skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was just talking about this idea with my wife. We're both now senior enough in our jobs that we're team/project leads (not managers, just technical leaders of stuff).

One of the projects I'm leading is a small R&D effort to see if a new technique will improve one of our core algorithms. And I have a very bright new junior programmer who has been with the company about 2 years and has a little post-college experience at another company, so he's not totally new.

When I give him work, he gets stuck (it's R&D after all), and blames the library or the API or things like that. It's like the "no there's not a bug in the compiler meme".

I'll take a good chunk of my day and pair with him to show him how to get around the problems, and it seems like he gets it, and then the next week when we sync up, he's back to blaming the tools.

My wife's opinion is that it just take a LONG time to learn that you're usually the one who's wrong, not the tools. And she pointed out that we both spent about 5 years in grad school. The biggest lesson of grad school is that you never know what's going on and that you need to figure out your tools, and that you're always the dumb one.

I've always been a little disappointed that I wasted so many prime earning years in grad school, but I think I agree with her here. Grad school is as close to the old "apprentice" model where you don't earn much (if any) money because you're primary goal is to learn the field and you really spend most of your time being in the way or annoying to your grad advisor. You don't bring much value in the time you're there. Much of that is learning how to deal with failure and working around that. (Edited to add: last week I found my archive of code that I wrote in grad school. I was surprised how little code I produced in those years and how I could now have solved the problem in about a week or so since I understand what tooling I now have at my disposal. But I did learn a ton in those years.)

I'm trying to figure out a way to get those lessons to my junior teammates (without making them feel as worthless as I did in grad school).

To bring this back to the topic, maybe Lamba school like boot camps are a problem just because the time is so compressed. You need time to keep learning the lesson that it's not the compiler, it's you. And then you can learn the problem solving of how do _I_ make this work.

Lots of self-taught from a young age people learn this, so it's not the grad school that's as important as the freedom to have time to learn (while not being on the hook to be providing value to someone who's paying you).

Not saying it's fair and I understand people need to support themselves, but I do think that the best problem solvers have put in the time and there's not real substitute for time.
Habbo Hotel Origins Launches
For the purposes of input on the question of living in a big city vs a rural community, yes, but don't forget, there is also the 3rd option of living in suburbia. I hear it's quite popular in America.
the vision here is amazing, but I can't help but feel a bit uncertain about basing a "safe super intelligence" lab in an apartheid state that is currently genociding its indigenous population using variants of the very same technology
Lendup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Institute_of_Technology
I am still struggling to understand “safe”. What is it we need to be kept safe from? What would happen if it is unsafe?
That’s very different than what the OP question is about. Both are called “bounties” though.

One is getting paid to write code that fixes bugs or adds functionality to open source projects. (Pays very little and we suspect nobody makes a living from)

The other is doing security research and reporting on vulnerabilities. Here typically no fix is provided. You are paid for the discovery. Plenty of good researchers make a living on these security bounties
no, he should have empathy for everyone he screwed over and doesnt, so i wont have a single ounce of empathy for him
Is OpenAI on a path to becoming the MySpace of generative AI?

Either the Facebook of this era has yet to present itself or it’s Alphabet/DeepMind
Dethrace 0.7.0
5 minutes of training time should go far
True, I liked that transition too)

Thanks for sharing your own one. I like that visual part of it a lot, I did use wavy underlines, but sometimes it goes too messy) Anyway, with these small signs I come up with a question: how often do we think in the pictures dimension of the text parts that we find appealing, smart or charged?
Lame chat ai
just to level set, i myself went thru a normal (non lambda school, but still highly rated) bootcamp in 2017 (some of which were ISAs, the rest regular tuition), and about 30% of my classmates went back to their past jobs and careers. i'm sure about 20-30% of the rest are in tech but in unhappy situations. but for the remaining 30-50% of us it was a lifechanger.

i wish that people would not throw out the baby with the bathwater when changing careers and reskilling people is an inherently messy process that obviously the bootcamp cannot totally control even if were run perfectly, which lambda definitely was not. it just turns off a lot of people like me who actually could potentially change their lives for the better if they were presented simple facts without the extremes of hype or hyperbole.

p.s. for sibling comment - yes it is -normal- for good students to be offered another term as TAs for the next class. this was considered an honor and actually was fairly competitive and i think helped them be really good by the time they got into the job search. TAs are TAs, all colleges have them; they do not replace full instructors, but some of them are worth their weight in gold due to their student empathy.
High-speed baby stars circle the supermassive black hole Sgr A*
Last I checked the researcher salaries haven't even reached software engineer levels.
Climate change forcing ground water battle over carrots
Anyone who knits knows the textile, stitch, and tension all contribute different properties to the finished fabric and can be used to various effects even in the same garment. For example, a rib stitch done on a smaller needle size (which affects tension) is usually used for cuffs so they don't flop all over like the stitch and tension used for the main body of work would.

What's interesting is these folks have engaged in a systematic engineering study to document these different choices and their effects on the properties of the fabric. Interesting because knitting has been around for thousands of years and everyone knows this stuff, but it's generally considered a women's craft in Western society and so has little value. Times are changing.
I have a pair of matching Nike socks, where one of them said that, and the other one replies “fast is faster”
Driverless cars are mostly safer than humans – but worse at turns
The goal of science isn't to publish papers, it's to investigate hypotheses. If 98% of social science papers cannot be replicated then that's an indictment of social science, not the requirement to replicate.

I suspect a lot of "hard" science papers would be caught as well so it's a necessary quality control method
Insanely complex wooden 'time machine' vehicle hits the streets
I imagine the use-case for low-code tools is when your ratio of "business experts" heavily outweighs programmers, and the cost of inefficient dev processes/tech debt is less than the cost of waiting to onboard people with a coding background.
cs.stanford.edu/~danilevy
The Most Bug-Like Robot Bug Yet
That’s the first step towards returning to candlelight. So it isn’t a step toward safe super intelligence, but it is a step away from any super intelligence. So I guess some people would consider that a win.
New ALPR Vulnerabilities Prove Mass Surveillance Is a Public Safety Threat
Firewall issue: https://www.wcvb.com/article/911-outage-massachusetts-cause-...
Yeah, similar to how Google's clickstream data makes their lead in search self-reinforcing. But chat data isn't the only kind of data. Multimodal will be next. And after that, robotics.
>> JDdoc: Once you knew you had access, did you make a point of saying “I’m IN!” out loud, even if no one was in the room with you?

> dotslashpunk: lol, no I only say that during either sex or when I'm able to join a meeting successfully with my microphone and speakers actually working. Both are rare.

Talented and funny. He's wearing his new found fame well.
Maybe they're using the video gaming version of cracked, which means you're really good.
If there were ever a good argument for bringing back corporal punishment, surely Just Stop Oil is making it.
Surprising to see Gross involved. He seems to be pretty baked into the YC world, which usually means "very commercially oriented".
> I've never figured out why the inordinate delay given that millions are unhappy with Windows and Microsoft generally. You'd reckon open source developers would be falling over themselves to join such a project but it seems not.

I think there is a strong misconception that there is this massive pool of open-source devs twiddling there thumbs just itching to jump in on some project were they can pour time and effort for nothing more than the "good of the community". I don't have any sources for this, but it my strong suspicion that the vast majority of "open source" contributions are actually done by contributors that are compensated either by a company that doesn't mind paying their employees to work on open source projects, or by a foundation behind the open source project. Take Go-lang for example, originally created by Google, then opened up. I am sure there are Google employees that still contribute (on Googles dime) to the project. Why would Google do this? Why not keep the Go just for themselves? Simple, if they open it up and can get other people/companies to use it, then they can make future hires where they don't have to train everyone on a proprietary language.

ReactOS doesn't have a large foundation behind it, and it doesn't make sense for companies to allow their employees to develop and contribute to it on their dime.

Development is skilled labor, especially for an OS. Dev's need to eat, need a home, etc. I don't know a single dev that is itching to give away their skills for 0 compensation. The only time devs really do that is when it is a personal passion project.
One can already see the beginning of AI enslaving humanity through the establishment. Companies work on AI get more investment and those who don't gets kicked out of the game. Those who employ AI get more investment and those who pay humans lose confidence through the market. People lose jobs, get harshly low birth rates while AI thrives. Tragic.
Bonus design: Emma's website easter egg (2023)
What if there are other ways to improve intelligence other than throw more money at running gradient descent algorithm?
> You should trust it as much as you'd trust another human.

Eh? Only a sociopath, when confronted with a question they don't know the answer to, confidently makes something up. The human may not know the answer, but they generally know whether they know the answer or not. The machine does not (of course, it doesn't _know_ anything). You should absolutely trust something less than this far less than the average human.
Prediction - the business model becomes an external protocol - similar to SSL - that the litany of AI companies working to achieve AGI will leverage (or be regulated to use)

From my hobbyist knowledge of LLMs and compute this is going to be a terrifically complicated problem, but barring a defined protocol & standard there's no hope that "safety" is going to be executed as a product layer given all the different approaches

Ilya seems like he has both the credibility and engineering chops to be in a position to execute this, and I wouldn't be suprised to see OpenAI / MSFT / and other players be early investors / customers / supporters
I was actually expecting Apple to get their hands on Ilya. They also have the privacy theme in their branding, and Ilya might help that image, but also have the chops to catch up to OpenAI.
Right, true safe super intelligence could only be developed in countries that finished genociding their indigenous populations centuries ago.
In a lot of these discussions the point gets raised about the work to maintain a self-hosted server. When i've done it I install the os (usually ubuntu server), turn off unused services, setup the firewall to only allow required ports, and then it just sort of sits there and does its thing. Uptimes have been measured in years in some cases and the server just sits there happily serving whatever html and connecting to whatever db forever.
I think they will easily find enough capable altruistic people for this mission.
At this point, all the computing power is concentrated among various companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, etc.

It seems to me it would be much safer and more intelligent to create a massive model and distribute the benefits among everyone. Why not use a P2P approach?
> Perhaps they can find people who are ideologically driven

given the nature of their mission, this shouldn't be too terribly difficult; many gifted researchers do not go to the highest bidder
You can do all of this stuff yet the small lot milk is only $8 and the smoothie at Erewhon is only like $10 still. This is what they mean by things being more expensive for poor people. Even with being choosy, prices can only realistically be so high. Say you are a working professional: the local economy by default has to price things such where they are somewhat affordable to a certain number of people to support the business. Unless you live in Monaco chances are you having a degree and using it in your work puts you at the elite end of the wage earning scale in your local city. Therefore to satisfy business cases, things are relatively cheaper for you and relatively more expensive for everyone else. This is true for coca cola, erewhon smoothies, local farmers markets, cars, plane tickets, and homes. Whatever it is. It's even more egregious for the filthy rich. How shameful we let someone like Lionel Messi only pay $10 for an Erewhon smoothie or only $100k for a mercedes considering what that relatively means to their bottom line compared to what it means for ours.
I don't think I could have done it without a camp. I think that initial push to get "over the hump", at least the first hump for me really required someone I could immediately bounce questions off of, the structure of a classroom environment, and push to keep going because, class goes on.

Granted after that... I was fine learning on my own / that's half the job of programming. But initially I don't think I would have made it over that first hill.

I do think that is a personal learning style thing. When I was younger I was a TERRIBLE formal schooling type learner. When I went back I was appreciative / loved that environment.
Too snarky...anyway, "crack" means "exceptional" in some contexts.
I've seen footballers using it a lot over the years (Neymar, Messi etc) fwiw.

Just realized - we even say "it's not all its cracked up to be" as a negative statement which would imply "cracked up" is positive.
I have made projects in Angular 1, Vue, React, and Svelte. I would start a new project using React because it’s the most popular, it has the most well maintained libraries, LLMs know it better, and the other frameworks aren't much different.

Svelte is nice but I like react/mobx more.
Programming is really not as hard as you're making it out to be. I've taught it to beginners both children and adults and they struggle but they all learn it. Professional software development is quite difficult, but programming is only a portion of why. And even then, software dev is only like the second or third most technically difficult job I've had. Any welder or marine upholsterer or nurse or whatever has about as intellectually demanding a job as we do.
WBRTC in India used to have noticeboards and buses painted with “Safe Drive Save Life” and “Save Drive Safe Life”

I’m not sure anyone noticed the difference between the two
>aiming to create a safe, powerful artificial intelligence system within a pure research organization that has no near-term intention of selling AI products or services.
Who is going to fund such a venture based on blind faith alone? Especially if you believe in the scaling hypothesis type of ai research where you spend billions on compute, this seems bound to fail once the AI hype dies down and raising money becomes a bit harder
“””We are assembling a lean, cracked team of the world’s best engineers and researchers dedicated to focusing on SSI and nothing else.”””

Cracked indeed
Grocery stores implementing digital price tags, replacing stickers
> Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our time.

Isn't this a philosophical/psychological problem instead? Technically it's solved, just censor any response that doesn't match a list of curated categories, until a technician whitelists it. But the technician could be confronted with a compelling "suicide song":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloomy_Sunday
This is the best meme ever / So accurate in many ways
You could fit a lot of data in a pneumatic tube capsule full of SSDs, haha. It might give the old hatchback a run for its money.
These parasites aren't just feeding off of news but everything published anywhere. I hope journalists continue to call them out, and even though Google is doing the same, or similar, they should mark sites like Perplexity as a link farm or duplicate content.

$165M in funding and ignoring robots.txt deserves every amount of scrutiny.
The first one comes up in control systems: you have two displacements, the target position and the real position. You subtract them to get the error, also a displacement. You can then integrate that error term to get the total error over the course of the control period. That would be “absement”, measured in m*s. You might then tune your control algorithms to optimize that value.

I’m not sure how to think about the lower orders. You might, for instance, have a learning control system you expect to come to a lower error state over time. The integral of the absement would be a decent way to capture that phenomena.
One would think the advent of modern, semi-autonomous robots could fulfill much of the function of pneumatic tubes for transporting small packages across a facility.
That's a misleading number, knowing that he was a lauded prof at MIT we can expect that he was significantly wealthier than the median Mass. resident and with that significantly higher life expectancy.
I can't read enough of that article to determine whether they're actually excluding making turns from "routine conditions" or that's just awkward phrasing.
From competition.
very interesting take.

maybe with AI we can all get bespoke heuristic intelligent operating systems? these could be almost impossible to crack and exploit.
But basing it in US who launched the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is safe?
rigour is is not about destroying bad intuition, but rather formalizing good intuition, imho. The ability to know good from bad is somewhere in-between total newb and expert.
I wonder how long the pool will stay open?
Once you add API gateway, IAM roles/permissions, VPC, security groups, it gets a lot more complicated. Then you want to host a static web site, reverse proxying to API gateway, add CloudFront, WAF, etc. You'll go crazy setting this up manually, so you'll also want Terraform or CloudFormation to make it repeatable.

For anything complex, you'll run into "slow start" issues and have to look at provisioned concurrency.

Lambda also sucks for dependencies. Zips and "layers" can only be so large. Eventually you'll hit the limit and have to move to containers. There are also other limitations, like payload sizes. Eventually you might run into that, too.

Also, it would be nice if Lambda just reused the CGI interface instead of inventing its own thing.
If the only thing justifying US head count is the ability to go to an office then that US headcount was never secure anyway.
It is a little young, the impression is right. Statistics is hard. "Life expectancy" being an average includes all of the reasons to die when you're young, and young deaths have a large effect on the average.

The most frequent age at death is in your mid to late 80s. I'd like to post the statistic on the 25th and 75th percentile of age at death or maybe 40th, 60th, but I can't readily find the data with the amount of effort I'm willing to put in.

Here's a histogram though

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Histogram-of-estimated-n...
Did everyone just forget about Varnish HTTP Cache or something? Or are we just using the new shiny ball because its new?
His latest project (https://pioneer.app/) recently (this year I think) got shutdown. I guess he's pivoting.
Would you rather your future overlords to be called "The Safe Company" or "The Open Company"?
I don't think so since you need to leave edit mode to terminate the macro.
What exactly is "safe" in this context, can someone give me an eli5?

If it's "taking over the world" safe, does it not mean that this is a part of AGI?
What could go wrong with a name tied to wargames and D&D?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Simulations
Thanks! That's a good point!
It does say they have a business model ("our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures"). I imagine it's some kind of patron model that requires a long-term commitment.
The kind of AI researchers being discussed here likely make an order of magnitude more than run of the mill "software engineers".
All very good advice that I feel deeply. I think I fell into the honey trap some time ago, but I've made peace with that — the tools I'm making will probably do more good than any game I could finish making, at least for now.

Jokes aside, though, I do try to dog-food my tooling as much as possible. I maintain a Godot/C# 3d platformer game demo with full state preservation/restoration (<https://github.com/chickensoft-games/GameDemo>) to demonstrate this.

By the time I've finished writing tests and docs for a tool, I've usually identified and fixed a bunch of usability pain points and come up with a happy path for myself and other developers — even if it's not 100% perfect.

I also have a bunch of unreleased game projects that spawned these projects, and even gave a talk on how this stuff came about (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLBkGoOP4RI&t=1705s>) a few months ago if that's of interest to you or anyone else.

The requirements you mentioned in your comment cover selectively serializing state and decoupling saving/loading logic, and I could not agree more. While you can always abuse a serializer, I hope my demonstration in the game demo code shows how I've selectively saved only relevant pieces of game data and how they are decoupled and reconstructed across the scene tree.

Also probably worth mentioning the motivation behind all this — the serialization system here should hopefully enable you to easily refactor type hierarchies without having to maintain manual lists of derived types like System.Text.Json requires you to do when leveraging polymorphic deserialization.

Manually tracking types (presumably in another file, even) is such an error-prone thing to have to do when using hierarchical state machines where each state has its own class (like <https://github.com/chickensoft-games/LogicBlocks>). States as classes is super common when following the state pattern and it is well supported with IDE refactoring tools since they're just classes. Basically this serialization system exists to help save complex, hierarchical state without all the headaches. While I was at it, I also introduced opinionated ways to handle versioning and upgrading because that's also always a headache.
his old articles are shared a lot on here