skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Suppose you're right, the internal model of game rules is perfect but the application of the model for next-move is imperfect. Unless we can actually separate the two, does it matter? Functionally I mean, not philosophically. If the model was correct, maybe we could get a useful version of it out by asking it to write a chess engine instead of act as a chess engine. But when the prolog code for that is as incorrect as the illegal chess move was, will you say again that the model is correct, but the usage of it resulted merely resulted in minor errors?

> You are saying the LLM is making a model error (rather than an an application error) only because of preconceived notions of how 'machines' must behave, not on any rigorous examination.

Here's an anecdotal examination. After much talk about LLMs and chess, and math, and formal logic here's the state of the art, simplified from dialog with gpt today:

> blue is red and red is blue. what color is the sky?
>> <blah blah, restates premise, correctly answer "red">

At this point fans rejoice, saying it understands hypotheticals and logic. Dialogue continues..

> name one red thing
>> <blah blah, restates premise, incorrectly offers "strawberries are red">

At this point detractors rejoice, declare that it doesn't understand. Now the conversation devolves into semantics or technicalities about prompt-hacks, training data, weights. Whatever. We don't need chess. Just look it, it's broken as hell. Discussing whether the error is human-equivalent isn't the point either. It's broken! A partially broken process is no solid foundation to build others on. And while there are some exceptions, an unreliable tool/agent is often worse than none at all.
It’s hard to know what’s real and what‘s not in China. Or what’s safe and what’s not. See tofu dreg construction, electric car fires, contaminated baby food, and a long list of other things. But I have to say, from the outside, it seems like they are making very strong progress on all things software except MAYBE building a native OS for themselves. On AI, I think the only bottleneck is perhaps access to Nvidia GPUs but even that has workarounds for them (through third parties that end up purposely or accidentally selling them GPUs). Eventually that’ll fall too. Without protectionist strategies, things like their robotaxis could be very destabilizing to other countries’ economies by putting people out of jobs in a short amount of time.
That sounds super interesting. Is there a write up somewhere of the project?
We don't have hard evidence that no other functions exist that are computable, but we have no examples of any such functions, and no theory for how to even begin to formulate any.

As it stands, Church, Turing, and Kleene have proven that the set of generally recursive functions, the lambda calculus, and the Turing computable set are equivalent, and no attempt to categorize computable functions outside those sets has succeeded since.

If you want your name in the history books, all you need to do is find a single function that humans can compute that a is outside the Turing computable set.

As for LLMs, you can trivially test that they can act like a Turing machine if you give them a loop and use the context to provide access to IO: Turn the temperature down, and formulate a prompt to ask one to follow the rules of the simplest known Turing machine. A reminder that the simplest known Turing machine is a 2-state, 3-symbol Turing machine. It's quite hard to find a system that can carry out any kind of complex function that can't act like a Turing machine if you allow it to loop and give it access to IO.
> At the very least, a ban on semiautomatics and bump stocks sounds like it'd reach bipartisan appeal.

I think you're assuming that Republicans are still capable of bipartisan compromise. You'll have to pardon my cynicism given recent history.
Great read ! My father has published 12 books in his native language, I am in process of converting them in English using chatgpt. This gives me idea !!
I’ve got my great-grandfather’s autobiography and one of the striking features is the language. It’s extremely matter of fact with very little prose to connect his life together, just a lot of details like “moved to X in year Y” and “went to school for X between Y and Z years”. It’s got a lot of facts, but little coherent narrative.

If someone is important enough to warrant a biographer they’ll put more work into the narrative but old autobiographies seem to be very mechanical records.
I really don't see that happen very often. Can you give examples?

I think it's a vast exaggeration. Every human activity and institution has flaws; we can't eliminate all of them. One solution is to have transparency - journalists are transparent because they have to provide evidence.
Growing up, I'd watch the run coming through the Ballard Locks. Phenomenal to see.
gives me "nazi" vibes, where the word is just applied to anything one side doesn't like as well. We saw it used through the elections heavy handed by all mainstream media
Meh. How many Nazis and trolls do you want to hear from today? People can go where they want.
Freedom isn't free. It costs lawyer fees at least.
> DISCLAIMER - Will only work on a Windows device running Chrome or a Chromium browser.

It loaded, but "work" is a stretch. It was a multiple second lag to react to input. Very choppy.
Ask HN: Is distributed LLM training in browsers (WebRTC and WebGPU) possible?
There is a huge drama lurking. Kent was very uncivilized, but did not behave worse than Linus, who is saying such things ("get your head examined") every other day. So when they now block Kent, there will be no bcachefs fixes, and there will be a huge leadership discussion, worse than before. Which could destroy the project as a whole as we know it. Many other projects died the very same way. A CoC is a huge risk.
I am not sure how much it will help actually rural areas, but it could definitely help with smaller cities where the internet infrastructure is poor. I think though it is less about satellite internet and more about the higher tolerance for remote work.
this is like saying the US constitution does not force anyone to talk (true that)...

however of course, it does preserve the right of someone to do so, if one chooses...
It would help if those "soft sciences" had any sort of reproducible outcomes. As far as I can tell every instance of these "soft sciences" are just an arm of the geopolitical body/state that backs them...with the sole purpose of rationalizing what ever that states status quo is.
> Google infrastructure is weird and takes significant work to disentangle from a given project, so I'm not surprised it took them six months to open-source it.

No, this is ridiculous. Then don't publish, damn it. But they publish first, claiming that all the data is there, claiming that their papers satisfy all the rules required for reproduceability... and only actually release the source once they're caught lying . It is not the first time it happens.

This seriously damages Google's credibility and very well deservedly so.

> I don't know how long someone should expect to remain employed when making baseless allegations of scientific misconduct against his colleagues instead of doing actual work.

My question was whether this supposed data was available to the whistleblower before he was fired or not. It is kind of important (see my first point).

> Again, he did not have evidence to support his suspicion of fraud, and he admitted this at the time.

Why are you ignoring my counterargument? Where did he admit this exactly? The only source for this quote so far is hearsay from the defendant itself in a civil lawsuit, i.e. 0 value.

> If the old guard struggles with ML basics, what can the AlphaChip authors be expected to do about this? This pattern is unfortunately common when ML comes for a new field -- some researchers adapt and build, and others fail and complain (or worse, don't really even try).

This is as much of an ad-hominem, childish and stereotyping attack as it gets, holier-than-thou attitude, and, frankly, I resent the implications. Imagine if I said "If the morons at Google struggle with chip design basics, what can we do?". Does this encourage conversation?

There is no "old guard", EDA has been using AI quite effectively since before Google was even a thing, and likely _right now_ there are more experts in RL employed by EDA companies than there are AI experts at Google entirely.

> If the hoop doesn't match what modern chip design needs, we shouldn't expect researchers to hop through it.

The difference in "needs" is nowhere near great enough yet to be worth the effort of changing it, for reasons that should be evident by now.
It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance, largely due to exponentially better and cheaper compute, as well as tools for distributed collaboration.

But depressingly few of my peers seem to be true general "artisan scientists" as I see it, understanding engineering to be not only a job but a craft, a discipline, an art form, a power and a responsibility.

So much is possible today. Individuals in developed countries, and even many in underdeveloped countries with access to tech, have more velocity at their fingertips than almost any individual in history.

We've built critical systems which rapidly create value with the slightest gesture. But few really take the time to sit down and connect enough dots to see enough of a bigger picture to make meaningful and considerate modifications to the status quo. Few push back against what they're told, few take the time to deeply appreciate even a fraction of the complex systems which create modern society.

We have to do better about educating ourselves, our peers, and our offspring. We need to encourage generalists, facilitate access to multi-disciplinarian education, and hold ourselves and others to higher ethical standards which are themselves informed by a broad perspective.

This certainly comes at the cost of one's personal time. However, I think a majority of us are overentertained and could be better about conditioning ourselves to routinely seek out and learn new things.
That's fine. I've made no claim about any given training process. I've addressed the annoying repetitive dismissal via the "but they're next token predictors" argument. The point is that being next token predictors does not limit their theoretical limits, so it's a meaningless argument.
Here is a nice article on a study of baseball bats using microphones. https://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/bats/papers/AcousticsToday_...
Thanks for the idea of sharing the extension but I'd like to focus any discussion around growth itself.

As for being concerned about a rugpull, I definitely get it. My approach is to keep as much of the product open source as possible and be very transparent around any ownership changes.
I think it's fair. It's the same thing humans do with their own art. You don't release the piece until you like it. You revise until you think it's don't. If a human wants to make AI art, they aren't just going to drop the first thing they generated. They're going to iterate. I think it's just as unfair to include the worst generations, because people are going to release the highest quality they can come up with.
Getting around anywhere in Seattle, even though the distances are short, is still hard. Traffic is far, far worse than it was ten years ago. It takes more time to the point that I can’t say the access is truly greater than a rural area unless you choose to live in a neighborhood with high walkability and your chosen destinations aren’t outside of that.
No, but that was also not the claim I made.

The point is that as the person I replied to pointed out, that LLM's are "next token predictors" is a meaningless dismissal, as they can be both next token predictors and Turing complete, and given that unless reasoning requires functions outside the Turing computable (we know of no way of constructing such functions, or no way for them to exist) calling them "next token predictors" says nothing about their capabilities.
People always have made bad assumptions or had misunderstandings. Maybe the author just doesn't understand ECC and always assumed it was consensus-based. I do things like that (I try not to write about them without verifying); I'm confident that so do you and everyone reading this.
Is there demand for free product manager advisory services in startup community?
Hi everyone,

I’m a UK-based B2B product manager with experience working with both small and large software businesses, owning entire suites of large and complex products. Selling into the upper market, including government.

I'm looking to offer free advisory services to help small software businesses or startups with product strategy, roadmap planning, and general product management challenges.

Why? Well, I'm hoping to network, build some connections and friendships, and maybe get a few testimonials.

However, I'm curious to know if there is actually a demand for it. Are any of you founders of funded or revenue-generating businesses that would appreciate some extra support and advice each week? Happy to even get a little hands-on.

If you're interested, feel free to respond to this post. If your contact details are public on your Hacker News profile, I'm happy to reach out directly to arrange an initial chat.

Looking forward to connecting with some of you!
>Downsides to using ... wood for takeout should be obvious

I don't understand why our civilization has still not replaced almost everything with bamboo (though technically the bamboo is grass, not wood). It grows fast (and an order of magnitude better sink for CO2 than trees) and seems to be very usable as bamboo utensils demonstrate for example.
How does the cost compare?
In 1991 the Budapest agreement had Ukraine relinquish its nukes in exchange for security guarantees from both Russia and the US, amongst others.

Actually the Budapest Memorandum (from 1994, not 1991) explicitly avoided any mention of security guarantees as such, which has been seen as one of its major shortcomings.

It asked that the signatories respect each others' borders, which was in itself significant. But this by itself does not amount to any kind of security guarantee.
I hate lawyers. It seems the license allows using the document to make compliant implementations, but if your implementation is incompatible in any way you lose the right to read the document.
I've built a tool for this. How can I DM you?
I can't find anyone else mentioning this here, so interesting fact, marble madness was designed by mark cerny

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Madness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Cerny

Who is better known for designing the PS4 and PS5.

Edit: can someone explain what netlify does? I visited the site, and while I appreciate it can be difficult to explain these things in marketing blurb, I really came away none the wiser (I work as a programmer so maybe I'm not quite the target market)
> just buy credits for each API

I’ve always considered doing that but do you come out ahead cost wise?
> AI, bots, and the constant need to fuel training, turns the internet forest into a place where anything a person publishes will be vampirically consumed, mimicked to see whether it can replicate whatever value could be had, and capitalized on if possible or ignored if not.

That's honestly not a problem, unless someone believes they're entitled to 100% of value generated by their interactions with the world - but that's a level of greed way beyond Scrooge McDuck, and the kind of thinking that defines the dreaded "late stage capitalism".

It really is an option to publish something and not care about knowing exactly who read it, and what they're doing with it.
Which use case generates more revenue? (Genuine question. It could be the restaurants but how to monitize)
Pretty sure you followed the thread wrong. They only mentioned the square root in response to you?
Postel's law is the main reason why there are so many cases where something is being liberal in what it sends. It's a natural approach when trying to enter into an existing ecosystem, but when the whole ecosystem follows it you get a gigantic ball of slightly different interpretations if the protocol, because something that is non-compliant but happens to work with some portion of the ecosystem won't get discovered until it's already prevalent enough it now needs to be accounted for by everyone, complexifying the 'real' spec and increasing the likelihood someone else messes up what they send.
Oh I see. I don't disagree with you point then, but the context here is 'immortal works' and that's definitely strongly correlated with the popularity of the work. 'Immortal work' ~= 'still popular long in the future'
AI-generated grandma as a scam Buster
would that work with different resolutions etc?
It would be amazing if that site were served only over http
This is great for creative accounting. AWS now has 4bn in equity and 4bn in additional sales.
I still don’t know what your point is. I’ve been consistent since the beginning. UK and France are quite weak indeed, nuclear is a separate plane that is irrelevant in this thread.
"Mixin?" What's it mixin'?
That sums up the internet for me, constant feeling of not doing enough to get your kids ahead and personally not amounting to anything because everything has been done better than you can do it.
You can't really draw many conclusions from this test, since the AI art has already been filtered by Scott to be ones that Scott himself found confusing. So What do any of the numbers at the end of this really mean? "Am I better than Scott at discerning AI art from human" is about the only thing this test says.

If you didn't filter the AI art first, people would do much better.
Have you thought of building an affordable small-scale product for home labs and maybe SMBs? Even if that line didn't turn a profit, it could function as a loss leader in getting engineers and consultants familiar with Oxide, and an opportunity to experiment with (and ultimately evangelize) your tech stack without needing to already have an enterprise-scale use case.
Why is that "oof"? They're using commodity servers today. Oxide does not offer commodity servers.
Why do you think that business value is the only thing to look at here? If someone starts copying my likeness, mannerisms, writing style, etc. they could also use that to damage my reputation or harm my relations with other people. I think that those two possibilities represent irreparable harms with no associated business value.
I think popular is very situational though.

For me I see a lot more dynamic than condensers but I guess if you are talking about what is in like every single IOT thingamabob then you might be right there.
First, let me say I am totally in favour of the sentiment here:

Python is by far the fastest to write, cleanest, more maintainable programming language I know, and that a bit of a runtime performance penalty is a small price to pay when I'm rewarded with significant productivity gains. I rarely feel Python slows me down, and on the other side I constantly marvel at how fast I code with it compared to other languages.

Personally I prefer Raku [https://raku.org] to do the same.

Here is the Python code from the article:

import sys

def fibo(n):
if n <= 1:
return n
else:
return fibo(n-1) + fibo(n-2)

if __name__ == '__main__':
for n in sys.argv[1:]:
print(n, fibo(int(n)))

And here is my Raku code:

sub MAIN(*@n) {
say (0, 1, *+* ... *)[@n]
}

So, even better on the "quick to code and easy to maintain" imo.

The performance comparison is interesting too...

CPython 9.72 - 22.10 secs

PyPy 1.65 secs

Node 1.76 secs

Rust 0.25 secs

Raku 0.12 secs

> time ./fibo.raku 10 20 30 40
(55 6765 832040 102334155)
./fibo.raku 10 20 30 40 0.12s user 0.02s system 114% cpu 0.124 total

Haha (admittedly I am on an M1 not an i5 so this is a bit Apples vs. Oranges ... but CPUs getting faster all the time and Raku has no GIL)
I used to have a pretty successful browser extension that I shut down because the site it worked on shut down.

I grew it by adding features that people would ask for on the site's forums, for example a user would say "hey can we have x feature?" and I would respond saying "great idea, I added x feature to my extension y!" This was very effective and over time others would start responding saying my extension had whatever feature they were asking, capitalizing on how relatively slow companies are to implement features.

This does rely on the extension having a site it operates on and having a forum for users though. If I were to do it today I'd focus on finding places where my extension's users concentrate, Discord, a community Slack, or otherwise, and doing the same thing.
Well, a simple description is that they discover circuits that reproduce the training sequence. It turns out that in the process of this, they recover relevant computational structures that generalize the training sequence. The question of how far they generalize is certainly up for debate. But you can't reasonably deny that they generalize to a certain degree. After all, most sentences they are prompted on are brand new and they mostly respond sensibly.

Their representation of the input is also not linear. Transformers use self-attention which relies on the softmax function, which is non-linear.
Speaking of ChatGPT getting worse over time, it would be interesting to see ChatGPT be benchmarked continuously to see how it performs over time (and the results published somewhere publically).

Even local variations would be interesting
Where Can I Find San Francisco Bay Area Angel Investors for My Podcast?
Hi all,I have a startup podcast that focuses on introducing the startup ecosystem to the younger generation. I have successfully completed two episodes featuring investors who have backed unicorn startups as angel investors. I want to create some face-to-face episodes and invite more angel investors. Do you know where I can find a list of angel investors living around the San Francisco Bay Area? Or do you have any recommendations for individuals to invite?

If you want to check out my podcast, you can visit https://www.tiktok.com/@founderapp.com.
I've added my contact email to my profile, thank you.
> Plastics are mostly carbon and hydrogen atoms

In general, this particular stuff is significantly different.

The article mentions sodium hexametaphosphate [0] and guanidinium sulfate [1], which have phosphorous and nitrogen respectively. Those are both common in fertilizers and are implicated in algal blooms.

[0] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Hexasodium-hexamet...

[1] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Guanidinium-sulpha...
One day it is hoped that enough mathematicians will have worked on the problem to have finally, definitively answered Steve Ballmer’s interview question. The job will be shared between them.
I'm not sure how this article relates to the dark forest hypothesis, or really anything else for that matter—I can't see the thread. Can anyone summarize?
It could be the anthropic models makes bedrock attractive and profitable and more importantly medium term competitive against azure. It seems worth it.
https://github.com/TheNumbat/rpp/blob/main/rpp/string0.h#L92 here it is
I would like to know as well. Can you please DM me?
Ladders can be fine, but I think one has to accept that the cost:benefit of installing a good ladder at an old dam might favor just removing the dam.

Hatcheries, OTOH, are a poor simulacrum of a real fishery and a real lifecycle. They might churn out more juveniles than a natural river would, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a larger catch or higher quality catch.
You know many many people stopped posting or reading Twitter because it became a hostile place and the growth on bots and spammers didn’t help either?

We didn’t all go to Bluesky because we want a political echo chamber… we went there because our communities of interest went there, we want to be able to discuss our interests without others turning it cesspit of polarisation