skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are so many comments in this thread that amount to "it's just a fancy title". With respect, I think these comments (and also the original article) are missing the mark. Generally, the staff+ engineer role is accountable for the technical architecture and output of a large team over a long-term horizon.

How large a team? It varies but I'd say at least 25 and often much larger. How long a horizon? As far as the organization can plan. They generally report to someone with a title like Director or VP and advise that person and their staff (typically managers and other staff engineers) or do high-level technical work needed, like evaluating a new technology or system that the team wants to invest in or depend on.

The consequence of this is that the "day to day" of the role is highly variable based on what the org needs at the time. Sometimes it's hands-on development for tricky technical tasks, sometimes it's talent development, sometimes it's dealing with escalations or emergent issues.

I think this high degree of variability plus the fact that a lot of the "staff meeting" work is not visible to line engineers contributes to the confusion about the role.
I think using the word "democratization" is the main issue, how does that even make sense in software? Who is doing the voting? You just "vote" by forking...? I don't get it, you also "vote" by using Microsoft Excel.
Perhaps because that's a strawman argument. "Scaling" doesn't mean double the investment and get double the performance. Even OpenAI's own scaling laws paper doesn't argue that, in the graphs compute increases exponentially. What LLM scaling means is that there hasn't been a wall found where the loss stops decreasing. Increase model size/data/compute and loss will decrease -- so far.
Thanks for the citation, I did my work in the area around 2014 and never looked back. That's a very good summary of the state of the field as I remember it.
Wonderfully written article! Thanks for sharing.
I can know literally nothing about a programming language, ask a LLM to make me functions and a small program to do something, then read documentation and start building off of the base immediately, accelerating my learning allowing me to find new passions for new languages and new perspectives for systems. Whatever's going on in the AI world, assisting with learning curves and learning disabilities is something it's proving strong in. It's given me a way forward with trying new tech. If it can do that for me, it can do that for others.

Diminishing returns for investors maybe, but not for humans like me.
if it's a Mersenne prime, then it could just be 0xFFFFFFFFF...
Did uber leave or did your city scare them off
Using parens to pass type arguments was one of the things that turned me off on Zig. For a language that prioritizes "no hidden control flow," it sure did a lot to make various syntax conventions _masquerade_ as control flow instead.
That’s sad to read. I encourage you to explore games like Sanitarium, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.

I think they have a lot to offer story wise. And very little in terms of being blocked by mechanics.
How are the authors able to discern between vaccine related events, and non-vaccine related events? There is no oracle one can consult to determine this. That’s the entire point of having a second group which was not treated - to have a reference that one can compare against to determine if outcomes were correlated with the treatment. Even then, one cannot say with certainty if the events were caused by the treatment, or simply correlated; to say that all 231 distinct serious outcomes were not caused by the vaccine seems a very extreme statement to make, and can almost be disregarded prima facie; if the researchers were infallibly able to determine what adverse events were caused by the treatment, then why would they need another group to compare to?

Similarly, while there may be ethical concerns with using a placebo, statistics and biology do not care about ethical concerns. There are real results which come from medical treatments, and ignoring them does not make them go away; it just makes us ignorant of them.
We're gonna need a bigger namespace.
He's part right. There's certainly a law of diminishing returns in terms of model size, compute time, dataset size etc. if all that is to be done is to do the same as we are currently doing, only more so.

But what Marcus seems to be assuming is the impossibility of any fundamental theoretical improvements in the field. I see the reverse; the insights being gained from brute-force models have resulted in a lot of promising research.

Transformers are not the be-all and end-all of models, nor are current training methods the best that can ever be achieved. Discounting any possibility of further theoretical developments seems a bold position to take.
Show HN: Turn YouTube videos into X and LinkedIn posts
Yes, I read that. That's why they were put there. Why are they still there?
It's interesting how much this is still the case.

I was just thinking about it myself when considering the new remake of Silent Hill 2. It's mostly beloved for its story and it spends a lot of time on that, and there's of course a lot of survival-horror combat in between. But beyond that there's another horror game (and just game) staple: lots of puzzles.

The SH2 remake aimed to be very faithful so was always going to have a bunch of puzzles (Silent Hill games typically have had a separate difficulty setting just for the "riddles"). But it's one of those things that you still almost have to have, particularly as a horror for some reason.

Silent Hill 2 is actually a case where even the "obligatory" elements operate pretty well in service of its themes, but plenty of the time games have these things just to have them.
I like to joke that microplastics are responsible for social changes, and I don't deny that it has some effect but it is probably minor in the grand scheme of things
This website by a former OpenAI employee was arguing that a combination of hardware scaling, algorithmic improvements, etc would all combine to yield AGI in the near future: https://situational-awareness.ai/
https://meetingglass.com - Easy long video meetings with the ability to hide behind virtual frosted glass.
Hmm. I got ChatGPT-4o to write some code for me today. The results, while very impressive looking, simply didn't work. By the time I'd finished debugging it, I probably spent 80% of the time I would have spent writing it from scratch.

None of which is to discount the furture potential of LLMs, or the amazing ability they have right now - I've solved other simpler problems almost entirely with LLMs. But they are not a panacea.

Yet.
Make sure to check out the 3D models tab. That’s definitely the most interesting part of the site!
> What I don't understand here is how they are going to do all this tracking and ambient AI without destroying your phone battery

Possibly related explanation here "Now Playing: Continuous low-power music
recognition" https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
Verbalize – text editor with writing assistance for Brazilian Portuguese
I'm a linguist and technical writer (tech writer, dev writer, documenter, technical editor, etc.) and I've always used Hemingway for my English writing. The problem was that I'd never found a text editor capable of suggesting possible improvements to a text in Brazilian Portuguese.

Years passed, and this week I had time to create a fork of [Techscriptor](https://github.com/cbrincoveanu/techscriptor) with some interface improvements and adapt it to Brazilian Portuguese. That's how version 0.1 of Verbalize was born.

## What does it do?

In a basic and summarised way, you can upload a file from your computer (in `md` or `txt`, for now) and the editor, besides allowing you to actually edit, will give you hints on how to improve the text (long sentences, complex words, jargon, adjectives and other things we should avoid in texts, especially technical ones).

Once edited, you can download the file in `md` format.

## Access

The application can be installed (Electron), accessed through the web, or you can download the code from GitHub and run it locally in your browser.

- [Live version](https://verbalize-editor.netlify.app/)
- [Source code](https://github.com/mtgr18977/Verbalize)

## Improvements

I have a few 'next steps' in mind:

- Google Drive/Onedrive integration.
- Possibility to upload a custom rules file.
- Allow it to be used offline as well.
- Improve the GUI.
life extension technology will only increase the parasitic senior population and will the nail in the coffin for society at large
CouchTube: YouTube based application that recreates the feel of a TV channel
Could be. It would make sense: there’s only so many next logical words / concepts after an idea. It’s not like language keeps inventing new logic at a rate we can’t keep with.

Also, new human knowledge is probably only marginally derivative from past knowledge, so we’re not likely to see a vast difference between our knowledge creation and what a system that predicts the next logical thing does.

That’s not a bad thing. We essentially now have indexed logic at scale.
At my first high school they bought pcs with the MediaGX for their 'lab'. Terrible machines.
> Let’s have 0% mortgage rates then

Pretty sure that would result in infinity price houses.
It's also Marcus's best interest to push "LLM is hitting a wall" agenda. Check his blog. It's basically his whole online personality now.

So Marcus and Altman are both speaking out of their agendas, except Altman has a product and Marcus has... a book.
I find Marcus tiresome for many reasons. I look for writing with testable claims and good argumentation. He comes across as evangelical. Am I missing something?

Sure, there is considerable hype around generative AI. There are plenty of flimsy business models. And plenty of overinvestment and misunderstanding of capabilities and risks. But the antidote to this is not more hyperbole.

I would like to find a rational, skeptical, measured version of Marcus. Are you out there?
I am in full agreement that LLMs themselves seem to be beginning to level out. Their capabilities do indeed appear to be following a sigmoid curve rather than an exponential one, which is entirely unsurprising.

That doesn't mean there's not a lot of juice left to squeeze out of what's available now. Not just from RAG and agent systems, but also integrating neuro-symbolic techniques.

We can do this already just with prompt manipulation and integration with symbolic compute systems: I gave a talk on this at Clojure Conj just the other week (https://youtu.be/OxzUjpihIH4, apologies for the self promotion but I do think it's relevant.).

And that's just using existing LLMs. If we start researching and training them specifically for compatibility with neuro-symbolic data (e.g, directly tokenizing and embedding ontologies and knowledge graphs), it could unlock a tremendous amount of capability.
> So what was it about the economy from the '90s through around 2008 that made those rates more acceptable than today's similar rates?

House prices were lower (...because people couldn't money as cheaply)
Sorry to hear that :(. Don’t give up!
Congress, not the supreme court, passed a law favoring arbitration clauses in consumer contracts.
IDK about east asia but the US population is still growing year over year, so I think it is more specific to eastern culture.
Definitely not a port of Away3D or Papervision3D.
we're talking about a spreadsheet engine, the backend is not going to be the Xserver displaying it
The mechanisms of action of metformin (2017)
Diminishing returns means is not getting better. Its not saying anything about the current state. So that's great that its current capabilities meet your needs, but if you had a different use-case where it didn't quite work that well and were just waiting till the next version, your wait will be longer than you think based on past progress.
When I see stuff like this, I don't understand how the economics work out for YouTube. So many pointless videos uploaded for free. How can they possibly make a profit?
You can try Quen 2.5 here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen2.5
When I proof my own work, I read what I thought I wrote, not what I actually wrote.
Yup, we bought 1.5Mb of core for our B6700 for over a million dollars (I think we only had 3Mb on the machine I was working on)
It's also not untrue, either, we don't know who will be taking that seat.
> Your desire to want to pay someone to do work does not surpass their religious convictions to not do it. My "idealism" is really pragmatism.

How is this pragmatic? In all my real-world experience, money trumps all. It's trivial to pay religious people to say things they don't really believe. Pastors do it all the time, with no pressure from others.

In the real world, this is how things work. Yes it sucks and yes I wish people had more conviction. People are weak in this money driven world and I can't necessarily blame them.

> Have you read anything that liberals put out? It's some of the most profane stuff out there. They overused profanity to the point that it doesn't have any punch anymore, while choosing to get butthurt about all kinds of other harmless words so they can get clout.

I just don't think this is true at all. If you look at the democratic candidates, they were very well spoken and respectful. IMO, to their detriment. They should've been more rude, and that cost them from a populist perspective.

> As with any crowd, there are smart ones and dumb ones

It's not a matter of smart or dumb. I believe Trump is a smart person, I also believe Elon is a smart person. But in their populist endeavors, they say MANY reprehensible things.

For example, can they address immigration without racism? Certainly it's possible, but they haven't.

These aren't randos online, these are the face of the republican party and the future president. Sure, you can find dumb liberals. But does Kamala use slurs or question how black someone is? No. That's the difference. The example republicans have is a very poor one.

> He talks about some women like they're dogs, because they stabbed him in the back

Okay? This changes nothing. If your boss is rude to you and you call her a whore, you're getting fired. End of, have a nice chat with HR. This is what conservatives don't understand. You don't get a free pass to say whatever vile shit you like just because you think it's justified. That's why you get "censored".
> a) If it's worth the cost of hiring a lawyer and paying court fees

It's not.

> b) It's my understanding that access to Small Claims court is also often barred by these binding arbitration agreements... so even if it's small enough to not require a lawyer (let alone a jury), you may be prevented from seeking redress in open court.

Sounds like you agree that smaller situations should not escalate to a jury?
what's the backend of a spreadsheet engine going to be doing? updating the datastructures of the spreadsheet.

is it going to be local or remote? that's not part of the question.

is it foreground or background? that's an implementation choice. apple II, yeah, everything freezes while it recalcs. windows? recalcs when it can, don't let the mouse freeze.
If they signed such a deal, I wonder what the legal definition of AGI is?
> except Altman has a product and Marcus has... a book.

That makes it sound like Altman has even greater incentive for motivated reasoning.
I think in most of my use cases the limitation in waiting for is speed and cost. 4o is good enough for most tasks it’s just slow and expensive.
It's not unacceptable. Electing garbage is unacceptable. Get your priorities straight.
What do you mean? It is control flow. Generic functions are just higher-order functions that get evaluated at compile time.
That would come as a surprise to me, as a male. What did they give me??
Some cool examples of 4D games

https://4dtoys.com/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2147950/4D_Golf/
Any sexual hereditary information needs to be passed via germ line cells. So if it’s not encoded within a single sperm or egg cell, then it can’t be passed down via sexual heredity.

Information that might be passed from parent to offspring after conception is not hereditary by definition, and would be a type of learning, (ie birds singing to babies in eggs, antibody transferring from mother to baby)

Everything else you mention is very easily passed down via genetics which is not chemical signaling, but actual information encoding. And simple rules can lead to complex behavior.

Edit: Here’s an example to better illustrate the genes power of information encoding. Camouflage, which is a genetically heritable trait, can be incredibly complex. We can think of the information encoded in the genes for camouflage as a visual description of the environment that the animal evolved in. So the gene’s have actually encoded what the dessert environment looks like, or the sea floor, or the vegetation. That’s a single example, but every animal carries such complex information (how to navigate certain landscapes, how to survive current living pathogens in the environment, etc) within their genes.
Written by an author that previously wrote an article in March 2022 well before GPT-4 that LLMs were hitting a wall. Unbelievable.
Actually GEO is one of the worse orbits for this, because

1) unlike LEO, there's so little drag that both large particles and small fragments are essentially up there forever

2) all the satellites are concentrated in a line, not spread out in a 2D plane or (even better) a 3D volume (collisional probability scales as number density squared)

3) despite that, the moon perturbs any uncontrolled debris into a slightly inclined orbit that nevertheless crosses GEO with >500 m/s relative velocity

If you want to intentionally rendezvous with and deorbit satellite debris, GEO is certainly one of the orbits to prioritize.
> One of those "why hasn't someone done this already?" projects.

I think this one is fairly clear. It’s because it’s a massive amount of work with a not necessarily large payoff for yourself?

I think some of these basically get made when someone gets too annoyed something similar doesn’t exist.
You could as easily say "behaving peacefully" is a problem, or refusing to cheat.

I don't want to win an election. I'm not running for anything. I'm emoting about something any decent person should also be emoting over.
this is where we desperately needs Johnny Mnemonic
This is what KDevelop called Semantic Highghting (as opposed to Syntax Highlighting). I think it was there earlier than this, but the earliest post I can find describing it is from 2009: https://zwabel.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/c-ide-evolution-from...
I know this seems crazy, but if a country is willing to enforce a one-child-policy might they just turn their old folks into soylent green as well?

It doesn't mesh with existing chinese culture, so I wouldn't expect this to happen in our lifetime, but it wouldn't be the first time malthusian government policy is deployed at large scale.
Wow. The sheer magnitude of "I told you so" in this piece is shocking!

It has been difficult to have a nuanced public debate about precisely what a model and an intelligent system that incorporates a set of models can accomplish. Some of the difficulty has to do with the hype-cycle and people claiming things that their products cannot do reliably. However, some of it is also because the leading lights (aka public intellectuals) like Marcus have been a tad bit too concerned about proving that they are right, instead of seeking the true nature of the beast.

Meanwhile, the tech is rapidly advancing on fundamental dimensions of reliability and efficiency. So much has been invented in the last few years that we have at least 5 years worth "innovation gas" to drive downstream, vertical-specific innovation.
> Oh wait, this reinvents the court system.

The person you are responding to is entirely aware of that. I'm not sure what point you're making.
I've been using ChatGPT (paid) and Perplexity (unpaid) to help with different coding stuff. I've found it very helpful in some situations. There are some instructions I give it almost every time - "don't use Kotlin non-null assertions". Sometimes the code doesn't work. I have some idea of its strengths and limitations and have definitely found them useful. I understand there are other AI programming tools out there too.
In my experience it is absolutely more complicated.

Not if all the trains are running normally. The problem is that they often (usually?) aren't.

The complexity isn't the map. It's the fact that trains shut down, swap tracks, switch lines, skip stations, end early, etc.

I've never seen any other city where you have to stay on top of the constant changes. During weekdays it's not so bad, but nights and weekends yikes.
proof reading one's own work is hard. it's why editors exist
What kind of software did you use to write your book?
I feel a medical event that happened during a mission should be worth reporting even if it doesn't seem related at the time. There are so few humans that have spent significant time in space, less than 1000 that have went for any time all, and nearly all of them have been publicly funded research missions. Rather than hide data that seems innocuous at the time we should be gathering and sharing that until it's not such a rare research oriented project to travel to space. If you can't put your personal medical privacy interests aside then you shouldn't be the one signing up and being selected for such a public research service function.

At the same time I imagine this issue is something extremely mundane... which makes the lack of transparency and resulting media stir even more grating.
> Obviously you have to be careful what you install, just as with any app not found in Play Store, but if you're getting your apps elsewhere anyway this is really convenient.

Its still a lot more dangerous than the Play store, and I assume a good threat actor can go undetected, but the Play Protect even scans apps that are installed from outside the store.
check out https://extism.org!
You can just read the text, you know. It's fully and freely available online.

> None of the deaths were considered by the study investigators to be vaccine-related. The five deaths in the 9vHPV vaccine group were the result of suicide (15 days after vaccination dose 1), acute lymphocytic leukemia (diagnosed 27 days after vaccination dose 3), traffic accident (226 days after vaccination dose 3), hypovolemic shock and septic shock (531 days after vaccination dose 3), and sudden death (678 days after vaccination dose 3). The five deaths in the qHPV vaccine group were the result of accidental death (airplane accident 7 days after vaccination dose 3), spinal cord injury (141 days after vaccination dose 3), gastric adenocarcinoma (diagnosed 403 days after vaccination dose 3), cervical spinal cord injury (811 days after vaccination dose 3), and cerebral hemorrhage (1114 days after vaccination dose 3).
Does it post

To LinkedIn

In this stupid format

That people

Who are self-important

Use to tell

Some shit ass story?
Although I (and I assume Patrick above) were joking, I will back you up here- having studied and worked with physicists. Some people can visualize, through practice and psychological “tricks” higher dimensional spaces- and different people can do this to different levels. Some people can instantly intuit approximate geometric solutions to high dimensional problems without working out the math- so I know they are either visualizing it, or doing something similar. I can generally visualize 4D with some “tricks” that compress the problem. For example if you can imagine varying configurations of the same 3D space, that itself is essentially at least a non continuous 4th dimension. If you can imagine that evolving into new configurations, you are starting to visualize or at least imagine 5 dimensions. Some people appear to be able to so this for ~8 dimensions.