skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Can you expand on your spreadsheet analogy?

Sure.

(I've been coding long enough that what Joel writes about there just seems obvious to me: of course it happened like that, how else would it have?)

So, a spreadsheet in the general sense — not necessarily compatible with Microsoft's, but one that works — is quite simple to code. Precisely because it's easy, that's not something you can sell directly, because anyone else can compete easily.

And yet, Microsoft Office exists, and the Office suite is basically a cost of doing businesses. Microsoft got to be market-dominant enough to build all that complexity that became a moat, that made it hard to build a clone. Not the core tech of a spreadsheet, but everything else surrounding that core tech.

OpenAI has a little bit of that, but not much. It's only a little because while their API is cool, it's so easy to work with that you can (I have) asked the original 3.5 chat model to write its own web UI. As it happens, mine is already out of date, because the real one can better handle markdown etc., so the same sorts of principles apply, even on a smaller scale like this where it's more of "keeping up in real time" rather than "349 page PDF file just to get started".

OpenAI is iterating very effectively and very quickly with all the stuff around the LLM itself, the app, the ecosystem. But so is Anthropic, so is Apple, so is everyone — the buzz across the business world is "how are you going to integrate AI into your business?", which I suspect will go about the same as when it was "integrate the information superhighway" or "integrate apps", and what we have now in the business world is to the future of LLMs as Geocities was to the web: a glorious chaotic mess, upon which people cut their teeth in order to create the real value a decade later.

In the meantime, OpenAI is one of several companies that has a good chance of building up enough complexity over time to become an incumbent by a combination of inertia and years of cruft.

But also only a good chance. They may yet fail.

> On the other hand, people don't have extremely specific expectations for LLMs because 1) they're fairly new and 2) they're almost always nondeterministic anyway. They don't care so much about using the same one as everyone they know or work with, because there's no network aspect of the product.

For #1, I agree. That's why I don't want to bet if OpenAI is going to be to LLMs what Microsoft is to spreadsheets, or if they'll be as much a footnote to the future history of LLMs as Star Division was to spreadsheets.

For #2, network effects… I'm not sure I agree with you, but this is just anecdotal, so YMMV: in my experience, OpenAI has the public eye, much more so than the others. It's ChatGPT, not Claude, certainly not grok, that people talk about. I've installed and used Phi-3 locally, but it's not a name I hear in public. Even in business settings, it's ChatGPT first, with GitHub Copilot and Claude limited to "and also", and the other LLMs don't even get named.
Because some people care about low-bandwith users. Or about not being wasteful as a principle.
> this guy apparently killed himself.

where did you get that? this article doesn't say a cause of death.
Get right-wingers in, this is what happens to a country. Right wing politics is bad socially, and economically, unless you are already stinkin-rich
The goal to "avoid an AGI dictatorship" may sound silly but it doesn't seem very far fetched that someone like Putin would replace themselves with a Putinbot which could then scheme to take over the world with their nukes much like now. One good thing about human dictators is at least they die eventually.
Good thing I love everyone and have a loving family with two exceptional teenagers in this age of troubled youth. We laugh and have fun and my wife and kids are beloved by everyone they know, and each of us have developed personal skillsets that bring us and those around us joy.

I was about to post this, from memory:

"You will know them by their fruits."

Then I DDG'd it, and -- GUESS WHAT!? -- it was the verses that follow the verse you supplied :-)

Matthew 7:16-20:

You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? 17 Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Therefore by their fruits you will know them.

You know what the math genius janitor last said just after he left the bar in "Good Will Hunting", right?
It’s in an email from January 2018, between Silicon Valley tech bros, next to discussion of fundraising. Of course they’re talking about an initial coin offering.
Yeah - what Disney does with the mouse is egregious, but if I write a book or creating painting I'd like to not have a thousand imitators xeroxing away any potential earnings.
My favorite comparison right now is to the microwave oven.

It's a novel thing. It's not going anywhere. It makes some things easier, sometimes, in both personal and professional settings. But you're not at a big loss without it and in many cases your choice to do without is a choice that favors quality, control, nuance, and skill refinement.
My gut reaction was that the horizontal motion (away from narrow inlets) is very small.

I tried a calculation. On the US East Coast, St. John's Bay to Cape Cod is about 500km. So, take a 500km long trough that's 1km deep. If the water sloshes so that one end rises by 10m and the other falls by 10m, with a smooth slope between, the midpoint of the body of water would shift by 1.25km, which is more than I expected. But remember that that's over six hours, so, the peak water velocity would be on the order of 2cm/second. It would be pretty hard to capture power from that slow a current.
A C++ reference is more like a Rust &UnsafeCell<T> in practice - and there are thorny issues around the possibility of null references in C++ (which are supposed to be insta-UB per the C++ standard but are allowed by most compilers) that introduce additional questions about what the best mapping might be.
Strong disagree. Under many circumstances, law enforcement officers are allowed to enter places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Just because the police are allowed in such locations doesn’t mean the general public should get to watch.

Let’s say you fall in the shower and you are badly injured. You call 911, and the police are first to arrive. Officers enter your house and try to keep you calm until an ambulance arrives.

You think police body camera footage of you, naked and injured on your bathroom floor, should be “transparently available and searchable”?
Attachment is the root of all suffering
What Happened to the Tech Industry's 'Perks Culture'?
That wasn’t TTS though, but actual sampled recordings.
Kalshi CEO admits enlisting influencers to dis Polymarket in a podcast segment
https://archive.ph/Cd2PJ
doppler effect.
It's only implied by secure_random if you know secure_random exists. This is a very very very well known thing. The default MUST be secure.
He is a Green. Has talked about detonating nuclear weapons over the poles to melt ice.
So the lawyers who said they had "possession of information that would be helpful to their case" were misleading? Your whole rationalization seems very biased. He raised public awareness (including details of) of some wrongdoing he perceived at the company and was most likely going to testify about those wrongdoings, that qualifies as a whistleblower in my book.
It seems like it would matter if they internally believed/discussed it being illegal for them to do so, but then did it anyway and publicly said they felt they were in the clear.
Meta is a very large organization, and I'm willing to believe that a good chunk of Meta FAIR (the lab releasing all of this stuff) truly do care about innovations for advancing AI safety and are doing great work along these lines. I'm not disagreeing with your point about the company being led by its financial incentives as a unit, but let's also allow ourselves permission to celebrate this work by this group of people.
I guess the question is whether those documents have already been entered into evidence?
Wow:

“I don’t know why we call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologise. It started that way and we never did change it”

Truly a sense of looking back into the past and seeing history in the making.
> It’s better at search than Google.

That’s hardly a high bar now.

> And programmers are dependent on it.

Entry level ones, perhaps.
LLMs are decent at Pandas.

I say "decent" because most of the available training data for Pandas does things in a naive way.

OTOH, they are horrible at Polars. (I figure this is mostly a lack of training data.)
Right, but as you note the legal definition doesn't apply here anyway, we're clearly using the colloquial definition of whistleblower. And that definition comes with the implication that powerful people would want a particular person dead.

In this case I see very little reason to believe that would be the case. No one has hinted that this employee has more damning information than was already public knowledge, and the lawsuit that he was going to testify in is one in which the important facts are not in dispute. The question doesn't come down to what OpenAI did (they trained on copyrighted data) but what the law says about it (is training on copyrighted data fair use?).
Show HN: Wool Ball – Decentralizing AI with Distributed Browsers
Hi HN,

I recently launched Wool Ball (https://woolball.xyz), a project designed to test the concept of paying people to enable their devices to process AI tasks through their browsers.

The idea revolves around “browser as a service” or “browser as a server,” leveraging idle browser resources to create a decentralized, scalable, and cost-effective way to run AI workloads.

We’re still in the early stages, and I’d love to hear your feedback on the concept and the product we’re building.

Overview: https://woolball.xyz/Guide

What do you think of this approach to decentralizing AI?
This is 400004 (4 0's), TFA was 4000004 (5 0's)
There was also a planned (but scrapped) project in Rattenberg, Austria:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rattenberg
It's not a hype when it's delivers and I'm also not seeing a ceiling yet

Yet again interesting progress.

Also I like the idea of using the pose model to generate not a NPC but a avatar living in my phone or glas cube as a hologram. That would be quite scifi futuristic
I can't find the chart but I remember seeing some demographic data from a rural part of India where, after a certain age, it started to look like stair steps with discontinuities every 5 years. Did they just have a huge (well-timed) baby boom twice a decade? The real story IIRC was that most of the elderly people didn't care to keep track of it and would just round their age to the nearest 5 years when asked.
i learned o7 from Elite/Elite Dangerous but the same starship skipper-to-skipper vibes apply!
I once had one of my users come to me: "I accidentally typed "ci filename" rather than "vi filename", it asked me some questions and I answered them, and now my file is gone." I told her: "Don't worry, I know exactly what happened and how to fix it!" She was one of that day's Lucky 10,000.
> multiple news agencies

In the case of the US, you cannot make your selection wide enough. For optimal security, get it to both local news organizations and serious European press agencies.

The US news media do not have independent editorial boards. Several titles are actually from the same house. Corporate ownership, and professionals going to the dark side via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_capture are just some other risks.

Even if it gets published, your story can be suppressed by the way the media house deals with it. Also, there are many ways to silence news that is inconvenient or doesn't fit belief schemes, good example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42387549
Your comment has me very curious what exactly you are looking for in a "markdown equivalent" for spreadsheets. Do you want Excel to be able to export the spreadsheet in a Markdown-like format (including formulas, etc)? Or do you want to build the spreadsheet in a text editor using Markdown++ syntax and then use some GUI application to render it? Or do you simply want an ASCII version of Excel that works in a terminal?
They're two materials that 2D materials people commonly stock. BN is thought to be a pretty innocuous insulator. Might as well be the lettuce of the sandwich. However, it's now showing that it has effects on the nearby layers, so people are playing with it in heterobilayer devices.

A large part of the field of 2D materials is just trying stuff.
How interesting..... Of course liquid nitrogen + milk (with one or two other things) is worth more than the sum of its parts.
I assumed it was a safe place to live in the year 1300 through the 1800s when Napoleon was romping through Italy on through to the 1940s.
> "possession of information that would be helpful to their case" were misleading?

I didn't say that, but helpful comes on a very large spectrum, and lawyers have other words for people who have information that is crucial to their case.

> that qualifies as a whistleblower in my book.

I'm not trying to downplay his contribution, I'm questioning the integrity of the title of TFA. You have only to skim this comment section to see how many people have jumped to the conclusion that Sam Altman must have wanted this guy dead.
How do you go about practicing? Do you just try to push yourself faster?

I notice that my error rate (reading words that aren't there) goes way up if I push myself to go faster. If I'm reading something that is easy to guess at then it might feel like I'm blazing through it with good retention, but if the words aren't what I expect then it ends up being quite counter-productive
Basically it removes excess water from the filter, creating less soggy pucks. Easier to clean. I imagine the rapid depressurisation "upwards" may cause the puck to move a bit upwards, again, making it easier to remove.
I made a (now deleted) root comment about this, but saw someone else commented about it to.

All the links people have in their profiles basically doesn't work anymore. Maybe you could at least setup a redirect from the URL without the coordinates to the one with the coordinates, assuming when they set up the link, they used whatever first result you got back then. Basically run both versions (not literally), but redirect from the old one.

Good practice to keep URLs alive one way or another for as long as you can, as effectively all the links the initial group of users put no longer works as expected.
Cryptic error messages? maybe in comp time type level code

Puzzling syntax, I simply disagree, it’s not that bad, can you give an example?

Brutal compile times? Idk, for me it’s usually instant, and if there’s a problem I know right away instead of needing to wait for runtime crashes

Rust has been hella worth it for me. Only time I didn’t like it was when I tried to “impl Future for T” instead of writing “async fn”
He is too "soft" for that I bet. Maybe the shareholders?
>It’s better at search than Google

in what world? what it's good at is suggesting things to search, because half of what it outputs is incorrect, so you have to verify everything anyway

it does, slightly, improve search, but it's an addition, not a replacement.
These novel new superconductors are generally considered to be "bad superconductors." They have really low critical fields.
Just to beat the horse to death, I want to be clear that what I'm asking for isn't much:

1. The default random() call/library should always produce exactly what it says -- real, secure, unpredictable (pseudo)random numbers.

2. For statistical and non-security applications it's perfectly fine to have a generator of the form random.insecureAndFast(). Or call it whatever you want, the important thing is that the developer make a tiny amount of conscious effort in the process of using it.

3. If you require reproducible and insecure generator, just use approach (2) above and add a seeding function. (Honestly I don't like anything that uses global state, but I don't care as long as it's labeled insecure.)

4. If you require reproducible and secure random numbers, then you have a slightly challenging problem on your hands that is way beyond the scope of this discussion.

For people who don't require secure randomness, the total "cost" of my proposal is something like an extra dozen characters added to your code in a few places -- and if that's too much work for you, then you probably aren't writing reproducible tests or spending a lot of time optimizing for speed. On the flipside, you might save someone a few million dollars when their crappy Bitcoin library uses a dependency that relies on random().
Read up on Vioxx [1] to know exactly what the free market will do.

Drug companies simply won't test for safety (or lie about the results). Any 3rd party will be seen as worse than worthless. They'll either be funded by the competition to undermine trust in competitors or they'll not have the funding needed to advertise their results (they'll be indistinguishable from cranks).

And further, No free market mechanism will actually have enforcement mechanisms. Which means unsafe medicine will stay on the market indefinitely.

Testing for safety is a costly endeavor that pharmaceutical companies will pretty happily ditch.

We know what the US without the FDA looked like. The FDA wasn't always there. In that bygone era coke was sold as a health drink and milk was blue. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal
My point is we have the major corpus of research for these topics already. The societal value - rich discussion, learning, critical thinking - can be accomplished solo or in a group setting with a solid teacher. We don’t need to fund 6 figure salaries for an army of tenured faculty to produce more journal articles on these subjects
> Not that thoughtful. Copyright law is mostly harmful. Apparently he couldn't realize this simple conclusion.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You only need one person who seem interesting enough to want to have a quick chat with :)
I'm a normal to slow reader so take this with a grain of salt, but I've noticed that speed readers tend to turn their heads, whereas normal speed readers just move their eyes and not their head. Would be interesting to hear if you try moving your head if it helps your speed.
Gonna have to give it a proper read-through over the weekend, but this looks like a stellar guide at a glance. Sincere thanks for sharing your work and looking forward to further entries in the series!
i started looking into using Cloudflare AI gateways for this exact [caching] reason a few months ago but got distracted with GPU Cloud Run so i never did get decent load/numbers on the AI gateway cache to see if it was worth bothering about
I have the same habit. The lack of tilde expansion after the equals sign has helped a bit in breaking this habit, however.

Interestingly, bash does do tilde expansion, but not tab completion, after the first equal sign, and after every colon, in variable-style arguments:

$ /bin/echo --foo=~ bar=~:~root
--foo=~ bar=/home/jtm:/root

While tab completion can be fixed in appropriate contexts using custom completion functions (e.g., [1]), AFAIK there's no way to customize tilde expansion contexts (other than the fact that tilde expanding variable-style arguments is disabled in POSIX mode).

[1] https://github.com/scop/bash-completion/blob/8a8880db78e9b04...
Server is hanging up on me for some reason. Posting an archive link in case anyone else has this problem.

https://web.archive.org/web/20241213205017/https://www.tuhs....
No. Anytime someone potentially possesses information that is damning to a company and that person is killed… the low probability of such an even being a random coincidence is quite low. It is so low such that it is extremely reasonable to consider the potential for an actual assassination while not precluding that a coincidence is a possibility.
LLM providers also let you send PDFs directly, too.

OTOH, sometimes you are the LLM provider, and you may not be using a multimodal LLM. (Or, even though feeding an LLM is a common use. You may be using the markdown for another purpose.)
Not sure I follow, do you not use templates and scripts to generate the static pages?

I was a web developer 25 years ago and for the majority of projects we only made static sites, all templated and minified. My skills are somewhat "of that time".

Recently I was asked to build a site to demonstrate some new software. It consisted of over 10k pages that once built would rarely, if ever be updated.

I just scripted and templated the generation of every single page hosted it in S3. This may sound ridiculous in this day and age but it takes a few minutes to rebuild and update the entire site.

Guess my point is I don't really find duplicating things to be a pain in the ass
AI probably has more capacity to be incorporated into many things than microwaves.
If I pass the --help flag, I'm explicitly asking the program to print the help text. In this case it's appropriate for the help text to be written to standard output since the help text is the output.

If the user passes invalid options and inputs, then the program should produce no output and any error or help messages should be written to the error stream. It's important that these messages end up on the terminal when one gets the command invocation wrong while trying to pipe data into another program. If they're written to standard output, the program on the other end of the pipe will slurp all the error messages up and try to parse them as though they were valid inputs.
Amid lawsuits and criticism, Character AI unveils new safety tools for teens
Presumably it's pleasant the rest of the time, or near a suitable travel route or natural resources, and because it's easier to build there than higher up the mountain side.

E.g. while much newer, the town of Rjukan in Norway which also has a small heliostat, was built specifically due to the nearby waterfalls that provided easy access to power for industrial use, and the valley floor was where most of the town was constructed because that's were the easily accessible terrain was.
OpenAI whistleblower found dead in apartment
What would that accomplish?

Are you saying they won't kill you because then the documents would be released? So you would never release the documents if they never kill you?

Or are you saying you'll do this so the documents are guaranteed to be released, even if you're killed? In that case, why not just publish them right now?
Like all great humor, it's hilarious because it's true and points out an absurdity
Not to their proponents particularly at the time.

For the rest of us in HN it was easier to judge on much mileage will get, but a long time in each cycle we were in the minority, just like the AI skeptics including me and many here are today on how much we will value get.

Don’t get are wrong, AI is more real and more useful than the things before it, but everything is on a spectrum of success - some more and some less, but none of it has been or will be world changing or truly global.

The true breakthroughs rarely get public or even tech community attention until late in the cycle although their progress is public and can be tracked, like with EUV or mRNA or GLP-1 etc . Others which are incremental changes like 5G or cheaper smartphones do not get as much attention as their impact should warrant especially compared to the fads

Hype cycles don’t correlate well with real tech cycles
Murdering a us citizen on us soil is not something any enlisted or officer would do.