skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LLMs are milking us of knowledge and skills, repackage them and give it back to us. Models interact with the internet, humans and code execution. They are exploring. Lots of exploring now happens in the chat room, a place where ideas are first tried out. With billions of users, the volume of information LLMs collect from us is huge. We bring references, guidance and feedback right into its mouth, the LLM doesn't even need to do anything like crawling.

Imagine how many things we know, things we accumulated in our life experience, that were never written down anywhere. That information was lost to others. But now we use LLM assistants, so they get to be in the loop and collect tidbits of human life experience that is not written on the internet. And soon they will also work on audio/video and travel with us everywhere, seeing what we show them.
Imagine bragging about 74% accuracy in any other field of software. You'd be laughed out of the room. But somehow it's accepted in "AI".
So I am tiny fish, https://www.linkedin.com/company/crime-de-coder/, so not quite sure what typical impressions look like for the big influencers (currently my company webpage has 2700 followers). LinkedIn lets you grab your stats for posts over the past year -- have only recently heard the thing about urls, I pretty much always shared posts with URLs. (My company webpage for along time was not indexed at all on Bing, but my LinkedIn posts did come up.)

Here are my stats aggregated to domain for impressions for all domains I posted 2+ over the past year. I suspected youtube links are not promoted, and this confirms this. Also the local Raleigh newspaper is not doing so hot. But otherwise my NO URL posts don't do any better offhand than the linked ones.

| domain | count | mean | std | min | 25% | 50% | 75% | max |
|:--------------------------------------|--------:|-------:|------:|------:|------:|------:|------:|------:|
| crimede-coder.com | 61 | 1304 | 1261 | 345 | 625 | 854 | 1380 | 7179 |
| andrewpwheeler.com | 53 | 1309 | 820 | 481 | 813 | 1074 | 1501 | 4463 |
| NO URL | 13 | 937 | 489 | 453 | 692 | 850 | 909 | 2413 |
| www.tandfonline.com | 6 | 1655 | 682 | 967 | 1119 | 1572 | 1960 | 2764 |
| journals.sagepub.com | 6 | 1613 | 983 | 669 | 839 | 1363 | 2207 | 3134 |
| link.springer.com | 5 | 3029 | 2810 | 1478 | 1722 | 1753 | 2154 | 8038 |
| github.com | 5 | 873 | 170 | 658 | 838 | 864 | 874 | 1134 |
| www.newsobserver.com | 5 | 496 | 144 | 363 | 365 | 459 | 626 | 670 |
| www.crimrxiv.com | 4 | 1990 | 1678 | 489 | 585 | 1871 | 3275 | 3730 |
| onlinelibrary.wiley.com | 4 | 1851 | 1258 | 817 | 1276 | 1452 | 2028 | 3684 |
| www.carolinascrimeanalysis.org | 4 | 988 | 198 | 799 | 850 | 956 | 1094 | 1241 |
| www.youtube.com | 3 | 457 | 160 | 281 | 388 | 496 | 545 | 595 |
| theconversation.com | 2 | 2308 | 1151 | 1494 | 1901 | 2308 | 2715 | 3123 |
| crimesciencejournal.biomedcentral.com | 2 | 2158 | 987 | 1460 | 1809 | 2158 | 2507 | 2856 |
| papers.ssrn.com | 2 | 1719 | 387 | 1445 | 1582 | 1719 | 1856 | 1993 |
| alexchohlaswood.com | 2 | 1505 | 585 | 1091 | 1298 | 1505 | 1712 | 1919 |
| www.jratcliffe.net | 2 | 1349 | 552 | 958 | 1153 | 1349 | 1544 | 1740 |
| osf.io | 2 | 1138 | 465 | 809 | 973 | 1138 | 1303 | 1468 |
| academic.oup.com | 2 | 874 | 379 | 606 | 740 | 874 | 1008 | 1143 |
| asc41.org | 2 | 841 | 665 | 371 | 606 | 841 | 1076 | 1312 |
| www.amazon.com | 2 | 803 | 151 | 696 | 749 | 803 | 856 | 910 |
| americansebp.org | 2 | 798 | 627 | 354 | 576 | 798 | 1020 | 1242 |

So no experiment, but some hard numbers at least!
Not only who create git, but why specifically they created git.
A simple counter example: Bootstraping in statistics or any resampling method for that matter, can help us understand things about the underlying distribution, even though we do not know it.

Update: typo
Of course they lack building blocks for full intelligence. They are good at certain tasks, and counting letters is emphatically not one of them. They should be tested and compared on the kind of tasks they're fit for, and so the kind of tasks they will be used in solving, not tasks for which they would be misemployed to begin with.
`Get-CimInstance Win32_Processor` on Powershell Core
You can read more about my thinking around the tool here: https://thelastwave.substack.com/p/associative-data-structur...
I use a lenovo laptop, a t15g2 because of 4x dimm slots that let me fit 128gb of ram, and yes, I tend to use that even under linux. I tend to do work and personal business across this device, which includes full separate firefox profiles for each, usually 4-5, and it's not uncommon to see it or chrome/chromium actually using 60-70gb, not just reserved, of ram alone each connected to gapps, teams/orfice365, whatever needed for work.

Throw in almost always using a windoze vm for windoze things for another 8gb, at times other vm's using 4-8gb doing various things for testing, libreoffice with 20 complex spreadsheets, steam games, normal use really, all adds up to a lot of at minimum reserved memory far exceeding physical, at times things ballooning within that, and thus at times getting cranky to still oom occasionally.

I rather wonder who actually uses boxes with only 8gb of ram some still ship with.
the one in your language's alphabet, not just anything that looks similar
The Mitochondria Chronicles of Melatonin and ATP: Guardians of Phase Separation
It's _relatively_ easy, I think to filter out sites with a large proportion of low quality ai-generated glurge.

Then you're left with a lot of AI generated or assisted content that has quite often been filtered and modified by humans, so that might mitigate some of the problems that cause model collapse because the filtered content _should_ better reflect reality or desirable output?
https://archive.ph/pW6WV
They also got rid of most of their US based unionized employees recently.

https://union.place/@fastmailunited/112672408714595554
> No team is happy and productive

I have at least two counterexamples in my personal experience.
I just read this article about Phish and the Dead at the Sphere and had the same confusion: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/29/reckoning-with...
> A year or two beyond the competition, at this point, is their moat.

That doesn't seem like much of a moat.

> They have GPT-5 in the pipeline and are likely hard at work planning and prepping for GPT-6.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's an element of diminishing returns here. The improvement from GPT4 to GPT5 is likely much less than GPT3 to GTP4.
maybe Reddit has more value than XYZ?
> The world has far more unsuccessful jerks than successful ones.

That's not a very useful metric. Now, if the proportion of successful jerks vs non-successful jerks were much lower than that of successful nice people vs. non-successful ones, that might be interesting to look at as a starting point.

That said, what does "successful" even mean, and why is it something worth pursuing?
> Developing on Windows can be frustrating

As a primarily Windows developer of video games I find developing on Linux far more frustrating, fragile, and error prone than Windows.

However it's less about which is better or worse, and more about the devil you know. Setting up a brand new macOS for development is excruciating. Learning Linux is an extremely long, time consuming, and painful experience. But once you've built up some scar tissue it doesn't seem so bad!

> The cleanest way is to just use Linux on Windows

Hard hard hard disagree. I could not possibly disagree more strongly. I violently and disrespectfully disagree.

> The other option is to use Windows proper

This is the way. Don't use Cygwin or MinGW-64. That is bad advice.

I write a lot of C++ code. It typically needs to run on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android. My experience is that Windows developers are generally content to step out of their comfort zone and work on macOS and Linux "natively". My personal lived experience is that Linux-first developers are far and away the least likely to even think of Windows or other platforms. They frequently refuse to request a Windows machine so they can even test another platform. Which means I have to fix all their broken code, grumble grumble. If you hard coded /usr/lib or similar you're a bad person.

My recommendation is to simply learn Windows and do things the native Windows way. Stop assuming all platforms are Linux. Cross-platform is a solved and relatively simple problem. Trying to force everything to behave The Linux Way is pain and suffering.

Personally I think "The Linux Way" is generally quite bad. Try something different! Be open to new experiences! Don't dip your toes in the water, jump in the deep end! You might learn a thing or two. And who knows, you may even discover it's quite pleasant.
If you encounter this, a good fix is to break out handbrake and to re-encode your files as web-optimized mp4. That helps with skipping video back and forth and quick loading.

The other thing to check is your transcoding setup. Sometimes the settings are not optimal and can cause playback issues.
The question is how many of them are willing to review and read these publications. Of course as an individual scientist (not me, but someone who does experiments), I'd love to capitalize on my work, even if it is unsuccessful (in the sense of null result), by publishing it. But do I, and scientific community in general, care about null results? I'd say mostly no. Null results, if universally published, would overwhelm already overwhelmed publication system.

If you think it will be helpful to others to know about specific failure, put it in a blogpost or even on arxiv. Or talk about it at conference (for CS, workshop).

Also, if we use publications as a measure of scientists success, and we do, is a scientist with a lot of null results really successful?
Looks good!

I really wish folks had, back in the day, gone in on writing their own chrome sync services. I don't know what the state of the world is today, but for a long time it was a not-that-wild set of extensions atop XMPP. https://github.com/valurhrafn/chrome-sync-server

I don't know what Chrome does today. Writing extensions to manage all this state seems fine, sensible. But I wish we really could go deep & really supplant the actual cloud system the browsers use, as sweet as it is that we can strap on this other sync mechanism thanks to extensions.
No it is not "just status code":

Successful responses (200 – 299)
Client error responses (400 – 499)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status

I am not monitoring it per se - but all the tooling we use counts it as an error.

My endpoint is not lying - request is a question "Is there an entity B linked to entity A" - hence answer is always there and it is either "true" or "false", I am not requesting "give me entity B with Id xyz", that is a different endpoint that can return 404 nor prob.
Thank you for sharing your insights. Very helpful. Yes you got it right. I would change the landing page then to make it more visible.
Maybe, but Amazon is already from the previous generation and so by your metric another is due. Good luck starting it.
https://archive.ph/G8ikO
I wish that too.
Besides missing the actual testing (!), the staged rollout (!), looks like they also weren't fuzzing this kernel driver that routinely takes instant worldwide updates. Oops.
I'd rather deal with smart jerks than nice dolts any day. But maybe my experience with jerks is too limited. I've known few, but they were smart. And smartness is my most significant factor in how much I like a person, even if they're being a jerk to me. :p
I think the HN stance is a bit more nuanced: it may depend on the drug. It's pretty clear that not all drugs have the same health risks and addiction potential, so I'm not surprised people don't treat them all the same way.

As an easy example: I don't consider myself an alcoholic and even hate being drunk, yet I would be bummed to never be able to have a drink again.

> I think it starts with educating youth, with proper campaigns. Make it clear living as an addict is not something you want.

Indeed. But I'm not convinced that banning the substances in addition to this education is actually useful.

> But at start we need to decide if we want these drugs in our society or not.

That's a good question. But, like it or not, these drugs are in our society today. I don't see any practical means of getting rid of them. Outlawing them clearly not only doesn't work, but actually has some pretty terrible side-effects of its own: health-related (via adulterants) as well as social (drug-related gang crime).
Your comment implied other airlines are worse because of two anecdotes. You simply like spirit because it’s cheaper, and that’s ok. It has nothing to do with me not wanting to mix up with “other middle class people”. Somehow you assume I’m not middle class because I stated that Spirit is very basic.

Also I just happens to be looking at flights and the difference between Sprit and American is minimal. Add a carryon to Spirit and it might be over the American flight.
Training on ai-generated data isn't a problem, and has been routinely done by everyone for 18 mo +.

The issue is training on 'indiscriminate' ai-generated data. This just leads to more and more degenerate results. No one is doing this however, there is always some kind of filtering to select which generated data to use for training.
So the finding of that paper are entirely not surprising, and frankly, intuitive and already well known.
Show HN: Fynspo. – Shop clothes that match your taste
Hey HN! I'm Dhruv from fynspo. We're building a unified app to shop for clothes across any brand, and search based on outfits personalized to your style.

We've been working on our first version for about 3 weeks and we're excited to finally have it published on the Apple App Store.

This idea was born when we participated in a SPCxOpenAI hackathon a few months back and built an early version using GPT-4V. I've found that most technical solutions should stay away from using LLMs, they suck. Instead, creating a pipeline consisting of smaller ML models trained for specific tasks yields more accurate, cheaper, and faster results.

I’d love for you to try it out and share your feedback. We are making rapid improvements for our next update and any thoughts or suggestions would be very appreciated!
The official story according to who?
I feel the same way. I reject all this kind of stuff, as in real life it doesn't work very well and doesn't solve any problems I have. My light switches have never failed. Neither are setting timers and playing music things that vex me. Computers fail all the time, either literally, or by popping up some irrelevancy that gets in the way of what I want to do.

I want dumb devices that I directly control and that do not try to second guess what I mean or suddenly behave differently or have to "restart" because an update got pushed out, or have to deliver an advertisement before they will do what I asked.

I'll never have an Alexa or anything like it. But, I get that some people like gizmos and their perception is different. They are welcome to do whatever they want.
How is a layman supposed to even know that it's testing on that? All they know is it's a large language model. It's not unreasonable they should expect it to be good at things having to do with language, like how many letters are in a word.

Seems to me like a legit question for a young child to answer or even ask.
Products need to evolve with time. Gmail is not same as 0 years ago even though core functionality is email. Same for Google maps, Same for Amazon Prime etc. But Alexa has not really evolved.
I’m at a point where I no longer call these things chips. I don’t know what they are, they have pins but to me the precision and machinery used is at the very least on a scale of atomic design. It should not be possible for automated machines to fabricate these things. Yet here we are.
How to make people who were there to witness it and migrated projects from subversion before GitHub was a thing feel old. Twas only yesterday dammit
It simply won't work.

Unless you are an actor or super outgoing, listening to audio/video recordings of people is going to be boring. Especially video.

People need people to play off, not just talking to camera. They can push for these, but it won't take off.

Besides you know it will end up just coming down to looks, how organized someones house is and personality with these things. But I guess many job interviews are like that already.
>The reason I use the things is because every more modern device I have seen or tried is inferior.

The Linux advocate's obsession with ThinkPads is baffling.

Lenovo, through their phone and consumer device divisions mainly, has been accused of more GPL violations than practically every other company on Earth combined and that's only slight hyperbole.

Plus, all of the security and privacy violations which make Microsoft look like a concerned and caring best friend.

I suppose seeing sticker-clad ThinkPads at conferences makes it easy to see who is cosplaying as someone who cares, like a speaker at an PETA meeting arriving in a (SECOND HAND, BRAH! I didn't buy this NEW! GAWH!) fur coat.
This gives me heart. I like writing about technical things, but I also like writing about personal things, concerts I went to, whatever. I'm a whole person, and I never liked the pressure (mostly from social media) to build your "brand" around one genre or style of writing. For me, my site is a personal one where I post about things I'm interested in. Ham radio, machine learning, my travels, pay phones, whatever. Maybe less useful for a reader or audience building but...I just like to write and share things.
Yes, even just 8 GB can be fine today depending on what you do.
It is. Strawberry is one token in many tokenziers. The model doesn't have a concept that there are letters there.
Whose society? Western society? What about Mexican society? South america? The native Americans used psychedelic cactus and mushrooms. You seem to be drawing relatively arbitrary lines based on your own biased upbringing

And we don't have to choose only one, that's arbitrary too. We can easily dismantle the current prohibitory system to allow for a system of regulated production and access which would improve safety and reduce overdose deaths. Most overdoses happen because of the nature of the black market. There is no regulation or testing so substances, particularly opioids, can get cut to unknown potencies depending on the person handling it. This makes it a gamble every time a person were to use rather than consuming a measured amount of a pure substance. Prohibition objectively increases harm to individuals, society, and the economy.
You surely are turning into one which as a long time paying user, this is a real shame that you're putting most of your loyal users under the bus.
I hear this a lot but there are vast sums of money thrown at where a model fails the strawberry cases.

Think about math and logic. If a single symbol is off, it’s no good.

Like a prompt where we can generate a single tokenization error at my work, by my very rough estimates, generates 2 man hours of work. (We search for incorrect model responses, get them to correct themselves, and if they can’t after trying, we tell them the right answer, and edit it for perfection). Yes even for counting occurrences of characters. Think about how applicable that is. Finding the next term in a sequence, analyzing strings, etc.
We pay $179 a year for Amazon music. We use Alexa all the time to play music. How is that not a huge revenue success? It sounds like they are not properly factoring that in as a downstream impact.
At Caltech specifically FWIW, the biology major requirements include intro to diff eq (Ma 2),[0] which is usually taken in the first quarter of sophomore year.

[0] https://www.bbe.caltech.edu/academics/biology/undergraduate-...
Ask HN: AI engineers and researchers, TensorFlow, PyTorch or Jax and why?
Which do you use and why do you find it the best for your applications? Are other frameworks like DeepMind Haiku used lots too?

I'm a student who would like to get into deep learning research and have written articles/papers in the past but are not sure if I'm using the most efficient tools at present.
I think it's more that the question is not unlike "is there a double r in strawberry?' or 'is the r in strawberry doubled?'

Even some people will make this association, it's no surprise that LLMs do.
This is an HN thread about co-evolutionary feedback loops. You can start a new thread on your topic of interest.

Multiple, independent responses to your "question" have said almost the same thing. Good luck finding different answers.

If you want to move the conversation forward in your new thread, you can offer evidence of a positive claim, instead of asking others to provide evidence of a negative claim.
I don't think any of that is true. If Costco produced such features in their imaginary product, people may use it. Why? Because Costco has proven itself trustworthy of a blind repeat purchase. You could trust the price you're paying is typical and fair. Amazon on the other hand...
Ask HN: How to prevent lockout from Google Account in case of phone theft?
Unfortunately, in Argentina, there are increasingly more cellphone thefts (more than usual, which is already high), and I'm becoming a bit paranoid. So, I would like to have a plan B. It's not that the value of the device doesn't matter to me (replacing my Pixel 7 will probably cost me a lot), but I'm also concerned about the accesses I have stored on it and want to avoid future problems.

The central access to almost everything in my life is my Gmail account, and I also use Google Auth for 2FA codes (which I have backed up in the cloud). My biggest fear is having my cellphone stolen and, when I try to access my Gmail account from my laptop, not being able to do so for some reason and getting locked out forever.

I thought of using an old Google Pixel that I have and installing only Gmail and Google Auth with my Google account on it to have it as a backup. Is this a good idea? I'm not sure if Android allows the same Google account on two different devices. If this is not a good idea, what do you suggest?
Interesting points thanks, I still disagree on your final point, however I agree more train links needed.
I get the impression that scraping the web isn't nearly as important a source of LLM training data as it used to be.

Everyone is trimming down their training data based on quality - there are plenty of hints about that in the Llama 3.1 paper and Mistral Large 2 announcement.

OpenAI are licensing data from sources like the Associated Press.

Andrej Karpathy said this: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1797313173449764933

> Turns out that LLMs learn a lot better and faster from educational content as well. This is partly because the average Common Crawl article (internet pages) is not of very high value and distracts the training, packing in too much irrelevant information. The average webpage on the internet is so random and terrible it's not even clear how prior LLMs learn anything at all.
GP clearly fails the empathy test when the subject has a different neurological matrix to their own. I wonder if with this, they will attempt to correct that effect now that they've been made aware of it.

Edit: given the downvote, I assume not.
Gmail would be more or less just as successful if it were exactly the same as 10 years ago
I really like to know this as well. What lack of transparancy indeed.
My experience is that smart jerks are actually a sign of having a hierarchy of jerks going all the way to the C-levels.

For every smart jerk there's a manager who endorses that person and who also has a manager who in turn either has the same attitude or "lets them cook" as long as KPIs are fulfilled.

People will generally downplay toxic behaviour if they exhibit it themselves. Not saying that's always the case, but in my experience it's much more common than management being intimidated enough by the jerk to not want to touch them.
The Bouquet Residence – Keeping up appearances in tech