skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First result:

Me > Alice has 40 brothers and she also has 50 sisters. How many sisters does Alice's brother have?

GPT4o (web version) > Alice has 50 sisters. Since all of Alice's brothers and sisters share the same set of siblings, each of Alice's 40 brothers also has 50 sisters. Therefore, Alice's brother has 50 sisters.

---

Step by step:

Me > Alice has 40 brothers and she also has 50 sisters. How many sisters does Alice's brother have? Think about it step by step.

GPT4o > To determine how many sisters Alice's brother has, follow these steps:

Identify the total number of siblings: Alice has 40 brothers and 50 sisters, plus Alice herself. Thus, the total number of siblings is:
40 (brothers)+50 (sisters)+1 (Alice)=91 siblings
40 (brothers)+50 (sisters)+1 (Alice)=91 siblings

Focus on Alice's brother: Alice's brother is one of the 40 brothers.

Determine the number of sisters for Alice's brother: Each brother has the same number of sisters. Since the brothers do not count themselves as sisters, they only count the 50 sisters, excluding themselves and other brothers.

Therefore, each of Alice's brothers has:
50 sisters

So, Alice's brother has 50 sisters.

---

Thinking step by step somehow gave an even more nonsensical answer, I'm actually very surprised it didn't work when prompted to do it step by step.
This is great! I was just thinking of switching to apple music because of the spotify price increase, and my friends and I were all complaining of this same issue with migrating.
"We've realized for some time that not only are language model technologies going to dominate our future"

Close, but not quite. What we realize right now is that AI has pumped, pumped, pumped a whole lot of stock valuations sky high, and the first faint glimmers of the market asking that some actual money be delivered in proportion to the sky high valuations are starting to appear. (Note carefully the "in proportion to"; it is not enough to make a bit of cash. These valuations are enormous.) The stocks so pumped need results more-or-less right now, since propagating anything they have right now out into the market to actually gather revenue is going to take some time.

I expect a couple of other Hail Mary plays like this to show up too.

And again, let me underline, emphasize, and highlight, this isn't about whether AI can make "any" money. It's about whether it can justify those staggeringly high stock valuations in, say, the next year or so. This is a fairly uphill battle. Even if you are a True Believer than AI will be an economic revolution in literally the next 12 months or so, it's hard not to look at the market and come to the conclusion that right now every AI player is being valuated as the inevitable victor and the inevitable beneficiary of 100% (or more) of the AI gain, e.g., nVidia is being valuated as if there will never, ever be any competition for AI hardware despite all the incentives, each AI user valuated as if they are the inevitable winner in their respective domains, etc. They can't all win simultaneously like that, it's just impossible.

(On the plus side, it's really just stock valuations. I don't expect an AI winter this time, the tools are much more valuable than they were last time. I mean, I would still very firmly say that what we have right now is grotesquely over hyped, but there's still quite a bit of "there" there. The previous AI hype cycles didn't have anywhere near as much "there" there.)
Indeed. The most interesting bit here is loose calibration, not no-calibration.
Suddenly, distributed private inference, compute, storage and bandwidth mediated by Holochain at global scale will become … valuable.
Page is down, I assume due to load from HN traffic. Maybe HN should implement some kind of custom CDN, but only for pages that hit the front page?
If you're already using Parallels, their companion toolbox app has a similar utility
What is their proposed future then?

It's not Xbox, they're losing that war, and it was based on Windows. It's not phones, they already lost that one and that was based on Windows anyways.

It can't be Office; there's less and less of a need for a paid office suite, and MS Office in a browser is rather bad.

It might be Azure, but IMHO the big onramp to Azure is Microsoft pushing corporations to move ActiveDirectory and Exchange into the cloud, but the end of Windows means the end of ActiveDirectory, and there's options for Cloud mail and calendar. Is Azure compelling for many if you're not already there because of Exchange?

> And once you realize that you can see the future is very bright

The future may be bright, but how will you know if there's no Windows to see it through? ;p
Even that doesn't load for me, https://archive.is/5sSg1 does
I think that quote is just a restatement of "We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us."
It seems like a somewhat far fetched explanation, but then I can’t think of a better one. They come up with this farcical application that nobody wants, to justify the hardware requirement, so that at least the hardware will be out there for when Apple shows them what the actual application is.
Agile means delivering very small increments to users at a frequent pace, allowing them to provide feedback early and often. When done correctly, this eliminates a significant amount of guesswork. However, if the client (or, indeed, your own team or management) does not fully understand the process, things can go spectacularly wrong in many different ways.
> We've realized for some time that... language model technologies going to dominate our future

Citation Needed.
This is a good way to get laid off. A developer has never generated ROI in the history of finance, it was ALWAYS an MBAs idea.
fwiw i am a fan of azure resource IDs as they make it easy to identify what and where a resource is vs a random magic string you have to go look up
> Even by today's loose definition of "AI" I'm having trouble making that connection. I guess the OCR is based on machine learning?

It's long been noticed that every time AI researchers figure out how to do a thing, it goes from "this is impossible SciFi nonsense" to "that's not real AI".

It's weird for me to actually encounter people doing this.

I remember when OCR was impossible, at any decent quality level, for AI. We used this to stop bots logging into forums, with a thing we called a "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" or CAPTCHA for short. It started off as text, then the text got increasingly distorted until most humans had trouble reading it, then it became house numbers, then it became "click all pictures of XYZ", before mostly disappearing into analytics seeing where you hovered your mouse cursor and which other websites you visited.
Regardless of whether Microsoft == Windows, a company's brand matters, especially when trust is required for adoption of their new offerings.

Microsoft had been trying, it seemed, to make their image more positive, with some positive results in recent years.

Their recent decisions have revealed that their priorities are not very aligned with their users. The future may be bright, depending on their goals, but I have no interest in being a customer of a company that makes decisions that are so user hostile and frankly, idiotic.
Answering my own question (with the help of replies on Twitter: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1798368111038779610 )

Best guess is that there's some level of semantic analysis going on beyond just OCR, which tips the balance (at least for me) to being an "AI" feature based on loose current usage of that term.

The clue is that in this demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZbHd4suAnQ&t=1062s they show searching for "blue pantsuit with sequin lace" finds something that was described as "peacock" in the text. It looks like this is based on embedding search against image embeddings.

And... one of the 3 SQLite databases created by Recall is called "SemanticImageStore" - which suggests to me there may be a CLIP-style image embeddings model being run on-device here.

Those databases contain "diskann" columns which are likely a reference to Microsoft's vector indexing library: https://github.com/microsoft/DiskANN
Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (2019)
I had the same issue. I thought it was postponed for a longer period given the messaging from the last scrub.

I only knew it was launching 6 minutes prior because my partner alerted me about it because it was top stream on twitch.
A technique I've had a reasonable amount of success with when teaching formerly imperative programmers is focusing on the constraints that force something like a monad to exist (the "you could have invented it yourself" teaching approach):

1. One of the main points of functional programming is that your computations are the results of pure functions -- enabling niceties like thread-safety, type-safety, ....

2. That view of the world is imperfect because some interactions (like responding to user input) require a _sequencing_ of events.

3. Imperative languages accomplish that task easily. They just write the events in the sequence they want them executed. With constraint (1) though, your only option for sequencing is function composition. Whatever interface you choose, it _has_ to use composition somehow.

4. Monads are one of many possible solutions, and they're the one we happen to have standardized on. They're convenient because you can wrap up all that compositional nonsense into something that feels a lot like the mutable objects you're used to when you actually apply them in your code.

That explanation skips over a lot of details, but it helps people build the initial spark of intuition to attach all the rest of the ideas onto. The mechanics of a monad, their capabilities, the available syntax, ..., don't seem to be the main stumbling block in my experience.
Ive read Sapolsky and listened to his Stanford Coursework. I think he has a lot that it interesting to say, but there are some areas where I disagree and even he admits there are weaknesses to his position. Im not arguing against change, reform, or anything else.

>What I'm saying is that a kings conduct to do governance doesn't tell me about their character as a human.

This is where I disagree. If a king needlessly tortures and rejoices in suffereing, that tells yuo about their character as a human. The governance of Sauron or Jofferry tells you about their moral character.

>So to say that it's an entirely level playing field isn't fair to social conditions and identity.

This is where you lose me? Who said anything about a level playing field? IF you reread my last post, I said different people can find it more or less difficult to be moral. I see no problem with the idea that is more difficult to be both a king and a moral person, than a peasant and moral person. Just like some jobs are more physically strenuous, some are more morally challenging.

Back to reality, this is obviously the case. Different people are faced with different life challenges, and moral challenges. The playing field is not level.

It is easy for me not to beat innocent people. I do it without thinking and it takes zero effort. Take someone raised in an physically abusive household and this might not be so easy for them. The difference in challenge does not mean you can be moral while going around and beating innocent people.

Im fine with the idea that being a moral king, or a moral politician is a hard task. I dont think that it being hard means the bar for morality is lowered.

The same goes for corruption, which is where we started.

>Seems irrelevant. If someone is corrupted and does amoral things, the result is still an amoral person.
Sauron is not moral but corrupted. They were corrupted, and thus became amoral.

I dont think power corrupting is relevant to judging if a king/politician/murderer is a moral person.
We do general AI/LLM consulting in the data space - not so much generative text, more along the lines of analysis, indexing, and search. Our path to customer happiness is simply to produce systems that actually work!
generally they wait until something explodes or they cannot add any features to the unmaintainable mess and they have no choice :)
Writer AI Studio: build apps fast on a full-stack generative AI platform
> The way I like to manage projects these days is a kind of kanban system with a task queue, and 1-2x a week brief cadence meetings to discuss priority/alignment and any blockers.

To me, distilled down to its core, agile is all about faster feedback loops and course corrections.

If you’re regularly getting good, actionable feedback on your work, and maintaining alignment, I think you’re living up the spirit of agile.

There are plenty of “agile” teams going through the motions, doing the ceremonies, but not actually reaping what the real benefit is supposed to be: frequent, actionable feedback that helps guide and align the next phase of work.
> language model technologies going to dominate our future

I know many people who are _far from convinced_ of that. But that's not the relevant point: Microsoft, Google et all clearly are.

And watching them collectively, desperately stampede after the mirage, at great cost, is certainly something.
Most content moderated by most sites isn't strictly illegal. On Hacker News you can be modded down for being impolite, or insufficiently substantive, for mere disagreement, for being repetitive or any number of reasons including "just because," since there are no real guidelines for voting here, and people tend to use flagging as a "super downvote" rather than for content that just violates the ever increasing list of guidelines.

The number of sites that limit moderation to strictly illegal material are few and far between, and they tend to degenerate into cesspools where only the worst elements prefer to gather. Even Gab recently learned this lesson[0,1].

[0] https://news.gab.com/2024/03/were-cleaning-up-gab-and-its-lo...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39686704
FDA advisory panel rejects use of MDMA for PTSD treatment
From the article:

> The dispute erupted when Supermac’s applied to register its company name in the EU as it drew up expansion plans. McDonald’s objected, saying consumers would be confused because it already trademarked the Big Mac name.
> Supermac’s filed a 2017 request with the EU’s Intellectual Property Office to revoke McDonald’s Big Mac trademark registration, saying the U.S. company couldn’t prove that it had used the name for certain categories that aren’t specifically related to the burger over five years.
What would you do if you had several billion devices that you had root access to, used directly by humans and isn't making you any money in sales these days?

The 2024 answer is to use it to capture data to train AI.

Microsoft could lose 9/10 of their market share (which they won't) and still have millions of devices harvesting training data for them.
It's a counter suit, McDonald sued them for trademark infrigement, Supermac defense was to straight up go after said trademark.
Subhuman intelligence/reasoning with superhuman knowledge access.

Searle's chinese room argument is starting to make sense in this case.
One approach that I've found to be quite effective is to use a dedicated configuration directory within your project.

The basic idea is to create a subdirectory, often named something like `config` or `.config`, that holds all of your project-specific configuration files. This helps keep your repository's root directory clean and organized.

There are a few ways you can make this work:

1. *Relative Paths*: Your application can be designed to look for configuration files in a relative path, such as `./config/my-config.yml`. This is a simple approach that doesn't require any extra tooling.

2. *Environment Variables*: You can set an environment variable that points to the configuration directory, and your application can then use that variable to find the files. For example, `MY_APP_CONFIG_DIR=/path/to/my/project/config`.

3. *Config Management Libraries*: There are various libraries and tools that can help manage configuration files, such as Viper for Go, ConfigParser for Python, or dotenv for Node.js. These provide a consistent API for loading and accessing configuration data.

4. *Symlinks*: If you have multiple projects that share some configuration files, you can use symlinks to link those files into each project's `config` directory. This avoids duplication and makes it easier to update the shared configuration.

The key benefits of using a dedicated configuration directory are:

- *Separation of Concerns*: It keeps your project's root directory clean and focused on the core application files.
- *Consistency*: All configuration-related files are in a predictable location, making it easier to manage and navigate.
- *Flexibility*: The different approaches (relative paths, environment variables, libraries) allow you to choose the solution that best fits your project's needs.

I hope this gives you some useful ideas on how to better manage your project-level configuration files.
This article is balm for my battered nerves. Unfortunately it won't reach, let alone convince, those who have the most urgent need of getting the message. They will have to learn it the hard way.
What would be the Agile approach to a process with a 1% success rate?
Yeah, the overfitting is apparent with these kinds of edge cases, which makes you wonder where else it's over fitting. I can actually tell this when I'm working in a programming domain where I'm an expert and where a compiler holds the source of truth, but not in others, so I'm wary to use it there.
> I don't see this as a problem; there's nothing stopping anybody you send anything to from taking a copy of it. You can't take emails or IMs back. It's just dumb.

I may trust someone personally, but not trust their ability to administer a system. This requires me to do both if I am sending information to somebody.
MSFT's future is safe, it is not a company of innovators, but it is good at selling its products and services.
The fence analogy kinda breaks down here. The sum total of regulations are like a collection of Chestson's Fences, each one added to the legal code for specific edge cases and the outcome of removing any individual one will have different results.

It doesn't mean anything to talk about reducing regulations without being specific about which rules you actually have an issue with, but it can provide the illusion of consensus.

Like we could both talk about healthcare and say that healthcare is too regulated in the US and that we should reduce the regulations! This a broadly agreeable position! But if I'm thinking of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need and you're thinking of the ACA cap on insurance profits (Medical Loss Ratio https://content.naic.org/cipr-topics/medical-loss-ratio#:~:t...), then we didn't actually agree on anything, did we?
Over a million people lost power in Texas just about one week ago, an issue that continued to impact hundreds of thousands of people days after the event. Hundreds of thousands lost power for multiple days last winter as well following another cold snap. Those are two events I can recall by memory - one because it's so recent, the other because I was personally impacted by it.

Do other states regularly have multi-day outages that impacts hundreds of thousands of people? I know California has at times with wildfires, but other than that? Are these issues below the line for being considered "systemic"? I'm actually asking, not refuting using question marks.
I have escalated customer security issues while working as a support agent. I have also found and been paid what could be considered a bounty (in the form of a bet made by the lead dev to another person) while working support.

Admittedly, this is anecdotal, and it was a small company, and my skillset was being very underutilized at the time. However, I don't think it's hard to imagine a me that would have been closed minded enough to normalize my experiences and expect it of others. In fact, I'd say I still fight with it regardless of having seen it.
Our docks require the same permission as a way to verify the multiple monitors are actually working. As a result I just bring my usb-c dongle and a couple usb-c -> displayport cables instead
World hits streak of record temperatures as UN warns of 'climate hell'
Why was it a declaration of war?
It’s an interesting paper, but my worry is that this is cherry-picking a surprising negative result. (The paper does not seem to discuss how many evals were considered to find this case.)

The general expectation should be that some AI failure modes will be for things that seem obvious to humans. (Because they have a different architecture to humans and different strengths.) The important question is whether this is a single weird cognitive bug on the family size formulation, or representative of a broad family of cognitive errors? It’s difficult to say from this paper.

It’s well known that the framing of a logic problem can dramatically influence its difficulty for humans, even when the underlying comparisons are isomorphic.

I think this line of research is important, but we need a larger battery of evals (and training on the evals will always be a confounder).

The broader family of reasoning here is relational problems (as noted in the paper) and so as a follow-up it would be interesting to explore reasoning performance across a set of isomorphic problems. My hunch is this will generalize somewhat (as LLMs are still not great at relational reasoning), but that there is something about the family formulation in particular that is confusing for LLMs.
The effect persists in well ventilated buildings (good thought though)
I'm wondering if they mean "Intel" in the "x86" sense or "Intel" as in "CPUs actually built by Intel"? The market share of the latter is probably shrinking faster than the former...
This is only in response to McDonald's raised an objection to Supermac registering their trademark in the EU
Didn’t even read it,
I've seen skyscrapers with fewer flaws than the report this is based on.

But seriously, the data is scraped. In my experience, these networks are pretty finicky about which comments they'll actually show you (even if they're not deleted).

A lot of spam and hate speech is automagically nuked at point of post, or soon after. 8-10 minute scrape cadences are going to miss a large portion of good deletes, strongly concentrating bad deletes.

There is no account for who deleted the comment; it's considered infeasible, but it's also said to be essential... Users deleting their own comments is censorship.

It's no secret that many communities uphold a comment threshold far above the legal speech level. You should expect to play by house rules. That's not censorship.

These seem like serious people, making a professional report, and they've put in a serious amount of work to code the comments they've seen, but every proportional argument is fatally flawed. Their source data is too flawed.
Which is the part that the European Parliament solves. Would advise voting tomorrow if you are able.
Perhaps you don't need to organize icons like other users do.

But for us who do, it is clearly essential.

> "Ugh, this sucks. This app was nearly essential on MacBooks with a notch, since you could hide lesser used icons away to make everything fit." - LeoPanthera 13 hours ago

> "True, but it has been essential for a long time before the notch for those of us with a non-trivial amount of software. The menu bar is a popular spot and so many apps want to put an icon there." - Tagbert 13 hours ago

And that's just from a quick glance.

Most users don't even know it's possible to improve their UI with this third party tool. I bet if they knew it would be considered very important to the mas well.

Specially power users who fight with screen space.
Gallows humor on the livestream chat: bet NASA will get another movie out of this.
4 days ago. 48 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40547338

Also 30 days ago.