skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right? and yet so much focus is put on the operators of US$60 million machines like an F-18 or even commercial aviation pilots… and yet, it seems like their capacity for harm — and, as an aside I’m not saying that it was any human error that caused this, — but the capacity for harm of these aviation operators is, to be honest — 9/11 notwithstanding OK OK bear with me — is, perhaps a little less than the operators of these pervasive ubiquitous Gigantus ships
What helps push down prices of bridges, is to not build them in US.

Or at least, it always strikes me how outlandishly expensive infrastructure projects are in the US (for me coming from Europe, originally).
Demand Letter: Definition, Purposes, Sample Contents, Legality
> IANAL nor in the US, so I'm curious whether this is standard law to be able to limit your liability to the (post-crash) value of the ship

46 USC 30523: General limit of liability [1]

"In General.-Except as provided in section 30524 of this title, the liability of the owner of a vessel for any claim, debt, or liability described in subsection (b) shall not exceed the value of the vessel and pending freight.

[...]

liabilities subject to limitation under subsection (a) are those arising from [...] any loss, damage, or injury by collision"

Of course, this is kinda what limited liability is - even if the law didn't say that, the owners of a $90M ship could simply set up a limited company that just owned that one ship and had no other assets, and simply declare bankruptcy if liabilities exceeded the value of the ship.

[1] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?hl=false&edition=prelim&...
NO, obviously NOT.
Now consider all the people driving around in their cars everyday.
Full on tinfoil hat here. But warranted and practical.

I'm wondering what fallout we'll see from this backdoor in the coming weeks, months or years. Was the backdoor used on obscure build servers or obscure pieces of build infrastructure somewhere? Lying dormant for a moment in future to start injecting code into built packages maybe?
Are distro's going to go full-on tinfoil-hat and lock down their distribution, halting progress for long time? Are software developers (finally?) going to remove dependencies(now proven to be liabilities!), causing months of refactoring and rewriting, without any other progress?
> My second proposal — and this is a wild one — is that promotional notifications should just not be allowed. Or you can opt in to them if you desperately want to hear from the Starbucks app every single day, but you should have to go out of your way to do that and should not be the default behavior when you choose “allow notifications.” Just an idea!

Yep, this is my biggest complaint. I don’t want offers from Uber/Doordash/etc but I do want notifications of where my driver/food is, there is no middle ground in most apps. It’s all or nothing. I’d settle for a third party filtering app/service but that’s also a privacy nightmare.

In addition I’d love to be able to set up DnD on a fine grained level. I don’t want and all or nothing for something like discord. I’d like to let specific people through while ignoring channel notifications. I know this can sort of be done inside Discord/Slack/etc but I really don’t want to have to manage it in so many places.
FYI Austria and sometimes Italy have weighted self checkouts.

In Switzerland the age check is done by any cashier nearby. Sometimes so fast that you don't even notice that there was a check.
Figure 2 is incredible.

With only passing familiarity with the norms in this kind of work, the accuracy rates of all models on this benchmark suite seem suspiciously (and uniformly) high. Is choosing the right intention among “20 vehicle functions” or “20 Android APIs” consistent with an ordinary level of ambition in this kind of research these days?
Something being in a bubble and being useful is not mutually exclusive. Remember the dot-com bubble?
If you want to find out what the human archetypes are, you have to measure real people for specific properties and look if there are patterns. Myers & Briggs did that in 1944, their ideas got popular but are not uncontroversial.

"Seeing behind fiction" is a bad excuse, the only thing you will get is your own imagination.
This is primarily a terminological issue, what is used as a general term: "Philosophy", "natural philosophy", "Science and scholarship" (the German "Wissenschaft" always means both together -- "science" in particular is "Naturwissenschaft").

A discipline emerges, when a specific body of systematic knowledge becomes so specific that it typically requires specific expert knowledge and training (polymaths aside). In the European history of ideas, the first such body of knowledge was mathematics, but many others evolved already in Antiquity and were refined during the Middle Ages, such as astronomy, medicine, botanics, ... By the way: music theory in this times was the study of harmonic intervals and predominantly mathematics.

And the conflict between religion and science avant la lettre was as old as all of this (see Sokrates or Abelard to mention just the two most famous from Antiquity and the Middle Ages, respectively).

What changed gradually in the 17th and then had a break through in the 18th century was the adoption of the experimental method. This was not completely new, but from then on become the standard that makrs modern science.
What's the point of having someone maintain your codebase if you have to do even more work than if you just did everything yourself?
Seems like a sensible thing to do, assuming this is a state-level threat actor there’s really no easy way to prove that their contributions are free of back doors. Seems not worthwhile risking the security of a large part of the Internet over a few thousand lines of code.
Where was this his choice?
Imagine paying for a security scanning service such as Snyk and finding that it never scanned source code for injection attacks. How many millions of dollars went down the drain?
Why did the engine fail?
Location: Bangkok, Thailand and/or Kentucky (US citizen)
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes (to/within USA)
Technologies: Javascript, Python, Java, C++, C#, Godot, Unity, Blender, Git
Résumé/CV: http://michaeldelfino.com/resumes/2024.pdf
Email: michael.a.delfino@gmail.com

Worked for a few years as a firmware engineer after undergrad (CS) but decided to get into education. I'm nearing a decade of teaching high school math and computer science in the US and abroad. I picked up another degree along the way (Georgia Tech's OMSCS) to keep my skills sharp. I'm now thinking of making the switch back into tech, preferably something related to education and/or games.
Here in Tokyo, there's a relatively new bridge that's almost exactly the same length as the Key bridge in Baltimore, and was expressly designed to allow large ships to pass underneath:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Gate_Bridge

By my calculations (using the yen cost in the wikipedia article and the JPY/USD conversion at the time), it cost about USD $1.1B, so a bit less than double this estimate.

However, with the way things get done in the US these days, I suspect your 10x prediction is much more likely.
That's a great use-case! But what about when GPT hallucinates - gets it wrong.
What happens when you have sent a (potentially legally-binding) quote to your customers, and you have to back out of it?

Humans make mistakes - whether directly, or indirectly through the software that we craft. But when the mistake happens, we can reason about it, understand why it happened, and fix the problem.

Wouldn't it be embarrassing to not be in a position to reason about / explain a mistake to your customers caused by this "thing" we use that's been trained on all the random information available on the internet? Would that not reduce the value and standing of your business (which is ultimately about the people and expertise contained within) in the eyes of customers?

As an engineer, technologist, and CTO I absolutely love what I've been able to craft using generative AI under direct supervision.

But I cannot imagine a world where we give our carefully thought-through, easily changeable, algorithms and processes for a black box that cannot be reasoned about, no matter how good the output _sometimes_ is.

I have to think many people feel this way.
American companies are always free to leave, if they don't want to be regulated.

Yeah, we'd also need more innovation here, but regulation is not a bad thing no matter what libertarians say.
It won't burst, it'll just eke out over a few years as people realise it's harder to implement than it is to talk about. Some things will be successful, a lot won't. People will move onto the next thing, marketers will market.

See: digital twins, cryptocurrencies, semantic web...
To be clear, I fully believe the official statements that this crash was accidental - putting that up front to avoid seeming like I believe any of the nonsense conspiracy theories that came out about the accident.

But if you were someone like Russia or Iran who wanted to financially hurt the US (or any other country - and, equally feasible for the CIA or Mossad or whomever to use it as tactic to financially harm any enemy country with a significant port; or a terrorist group wanting to kill people seems less likely but not impossible) - wouldn't you be having that same thought now?

Secret services of various countries surely wouldn't find it hard to plant agents in shipping companies who end up captaining huge container ships around the world if they wanted to, and there's probably enough low-security situations for the boat when docked that gaining physical access (through spies taking engineer jobs or through sneaking onboard at a quiet time) could maybe allow some sort of sabotage equivalent to partially cutting the break lines on a car, which could be planned to cause problems roughly the right number of minutes after a ship leaves port to have the highest chance of impact.

If your goal is hurting a country financially rather than murderously, and you want an illegal way to do it that's completely deniable and even looks accidental, I'm not sure how many better options there would be?

I hope I'm wrong and it wouldn't be as easy as I'm imagining for any major country to place someone they trust (but won't be linked to them / suspected) into a career leading to being a captain on these ships...

(It might not even be limited to state actors - it's not unprecedented for a business executive to be a psychopath willing to commit crimes to boost their business, what's to stop the CEO or owner of a port, or a toll bridge, or a construction company from bribing a ship's captain with $20M dollars to take a port or bridge out of action, even a brief closure could be worth enough money to alternative locations and/or companies hired to fix it to make such a huge amount more money that a huge bribe would still make it wildly profitable. Obviously most companies won't have people specialised in committing this type of crime, so it wouldn't be easy to find the right captain who'd accept a bribe for that, yet alone do it without getting caught, but the captain could maybe create a fake medical emergency to cover their "mistake", etc... hopefully it's such a big criminal risk, and hard enough to do, that there wont be any crossover between the hopefully low number of psychopaths in positions of major corporate power and people who could pull it off if they wanted to.)
I suppose this is where the whole "you are what you eat" and similar BS sayings came from.
Yeah I've got to agree with this. Having links to a paper is useful - but not that interesting without a demo and the source code. It's not helped that ArXiV has a pretty horrible interface for anyone other than people writing papers.
They can call it an AR headset all they want but the thing they shipped is a vr headset with pass through
Right, but I think it would be quite the engineering challenge — or, ‘evil genius side quest’, whatever you wanna call it disturbingly — to cause $600 million worth of damage with a sedan car. Tho, YMMV, that’s just me.
We removed tens of thousands of lines of code for fixes for those "simple" init scripts when migrating to systemd.

They are never "simple", there is always some fucking edge case, like for example we had Java apps writing its own PID few seconds after start. So any app that did start and immediately after status (like Pacemaker) threw errors.

Or how once in blue moon MySQL didn't start after reboot because it so happened that:

* the PID file from previous boot wasn't cleared
* some other app ran with same PID as it was in file
* Script did not care, script saw pid file existing and didn't start MySQL.

Both examples from pre-systemd CentOS
Yeah this just seemed like people making rude (“designed by monkeys”, really HN?) unspecific statements about a standard while the examples were about a library they didn’t specify..
Partly yes, I mean my effort was just to search for a link about the subject to something that seems reputable enough to share.

On the other hand, I just stated a fact. If by "explanation to try and refute" you mean just the story around china and geopolitics, it is not any high effort one. It is just repeating the same official story over and over. It does not change the fact of who is paying for it, as any sort of geopolitical justification for a war (or supporting a side in a war or supporting the continuation of a war) does not change the fact of who dies for it. Or who profits.

Funny note: your comment being self-referential.
Show HN: SmartDeck – The Ultimate ChatGPT Shortcut Tool for macOS Users
I hope to instantly obtain the answers I need through ChatGPT with shortcuts, such as translating text on a webpage or refining a specific sentence, which is why I developed SmartDeck.
Contact me: swk777@gmail.com
That entire product category is for the most part snake oil.
Most investors are fairly sure the dot-com bubble burst; but it recovered well, and obviously there were still winners. The last two times the AI bubble burst also did not stop us getting here.
Conservatively, I think LLMs will replace SWE roles within the next 5-10 years. In that period SWE roles will change drastically, to be more hearding of AI agents.

We can't hope to compete with something that can edit all the files in less than 5 minutes.

If you're not at least trying to plan what your life will look like under these circumstances then you're doing yourself a disservice.
No, I completely believe this was just some mechanical Newtonian inadequacy that was accidental. However, I’ve never considered the possibility of sabotage, but now that you mention it holy fuck yes that must be a possible threat vector.
That's a signal that the tide IS turning. I follow some people who went all-in on AI (consultants mostly) and their tone has changed quite a bit in the last few months.

Cool new tech that was oversold in terms of what it can do for businesses. A correction is in order.
This kind of thing is quite difficult to do generally, because it is very easy to bypass, has significant performance impact, and has low reliability to boot.
To quote a Canticle for Liebolitz:

To survive the Church's slow sifting of the arts, you
have to have a surface that can please a righteous
simpleton; and yet you need a depth beneath that surface
to please a discerning sage. The sifting is slow, but it gets
a turn of the sifter-handle now and then– when some new
prelate inspects his episcopal chambers and mutters,
"Some of this garbage has got to go." The sifter was
usually full of dulcet pap. When the old pap was ground
out, fresh pap was added. But what was not ground out
was gold, and it lasted. If a church endured five centuries
of priestly bad taste, occasional good taste had, by then,
usually stripped away most of the transient tripe, had
made it a place of majesty that overawed the would-be
prettifiers.
Yes - this is great additional information. Here's some additional context around the article. Lloyd's of London is the original insurance company. They work in a syndicate structure, where the various other commercial insurance companies (think AIG, AXA XL, Starr, etc) all work together to share risks using their domestic balance sheets. I'm simplifying a lot here, but the insurance policies covering the various entities are stitched together like a quilt. No overlap and when assembled you're fully covered! For example, one insurance company may say they will cover the first $10M of a claim, another might share the next $10M of coverage with a few other companies, etc. They do this to limit their losses on a program. It's a lot more manageable to pay out only a small share of the claim than it is to pay the entire thing. By doing it like this, the brokers build out an insurance program for the covered entity that pulls in capital from across the globe in a very cost-effective way. It also has the added benefit of not stressing any one insurance company too badly.

What Neal (Lloyd's boss) is saying is "hey guys, we know we are all hosed here. It's gonna be an easy billion, probably more. Just because you're only expected to pay claims above $100M, you're certainly going to have to pay out. Let's not be knobs and pay this claim quickly to get the port back on their feet again"
Yes I know it's useful. The last line of my comment said that: "Reducing blunders is obviously good in any situation, but is it the dealbreaker for startups? It always depends on the context".

"is it useful?" usually isn't a very interesting question, because a lot of things are obviously useful and yet don't have much of an impact on results.
On a sidenote, I love how this post has been banished from the front page and yet continues to acquire upvotes
What features can I expect from an AI girlfriend simulator?

In general, you can expect the following features from an AI girlfriend simulator:

Immersive Conversations: AI girlfriend simulators offer immersive and realistic conversations that simulate the dynamics of a relationship, providing an interactive experience that feels genuine.

Customization: Users can customize the appearance, voice, and personality traits of their virtual girlfriend to tailor the experience to their preferences and personality, ensuring a unique and personalized interaction each time.

Availability and Adaptability: AI girlfriends are always available for conversation, providing companionship and social interaction whenever needed. They can adapt to the user’s preferences over time, creating a personalized experience that evolves with each interaction.

Interactive Interface: The AI girlfriend simulators typically have an interface resembling a messaging app, where users can engage in various conversation topics, from casual small talk to more in-depth discussions, enhancing the interactive experience.

Escape or Conversational Options: Users can choose to either engage in endless conversations with the AI girlfriend, exploring different topics and the girlfriend’s personality, or opt to navigate challenges to escape the possessive nature of the virtual companion, adding an element of suspense and excitement to the experience.

Voice: Some AI girlfriend simulators offer a voice recognition system, allowing users to communicate with their virtual companion through speech, enhancing the hands-free communication experience.

These features collectively create a virtual girlfriend experience that aims to provide companionship, entertainment, and a sense of connection for users seeking a simulated romantic relationship or virtual friend.
Our sales people do a quick eye test before sending it out.

Usually, the list of recommendations are about ~8 services that we can replace. Our sales people know those services and prices by heart. A quick glance is enough for them. Our quotes are not legally binding. The contract that we sign is.

We found that it was highly accurate. GPT4 has been especially good at stuff like this after OpenAI changed it to write Python code for this kind of calculation.
People (SWEs) don't want to hear this. I think it's an inevitability that something of this nature will happen.
> Let’s just hope that this time around the they don’t intentionally hold back innovations in favour of slow-dripping a predictable fixed X% gain per year like they did 2014 to 2020 in the absence of competition.

idk why you would cite this as a downside when this is specifically what the tech review community has been begging for with gpus. Having a gen do 40% and the next do 0–10% is grating to consumers and disruptive to the market. What consumers need is exactly this smoothing of generational progression and the removal of huge outliers in terms of generational step. Smooth the curve - which inherently will be much closer to that 15-20% progress generationally, given how slow the transitor tech is moving nowadays.

As Tim Hardwareunboxed says - if you don’t have a good uplift, don’t release the product. Intel made sure they had an uplift every year. You can’t change actual progress but it can be smooth.
I think I like you.

But is your program actually P2P? (If it were, then: The sender would know when the recipient has completed the download, because the sender was finished sending it and the recipient has stated that they are done receiving it. And there would be no need for gymnastics.)
His Twitter feed is nonstop, more-than-daily posting that a new AI winter is just around the corner, really, this time. I haven't bothered to count every prediction but he's got at least three 9s of being wrong about this topic and refusing to update his arguments when faced with new evidence.
Even if it's usually a terrible idea, I quite like how formal objective-c and swift make doing this with extensions/categories. Subclassing would probably be easier to read, but extensions sure beat the hell out of whatever hacks someone would come up with to add a method to the String class.
Hallucinations don't matter if you check the output before using it, at least as long as it still saves you plenty of time.

Can it find 500 issues in a codebase, 470 of which are real? Good. Can it summarize a conversation and find who proposed a certain course of action? Can it go through 170 years of legal precedent and quote relevant cases (better than the existing, conventional search engines, which you would then later use to verify the quoted cases)?
For developers ChatGPT is like having a team of good juniors on your fingertips. I think it can increase the productivity of a senior engineer probably three fold. But you must do code review and understand the code.
The lamps you're not allowed to have. Exploring Dubai lamps
> If an app doesn't load, I can imagine a dozen reasons why that might be happening, and what I could do to fix it.

If you open your water tap and no water comes out, a plumber can imagine a dozen reasons why that might be happening, and what he could do to fix it...

All facets of modern life are extremely complicated and no one can know most areas beyond the very basics.
This is a nice headline. I just wish their stock falls down a bit so I could pick up some more.
The living brain imaged with unrivaled clarity
There’s also an argument that ChatGPT kind of transcends the bubble. The bubble is everything that calls their API and now suddenly gets a huge valuation because it’s “AI”, but the feature the AI enables is of dubious value.
Very reductive. I recognize it's useful in some very specific use cases, yet I wouldn't miss it a second or care if it disappeared.
Nobody wants to support old tech forever, regardless of any personal or financial value in doing so. People don’t use USB in their car anymore they use Bluetooth. People don’t mess with their BIOS anymore (boy are computer manufacturers and OS developers seeing to that). People don’t care about transfer speed because they don’t use USB drives as much with free, near infinite cloud storage. You seem to be willfully ignoring the changes in the market over the last decade.

Trust me your use cases touch me, but the world is moving on.
I doubt hundreds of thousands of people get their cards compromised every day. Maybe a couple hundred.

Even so, how is this a startup?