skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you don't know Gary Marcus: He keeps repeating this same argument since many years. He has always downplayed the capabilities of LLMs since the beginning. He never really added much useful (constructive) content to the discussion or to the research, though (except that he is advocating symbolic AI methods). So he is not really taken seriously by the community, but rather annoying on this.

Although, of course he is not alone with his argument. E.g. even Yann LeCun is repeating a similar argument on LLMs, and many other serious researches as well, that we probably need a bit more than just LLMs + our current training method + scaling up. E.g. some model extension which handles long-term memory better (lots of work on this already), or other model architectures (e.g. Yann LeCun proposed JEPA), or online learning (unclear how this should work with LLMs), or also different training criteria, etc. In any case, multi-modality (not just text) is important. Maybe embodiment (robots, interaction with the real world) as well.

(Edit Wow, the votes on this comment go up and down. I guess it's a controversial topic.)
Driverless cars are here, without liability issues they would already be widespread. But scaling isn't what got them there. It was tons of labeled data, both from rules based implementations and shadowing human drivers.

The ability to generalize completely outside training data isn't that common among humans IME. That is a high bar. How many of us have done so without at least drawing an analogy to some other experience we have had? Truly unique thinkers aren't that commonplace. I myself could have probably just asked an LLM what I would say in this post and gotten pretty close...
Everyone is building nonsense betting that openai’s next real innovation will validate their idea and they’ll be ahead of the curve.

That’s all it really is
Driverless cars are not just demos, they already work in a few cities (granted, they are still limited). And LLMs are massively useful already. What is this guy talking about?
Ok so now we can make a browser plugin which will pick out all bicycles or bridges in a Google captcha, right?
industrial revolution broke backs, tech revolution breaks brains
Stacking triangles for fun and profit
How to Think About Integrating AI into Your Business
Ask HN: Apple Notes has jumped the shark, what should I replace it with?
Apple continues to lose the plot with regard to user interface, e.g., making right-swipe-from-edge increase an indent instead of go back, and making all monospaced text low-contrast with an absurd gray background.

What's the best thing out there to replace it with? Must be open source or freeware, limited rich text and images, no bloat.
This piece teaches me almost nothing about Vadim but shows me a ton about the environment he worked in. Someone built that culture, who are they? Why did they do it? Was Vadim complicit? Why did he feel so little control?

Hustle culture is not challenging, it does not help anyone grow, it simply exploits people. It's common, banal stuff.
> You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, “I have mental issues and need a day off.”

“I’m taking the day off.”

Your coworkers don’t need a reason. If your employer demands one, then that’s a different issue.
Some of the models are quite small and worth doing on-device vs the opposite of sending all the data to the server to process. The other huge benefit here is that transformers run in node.js and getting things running is way easier than trying to get some odd combination of python snd its dependencies to work
> That method requires you to very explicitly look at what is selected each time you press 'B', as opposed to just typing 'bagend' or 'bilbo'. Maybe it makes sense if you can't type?

It makes sense if you can type: that is, if you can type while looking at the screen instead of the keyboard because why would you look at the keyboard? To find the keys you want to press, one by one?
Evolution is an incredibly dumb, very parallel search over long timescales and that managed to turn blobs of carbon soup into brains because that's a useful (but not necessary) tool for its primary optimization goal.
But that doesn't make carbon soup magical. There's no fundamental physics that privileges information-processing on carbon atoms. We don't have the time-scales of evolution, but we can optimize so much harder on a single goal than it can.

So I don't see how it's a movie fantasy any more than bottling up stars is (well, ICBMs do deliver bottled sunshine... uh, the analogy is going too far here). Anyway, the point is that while brains and intelligence are complicated systems there isn't anything at all known that says it's fundamentally impossible to replicate their functionality or something in the general category. And scaling will be a necessary but perhaps not sufficient component of that, just because they're going to be complex systems.
Minitool: HTML, NeuronWriter to Zimmwriter Outline
Made a minitool to help with the AI content generation workflow for Zimmwriter with other tools.

You paste the HTML outline and get a Zimmwriter formatted one back.
I actually think that's a good idea overall.
...he comments on an article where the big rich tech company hands over money to the small guy he stole the idea from
I'm a songwriter with hundreds of melodies and song sections in Garageband and Logic.

I would love/pay/kill for an AI tool to help me flesh them out. Is anyone working on this?
The public will buy the cheapest, almost-as-good option 99% of the time. If morality were a strong deciding factor, we wouldn't have megacorporations like Nestlé and Unilever making everything, nor would all of our clothes be made by sweatshops.

I'm not going to spend billions of dollars on some new gadget when every other company will have the exact same thing for sale next month with razor-thin margins. There's no way to make a living innovating.
While it's true that it is worth being skeptical about the current deep learning/LLM boom, younger people who don't know who Gary Marcus is need to know that he is not really an unbiased observer here -- he has never liked neural net approaches and thinks they were a wrong turn (even though they obviously are far more successful than the older symbolic "GOFAI" methods).
Worse is when it's a salesman, not the CEO. It's infuriating.
I always wanted to tell that salesman that he got to go back to the customer and tell them that we weren't going to do it, since he was the one who promised it without finding out whether and when we could do it.

Of course, I never had the clout to force that to happen...
You forgot "Britain". So it's unclear whether we should look for words starting with B, E, G or U.

And there's also the case of dropdowns putting some most frequent countries at the top, so you spend ages scrolling to find the correct spelling, when listed above "Afghanistan".

Also fun when you're given flag emojis to choose from, sorted by country name, and you don't know which of UK/GB/EN they have used to sort with, and whether you should look for St. George's cross or the Union Jack.
Could these big expandable habitats help humanity settle the moon and Mars?
NASA Next-Generation Solar Sail Boom Technology Ready for Launch
Part of Porto's charm is its signature roughness ;)

- But are you actually considering moving there?
The paper that Gary cited is just so stupid. If you're drawing training data from a fixed distribution randomly, of course as the size of your training data set increases, the odds that you will get a random draw that is very similar to an existing piece of data increases, until you have to do a lot of random draws to see a new part of the distribution. That is the cause of the exponential increase in data requirements for linear increase in performance.

We just need to methodically sample the under sampled portions of the source distribution. Not more data, better data.
Training run to compare Mixture-of-Depths, Bitnet
The physical reason behind quantum uncertainty
My comment was a reply to someone talking about being expressive with AI music generators like these. The points you are making have nothing to do with what me or the person I was replying to said.
Given the human eye's sensitivity, I think it's a good first step.

In a dark room with fully-acclimated eyes, they definitely glow.

Mine are still perking up from shipping, so we'll see what output they finally achieve, but people forget you can see in a room lit by a single LED. It doesn't take much to be a night-light.
not if 'never rebase, it is a trick of the devil' is part of the Dogma and adhered to.

I'm being a little silly; but a team I worked on moved from P4 -> Git. It was an older develoepr base, so they wrote 1:1 translation wrappers for most P4 commands to git, and forced all developers to use them. Banning Rebase (in private branches, not even main) was one of the requirements to not break the wrappers.
Leave No Context Behind: Efficient Infinite Context Transformers
This was my last job, anyone in this position for any longer than necessary should be looking for another role. You're on a path to burnout or apathy, either way.

I called it "Monster of the Week", as I was watching a lot of X-Files at the time. Still like that term for it.
At one point many years ago I was Director of Engineering for a company that was planning a major new version of their product. After I'd been there a few weeks I said to the CEO that I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the scope and challenges for the new release.

The CEO said "no you don't" - which led me to ask why he thought this and he said he had thought up a new "must have" feature over the weekend - which was clearly very technically challenging. He then asserted that anything could be built in 48 hours....

I'm amazed I lasted as long as I did in that job.
I like to upgrade them (the battery life, screen, refresh rate, etc. have all gotten consistently better over the years), I usually have one to leave at work and one for home use, and I give the hand-me-downs to friends and family.

You can also sell them back to Amazon for a pretty good bonus when it’s time to upgrade. I think I sent back an old paperwhite and got $50 + 20% off my Scribe.

Right now I have an Oasis and a Scribe that I use about equally.

Reading is one of my bigger hobbies, I read around 100 books a year on Kindle.
> what does that have to do with your local books?

It's how double-entry bookkeeping works. Money can neither be created nor destroyed. On your local books you have an account where money goes and appears to be destroyed, but in reality there is a doubled entry in someone else's books. Just because you're unaware of it does not mean it does not exist.

And it's true that bookkeepers will have splits in their ledger in which one transaction consists of multiple entries, but that's a convenient shortcut for consolidating multiple items each of which is one half of a double entry. It has no bearing on how double-entry bookkeeping works and just needlessly complicates a description of the fundamentals. It has only to do with conventions for recording double-entry bookkeeping, just like using DB and CR to indicate whether entry is moving money into or out of an account.
Texas is replacing human exam graders with AI /
Amazing. So when you read about some weird (and mostly self-inflicted) problem you've never had in your life, you are not allowed to express your surprise because by doing that you're implying you're better than other people, and that would be horrible (the implying part is what is horrible, I think? Or maybe actually being better is also wrong? Can you even be better―yeah, I guess it's possible to be better than someone else at something).
OpenPGP Keys do have expiration dates/validity periods: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4880#section-5.2.3....
What Exactly Is AGI? Introducing a Unique and Rigorous Standard
For table-based testing, I have been using map[string]struct{...} for a while now instead of including the test name as a struct field. I have found it improves readability slightly and makes it harder to misname test cases (empty strings stand out more and duplicates won't compile).

Also, the shadowing of t in t.Run is intentional. You should not try to work around it. There's no risk of confusion either because you will always use the right one in the right place.
In the early 2010s there were definite upsides. Before social media there was corporate media, which is almost always controlled by the rich and powerful, or in many places outright by the government. Social media at its core is media by the masses, so when early-ish social media broke the mold we got a lot of people striving for positive social reform, like Occupy Wallstreet, the Arab Spring and the Hacktivism that happened under the Anonymous umbrella. Most of them got successfully snuffed out, but had social media continued like back then a lot of good might have happened.

This changed about 2015 as the weak and powerful alike learned how to manipulate discourse of social media, and bots started flooding most platforms.

Right now the biggest "positive" effect I can think of is that people are less idolized. Before social media you only saw the good side of most public figures. Now that we get to see a lot more unfiltered thoughts from them we get a much more nuanced picture of everyone, both their good and ugly parts. Not sure if this is a positive overall, since lower expectations also means we don't hold people to as high standards. I guess we'll see how this plays out as society adapts
Well - note that OP uploaded a key to keys.openpgp.org, and then seemingly forgot about it and lost the private key (or at least they couldn't decrypt encrypted emails, and their email client - not Proton's - showed them as being blank). So it's not a scenario that we explicitly tested for, and not something we can unilaterally fix completely - although we can try to make it clearer for the recipient why the message was encrypted and with what key, of course.
> You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, “I have mental issues and need a day off.”

You can. I started doing this years ago and it has been an overall positive experience. Others on my team told me about their own struggles because I took the initiative to open up about mine.
At my current job, I can. Up to three days a year, I can take a mental health day and charge it to sick time.

Note well: I have never had this at any other job. But if you need the day, take the day, even if it has to be vacation.
Amazon CEO Touts AI Revolution While Committing to Cost Cuts
My love for the dumbphone has nothing to do with disconnecting from distractions. I just want a small fucking phone again.
Technically all email providers support PGP assuming they support IMAPs. The mobile client is adding it soon if they have not already. I've been using it with Fastmail for some time. Thunderbird makes PGP very easy and happy-clicky. [1] I also just give people my public key out of band and avoid the key servers. Thunderbird also has it's own built in search.

I think most peoples non technical relatives could follow the pictured steps easily but if for some reason they can not then a desktop sharing session should get around helping someones mom set it up. I've had no issue with my non technical friends.

I should add that if Fastmail added PGP in their interface I would not use it. Nobody could convince me that when a mail provider or anyone else adds E2EE in their application that it's anything other than PP Pinky Promise. They can tamper with it to intercept my communications and no app provider could possibly convince me otherwise. There should probably be an RFC for PP.

[1] - https://support.startmail.com/hc/en-us/articles/360014775437...
Good luck. Home gardeners, at least, are absolutely going to propagate their own plants. Gift to friends, etc.

Sure, this patent nonsense might protect against broad sales but it won't be much use in stopping their spread. And like, if someone plants these outside, you think the bees are checking patents?
Ask HN: Track Code Changes That Outdate Tutorials
Hey all,

So the issue I'm having is that we regularly need to check whether all our tutorials are still relevant compared to recent product updates. And I've had this issue in previous projects or at previous companies as well. I tried searching for some automatic solution but haven't found anything (at all!). How do you check whether a new feature or product update requires changing or updating certain tutorials ?
Good question, it absolutely syncs without any network connectivity. For better or for worse, I have it setup NOT to sync to anything else- being a stratum 1 source is enough. Now… I will admit I’m just a hobbyist with this stuff. Anyways, the way I got around it trying to sync to another source when using the PPS was to define the GPS as two separate sources. One for the PPS signal and another for the NMEA sentences:

refclock pps ppspath /dev/gpspps0 prefer time1 0.004 minpoll 3 maxpoll 4 iburst
refclock nmea baud 57600 time2 0.068 minpoll 3 maxpoll 4 prefer iburst

To get around issues with sync being slow, I have NTPD configured with some extra flags to allow large time jumps at startup:

NTPD_OPTS="-ggg -N"

I have two raspberry pies setup this way- which I don’t use for much else. My primary computers have these two servers configured as time sources- but also have external sources- so as long as network connections are available, they can determine if they are providing a sane time or are false tickers. As for accuracy, you can view the ntpviz output for each setup in the hamburger menu. For catwoman, its regularly within 4 microseconds.
The Estate Nightmare Unfolding in Downtown St. Louis
Most residential codes require an exterior openable window in each bedroom. If you take an office building and subdivide it into residential units that may not be easily achievable.

Things that may be adequate in a large open floor office may not be when turned into individual separated dwellings.
Step 3 is reason for people to publish signing keys, not encryption keys. That was the whole point of my original comment.
The next line being "These petunias are sold exclusively for personal use."

As with copyrighted material, you get in trouble largely on redistribution, especially at large/commercial scale; I'm certain the company will be keeping a close eye on nurseries, eBay, Etsy, etc. Similar tags have been common practice with roses and other patented plants for decades.
> I would think twice to give my soul to an unregulated tech company on the quest to monetize

Especially one whose CEO is known for a cryptocurrency scam.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
The Syntax podcast recently did an episode on Transformers.js and the developer…

https://syntax.fm/show/740/local-ai-models-in-javascript-mac...
> Always doing shit themselves

This is one of the most counterintuitive things about leadership roles IMO.

If you get promoted there, it’s often because you got a lot of things done yourself in an IC role. And then the fewer things you do yourself, the better off you, the company, and your reports are once you’re in a leadership role.

So you have to learn that feeling idle compared to what you used to feel like isn’t a sign that you’re doing a bad job.
And thank God for that.

If there's one thing humanity doesn't need, it's the kind of person who leads a Silicon Valley corporate entity creating a self-aware consciousness.
They are essentially the same thing. Sometimes you have a last modified timestamp handy and sometimes you have a revision number handy.

I would agree that you shouldn't be doing signifiant calculations -- like checksumming the contents of a file -- to determine the current etag value.

Also, the excessive semantics of timestamps is a negative. It adds complication which sometimes trips developers up but doesn't improve the caching.
Vietnam tycoon sentenced to death in $12B fraud case
Cut costs - aka fire lots of people.
what is in-flight magazine if not slop
Signups can't be Show HN's, you should post this when you're ready for people to try it. Take a look at

https://news.ycombinator.com/show
Traits and contracts or interfaces, but even still inheritance has it's merits. Being fast and easy is a benefit, and I find defensive programming in extensible systems can benefit from a foundation of expecting inheritance.
How to pick the best embedding model for a RAG app
> Kind of similar to people posting pictures on social media without your permission.

Or uploading their full contacts to any chat app.
If they are single files or directories they could be drag dropped on use. Not very convenient though.

Maybe just some sort of api to give the website fine grained access to the filesystem might be enough. You'd specify a directory or single file the website can read from at any time.

However at some point you will have to download large files. I feel when done implicitly it's bad user experience.

On top of that the developer should implement a robust downloading system that can resume downloads, check for validity, etc. Developers rarerly bother with this, so the user experience is that it sucks.
My point is that no individual you work with (again aside from perhaps HR if the company is hella annoying) needs to know if it’s a mental health day or if you have the flu or whatever. It’s not their business.

Just say you’re not going to be there.
Damn, this would have been a great way to combat global warming. We just need much bigger plates.
Thanks for checking out aider.

That demo GIF is just showing a toy example. To see what it's like to work with aider on more complex changes you can check out the examples page [0].

The demo GIF was just intended to convey the general workflow that aider provides: you ask for some changes and aider shares your existing code base with the LLM, collects back the suggested code edits, applies them to your code and git commits with a sensible commit message.

This workflow is generally a big improvement over manually cutting and pasting bits of code back and forth between the ChatGPT UI and your IDE.

Beyond just sending the code that needs to be edited, aider also sends GPT a "repository map" [1] that gives it the overall context of your codebase. This makes aider more effective when working in larger code bases.

[0] https://aider.chat/examples/

[1] https://aider.chat/docs/repomap.html
It is funny when you know neither A or B in A is the B of C claims.
I’ve used Logseq with great success but it has a very different model of notes.
Plain old google ads.
My first $ came in a check and it was more expensive to cash it in my country than just frame it.
Morale: you actually "earn" something the moment cash is in your pocket. Everything else is plain accounting.
You should wait until you actually need it. Parallel tests can produce interleaved output.
>Lemmatization: some search indexes are even fancy enough to substitute synonyms for more common words, so that you can search for “excellent” and get results for documents including “great.”

This isn't what lemmatization is about.

Stemming the word ‘Caring‘ would return ‘Car‘.
Lemmatizing the word ‘Caring‘ would return ‘Care‘.
The problem in the U.S. (independently of everything else) is that value serves as a filtering mechanism.

Value of properties in a neighborhood correlates to the crime rate in that neighborhood - and that’s true nationwide, and because of certain political protections there’s no way to “divorce” the two - which presents a thorny problem.
"Mom" implicitly signed up for encrypted email when she decided to use Proton as her mail provider. It's what they're all about.
It's good advice if you have the appropriate financial resources or support network, but plenty of us don't have the option to move back in with our parents for six months and need to adult on hard-mode.
re #2: Yup. My solution is volunteering, creating urban forests. Digging out invasives, planting natives. It's surprisingly social. And helps my mental health.