skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Data structures is where I learned how to write test code. It was the best way to actually get the algorithms correct.

If we had git back then.. I remember one bug that took 6 hours to find, finally found it at 8am before the 10am class. Was typing as fast as I could for the next two hours... If there any kind of basic VCS back then that would have been as easy to use - it would have been many fewer all nighters.

Which is to say, a data structures class should have students coding. There are a number of skills you want when coding, basic and common skills that just make it a ton easier. Namely, confidence and iteration speed go up a ton when you can rollback. A modern IDE can do a lot of that too..

I guess I'm becoming an old fart, I've no idea why basic and helpful tools would not be emphasized early. Debugging with those tools is one of those things you want to learn. It helps build a data/fact based approach to coding.
What do you see in this picture?
Wow, what a great story! Really inspiring too, well done and well written.
Wow. The user agent they are using is so shady. But I am surprised they thought someone wouldn’t do just what the blog poster did to uncover the deception - that part is what surprises me most.

Other than being unethical, is this not illegal? Any IP experts in here?
The lie is in their documentation - they claim to use the PerplexityBot string in their user-agent: https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/perplexitybot.
'try to please all and you'll please none'.

Yes. But I do not want to try to please all.

In case of doubt, for the (potential) victims.

I am dealing right now with a case, where a pedophile tries to sneak into some semi public group activity/festival I am part of. The most frustrating thing is exactly this, some people saying the past where he was convicted is gone (or the conviction wrong) and he changed. Except it isn't and he has not changed (I am certain of because of some things I have heard him say, which are sadly not recorded). And if the conviction would not exist officially anymore, I would have allmost nothing solid against him, that he is in fact not just some weirdo, but a dangerous weirdo who should not be welcome, where I go with my children.

edit:

"Let's assume your villain provides proof well beyond reasonable doubt that he has actually changed"

And if there is no doubt, there is no doubt. Then it would be fine. But I want to judge myself, with as many facts as I can get and not blindly trust. I know people can change. But if people hide their past, I assume they have not actually processed it.
Agree - the first movers who scraped before changes to websites terms and robots files shouldn’t get an unfair advantage. That’s overall bad for society in terms of choice and competition
The super efficient ones are the panels they send to space. This is just like with chips, all about yields and price/performance.

I would not hold your breath for the typical consumer panel to improve much beyond 20%-25% any time soon sadly.

It does generate a lot of hopeful breathless articles which rubs me the wrong way. It is important to stay realistic in the search for solutions.

Solar is already great and cheap and there are lot more wins possible in the actual deployment as most of the cost is now overheads, bureaucracy, labour, 'etc.
To steel man this, even though I think the article did a fine job already, maybe the author could’ve changed the content on the page so you would know if they were serving a cached response.
I should have written that I hate such presentations when the history is up front. Tell me what you’re gonna do for me, tell me how so I believe you, tell me that you’ve been doing it a while for others so I believe you, then, if you want, tell me that you’ve been around for a while so I can depend on you.

But all that should be provided my my interests in mind, not your own ego stroking.

That said, different countries have different cultures in this regard. But peoples’ attention isn’t different and it’s a shame to waste the period of maximum attention on the thing that helps the least in sales.
expanding the concept: one thing (in my opinion) is that someone scrapes content to do something (i.e. training on some data), another thing is a tool that gets some content and make some elaboration on demand (like a browser does, in the end).
was there a declaration of war?
This looks so much like Golang, weird to not mention it
People's quality bar differs in height, that's true, but I want to raise one example: https://rclone.org/install.sh

Which is readable, understandable and exceptionally good at what it does for 200 line bash script.

So, there's good code out there.
Thought and discussion terminating meme twitter phrases like that bring the discourse level a lot lower on here.

There was much discussion in the relevant thread about the pay issue.

You’re a new account of 67 days, perhaps learn the culture here before spouting twitter / Reddit type culture war shit?
I think the GIF is supposed to give the breakdown. As I understand, type "@mymacro" and it can expand it to whatever you define.

Wouldn't hurt to have a description in text though...
I felt like this take was pretty spot on, and I think a lot of dissatisfaction can arise when folks feel like they are on the research team, but are actually on the spy team.
Debian is better than Ubuntu in every way. My relatives use it just fine.
> Next up is some kind of GDPR request perhaps?

GDPR doesn't preclude anyone from scraping you. In fact, scraping is not illegal in any context (LinkedIn keeps losing lawsuits). Using copyrighted data in training LLMs is a huge grey area, but probably not outright illegal and will take like a decade (if not more) before we'll have legislative clarity.
He agrees with you on the 20yr old engines and beginner projects.
Very interesting to read about their recurring problems caused by too-powerful aristocrats or ill-behaved iuvenes...and to consider the parallels to current-day social problems.
Well, the app is also tied to specific firmware versions, and both communicate to the Sonos cloud. It's not clear to me whether downgrading the app will make it lose connection with the speakers (which itself is quite a hassle to re-setup), and whether the two combined would be able to talk to the cloud for very long after that.
Great point, maybe that is the weakness in eye tracking. What about a small switch in the mouth you press with your talk, similar to a push-to-talk that activates the eye tracking. When you aren't pressing, you can look around and do other things with your eyes without affecting the computer?

Wish I had the bandwidth to take this on right now, because it sounds super fun and something I could be very passionate about.
Astonishing read. Thank you.
That's easy.

Mix up the verbs, add/delete "not", "but", "and".

Change names.
I think that’s the ideal as the server may provide different data depending on UA.

Does anyone actually do this, though?
Only reason OpenAI would do that would be to create a barrier for smaller entrants.
> “Gaining 1 or 2 percent more efficiency is huge. These may sound like very tiny increases, but at scale these small improvements create a lot of value in terms of economics, sustainability, and value to society.”

It’s so easy to forget this and the massive scale and its relevance at the massive scale of the systems we need to (and are, to some extent) roll out. It also seems promising when these breakthroughs are happening in R&D groups of industry players trying to dogfood it rather than in labs.

At the same time though, it’s starting to feel to me, to some extent, like we have kind of solved solar? It’s everything else around it that needs to advance, particularly grid infra, batteries and electrifying the general class of difficult-to-electrify problems (steel, concrete, freight). I might be totally off-base and blinkered with that assessment.

Edit: I guess I should try to clarify my feeling after reading some of the responses below: it feels like solar tech is not really the limiting factor in renewable scaling, and that advances in solar efficiencies won’t drastically/meaningfully simplify the other challenges/limiting factors we currently face (grid infra/batteries, electrification of mfg, duck curve, etc). Children point out that space and cost savings from efficiency gains in solar may still be significant at grid scale though! Still, this is very cool progress to read about!
"My KitchenAid has no mouth and it must scream" — oof
Website terms for unauthenticated users and robots.txt have zero legal standing, so it doesn’t matter how much hand-wringing people like the OP do. It would be irresponsible as a business owner to hamstring themselves.
>I'm not sure what the ideal poison would be

ChatGPT, write a short story that warns about the dangers of artificial intelligence stealing people's intellectual property, from the perspective of a hamster in a cage beside a computer monitor.
"Effortlessly emote and interact with the help of motion recognition triggers."
Um, muscles do that already to your face.

"To let people know what you're thinking, just nod."
So, like using a head?

Is this product literally a lower-resolution abstraction for what your face and head can already do?
If using copyrighted material to train an LLM is theft, so is reading a book.
Nukes feel more impersonal and the quick death seems merciful compared to being chased around a tree. But the sheer magnitude of the destruction of nukes still has me preferring murder done clouds to nukes.
Linux is like ice cream
Interesting (to me) screed on how to look at the various versions of Linux. I also liked how they categorized into three levels.

(And I also learned that on my next trip up the NJ Turnpike to stop in Princeton to check out the top 5 ice cream stores)
The only solution is technological advancement.

If humanity doesn’t rise to the challenge (degrowth) this could happen.

Fortunately there are smart people all over the world solving problems everyday and that is likely to continue.
Computer science in the graphics space requires a ton of gnarly coding. If we consider post-doc computer science in particular, the idea you dont then need to be at least a semi-competent programmer is.. a surprising idea to have.

Which is to say, the idea CS do not need to ever code is a stretch. How does a person work on cutting edge graphics algorithms without building something with it? Without coding in a pretty serious way?

One example, at the end of my intro to programming, the final assignment was to build something, I wrote a chess program (with a GUI). While some classes are quite theoretical, I strongly disagree that a person can get through all of a CS program without their coding skills being challenged.
Go is the only one of the three that directly uses syscalls. Rust and Swift both go through libc. Swift never even had the option of directly using syscalls, since it was originally designed for MacOS, and syscalls are so unstable there that they've changed in minor version updates.
I think the only way is to find some space aliens which were can all hate together. Humans have formed groups and fought ever since there were humans.
You can just point it at a webserver and ask it a question like "Summarize the content at [URL]" with a sufficiently unique URL that no one would hit, maybe with an UUID. This is also explored on the very article itself.

In my testing they're using crawlers on AWS and they do not parse Javascript or CSS, so it is sufficient to serve some kind of interstitial challenge page like the one on Cloudflare, or you can build your own.
This train of thought reminds me a lot of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga, in which wormhole technology is discovered by a duo not unlike Jobs and Wozniak, and commercialized, and arguably monopolized. As a result, this leads to considerable differences in opinion about the proper usage of wormhole technology in the setting between the two founders and in the wider society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga
I think the issue might be that people like to throw the tool at the whole problem when it’s not the right tool for a lot of it.

Don’t use LLMs for logic. Use it for colour and flavour. Generate your own layout, populate the rooms in a manner befitting the context, difficulty, story arc, and then whenever a user makes an action, update the state then pass to the LLM the state and ask it to describe the room and make a few other smaller decisions.
Do you mean the tangent space of SO(2) as a state?
How is a human reading a book in any way related or comparable to a machine ingesting millions of books per day with the goal of stealing their content and replacing them?
There are only so many ways to write "C, but better," or "C++, with fewer warts."

Any languages that want to be recognizable to people comfortable with the C-lineage are going to converge on a lot of points.
The issue is detecting them when they use random user agents and ip ranges.
Why? He is a terrible person and a terrible role model. Greedy, self centered, fosters a cult of personality, emotionally immature, and refuses to acknowledge his own daughter without any good reason. I wouldn't shake his hand if he offered it.

He's a person to point your son to as an example of what not to be.
That's not obvious to me. Can you elaborate?
Because part of the homework could be implementing algorithms and data structures. Even if that's done in pseudocode you'd probably want to expose your students to some form of VCS at that point. At my old faculty for example you worked through 1/3 of CLRS as part of the lecture and then implemented a few algorithms and data structures in both Java and C++ under the guidance of TAs.

So even students who failed the programming part and passed by acing the exam and the theoretic part knew what a shell was, what a compiler and linker did, how to find documentation and how to actually do all that on either their laptop or a provided thin client.

And most classes were set up like this. As a first semster student you'd be submitting your MIPS assembler homework using a VCS etc.
"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes." - Laughing Man, Ghost in the Shell

I don't think that this sort of mask will catch on generally, but you'll see them at anime conventions and Halloween parties maybe

One day there will be an artistic weirdo who only wears this sort of mask during all of their public appearances and interviews and such, somewhat like Yoko Taro's iconic mask

I still think it's neat honestly. It's so weird how much we're living through the creation of so much technology that people cooked up in science fiction and cyberpunk stories
A simple web search would have gotten you there: https://tinyurl.com/arlington-multimedia
It suffices to be the language of choice on Apple platforms.

This kind of embedded stuff is also used internally at Apple, and is preparing the work to replace firmware stuff like iBoot that is written on a Apple specific Safe C dialect.
> They released a major new app version this year that's really unstable. And even when it works, it has terrible usability. The feedback has been overwhelmingly negative but the company doesn't care.

As I understand it, the exact same version also removed all accessibility for blind people, leaving many unable to use their Sonos devices at all.
>open-sourcing .NET and VS Code

They didn't open-source the debugger so that you have to use VS or VSC. VS Code also has shittons of telemtry (same for dotnet LCI) and when you use Codium you are (officially) not allowed to use their marketplace.

>running GitHub well

GitHub is down nearly every week and constantly has problems. I appreciate them making certain features free though.
Indeed. None of them can be trusted.
IP banning might be limited if they're already using a proxy network, which is par nowadays for avoiding detection.
(I can't edit find the button to edit my comment)

Is memory really an expected bottleneck in the long term?
There is nothing unethical about not wanting AI companies to steal your content and sell it for a profit.
I remember reading some sci-fi about people wearing masked that messed with the shape of their face enough so facial recognition didn't work (to avoid getting killed).

Even now we could probably do this with adversarial sunglasses or makeup.

I wonder if this will become fashion statement in the near future
I am not sure I will ever stop being weirded out, annoyed at, confused by, something... people asking these sorts of questions of an LLM. What, you want an apology out of the LLM?
I just tried it recently, worked well enough, including support for std vector, string etc. You can loop over std vector items using a standard Swift loop, for example. It´s clear Apple needs and uses this internally too.
It's interesting to me how the article mentions the large payload requirement, then the only example of what that payload _could_ be is reconnaissance.

I always find it interesting how and when people or groups emphasize or de-emphasize the "death and destruction" aspect of military equipment
fun! but a few ill-intentioned agitators can use up the ability and resources of those trying to fight back. This phenomenon is well-known in legal circles I believe..
it's likely not the dimmer's fault; phase angle triac dimmers were designed when resistive loads (incandescent light bulbs) were king. except for the super-low-wattage-per-lumen type, most LED light bulbs I run across these days are based capacitive dropper power supplies, which are inductive by nature (hence their atrocious power factor). combining that kind of load with phase-angle dimming is a recipe for crazy harmonics many orders of magnitude higher than the 60Hz base frequency.
> Typically only Dutch bicycle makers care about things like proper mudguards and chain guards, for example.

That is not true.

It is about class of bikes, not brands. Sure there are brands such as Gazelle who focus pretty much on those characteristics only but there are other brands doing the same all over the world alongside more racy models.

> And, for example, the Cube bicycle as depicted in the article, is clearly not designed to be used in rainy weather

The bike depicted is a mountain bike, so no it hasn't be designed with fender in mind but that doesn't mean Cube or any other non-dutch brand doesn't produce city/trekking/touring bikes.

Having said that, I would expect a mountain bike to be built to survive wet and muddy conditions.
I highly recommend Ted Gioias jazz history books. "West Coast Jazz" is fantastic.
>and you'd do it too if you wanted your program to work properly.

If I know the creator of the page doesn't want his page used by my program I wouldn't do it.

>Discriminating based on User-Agent string is the unethical part.

Not being exploited by an AI company is unethical? Robots.txt is made for telling bot identified by user agent what they are allowed to read.
> but we've hit a point where even high-end chips from that generation aren't really wide enough for a lot of users

Software-hardware coevolution in practice.

When the first dual cores appeared, they were dual hardware cores... in a software world that was designed to operating with a time-sliced single core.

It felt like magic!

However, now most pieces of heavy software can use multiple cores, so you need 'one more core' to get the same level of surplus capacity.

Also, the typical load of multiple tabs open with modern js web apps is much heavier than anything that would have been running constantly then.

In the 90s, 00s, you closed down your background programs if you needed to run something important.
I have a silly website that just proxies GitHub and scrambles the text. It runs on CF Workers.

https://guthib.mattbasta.workers.dev

For the past month or two, it's been hitting the free request limit as some AI company has scraped it to hell. I'm not inclined to stop them. Go ahead, poison your index with literal garbage. It's the cost of not actually checking the data you're indiscriminately scraping.
> Is it actually retrieving the page on the fly though?

They are able to do so.

> How do you know this?

The access logs.

> Even if it were - it’s not supposed to be able to.

There is a distinction from data used to train a model, which is the indexing bot with the custom user-agent string, and the user-query input given to the aforementioned AI model. When you ask an AI some question, you normally input text into a form, and the text goes back to the AI model where the magic happens. In this scenario, instead of inputting a wall text into a form, the text is coming from a url.

These forms of user input are equivilent, and yet distinctly different. Therefore it's intelectually dishonest for the OP to claim the AI is indexing them, when OP is asking the AI to fetch their website to augment or add context to the question being asked.
Nope. For the foreseeable future, stable ABI on other platforms is basically only going to happen if a distro starts supporting an ABI stable standard library on their own.
Nope, to make the point about being cross platform, all sessions that weren't Apple framework specific were done in VSCode, Emacs or Neovim.

Just like when Microsoft started doing .NET demos on Mac laptops with VSCode, to send the message across.
Technology cannot solve privacy invasion. A face is only one data point. Skin tone, clothes, your gait etc... all can give away who you are.

What we need is a political framework that will go after privacy thieves. The thieves should face the same kind of consequences as someone who breaks into a billionaire's home.
> pending lawsuits notwithstanding

That’s a hell of a caveat!
I find nukes are preferable because it's possible to have survivors, and their bluntness discourages use. Drones preserve infrastructure and resources; the Nazis would have loved this for their "living space" plans.
My first thought reading the headline.
>"Perfectionism" is just avoidance.

And this is an absolute that isn't true.
> Only reason OpenAI would do that would be to create a barrier for smaller entrants

Only? No. Not even main.

The main reason would be to halt discovery and setting a precedent that would fuel not only further litigation but also, potentially, legislation.

That said, OpenAI should spin it as that master-of-the-universe take.
Perplexity, in their own docs, provides their user agent so that you can block it if you choose. The article's biggest quibble is that they are not actually us in the agent they publicly claim.
There are solutions out there though. Mostly it's a lack of - financial - incentive to standardize and iterate on them IMO. But GitLab at least is currently working on adding ActivityPub support.
And some of the bad ideas are also there.
Reading a book is not theft. Building a business on processing other people's copyrighted material to produce content is.
Please explain - in detail - why using information communicated by the client to change how my server operates is “unethical”. Keep in mind I pay money and expend time to provide free content for people to consume.
Right, you can understand them independently, but of course in reality they are intimately linked.

For instance, isn't genetic drift just a consequence of mutation and natural selection? Neutral mutations with weak selection pressure will tend to build up in a population over time.
Back in the 2000s:

- Trick your friend into clicking on that interesting link

- They get to enjoy good ole Rick Astley's baritone voice and shoulder padded jacket on youtube

In 2024:

- Trick your friend into clicking on that interesting link

- Phew, saved by two minutes of pre-video ads!
It's not. If you can sacrifice just one without a cost to the other, than they will. Witness the US leaving Vietnam and what would have happened if US soldiers were not facing a grueling war. Witness other asymmetric wars such as Iraq (500,000 Iraqi civilians killed and only 5,000 US soldiers) or the genocide in Gaza now (50,000-200,000 killed by Israel).

If one side has the ability to wage war at no human cost, it will mean massive human cost for civilians, as we constantly see.