skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for reading. I'm glad you enjoyed it. We have a large group of people with such diverse life and career experiences that I think it adds value to give some real-life color to some of these discussions and the parent comment immediately reminded me of my own experiences.

To answer your question about volatility of the nitroglycerin I'll lean on the safety information that we were given back in the day. We were told that there was minimal danger of explosion from the sweating sticks or the materials that absorbed the nitroglycerin because it required significant energy to initiate an explosion. That energy was to be supplied by the blasting caps. They said we could burn the sticks like firewood without risk of explosion since the nitroglycerin was in a nitro-soaked sawdust matrix wrapped in durable paper. They warned against jumping on the burning sticks or throwing things on the fire if you were trying to build or extinguish the fire though since they might be unstable.

Safe handling meant that we were to keep blasting caps separate from "powder" sticks. In normal road transport that was easy since each had separate locked magazines. Once you're in the field, as in this case, you just carried both together and followed normal safety guidelines to minimize the possibility of an accidental detonation of the primer cap. That meant that you minimized impact on the backpack and the copper jackets of the caps and insured that all the cap wires were twisted (shorted) so stray static electricity wouldn't be an issue. The caps all had a two-wire conductor to the primer which needed to be twisted (shunted or shorted) to protect from stray voltages that could cause the cap to fire. They told us that the cap could fire with less than 0.5V and that in the right atmospheric conditions normal static electricity could pop one so it was critical to make sure all were twisted. Normal procedure was to leave them twisted until you were preparing to fire the charge and then you would connect them to the blaster which supplied the voltage to pop the cap.

The blasting caps had approximately the same energy as a .30 caliber bullet impact so in theory you could shoot a stick of dynamite and cause it to explode.

It's been 40+ years since I worked out there and I still wouldn't trade the experience for anything else. It was foundational experience in field operations that set me up for a long career as a geophysicist.
Yes, same way that the image model outputs have already permeated the blogosphere and pushed out some artists, the other models will all bury us under a pile of auto-generated code.

We will yearn for the pre-GPT years at some point, like we yearn for the internet of the late 90s/early 2000s. Not for a while though. We're going through the early phases of GPT today, so it hasn't been taken over by the traditional power players yet.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41520465
> Presumably they don't want to release this so that it is raw and unfiltered and can better monitor for cases of manipulation or deviation from training.

My take was:

1. A genuine, un-RLHF'd "chain of thought" might contain things that shouldn't be told to the user. E.g., it might at some point think to itself, "One way to make an explosive would be to mix $X and $Y" or "It seems like they might be able to poison the person".

2. They want the "Chain of Thought" as much as possible to reflect the actual reasoning that the model is using; in part so that they can understand what the model is actually thinking. They fear that if they RLHF the chain of thought, the model will self-censor in a way which undermines their ability to see what it's really thinking

3. So, they RLHF only the final output, not the CoT, letting the CoT be as frank within itself as any human; and post-filter the CoT for the user.
The “sugar” in “high blood sugar” is glucose. Your body converts starches (say rice or bread) into glucose quite quickly which elevates your “blood sugar” in the short term. If you are healthy your body can quickly turn glucose into glycogen or fats or utilize it as an energy source but if you have Type I or Type II diabetes that process is impaired.

If you cut back radically on carbohydrate consumption, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet

you certainly will lower your blood sugar, your body will now use proteins and fat for energy as much as it can and produce both ketone bodies and glucose from those other macronutrients as well as stored fat and muscle tissues.

Table sugar and ‘high fructose corn syrup’ are roughly equivalent to 50% fructose and 50% glucose so far as your metabolism are concerned. Certainly fruit (rich in fructose and sometimes sugar alcohols) is good for you in moderation but probably not in excess. Your metabolism is certainly capable of converting fructose and some sugar alcohols into glucose. The story of what fructose does to you is much less studied than glucose. Certainly excessive amounts of sucrose and HFCS contribute empty calories that raise your blood sugar.
In Haskell, that's usually that's done using `do` syntax.

do
a <- somePartialResult
b <- partialFunction1 a
c <- partialFunction2 a b
return c

where we assume signatures like

somePartialResult : Either<A, Error>
partialFunction1 : A -> Either<B, Error>
partialFunction2 : A -> B -> Either<C, Error>

this overall computation has a signature Either<C, Error>. The way it works is that the first failing computation (the first Either that's actually Left-y) will short-circuit and become the final result value. Only if all of the partial computations succeed (are Right-y) will the final result by Right(c).

In Haskell we don't have an early return syntax like `return` and function scope. Instead, we construct something equivalent using `do` syntax. This can be a little weightier than `return`, but the upside is that you can construct other variants of things like early returns that can be more flexible.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Let's hope that MAD will deliver lasting world peace.
If only they had let him into Art school...
>crafting an alchemy...that are pretty grind-heavy to puzzle out on your own

Or it could be you have a minor goal (eg, 'what would X + Y be') but first you need to GET x and y. You're not spoiling what you're doing. The other day I was playing Infinite Craft and wanted to test something (what WOULD freedom + fries be; for those wondering, freedom + french fries is America), but first I needed french fries. I'm not too interested in figuring out how to get them on my own, so I looked that up.

In open ended games, wikis can be used to help accomplish goals you set for yourself, since they tend to have minimal direction. They take the place of, eg, hints on where to go next. Some games have official wikis (like Little Alchemy/Little Alchemy 2), even!
> "...they're not capable of thinking or coming up with novel ideas."

This claim is unfalsifiable given common definitions of "thinking" and "coming up with novel ideas".
I am a C# developer and I know it's basically .Net as shell, but I have no clue what to do when in PowerShell. I'm always lost, and without searching the internet I get to nothing. In Bash/Zsh I quickly reach my goals.

I just think coming from a Linux background, it's very hard to wrap my mind around the mindset of PowerShell which is just quite different from Bash.
Option-K: AI-Powered Instant CLI
For some reason my mind maps concepts from chess onto the real world and the other way around. The novel AI ideas in chess are usually combinations of several... well... bad ideas. People usually take on one bad idea at a time and try to make it work. If they succeed it is quite surprising because objectively it was a bad idea.

Our thinking is a lot less error prone than that of the LLM's but we have to study for years to absorb prior art that LLM's mostly receive at birth by osmosis. It won't be able to take on the truly stupid ideas but it can combine large numbers of the somewhat stupid.

Like a chess position with lots of possible moves followed by lots of possible responses.
I have access to the model via the web client and it does show the thought process along the way. It shows a little icon that says things like "Examining parser logic", "Understanding data structures"...

However, once the answer is complete the chain of thought is lost
>She was very adapt at wading into thorny blackberry bushes and eating only the ripest berries

That's a handy skill. Once you taste about-to-fall-off ripe ones, you can never go back.
I asked GPT-4o and I got the correct answer in one shot:

> Only one Monty Python member, Michael Palin, has been knighted. He was honored in 2019 for his contributions to travel, culture, and geography. His extensive work as a travel documentarian, including notable series on the BBC, earned him recognition beyond his comedic career with Monty Python (NERDBOT) (Wikipedia).

> Other members, such as John Cleese, declined honors, including a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 1996 and a peerage later on (8days).

Maybe you just asked the question wrong. My prompt was "which monty python actors have been knighted. look it up and give the reasons why. be brief".
No wifi - it's web serial so connects locally via the USB connection when you plug the iron (or base station) into your computer. It's only "web" in the sense that it uses a browser and web technologies for the GUI, not "web" as in over the internet or wireless.
The people from over 20,000 years ago came from the northern ice bridge, however. My suggestion is that these people got civilization ideas from the Islanders at around 1500BC. They didn't get a full line of communication with the old world but enough ideas were taken to kick start a civilization.
They partnered with Microsoft, remember?

1985 – Windows 1.0

1987 – Windows 2.0

1990 – Windows 3.0

1992 – Windows 3.1

1995 – Windows 95

1998 – Windows 98

2000 – Windows ME (Millennium Edition)

2001 – Windows XP

2006 – Windows Vista

2009 – Windows 7

2012 – Windows 8

2013 – Windows 8.1

2015 – Windows 10

2021 – Windows 11
The one-shot models aren't going away for anyone who wants to program the chain-of-thought themselves
The heating element and temperature sensor are also in the tips themselves in both Pinecil and the Miniware TS80/TS100 designs. Every modern 'commercial' soldering iron (Hakko T12 line, JBC, many others) has moved this way too.
How do you get access? I don’t have it and am a ChatGPT plus subscriber.
Prometheus scrapes metrics at constant intervals. How does being serverless helps here?
This doesn't feel like GPT-5, the training data cutoff is Oct 2023 which is the same as the other GPT-4 models and it doesn't seem particularly "larger" as much as "runs differently". Of course it's all speculation one way or the other.
TL;DR: Yes and it's creating "It's X and limited by Y, but it works" projects

In web front-end, the same pattern crops up repeatedly. Two examples:

* Elm[1]: It's brutally functional and limited by purity, but it works

* htmx[2]: It's grug-brained[3] and limited by that, but it works

I'll let others enumerate web frameworks. On desktop, software for uxn and Varvara[4] by Hundred Rabbits fits the same pattern:

* 64k of RAM and limited to 4 colors, but it works

* Created when Xcode was painful to install on a boat over pre-Starlink satellite internet

Who knew rage-quitting could be so productive? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1]: https://elm-lang.org/

[2]: https://htmx.org/

[3]: Said to be by the HTMX creator: https://grugbrain.dev/

[4]: https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/roms.html
That's a bit like saying there's no European civilization, just a bunch of different European civilizations sharing a broadly similar culture.

Or maybe ancient Greece, with its city-state structure is the better comparison.
My dull chef's knife got caught when I chopping an onion and nearly lopped my fingertip off. I was not a very good chef that night.
I also gave this a chuckle.

Background: https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/how-many-rs-in-strawberry-this...
I'm using the Android ChatGPT app (and am in the Android Beta program, though not sure if that matters)
Impressive safety metrics!

I wish OAI include "% Rejections on perfectly safe prompts" in this table, too.
Policy and the Passive Voice
How did we get to the point where Experian can have trash security practices and leak the private information of millions but you can't out a sex predator online? Is this hanging entirely on motive?
Even though there's of course no guarantee of people getting these chain of thought traces, or whatever one is to call them, I can imagine these being very useful for people learning competitive mathematics, because it must in fact give the full reasoning, and transformers in themselves aren't really that smart, usually, so it's probably feasible for a person with very normal intellectual abilities to reproduce these traces with practice.
Berkeley Tech Clubs Are Broken. Can They Be Fixed?
How could it fail to solve some maths problems if it has a method for reasoning through things?
> They are going to literally own a large portion of mars and ... (sic)

https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/out...

Article II

Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.

...

Article VI

States Parties to the Treaty shall bear international responsibility for national activities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, whether such activities are carried on by governmental agencies or by non-governmental entities, and for assuring that national activities are carried out in conformity with the provisions set forth in the present Treaty. The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty. When activities are carried on in outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, by an international organization, responsibility for compliance with this Treaty shall be borne both by the international organization and by the States Parties to the Treaty participating in such organization.
no, but with a shitty laptop it can be hard to be a good developer. having dull knives will make cooking experience, slow, dangerous, and unpleasant. having a boat-car will make it difficult to practice any sort of skilled driving.

it's not that you can't overcome adversity and do the thing anyhow, but you're certainly not making it easy. In all cases, using the proper tool allows you to remove the extra difficulty factor and focus on that task at hand.

But also, cutting a tomato with a sharp knife is way, way easier than with a dull knife. Same with soldering. Ignores the rest of the parts of being a chef, but you get the comparison.
Anytime I see an argument of the form X is just Y an alarm bell goes off in my head. While it is descriptive of the components, these arguments ignore the possibility of emergent complexity. Sometimes things are more than just the sum of their parts.

The sun is just a bunch of hydrogen.

A computer is just a bunch of transistors.

Humans are just a bunch of cells.

An artificial neural network is just a bunch of matrix multiplications.

I personally think LLMs are extremely limited and overhyped. But this form of argument seems incorrect to me since it can be used to argue that LLMs cannot do things we already know they can do.
Just did some preliminary testing on decrypting some ROT cyphertext which would have been viable for a human on paper. The output was pretty disappointing: lots of "workish" steps creating letter counts, identifying common words, etc, but many steps were incorrect or not followed up on. In the end, it claimed to check its work and deliver an incorrect solution that did not satisfy the previous steps.

I'm not one to judge AI on pratfalls, and cyphers are a somewhat adversarial task. However, there was no aspect of the reasoning that seemed more advanced or consistent than previous chain-of-thought demos I've seen. So the main proof point we have is the paper, and I'm not sure how I'd go from there to being able to trust this on the kind of task it is intended for. Do others have patterns by which they get utility from chain of thought engines?

Separately, chain of thought outputs really make me long for tool use, because the LLM is often forced to simulate algorithmic outputs. It feels like a commercial chain-of-thought solution like this should have a standard library of functions it can use for 100% reliability on things like letter counts.
Yes, my personal goal is to ensure that basically everything we do in the Oxide "stlouis" branch of illumos eventually goes upstream to illumos-gate where it filters down to everyone else!
Eh this makes me very, very excited for the future. I want results, I don’t care if they come from humans or AI. That being said we might all be out of jobs soon…
I think we may discover that model do some cryptic mess inside instead of some clean reasoning.
I don't think the iPhone is providing the hearing assistance, just the UI for configuring the AirPod Pro's hearing aid functionality.
Not at all... they're still so incapable of so much. And even when they do advance, they can be tremendous tools of synthesis and thought at an unparalleled scale.

"A good human plus a machine is the best combination" — Kasparov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metformin:

> It works by decreasing glucose production in the liver, increasing the insulin sensitivity of body tissues, and increasing GDF15 secretion, which reduces appetite and caloric intake.

Emphasis mine. So, looks like the actual aging deceleration is just the cliche, that it's healthy to not be overweight?
Looks serious: https://www.youtube.com/@EverydayAstronaut
Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with Americas
Isn't that still a build step?
Love the eggcorn as it works in well in context [bomb fire / bonfire]
"Better" is definitely the wrong word, but the jist is sound with the right framing. A better tool often allows you to do work safer, and that is what was attempted to be conveyed. Applying the approach to one of your examples, a faster car doesn't make you a better driver, but a car with more safety features makes your driving experience safer than one with less.
The hell and horror of cow attacks: 'I told my husband to leave me to die'
Sure, some call it Infrared, some call it terahertz radar.

The linked paper talks about 300 GHz SAR, which is generally the lower limit of infrared.
It's true that Maya are still around today. But there is a legitimate big mystery of why their large-scale civilization collapsed, well before the arrival of Europeans. I think what you heard in school was some kind of telephone-game-like corruption of the legitimate question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse
I'm not sure what that has to do with better vs worse tools. Expensive knives get dull too. Good chefs, on the other hand, keep their equipment in working order regardless of its value.
Also you now have to pay for tokens you can't see, and just have to trust that OpenAI is using them economically.
What, me worry?
Some things are really hard to appropriately abstract, but there's so much similarity we can't help but be tempted to try.

Soemthing that I wrote at $WORK recently was a data-oriented exponentially smoothed reservoir sampling order statistic randomized splay tree.

All of those components exist individually. Even picking on two of them though; given a tree implementation it's trivial (as a human) to create an analogous order-statistic tree. In any pseudo-mainstream programming language though, especially at a system level, how do you tack on the "order-statistic" behavior to an arbitrary tree?

It's not too bad if you additional require some interface the primary tree needs to adhere to. That interface is, necessarily, biased toward the needs of an order-statistic tree though. There isn't actually that much difference between implementing a tree which adheres to the interface and one which just does every operation manually. Plus, there are some allocation questions and other inefficiencies (or, alternatively, unsoundness) that level of abstraction introduces which you can avoid by writing the whole thing from scratch.

Bringing it back to the $GOOG library, the problem is that you have a lot of code which _looks_ like it's the same, but it's impossible to make it actually _be_ the same without heavy lifting for callers of that library.

Taking those monolithic frameworks (e.g., inadvisedly popular rate-limiting shenanigans) and turning them into libraries of helpful utilities often helps. General solutions are harder to come by.
It's RL so that means it's going to be great on tasks they created for training but not so much on others.

Impressive but the problem with RL is that it requires knowledge of the future.
>If there wasn't something like that what would you be looking forward to?

First of all, I don't want to be poor. I know many of you are thinking something along the lines of "I am smart, I was doing fine before, so I will definitely continue to in the future".

That's the unearned hubris I was referring to. We got very lucky as programmers, and now the gravy train seems to be coming to an end. And not just for programmers, the other white-collar and creative jobs will suffer too. The artists have already started experiencing the negative effects of AI.

EDIT: I understand you guys might not agree with my comments. But don't you thinking that flagging them is going a bit too far?
Hmm, are you sure it was using the o1 model and not gpt4o? I've been using the o1 model and it does consistently well at solving rotation ciphers.
So use an older version of the library, or stop using the library, or work around it. Libraries with such bad behavior are going to be infrequently used, or abandoned quickly regardless.
I'm aware of them (as any archaeologist remotely interested in the early Americas should be), but they're not completely established parts of the chronology, particularly Santa Elina. People tend to be extremely conservative on this subject because there's such a long history of scams, pseudoscience, and unintentionally misleading results that ended up being false. That results in an extremely high standard of evidence sites have to meet.

However, that's a wildly different topic than what the grandparent comment is talking about. I'm interpreting their comment in a charitable light because interpreting it more broadly quickly gets into hyperdiffusionism territory.
AI companies should be AI-first