tasks that agents are going to accelerate.

[1] https://github.com/hdresearch/hdr-browser
[2] https://hdr.is
macOS/iOS support autofilling 2FA codes received via email in addition to those received via Messages.
That looks like it fits with the theme, but events are difficult to compose & tend to have easy leaks by requiring explicit attach/detach (not that I'm sure the proposal here addresses those issues)
I already explained above why the existence of linux/landlock.h is not sufficient. Why do you still question it? If you know a bit about system programming and how configure checks work, the change in itself is totally reasonable.
It is well-known that PhD theses are made out of the fragments of broken life dreams.
The only two studies I'm aware of that look at this (admittedly from ~10 years ago and for England and the city of Melbourne in Australia) suggest that the proportion of vacant properties is highest where prices and capital gains are greatest. Not intuitive, but that's what they show.

But yes, it would be helpful to see the breakdown of that census data.

Edit: There is actually a breakdown by county if you scroll down the page. Dublin and Cork appear to be at 6 and 7% respectively.
That feels like a US problem.

Go find a recent GBP, CAD, or AUD note. Printed on a polymer stock you can't just get at Office Depot, so it doesn't feel like paper. Has clear windows and shiny foil elements in said stock, so if you look at it for 3 seconds, it won't be right.

Although, even throwing the US a bone, they have introduced some better security features, and the intaglio printing process does impart a specific feel that you can detect, it's of limited benefit because they never withdraw notes. I've gotten notes from the 1960s in circulation.
I was a regular reader of his columns in Scientific American. I think I have one of the anthology books.

I enjoyed the columns, tickled my geeky interests. Outside of what I read in SA, I didn’t know anything about him. He was just a by line on a magazine column.

That said, I was honestly quite stricken when I heard he was not just suggesting 9/11 conspiracy theories, but the ones he was touting were so outrageous.

Like I said, I didn’t know anything about this person. I don’t know how in or out of character such things were for them.

But, personally, I was rather devastated and disappointed when I heard about it.

RIP, condolences to his family.
Yes. SMS is completely about raising the insecure people to some base level of difficulty to compromise. This is often at the cost of more secure individuals.

The problem is that you can't force users to use a decently strong unique password. You can force them to set up SMS 2FA (with very minor exceptions of people without SMS access). Moving the base bar from credential stuffing to SIM swapping is a huge upgrade for big services.
> Keynes’s dream that we could all work for only 15 hours a week could finally be true – with only one small, simple (but transformative) change.

What the author fails to mention is Keynesian economics is how we ended up saddled with absurd debt. The "wealthy" are allowed to utilize this debt cheaply under Keynes.

For all the author talks about fixing the alleged wealth inequality caused by inheritance this single conclusion undermines a lot of work in the previous paragraphs.

My family matters more to me than any sort of baseless economic theory. If I knew my descendants would be forced to spend their inheritance I'd justify spending the money on exploiting any loophole available to avoid that. As it turns out, this is exactly what would happen under the proposed system and turning people into serfs with 99 year leases won't fix it. The theoretical "good citizen" doesn't exist and people will naturally do whatever it takes to preserve themselves and their wealth. The problem IS Keynesian economics that allowed such a disparity to exist. Taxing more won't fix it. I already pay enough tax as it is to wonder why the hell I even work. Imagine not even owning property your family can use in perpetuity. This is an absurdity that is advocating for feudalism where your lord is the government (which is already the case anyway).
It's my belief this applies only to the custom software. I saw reviews online of people using the Famicon version on OSX, using OSX's native keymapping to switch cmd&option around.

I pre-ordered a C64 version, hopefully my suspicion is correct because I plan on taking this to work for use on a Mac.
That might be true, but my feeling so far is that OpenAI doesn't want to do what they'd need to do to make any one product actually good, so they're going to keep bouncing from AI thing to thing, making foundation models that have a lot of wow factor but can't really deliver on their promise because they're too closed off to integrate into a workflow that might alleviate the issues.

Other people will try to build on OpenAI stuff, find that it's not quite good enough and OpenAI doesn't care to really make it good enough because it's a lot of work, and it won't be until we get competitors that take less sexy model tech and take the time to make it REALLY GOOD at certain things that AI really makes good on its promise. I'm guessing that will be driven by people taking open source tools that are ~80% of the way there and really building a system and domain logic around it to make it excellent.
The article is explicitly not about that.

The whole stated point of the article is that these things are neither real brands nor the absense of a brand.
It baffles me why something as complex as xz is apparently needed. The code for bzip2 is tiny and would need a small fraction of one person to maintain.
Sam Altman trying to convince Hollywood Sora won't destroy the movie business
How WhatsApp became the default communication app
I like your Spidey Sense for possible wrongdoing, and I guess there's a good chance you're on to something this time.

But I was confused why you were leading with a call to action of starting a subreddit, before you said why. What I think was the lede -- that there might be bad actors using fake interviews for training or other purposes -- was buried.

I happened to read further, but I think many readers wouldn't. Then towards the end, you're asking for more information, and the short-attention-span readers have forgotten your original call to action.
I greatly enjoyed this book. Is there a copy of it online ?
What Does 'Local' Mean?
One of them actually said to me: "Are you refusing my right to inspect your home for a T.V.?" — notice the wording. I slammed the door in his face as he was saying "You'll be prosecuted!".

Remember, if someone like that is _asking_ for something, it means they have no right to it.
(2013) shows here, and it’s about web pages, not typesetting printable documents.

Hyphenation is built into CSS now: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens (although I personally don’t think hyphenation is really useful on the Web).

Also, the sans versions of Computer Modern don’t really scream LaTeX at me like the classic serif version does…
Sadly to use AWS Textract with PDFs you have to push to an AWS S3 bucket and then pass the bucket and file name to the Textract API.
Sounds like a lot of emotional labor with major opportunity costs...

https://charity.wtf/2023/06/19/helicopter-management/
Reminds me of adding *'s and &'s until my C++ code worked in college.
That alternative frontend is the YouTube Kids app. It has exactly the functionality you want. I agree that no other video apps provide this functionality, but no other video apps have very many videos that I would show a kid anyway, so it doesn't make sense for them to implement.
Chain of thought takes time to generate all the characters. If you do a chain-of-thought for every action and every misstep (and you need to for quality + reliability), it adds up.
Yann is respected in the field, and he has some good ideas in that paper and others. But he not advancing the state of the art on LLMs. Ie, he talked about a world model and actor/critic model, but it's other people who are exploring LLM driven world/actor/critic models.

If you're not reading papers published in the last months, you're not going to see how quickly things are improving, compared to a year ago. Here's just one example: the incredible explosion in context length.

A year ago GPT4 would hallucinate critical details from a 10 page 5000 word essay.

Today, Gemini 1.5 can read a 1000 page 5 million word textbook, and recall facts with 99.5% accuracy.

This is already an AGI level feat. Now it just needs adaptors, memory modules.

AGI doesn't imply it can self improve. It's just generally intelligent and capable of many tasks. Off the shelf LLMs with accessory modules will be enough to build AGI capability and change the nature of work and knowledge.
Show HN: NixSH, run Bash/Python or any scripts with the power of Nix
Hello HN!

I had to work with a codebase that was full of magic environment variables and tons of bash scripts, which was and still is a nightmare.

I decided to try and make a solution using NIX, which ended being far more easy to work with and I think that brings a lot of value.

This is: https://github.com/Rucadi/nixsh

Some examples can be found on the readme but a more advanced example can be seen here:
https://github.com/Rucadi/nixsh/blob/master/examples/nixsh/c...

Here's a glimpse of what the solution offers:

- Precise control over environment variables, ensuring only the necessary ones are accessible when executing any script.

- Ability to set default values for environment variables

- Ability to dynamically manipulate environment variables directly from NIX expressions.

- Using nix to eliminate the need for manual installation of dependencies before script execution.

- Integration of disparate components like bash scripts and programs in C++, Rust, or Python, facilitating cohesive scripting.

- Leveraging NIX as a preprocessor for any file, for example, you can generate code using nix, and compile it before the execution runs automatically.

- Compile-Time checking of existence of files and envars

- Full interoperability, since you end up executing bash/python in the end, with the benefit that nixsh will already have cleaned your environment :)

The current implementation involves parsing NIX code using tools like awk and sed to strategically inject components where needed. While this proof of concept serves its purpose.

I think it's a cool program and I think that I will use from now on, I'm 100% open to contributions if you feel like it :)
Have you looked at DeaDBeeF for a music player that has the foobar2000 aesthetic?
> Not that Cobol is obscure exactly--I suppose there's probably quite a bit of it in GPT-4's training considering how pervasive it is in some domains

There is a huge amount of COBOL code in existence – but, almost all of it is non-public code used to run business and governments. Very little of it is publicly source-available (whether open source or something more restrictive than that)

Unless GPT-4's training data includes non-public code bases (I doubt it), it likely has rather little COBOL code in it
> Sure do wish we had some sort of collective bargaining power to prevent this

This feels a bit too extreme but I assume it comes from a place of pain and the effects of being exploited.

A less extreme solution could be increased transparency.

Here are some examples:

- Companies that post "remote" but it's "remote" only if you live 50 miles away from an office location.

They divulge this only in the offer. Why did they do the interview if they knew you were 200 miles away? To find out whether there's another hub worth opening where there are equally skilled candidates but cheaper

- Companies that post take home assignments to see if a problem they have solved can be solved in a more efficient or novel way. They don't intend to hire - they just don't want to share their current solution and also want to find out if there's a better way to solve their problem
Really? I've never done that, and I've bought several televisions.
I see that in your classification system an important entry is missing. The ones who disagree.

In your quest to convince me you forgot to even stop to ponder if you're right at all. And in my view, you aren't.

Perhaps the problem isn't that I don't understand you. Perhaps I understand you perfectly well but I understand even more, to realise that you're wrong :)
My family's first PC, they made a big point of getting both types of floppies; it was a 386SX, probably around 1992.

By 1995, you didn't get a 5.25 drive; I can recall bolting one into the family's third PC (a P100 Packard Bell, the second one was a P75 they swapped out under warranty) because I had acquired a 286 "project machine" and wanted to be able to sneakernet it; I had an extra 5.25 drive but putting a 3.5" drive in the 286 would take several years and upgrades.
Show HN: Libmui is a macOS Classic widget lib for Linux
Not sure if I would post this for the last day of #marchintosh OR wait for tomorrow the 1st of April. Both apply equally.

Anyway, here's a pet project of mine, I made it as a glued on for another pet project of mine, but it developed a life of it's own now and can soar skyward toward success, fame, and glory.
Can't speak for this keyboard, but the build quality for 8BitDo's controllers are excellent. Better than the office XBox controllers imo, and a bit cheaper too.
Nails Through the Ages: A Look at the History and Evolution of Nails
Is the contest continuing in the present ?
This isn't a smooth piece of silicon, its purposely made sharp to puncture bio membranes.

If it were made out of copper, or iron it wouldn't last very long - who cares.

But Si structures will last forever, its oxide an excellent (the best?) passivating layer ensuring no chemical or biological systems ever degrade it.

Si's stability is why silicosis is so pernicious. Carbon deposits can, theoretically, be cleaned by the lungs (specifically by peroxides), but Si? Nothing.

Let's add that, like in communication theory, In bio I'n not impressed by 90%. How does that compare, say, with a bare surface of brass?
> Over and over again people are fixating on the door issue because there is basically nothing else to point at

The door issue revealed severe quality control issues at Boeing.

How much is Boeing paying you to post this crap?
> Our field certainly could use more such negative feedback

Indeed and in part why I posted this
"keep in mind that silicon wafers are still quite expensive and probably too expensive for human scale objects"

That is wrong. The expensive part in silicon chip production is the process. It's just that hard to make working circuitry close to the molecular scale and a lot of sophisticated technology had to be developed for it (i.e. a lot of R&D invested money), hence the high cost of production nowadays. Here however, it's about close to no fabrication process (by comparison) and the purity of the raw material involved will not matter that much either.
In pypi to obtain a token that is limited in scope you must first generate an unlimited token.

True story.

In gh you can generate a limited one, but it's not really clear on what the permissions actually mean, so it's trial and error… which means most people will get tired and grant random stuff to have them working.
In German, admittedly, my mother's tongue, I have to actually think about how to capitalize, so capitalization slows me down. So while I capitalize, I make a lot of mistakes and I don't really care.

However, in English, capitalization is so easy. Even as a foreigner, I look at all-lowercase text and feel awkward.
If you're happy with 480p.
even though it seems to paint it in a bad color, it is a meta press release.

reality is much worse.

article don't even mention founder open letter when leaving.

or that whatsapp is free and doesn't count against data traffic, which is a multi billion dollar cost for them
India's Silicon Valley Faces a Water Crisis That Software Cannot Solve
But metalic Si will quickly grow a layer of passivating SiO2 whose lattice constant just happens to match Si's ensuring it doesn't flake off.

Either way metallic Si is, essentially, a forever "chemical"
Wow I didn't know neutron stars had a solid surface.
Cool. My least favorite, cumbersome and brittle aspect of using Ember becoming a core aspect of JavaScript functionality.

No fucking thank you.
Because we come here to learn, debate, and argue.

That sometimes leads to solutions, improvements, or startups, and if nothing else, better civic society and better personal choices.
Why do people always add this "blah blah hallucinations and critical systems"? 1. People write bad and buggy code. 2. You act like we're just blindly throwing untested code at production systems from LLMs.

It's just intellectually dishonest to talk this way.

They will still be helpful but we obviously need to test before we add code into systems. It goes without saying.
Yep. Assume one or more layers are pwned and rootkitted, especially if it runs Linux because the attack surface is huge in most distros. Never fall for the braggadocio of arrogant, lazy MAANG employees who blindly declare the infra to be "secure" without evidence. Where possible, run a transparent proxy/scrubbing/NIDS/NIPS network layer running OpenBSD or similar. Log setup using WORM media, log structured fs, and/or blockchain would be ideal.
It's not clear from the article how the light will be passed to this device under the skin?
> Very very few people are so strong by themselves that they can raise the level of a place just by being there individually.

If you are not at least a person who might have this property, you likely aren't PhD material.
There really isn't a syntax problem. All you have to do is, assuming you're in whitespace-oblivious mode due to being inside `()` or something, switch back to indentation-based lexing after the `:` of a `def` or `class`, and end once it dedents or you reach (but do not consume) a close paren (of course, after the close paren you might end up enabling indentation mode again).

I'm not sure what style guides would declare the correct formatting to be, but this would not confusing to the parser at least:

some_function(def f(a):
return a # comma must be on the next line unless you add parentheses
, def g(b):
return b)

Note that `lambda:` and `slice[:]` are different uses of the colon, and `wal := rus` is a different token.
This is beautiful! Simple and effective.
My post is not the article.
Transformers are not CNNs. Neural nets were the second best model for anything since their inception and it is proven mathematically that they can approximate any conceivable function so as long as it’s continuous. The issue at hand is that we have not a foggiest clue as to what it is we’re trying to approximate, so we’re now hoping that we get lucky again, and something will “emerge” somehow. Hope, however, is not a strategy. There’s no guarantee. If Demis believes what he says, he should put up a bet with a nontrivial amount. He won’t do that - he’s not stupid.
The problem is not translation - once it is ported to Java, who will maintain it? It has no specs, no tests, and it’s a spaghetti mess. Is any weirdness a bug or a feature? Nobody knows. Least of all the body-rental remote devs you hired to maintain it.
Protect prod, cut costs: concurrency in GitHub Actions
Agreed. I just opened https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/-/issues/25846 although I have no idea how hard it is to address this sort of issue robustly.