skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Recreated an open source version of the first social media
I've recreated Talkomatic, the world's first social media platform, as an open-source project. Originally launched in the 1970s on the PLATO system, Talkomatic was groundbreaking for its time, offering real-time, character-by-character communication in 5-slot chat rooms.

A web version was introduced in 2013, keeping the spirit of the original alive, but it was shut down in 2024. To preserve this piece of internet history, I built a modern, open-source version using technologies like WebSocket, Node.js, and Socket.io, staying true to its unique concept while improving accessibility and usability.

Source code: https://github.com/MohdYahyaMahmodi/talkomatic-classic
I really wish classes on basic philosophy and skepticism/propaganda techniques were taught in high school as mandatory class. People need to learn to question propaganda and demand sources and logic when people try to "convince" them of "thangs and stuff". Too many youngsters trust the crap on the internet without question if it makes them "feel" good or "a part of something" or any other number of emotional responses to tiktoks and instagram tripe.
They are choosing from a subset of materials that can form stable 2D crystals in order to test effects of relative twist angles on their energy bands.
There's a few fusion startup companies using superconducting ReBCO tape to make their magnets. From the results that they're getting, I think we've largely cracked the engineering problems of making "wire" from ReBCO and it's largely just a scaling game now. I do want to point out that they're still cooling with liquid hydrogen at ~20K for high current capacity though.
>people will move on to the next fad

AI isn't really a fad. It's going to something more like electricity, say.
Have you heard about brown?
Ah, I meant syntax rules, but syntax case is supported - there’s just no way to create syntax objects so it’s practically not useful.

My email is on my website, if you have any other questions feel free to shoot me an email.
Inexplicably no discussion, but popular yesterday (44 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42404691
This has to be most arrogantly ignorant statement I have read in a long long long while. I just have to imagine this was sarcasm.
It's interesting -- so, logically, `map` in Rust does imply an ordering. The closure is a `FnMut`, i.e. a callback which mutably captures values, causing external side effects. And it is guaranteed that if externally visible, mutations will be done in order.

But `FnMut` is the most general possible thing you can pass in. In reality, most callbacks are pure functions that don't alter mutable state at all. With Rust's monomorphization and aggressive inlining, LLVM can figure out that there's no mutation going on and can optimize that.

There is a wrinkle here, which is that capturing variables mutably is one of two ways a function can have side effects in Rust. The other way is via interior mutability, through UnsafeCell [1], or, more commonly, a wrapper around it like Mutex or RefCell. In that case as well, Rust guarantees that function calls to map are done in order. Luckily, because UnsafeCell is the root of all interior mutability, the compiler can simply track whether an UnsafeCell is transitively involved.

If you're wondering where the humble `print!` comes in -- well, it clearly has side effects. But it acquires a global lock on standard output each time it's called [2], so UnsafeCell is involved.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/cell/struct.UnsafeCell.html

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/macro.print.html
It's also worth reading his initial tweet: https://x.com/suchirbalaji/status/1849192575758139733

> I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I'm skeptical "fair use" would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post (https://suchir.net/fair_use.html) about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I believe this.

> To give some context: I was at OpenAI for nearly 4 years and worked on ChatGPT for the last 1.5 of them. I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they're trained on. I've written up the more detailed reasons for why I believe this in my post. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but I still feel like it's important for even non-lawyers to understand the law -- both the letter of it, and also why it's actually there in the first place.

> That being said, I don't want this to read as a critique of ChatGPT or OpenAI per se, because fair use and generative AI is a much broader issue than any one product or company. I highly encourage ML researchers to learn more about copyright -- it's a really important topic, and precedent that's often cited like Google Books isn't actually as supportive as it might seem.

> Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to chat about fair use, ML, or copyright -- I think it's a very interesting intersection. My email's on my personal website.
Being one of 12+ witnesses in a lawsuit where the facts are hardly in dispute is not the same as being a whistleblower. The key questions in this lawsuit are not and never were going to come down to insider information—OpenAI does not dispute that they trained on copyrighted material, they dispute that it was illegal for them to do so.
This is how we are going to "Make America Healthy Again"?
I've come to realize that "do it all" developers tend to be very very effective at recognizing and avoiding low-impact work. Top engineers are ruthless at prioritizing and dissecting requirements. Everything is on the chopping block, aiming for simplicity and well-defined domain boundaries with no superfluous complexity.

The 10x developer isn't 10x faster and doesn't necessarily produce 10x more code or handle 10x more tickets than their colleagues. But they are 10x better at understanding what needs to get done and what doesn't. It's quality not quantity.
This is so cool! Playing around with the first demo is a lot of fun. First one to get the model to moonwalk wins. My best attempt was probably something like `(body_speed_forward < -0.3) * (head_height > 1.0) * (stay_still > 0.2) * (body_speed_vertical < 0.1) * (stay_upright > 0.9)`

https://i.imgur.com/O5hGMo5.gif

Then the "Meta Explore Theory of Mind" is even more interesting. There was a thread about a month ago in which some of us were discussing some of the concepts here like "beliefs" and updating a model of the world accordingly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42035985
There's some fusion startups successfully making >10T magnets using ReBCO tape now, so hopefully things will scale up/cost down enough to be used in MRIs.
I would say that it's practically a worse situation. They aren't just ignorant, but willfully so because of a lack of measurable consequences for most. Even worse when there is market capture.
Weren’t theres couple of dead Boeing whistleblowers in recent times relating to poor AA/design?
Tipping Isn't about Service – It's a Psychological Con Job
There are essentially two answers to this question, and neither are in the interests of capital so there will never be progress if power toward them until forced.

The first is the bill gates "income tax for robots" idea which does a kind of hand wavey thing figuring out how to calculate a robot, how the government will distribute taxes, etc. That one is a mess impossible to get support for and nearly impossible to transition to.

The other idea, put forth by the Democracy in Europe 2025 party, is called a universal basic dividend, which essentially says that to make AI owned by humanity, the utility of automation should be calculated, and as a result, a dividend will be paid out (just like any other stock holder) which is a percent of that company's profit derived from automation. It becomes part of the corporate structure, rather than a government structure, so this one I think kinda has merit on paper, but likewise zero motivation to implement until it's virtually too late
meta has certainly redeemed itself and helping AI become moat-free
You haven't actually measured the societal value because you can't. You might mean economic value, but you haven't measured that either.

Regardless, what makes money and what's good for society are orthogonal, and sometimes outright at odds with each other. Certainly, it's easier to make money via evil than make money via good. And, certainly, economy is flexible - it can be anything. We can have a strong economy making trains, if we want. "Free market" capitalism is not the sole economic system nor is it the most efficient. It seems China has a much more efficient economic system.

I argue higher education is good for society, even if it doesn't make money. Critical thinking is vital in decision making, and the humanities have a bigger emphasis on critical thinking (yes, really). Software engineering is "hard", but not really. Literary analysis is a different beast which requires a different kind of intelligence, one that is lacking in STEM.
ChatGPT was a research project that went megaviral, it wasn't intended to be as big as it was.

Training a massive LLM on the scale of GPT-4 required a lot of lead time (less so nowadays due to various optimizations), so the timeframe makes sense.
> What industry could Mars possibly support profitably?

Government crew and supply launch contracts probably, though these don't need to be "profitable" in the conventional sense for the entity footing the bill.

All that's needed to be profitable for the launch provider is to convince Congress that it's in America's interest to establish a public-private project for a moon base and a Mars base. Now more than ever, when framed against a background of an ascendant Chinese Space program that will soon be sole operator of a space station.

Once the "Race to Mars" is won, NASA can grow soy-beans, do bone density studies, and any other science shit the NASA nerds can come up with post-hoc, but the main point will just be being there, and having the Stars and Stripes on the first flagpole planted in Martian soil.
I'd say it's because Proton does not employ actual cryptographers or security engineers. They do seem to have a lot of marketing folk, interns, and particle physicists, allegedly.
If there was a gun involved, I would imagine a neighbor would have called. He was found in his apartment.
>and no obvious large-scale product-market fit

I'm afraid you are in as much an echo chamber as anyone. 200 million+ weekly active users is large scale pmf
Inside Boeing's struggle to make its best-selling plane again
Shown in the article, but not linked:

Google's IPv6 adoption statistics: <https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html>

Facebook's IPv6 adoption statistics: <https://www.facebook.com/ipv6/?tab=ipv6_total_adoption>
Sure, there's nothing stopping any business from developing a moat. The Excel example doesn't make the case of OpenAI any clearer to me.
The “the value of Proust papers is unquantifiable!” argument doesn’t move me. Nor a lot of my fellow citizens
really? As an outsider, your post came off to me as combative and generally bad faith.
True it's probably easier to survive on earth in some luxury bunker than on Mars no matter how much we destroy earth. Alternative theories: billionaire space tourism, it was never really about mars but about asteroid mining, it was never about mars he just wants the government subsidies
U.S. Prepares New AI Chip Restrictions to Close China's Backdoor Access
An anecdote regarding this bug that always cracks me up. My college roommate showed up with a shiny new pentium machine that year, and kept bragging about how awesome it was. We used some math software called Maple that was pretty intensive for PCs at the time, and he thought he was cool because he could do his homework on his PC instead of on one of the unix machines in the lab.

Except that he kept getting wrong answers on his homework.

And then he realized that when he did it on one of the unix machines, he got correct answers.

And then a few months later he realized why ....
For those that don't know, Larry was the author of BitKeeper and when he changed the license for it, it prompted Linus to write Git. Guessing if he had never done that, we'd all be using BitKeeper now and Git wouldn't exist.
True. But after Elon's twitter lies and world domination ambitions he showed during the past 5 years, I just can't support his narrative.
> "supposedly" Rust's architecture support for all but the most popular archs is horrendous.

Unpopular architectures are a bit of a pain. But what if you compiled from Rust to WASM and then transpiled the WASM object code to C? Is this a viable approach?
McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis
There's no climate scenario in which Mars is more habitable than Earth. Even if a Texas-sized asteroid crashed into Earth, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars.
Boeing guy and OpenAI whistleblower were both seen as "not depressed" and have even gone far as to say that if anything happened to him that it wouldn't have been an accident.

I'm not sure why there are so many comments trying to downplay and argue around whether OpenAI was a whistleblower or not he fits pretty much all the definition.

OpenAI was suspected of using copyright data but that wasn't the only thing OpenAI whistleblower was keeping under wraps given NDA. The timing of OpenAI partnering with US military is odd.
Buy a bigger bag; it looks like a laptop, because it is a laptop.
> 404 - Page Not Found

Uh oh
Companies that want to build assets that connect to the transmission system
Not according to General Beringer of NORAD! :) [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/iRsycWRQrc8?t=82
David vs goliath where david swears he will never kill himself and that if anything happens to him it is someone coming after them, then david kills himself right before going to court to testify.
Broadcom is now the second biggest AI chip producer thanks to Google. Apple recently announced they will also work with Broadcom on something similar.
They were whistleblowers related to Boeing manufacturing and quality control.

Boeing manufacturing is also the source of the persistent Boeing problems and issues that goes back to before the MCAS catastrophic incidents and has continued after MCAS was fixed.

Airbus has deeply integrated R&D and manufacturing hubs where the R&D engineers and scientists can just walk a few minutes and they will be inside the factory halls manufacturing the parts they designs.

Meanwhile Boeing has separated and placed their manufacturing plants in the US states where they can get most federal and state tax benefits for job creation.
> never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs, and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about self-driving cars were the ones I was talking to myself, and everyone else was dismissive of them. Voice assistants were mainly mocked from day 1, with the Alex advert being re-dubbed as a dystopian nightmare.

Isn't that funny? It speaks exactly to the GP's point about how frothing and uninformative the "zeitgeist" can be, as my experience happens to have been the opposite of yours. The people I happened to be casually brushing around during those earlier fads happened to be hip to them, or maybe my ears were more attentive, and so I heard them mentioned more often and with more enthusiasm.

In contrast, most of what I happen to hear about generative AI, outside of HN, tends to be idly laughing at its foibles and misrepresentation if it's mentioned at all.

I don't expect you to have the same experience as me, but I'm careful not to assume too much based on either of ours.
I don’t think this is about a “good recording situation”. It’s likely people who think they suck at speaking/narrating or think they have a horrible accent or want to remain anonymous or just find the process annoying, and find it less embarrassing/more privacy-preserving/less of a hassle to use an AI voice.
Leaving the obligatory All Your Base remix video link here:
https://youtu.be/qItugh-fFgg?feature=shared
It's amusing how Sutskever kept musking Musk over the years (overpromising with crazy deadlines and underdelivering):

In 2017 he wrote

"Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved, AI should solve a long-standing unproven theorem, programming competitions should be won consistently by AIs, and there should be convincing chatbots (though no one should pass the Turing test)."

"We will completely solve the problem of adversarial examples by the end of August."

Very clever to take a page from Musk's own playbook of confidently promising self-driving by next year for a decade.
Don’t you love the doublespeak of using “FAIR” as well!
IDX – AI powered development by Google
more as hoverboard, onewheel etc. the e-bikes and e-scooters don't really have similar balancing mechanisms
Brain drain is insanely bad. Australia has better opportunities. New Zealand government hates the educated, and replaces them with lower paid immigrants. Oh, and they replace jobs that un-educated kiwis could do, with immigrants.
>People who are unemployed with no money today don't die. Even street people don't die.

Small point of contention here, but 100% of people die, and 'street people' exceptionally quickly.

>The tax system will become more redistributive and maybe we'll adopt a negative income tax.

And when the productive economy profits from automation while the government tax revenue decreases from lost income tax, what do you think this arbitrary money printing will do to the USD?
In my understanding, the concern is not what outside attackers can do. It is what capabilities exist under Intel's control before they are reduced to some hopefully benign subset.

And the understanding that we have is mostly limited to what is in flash memory, e.g. the ME's BootROM hasn't been dumped yet (as far as I am aware).
If evil company knows that you have this kind of watch-dog, you’re risking a torture instead of quick death.
Sorry, I missed your comment / didn't realize it was directed specifically at me. So, if you go back and read what I wrote:

1. I definitely did not say that economics does not strive for generalizability. Quite the contrary. I think the vast majority of economists strive for generalizable conclusions (i.e. go to great care to find study samples that are representative of the population of interest and use statistical methods that might allow them to plausibly conclude things about that group)

2. I never said "all" work in other social science disciplines rejects generalizability as an aim. However, I do believe, that more "empirical" scientific method based studies in a number of disciplines would be good. That is predicated on 1. a belief about the prevalence of qualitative/theory based scholarship. 2. a normative preference that the ratio is undesirable. I could be mistaken on my perception of the first point, but I don't think I am. On the second point, you're welcome to disagree. These are, like, opinions, man!

3. "reject the goal of generalizable knowledge because they question or reject 'the scientific method'" makes me think you've either missed my point, or you don't understand the nature of other forms of academic scholarship.

I'm not leveling a diss that e.g. a participant observation case study isn't a method intended to generalize from. That's just an intrinsic feature of that kind of study method. Of the qualitative researchers I've known, I can't imagine any thinking there is anything controversial about what I've said on that point. Though, some would definitely disagree with me on my opinions about what ratio of scholarship should be of this kind.

And lastly you've selectively quoted me there at the end, and attached a conclusion to it that is not mine. Consider this a bit of original qualitative research on my part: a sampling of non-empirical research that I've read in recent years has suggested to me a lapse in rigor in certain disciplines. But this conclusion is grounded in my "situated knowledge" of the space, and thus shouldn't be used to generalize without a suitably operationalized quantitative study ;-)
It’s the fastest product to 100m users ever. Even if they never update their models from here on out, they have an insanely popular and useful product. It’s better at search than Google. Students use it universally. And programmers are dependent on it. Inference is cheap — only training is expensive.

To say they don’t have PMF is nuts.
This is it. Another primary example is that I can put a 80 IQ person to work on a farm or let them build something under supervision. There is no way for an AI to do either at this time, even if the AI is much smarter.
> Normally the word "whistleblower" means someone who revealed previously-unknown facts

Not to be pedantic, but this is actually incorrect, both under federal and California law. Case law is actually very explicit on the point that the information does NOT need to be previously unknown to qualify for whistleblower protection.

However, disclosing information to the media is not typically protected.
Maybe head out there with a frequency scanner?
Is there even a single democracy-minded CEO of a major tech company? What a deplorable cesspit of an industry this is.
> Even code gen seems pretty underwhelming to most of the developers I've heard from that have used it - it may very well be extremely impactful to the next generation of developers - but most current developers have already honed their skills to out-compete code gen in the low complexity problems it can competently perform.

I'm in academia, and LLMs have completely revolutionized the process of data analysis for scientists and grad students. What used to be "page through the documentation to find useful primitives" or "read all the methods sections of the related literature" is now "ask an assistant what good solutions exist for this problem" or "ask LLMs to solve this problem using my existing framework." What used to be days of coding is now hours of conversation.

And it's also above-average at talking through scientific problems.
You seem completely unable to examine production in a more abstract or higher-level sense.

You cannot go to point Z without first going through A-Y. You cannot write legislation, make movies, make music, or do just about anything outside of engineering without first understanding literary analysis. Context, themes, critical thinking, taking an idea and making it into a thing that conveys that idea - that is what the humanities is.

It easy for me to say "learning about Shakespeare is useless!" But if we did not, would those highschool kids be able to read legislation? Would they even be interested in doing so?

The same principal applies. Much of schooling is "useless", as in on it's own it does not produce value. But it is a stepping stone to things that DO produce value.

You learned your times tables so you can pass Calculus 2, which you never use, so now you can be a software engineer. And you got there by problem solving, not by learning to code. You remove a piece from the Jenga tower and it crumbles.

People often misunderstand what they do or what things are for. Literary analysis is not for understanding what Proust is saying. No. Literary analysis is for understanding what EVERYONE is saying. Higher education is not for a job, for a degree, or for graduation. It is for learning to learn. If you don't know how to learn you are no better than a tree or a dog.