skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But I think there's also the bitter lesson to be learned here: many times people say LLMs won't do well on a task, they are often surprised either immediately or a few months later.

Heh. This is very true. I think perhaps the thing I'm most amazed by is that simple next-token prediction seems to work unreasonably well for a great many tasks.

I just don't know how well that will scale into more complex tasks. With simple next-token prediction there is little mechanism for the model to iterate or to revise or refine as it goes.

There have been some experiments with things like speculative generation (where multiple branches are evaluated in parallel) to give a bit of a lookahead effect and help avoid the LLM locking itself into dead-ends, but they don't seem super popular overall -- people just prefer to increase the power and accuracy of the base model and keep chugging forward.

I can't help feeling like a fundamental shift something more akin to a diffusion-based approach would be helpful for such things. I just want some sort of mechanism where the model can "think" longer about harder problems. If you present a simple chess board to an LLM or a complex board to an LLM and ask it to generate the next move, it always responds in the same amount of time. That alone should tell us that LLMs are not intelligent, and they are not "thinking", and they will be insufficient for this going forward.

I believe Yann LeCun is right -- simply scaling LLMs is not going to get us to AGI. We need a fundamental structural shift to something new, but until we stop seeing such insane advancements in the quality of generation with LLMs (looking at you, Claude!!), I don't think we will move beyond. We have to get bored with LLMs first.
That's awesome :) I used to cheat by setting the match to a custom size board with a height of 999 and width of 999. The board would not end up quite that large, however, clicking a single tile would reveal all other tiles of interest immediately, allowing me to mark them at my leisure.
What you were probably thinking of is that 0% of the irrational numbers between 0 and 1 can be described by language as single entities. Or phrased differently: If you had a magic machine that could pick a random real number between 0 and 1, with 100% probability you would get a number that no finite phrase / definition / program / book could define. That is because everything we can abstractly define is part of a countable set and the set of irrational number (and real numbers) is uncountable.

For that reason, quite a few mathematicians view the real numbers as a useful, but ultimately absurd set. Much more sane is the set of computable numbers, that is the set of numbers for which you can find an algorithm that computes the number to arbitrary precision. (More formal: A number x is computable if there exists a Turing machine that gets as input a natural number n, terminates on all inputs, and outputs a rational number y such that |x-y|<10^-n .) Every number you ever thought of is computable, but as a mathematician, working with the set of computable numbers is much more tedious than working with real numbers.
Arirang 아리랑 is by far the most popular folk song in both Koreas, often considered the unofficial national anthem of Korea and played at the Olympics as a common anthem. There are about 3,600 variations of 60 different versions of the song, all of which include a refrain similar to, "Arirang, arirang, arariyo (아리랑, 아리랑, 아라리요) It is estimated the song is more than 600 years old.
Arirang is included twice on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list. South Korea successfully submitted the song for inclusion on the UNESCO list in 2012. North Korea also successfully submitted the song for inclusion in 2014. In 2015, the South Korean Cultural Heritage Administration added the song to its list of important intangible cultural assets.
It’s called gaming the metrics and it’s totally a sign of dysfunction at the org level.

The team that decided to do this to keep the metrics happy rocks, though :)
I loved the recent newsletter-turned-book '50 Years of Text Games' by Aaron Reed. It's a bunch of deep dives into a bunch of games from throughout history, most of which I hadn't heard of.

https://aareed.itch.io/50-years-of-text-games
I think another overlooked portion is that we shouldn't be using meds (for infectious diseases) to enable fun (which seems common with sex). Eventually those meds will lose effectiveness, that's just evolution. Then the people who really do need them will be out of luck.
Not just plastics in the waterways, but in our brains and even our dicks apparently.
I like how you called it holistic, it is maybe the first time I see this word not in a "bad" context.

What about the topic, it is impossible to synthesize STEM things not in the manner an engineer does this. I mean thou shalt to know some typical solutions and have all the calculations for all what's happening in the schematic being developed.

Textbooks are not a joke and no matter who are you - a human or a device.
Reminds me of a bug I fixed in yamux, simply because of how long I've had to deal with it. Bug existed for as long as yamux did. (yamux is used by hashicorp for stream muxing everywhere in their products.)

If yamux's keepalive fails/times out, and you're calling Read on a demuxed stream, it blocks forever.

https://github.com/hashicorp/yamux/pull/127
I am software engineer form the eu and I hat everything they doing in tech. Really considering learning.
Does OpenAI use Rockset internally? I feel like I have some vague memory about that… in which case, the acquisition would make sense from a continuity of business perspective.
That's not a text adventure though? Or is the interface text? It's hard to tell from the screenshots and I'm on my phone right now :)
This is probably already researched today, and it seems close to how people would interact with clones of their deceased relatives or famous people of the past. However it's also a powerful tool to create nearly 100% successful influencing by instructing each persona to subtly inject the same idea into its human user by employing the most convincing tactics needed for that user. It's quite easy to foresee the use in advertising, where it would completely redefine the word "targeted", but also corrupt politics.
It's not. McDonald's chose to roll the two out at the same time. They would have benefitted from an advertising campaign raising awareness that the restaurants with kiosks are now cooked to order. Maybe their franchise rules prohibited them?
For every front-facing website there's 10 internal facing tools and dashboards. You don't "need" JS would be the wrong framing here. It's more like you don't need JS aversion when you're developing internal tools and you don't need the complication of SSR either (ask yourself whether the native or mobile app world is jumping on the idea of ultra-thin clients).

We waited so long to improve semantic HTML that ML rushed ahead and will probably deliver semantic comprehension far in excess of whatever we can hope for with conventional means now.
If you're going that minimalist, then why even have two tags (div, span) in your toolset when their only difference is display:block vs display:inline
I have tested Rockset for competitive analysis.

Good parts:

It has a slick and nice-looking UI. Good documentation. Many data loading options (including S3).

SQL support is good (Calcite?). Types are inferred on data loading. But you have to choose one "timestamp" column.

Bad parts:

First data load attempts failed (after 24 hours, it showed something like "too many retries").

I've loaded around 500 million rows, and the storage limit ran out.

Query performance did not shine. Storage size was very large (it seems they create many indices automatically).

Considerations:

The technology is not open-source. It is rocksdb + secondary indices + object storage + SQL engine.
I remember a company I worked at that an internal website for suggesting ideas. The problem is that the management never looked at it. And because of that, employees stopped posting to it. And that was that.
I’d rather have to wait a while for shiny new feature, than dive head first into the unknown.

We made that mistake with social media, not taking it seriously enough. I can wait a hot minute for my iPhone to summarise paragraphs whilst we try and avoid rampant, democracy breaking technology 2.0.
Colossal Cave Adventure (filename ADVENT) by William Crowther in 1976 on IFDB: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=fft6pu91j85y4acv

This is the game that started it all!

In my personal archives though, I only have a copy of the 1977 update by Dan Woods where the player can score a maximum of 350 points. This, I believe, is the Fortran source code of the 1977 version: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/source/adv350-p...
As a mindset, sure, I can go along with the idea of "constantly releasing".

As a user, constantly updating software has become one of my least favorite things our industry does. It's one of the reasons I avoid SaaS.
It sounds like the journalist(?) was in a tough spot, because it sounds like he either had to out his source which which journalists don't seem to be keen on doing, or leave it up.

How many future potential sources are going to go to him or avoid him now?
> Saying no isn't what ended his career.

Within NatSec, saying No to embarrassing the government is implied. Ceaselessly.

Equally implied: The brutality of the consequences for not saying no.
Yes...that's the problem. A problem that could be easily avoided by asking existing professionals what matters and what tools they actually want.
1. I don't like needles.

2. I would have a hard time deciding what to get since it was permanent.

3. Negative reaction to the ink.

4. Negative criticism.
Being horny also counts as being “in an altered state of consciousness that biases against use of condoms.”

As someone who took the condom off in a risky situation recently, there’s no comparison between the on and off feeling. It’s like licking a piece of candy vs crushing it with your teeth and sucking it all at once.
Not quite ready for autonomous taxis? Teledriving could be a bridge
Money has a tendency to corrupt.

Maybe a "church" should only be allowed to have the amount needed to fund reasonable operating expenses (plus some emergency funds and charitable work).

If you have more you aren't a church, you are now a business and standard business rules and taxation should apply.
When my friend found himself walking around in a new place after a complete discontinuity in experience. Was this discontinuity entirely driven by the impairment of lasting memory formation? Seems possible to me. Problem is, I've never experienced this myself - only heard his story from a close friend (repeatedly) and similar stories from others. The stories could be unreliable - but they suggest that the self was offline and came back while the body was still performing complex externally awake actions. Seems p-zombie-like to me.
i didn't remember you were at cmu. i can't say i can think of any notable software he's written or results he's discovered, but his counsel has never been as terrible and clueless as that of 'uncle bob'
Original discussion on the blog post that started it all?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786

(Blog post appear to exist anymore)
I misunderstood. My mistake.

Let me make another point.

Having access to multiple computer security firms is good, and the services Kaspersky provides do not end with their antivirus software. Security firms regularly publish their work and work with each other.

Perhaps I'm wrong here, but if memory serves, Kaspersky was one of the first firms to detect stuxnet and publish it's structure (I could be wrong here, trust but verify). Using this data, Symantec was able to begin studying the virus as well.

Walling off security research will lead to more parallel research, rather than international collaboration in computer security. Whether or not this is a good or a bad thing is arguable - but I believe international efforts are a net good while the Internet is an international affair.

Who knows, siloing of development might allow creativity and novel solutions in computer security like what happened with the USA/antibiotics and the USSR/phage theory - but I might be coping here.
October 2020 was an interesting time.
> and EU regulations have teeth

As someone who has been involved in this journey from the beginning, essentially starting from a point akin to "fuck the EU, they're laughably ignorable" it's really interesting to read this sentence. We can work with that.
Stand-up comedians test ability of LLMs to write jokes
Yeah they are the dark pattern, tracking, advertising l, privacy violating kings. Of course they’re going to keep doing all that “but with AI (TM)”
The Financial Transactions Database
I currently use Ollama + Openwebui for this. It also has a really serviceable voice mode. And it has many options like RAG integrations, custom models, memories to know you better, vision, a great web interface etc. But I'll have a look at this thing.
The US is a major user of Israeli software and hardware though, Mossad notwithstanding. Seems imprudent from the “national security” perspective
Perplexity Plagiarized Our Story About How Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine
If heroes are getting things done, it seems like it's possible. Wouldn't it make sense to study how the heroes are operating and try to make that part of the culture?
I'm terrified that JITX will get into the LLM / Generative AI for boards business. (Don't make me homeless, Duncan!)

They are already far ahead of many others with respect to next generation EE CAD.

Judicious application of AI would be a big win for them.

Edit: adding "TL;DRN'T" to my vocabulary XD
Except SLS?

Not that I think it's a good thing, but...
> youtube should just offer to generate the videos for you directly to save space.

Try imagining this concept applied to newscasts.
I think it's because Google has created an insular, navel-gazing culture that is excessively engineer driven rather than customer driven, to the extent of thinking people not at Google are just inferior.
Yes, there was a recent story about (yet another) Citi "fat finger" trade.
The headlines mentioned things like "the trader ignored 700 error messages to put in the trade", but listening to a podcast about it.. its more like awful systems that are always half broken is what ultimately lead to it.

The real punchline was this - the trader confused a field for entering shares quantity for notional quantity, but due to some European markets being closed, the system had a weird fallback logic that it sets the value of shares to $1, so the confirmation back to the trader was.. the correct number of dollars he expected.

So awful system designs lead to useless and numerous alerts, false confirmations, and ultimately huge errors.
The blog post seems to indicate the problem is systemic in the criminal justice system's attempts to integrate Science into its rulings:

> Once convicted, however, defendants in cases of faulty science run up against an anti-scientific defect in the system.

> Legal principles dictate a certain deference to the trial court’s decision. ... the court system would be hopelessly bogged down ... if the losers were entitled to endless rehearings of the facts. With scientific and medical questions, however, it means a reversal of the logic by which science moves.

(note to self: "... there are
four primary facets or canons (i.e., rules or
principles that guide a field of study) that define
the scientific method. They are empiricism,
determinism, parsimony, and testability." https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/469...
Aster shootdown over Sydney in 1955
The IF community recognized these problems early (late 90's/early 2000's) and mitigated them with helpers and a lot of playtesting.

This is not really an issue in any games released in the last 20 years.

I think for me the worst "guess the verb" blocker was in Enchanter with the mouse hole and how to get the parchment out of it. Who the hell is going to think of "REACH IN HOLE"?
Pricing AI products is an engineering nightmare
> No body was jailed for gross negligence

Jailing people means you'll have a hard time finding people willing to make hard decisions, and when you do, you may find they're not the right people for the job.

Punishing people for making mistakes means very few will be willing to take responsibility.

It will also mean that people will desperately cover up mistakes rather than being open about it, meaning the mistakes do not get corrected. We see this in play where manufacturers won't fix problems because fixing a problem is an admission of liability for the consequences of those problems, and punishment.

Even the best, most conscientious people make mistakes. Jailing them is not going to be helpful, it will just make things worse.
EU will regulate themselves straight out of economic productivity.
Suntrain – Energy Trainsmission
Quaternions Visualisation
The basis for this statement holds, but what the statement implies does not.

That is, the numbers are a subset of the rationals, but it does not follow that we can't describe a rational with a number. In fact the rationals between [0, 1) have a well known numbering,

[ 0/1, 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, 3/4, 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5,
1/6, 5/6, 1/7, 2/7, 3/7, 4/7, 5/7, 6/7, 1/8, 3/8, ... ]

where one increments the denominator and then goes through all numerators but keeps only numerators which have GCD 1 with the denominator (since if they share a factor they were already listed).
I asked this question of Duncan Dec 22!

If you are interested I highly recommend this + your favorite llm. It does not do everything but is far superior to some highly expensive tools, in flexibility and repeatability. https://github.com/devbisme/skidl
When you say you are tired of bureaucracy, what you are saying is that you are sick of listening to the voices of your fellow citizens. I would change the language so as to not slander the bureaucracy or the people who work there, who are usually just good citizens trying their best.

It's a good idea though, overall I think. Eventually you could do more than the public sector, the private sector has some terrible processes to navigate as well.
What is the relationship between indie hackers / devs and rock stars in your view? Are you implying they are the same? Different?
The bigger question if it will affect Apple's sales in the region.
Researchers 'crack the code' for quelling electromagnetic interference
At first glance I didn’t like this article (due to a long history of poorly executed redesigns for design’s sake) so I gave it a few minutes and reread it, and now I like it.

Sometimes when reviewing people’s redesigns, I can’t see the beautiful thing that they’re envisioning, only the trough. And over the years I’ve noticed that a lot of redesigns never make it out of the trough. I like the idea of doing small things quickly, I think that’s good, but that’s also technical debt if the redesign never results in a benefit.
I'm with Dedekind on this one -- Cantor's work, by and large, was hot garbage and led and continues to power some of the most naval-gazing mathematics ever invented.

Dedekind had a great idea that at its heart was a constructive notion of what a "number" was in terms of our ability to approximate it. That's the core of intuitionism, and after a long dark interval has finally come back into prominence in modern mathematics.
I’ve been largely skeptical since I finished the AI concentration in CompSci for my undergrad.

I’m gonna prob draw flak from this audience for saying this… but the con is right there in the name.

Artificial Intelligence.

We don’t know what intelligence truly is. And we damn sure don’t know what an “artificial” one is. But there’s a spark that it strikes in us. An inner curiosity. A fear. Who are we? Will we always be the smartest thing on the planet? The last one seems to particularly strike a fear in those with an outsized reliance on a perceived intelligence for their self worth. Elon?… does he read HN?

I’m not just being cutesy with language here. It’s a field that natural draws in those technologies that appear to be human, but may or may not be useful. That’s been happening since Eliza. Marvin Minsky even admitted to playing this card for grant money. Notice it’s not a field named after a particular technology. And it’s certainly not aimed after solving a specific problem. Anybody on here ever mention that what they wanted billions for was to create shakespearean plays in the style Tupac or what not? I’m guessing not.

And I’m not saying that I’m immune to the fascination. That’s why I studied it in undergrad.

It’s not that these technologies are worthless. ChatGPT is very impressive in what it does and if you’d asked me 5 years ago if we would have had this by now, I wouldn’t ever had thought so.

And it’s not that the field doesn’t concern me. But my major concern isn’t AI super intelligence. It’s AI super stupidity. Like when some glamor chasing politician gets sold a crappy product and it shuts down a power grid or goes awry on a major weapon system. I’m embarassed to admit that the Skynet scenario is actually potentially forseeable in our future.

And that Rocko’s Basilisk nonsense? Come on, guys. It’s like we’re not even
trying anymore…

And I’m gonna call my shot here. You know what’s far and above the most useful technique in my experience that could at all be called AI?

Bayes Law. From the 1700’s or whatever.

And Bayes didn’t even publish his own work. Doesn’t take a billion dollars of capital or a supply of GPU’s for that one.

Coincidence? Prob not.

edit: Marvin needed his last name.
To a first approximation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZB7xEonjsc

Less funny in real life. Sometimes the jizzless thing falls off with impeccably bad timing. Right when things go boom. People get injured (no deaths yet). Limp home early. Allies let down. Shipping routes elongate by a sad multiple. And it even affects you directly as you pay extra for that Dragon silicon toy you ordered from China.
My strategy has been to implement in / follow along with llamaindex, dig into the details, and then implement that in a less abstracted, easily understandable codebase / workflow.

Was driven to do so because it was not as easy as I'd like to override a prompt. You can see how they construct various prompts for the agents, it's pretty basic text/template kind of stuff
>It’s called gaming the metrics and it’s totally a sign of dysfunction at the org level.

Have you seen actually dysfunctional organization?

Millions being burned over ridiculous mismanagement. Bureaucracy which takes up vast amounts of time. Tracking of completely meaningless metrics. An IT department which needs to be "worked around". Managers who's only interaction point is them asking you what they should write into their MS Project document. Constant shifting away of responsibilities. People making completely unqualified decisions over the heads of the actual people being concerned. Inter department conflicts.

Really I could go on, but a bit of massaging metrics (which are totally irrelevant anyway and their trackers can be safely fired) is not particularly bad.