skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Best way to extract web element coordinates from an image?
I'm building a QA testing agent and everything works, except for having somewhat under par accuracy in resolving web elements from an image. For example I overlayed various types of grids onto an image which helped AI locate with better accuracy, but it was always still off the mark.

Is there some service I can use that will give me accurate coordinates of a web element on a viewport from an image?

I built a small DOM transformation tool to feed in a minimal DOM to my AI as context and it works very well, but things get dicey with iframes and some other things. Then I pivoted to using screenshots in base64 which has a much lower token count, but I can't solve my accuracy problem.
The reviewer wouldn't need to know, just the one coordinating who should review what.
> The heightening of the bar is an attempt to deny that milestones were surpassed and to claim that LLMs are not intelligent.

That was never "the bar"; nobody denies that milestones have been surpassed; none of those milestones are relevant to the question of intelligence.

> We had a threshold for intelligence. An LLM blew past it and people refuse to believe

Have you ever actually looked at contemporary (to Turing) examples of what people thought "passing a Turing test" might look like? It's abundantly clear to me that we were simply wrong about what the output would have to look like in order to convince human judges in the 2020s.

Even examples from much more recently (see e.g. on http://www-logic.stanford.edu/seminar/1213/Hawke_TuringTest....) suggest a very different approach to the test than prompting ChatGPT and marveling at the technical accuracy of its prose.

(Exercise: ask an LLM to write a refutation to your comment from the perspective of a human AI skeptic. Notice the ways in which it differs from mine.)

> Everyone still thinks all an LLM does is regurgitate things.

No; people still think LLMs aren't intelligent. Because they aren't, and they cannot become so in principle. They can do many things that are clearly beyond "regurgitation" (as we would otherwise apply the word to computer programs), but none of those things are the result of intelligence. Producing a result that could plausibly come from an intelligent system does not, in fact, demonstrate that the actual system producing it is also intelligent. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism wasn't intelligent, either, and applying a power source to turn the gears wouldn't have made it so, either.

> They don’t want to define an LLM as intelligent even if it meets the Turing test technical definition of intelligence so they change the technical definition.

The Turing Test was never a "technical definition" of intelligence. Turing's original paper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intell...) spoke of "thinking" rather than "intelligence". Besides, the "Imitation Game" is presented as a substitute problem exactly because "think" cannot be clearly enough defined for the purposes. The entire point:

> As Stevan Harnad notes,[7] the question has become "Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?" In other words, Turing is no longer asking whether a machine can "think"; he is asking whether a machine can act indistinguishably[8] from the way a thinker acts. This question avoids the difficult philosophical problem of pre-defining the verb "to think" and focuses instead on the performance capacities that being able to think makes possible, and how a causal system can generate them.

But the usual processes of pop science seem to have created a folk wisdom that being able to pass a Turing test logically ought to imply intelligence. This idea is what has been disproven, not the AI skepticism.
I use Ruby extensively in ops scripting and text mangling, where it supplanted Perl for me around about the same time that Perl stagnated ca.2010-2015.

However, Ruby doesn't make sense to me as a general applications language (Swift & Kotlin have won me over from C++ & Java), or as a systems programming language (I'm still rusted on to C, pun intended), and I remain super ambivalent about Rails despite using it extensively to stick web interfaces onto things. That doubt is in large part because Rails frequently undermines the Smalltalk-ish heart of Ruby.
Inbuilt authentication is a very welcome addition. I've been using Django instead of Rails for the last 4-5 years (for business reasons) and that was one of the features Django provided which, upon reflection, seems like table stakes for a modern web app. The other glaring omission being an inbuilt admin interface -- which may have been added after I moved on.
Object soup is like reinventing the heap, badly.
Talking about rabbit-holes. I used to have prototype OS/2 PowerPC 64-bit hardware from IBM before they killed the project. I should have kept that early EFI-based system. When the EFI boot sequence would panic, you would get an error message of "Danger Will Robinson".
I lament the world you live in. It sounds loveless and cold.
Sounds good! I just wasn't sure if I was missing something. Good work otherwise!
Yep! Not every operation you can do on a dict is thread safe but if you find a situation where it isn't it's a bug.

https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/112075

Google is recommending people not rely on it because it does make dict subclasses not substitutable. It's easy enough to avoid the issue completely so in most cases you might as well do that.
Any feedback would be appreciated. Thank you!
SSH remote absolutely rocks. It's the #1 reason I chose VS code instead of some other editor with an SFTP plugin.

I'm working on a Windows host with a bunch of Linux VMs. Although I can share directories between the host and guests, I prefer to rely on SSH remote because I want to work in the VM's filesystem and its environment. For example, I don't want to care which version of python and what kind of libraries are installed on the host. The VM is supposed to be a container for all that stuff, and different projects have different requirements.
I'm still using my 2015 13" Macbook Pro. I bought it in April 2015, and I think I'll actually get ten years' use out of it. The form factor is still decent, and it generally runs cool and quiet, but the performance is nothing to write home about (shall we say). It's still useable, for now, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that nobody is optimising their software for this tier of system any more.

You do have to be pretty determined to squeeze 10 years out of this sort of laptop. macOS gave up on my laptop a while ago (it runs macOS Monterey), and the app store moans at me occasionally about not being able to upgrade this or that because I don't have a recent enough macOS. It seems Apple gave up on selling replacement batteries for it at some point last year, too.
One stumbling block is that OpenAI's best model (o1-pro) can't yet deal with image uploads (edit: I'm wrong, it works now... trying it.)

Gemini 2.0 Experimental Advanced says:

-------snip--------

This document is a petition filed in the Orphans Court of Baltimore County. Here's a breakdown of its content:

Petitioners: Neary Senters and his wife are petitioning the court.

Subject: The petition concerns a boy named James Gannon, who is identified as a pauper and has been bound (apprenticed) to them.

Issue: The petitioners claim that James Gannon is claimed by a certain Henry Haine of Baltimore City. They believe Haine is attempting to exploit the boy's labor. He obtained the boy through a seemingly valid indenture (apprenticeship contract) authorized by two Justices of the Peace in Baltimore City. However, the indenture references records in the Register of Wills' office in Baltimore City, suggesting the boy was already an indentured servant. The petitioners argue that a 1793 Maryland law (Chapter 45) regarding the binding of apprentices invalidates Haine's claim. They assert that the law requires parental consent for binding out a child, and there's no evidence of such consent in this case.

Request: The petitioners request the court to summon Henry Haine and the Justices of the Peace involved in creating the indenture. They also seek to have James Gannon and his parents (if living) appear before the court. Their ultimate goal is to have the indenture to Haine declared invalid, thus retaining custody and the labor of the boy.

Legal Argument: The core of their argument hinges on the 1793 Maryland law, which they believe was violated when James Gannon was bound to Henry Haine without parental consent. They are essentially challenging the legality of the indenture held by Haine.

In essence, this document reveals a dispute over the legal custody and labor of a young boy in 18th-century Baltimore. The petitioners are using a specific law about apprenticeship to argue against another individual's claim to the boy, highlighting the importance of legal procedures and parental rights in such matters during that time.

-------end snip--------

The prompt was simply "Please provide a detailed summary of this document" (I wasn't sure what else to ask.)

Is that closer to your wife's interpretation? I mean, I can't make head or tail of it...
Because the argument isn't based on individual query results. See for example my comment on a previous post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42563715 .
There’s a video on X of the explosion from a security camera. Looks like a ton of big fireworks in the frunk.

Assuming this is just an accident, maybe right above a hot motor is not a great place to put a whole bunch of fireworks in a tight area.
Since Rails 8 I’ve even found myself using Rails + Sitepress over a static site generator. Kamal makes it really easy to run multiple lightweight sites on a cheap VPS writing even less configuration than Nginx, so it saves time up front.

Plus, nearly every static site ends up with someone saying, “oh I wish I could ____, but it’s a static site.” Instead of needing to pick a client-side-only solution, use a third party service, or integrate with a cloud Functions as a Service provider, Rails and a production-ready database are right there ready to help.
I don't get why this matters at all? I looked at the o1-preview paper, Putnam is not mentioned. Meaning that:
a) OpenAI never claimed this model achieves X% on this dataset.
b) likely, OpenAI did not take measures to exclude this dataset from training.
Meaning the only conclusion we can draw from this result is: when prompted with questions that were verbarim in the dataset, performance increases dramatically. We already know this, and it doesn't say anything about the performance of the model on unseen problems.
> The program should preferably be discarded, and the new team should be given the opportunity to resolve the problem from scratch.

Yeah right. "We don't know how it works so we're going to ditch it and create it again."

It works in some cases but by no means should that be the default.
consumer fireworks (1.4g) cannot blow up like this, by design and regulation. fire marshals can and do enforce this at points of sale & distribution

professional fireworks are also regulated to minimize mass-explosion risk.

if fireworks were involved in the explosion, it would necessarily be an improvised device. achieving this level of explosion with consumer fireworks would be difficult. the fireworks are a red herring, imo.
sure but i think it

1. is not very intuitive/useful to have mass that varies on the direction (which is what this implies)

2. is somewhat tautological to define a new mass m_rel = E/c^2 and say that it satisfies the equation when this is not what most people understand mass to be. most people understand photons to be massless particles.

at minimum, relativistic mass should always be specified as m_rel to distinguish from what is typically referred to as mass.

but i don’t think relativistic mass is a wrong concept any more than any other mathematical convenience like virtual particles. the main question is how useful is it and should it be described using the word “mass” or is this confusing. there is value in having shared language, even if you can construct an alternate system of symbols and rules that can yield the same answer to every question. to the extent to which intent of the author matters at all (probably doesn’t), Einstein agreed that relativistic mass was not a useful concept.

i'll concede that the arguments in the thread you linked are not good
Looks like that’s a list of films from the 1930s (the whole decade). Four of the listed films are from 1930 if you sort by release date.¹

¹ https://www.imdb.com/list/ls000050037/?sort=release_date%2Ca...
Hello, fellow Metamate ;)
Making an ASCII Christmas/Business-Card (& other decorations)
I made a little christmas card this year to send out to friends, where some semi-obfuscated Python builds the ASCII christmas tree on the cover. I kept a bunch of references in a markdown file as I went along making it, which became a short blogpost about making it. Hope it's of interest & hope you all had a good Christmas/new year.
He only skimmed them- scientists at his level are more like a CEO than the stereotype of a scientist- with multiple large labs, startups, and speaking engagements every few days. He trusted me to make sure the papers were good- and they were, but his name made the difference between getting into a good journal in the field, and a top “high impact” journal that usually does not consider the topic area popular enough to accept papers on, regardless of the quality or content of the paper. At some level, high impact journals are a popularity contest- to maintain the high citation rate, they only publish from people in large popular fields, as having more peers means more citations.
Reasoning involves making accurate inferences based on the information provided in the current context, rather than recalling arbitrary facts from the training data.
Ideas are kinda there, details (like names) are wrong wrong.

Feel like I should make this task my personal ASI benchmark lol :D
But even then wht if you ran the lite linux on the newest. Would the increased efficiency pay for it?
Why do they hate the idea?

It’s not clear what the core problem is. Are they contractually or by law obligated to comply with security/privacy requirements? Are they afraid you’ll misuse their data (steal their business, etc).

If you can be explicit about what “hate” means, you can find a solution, or decide this is not a potential customer.
Clearly from comment comments here some humans can do this, but are we sure that bots can’t?
right, but where did someone assume it wasn’t in the train set? they just said it wasn’t in the test set
Spoiler: divide and conquer is the way to go. Adding paths one at a time to a massive union is slow.

This seem like more of a surprise to the author than it was for me.

I’d say the takeaway is that treating everything like a black box doesn’t produce good results (sometimes). And not knowing enough to open the box completely leaves you with a lot of unknowns, surprises, and loose ends. But hey, figuring this stuff out is why we get paid the $$$.

Sometimes it would help to read a book or consult someone more knowledgeable though.
The 50g screen has only slightly (131×80 vs 131×64) higher resolution than the 48G series, but it has vastly better contrast, and, thanks to improved fonts and other UI improvements, the built-in software on the 50g also makes significantly better use of the limited screen real estate.

N.B.: Meta Kernel[1] provides many of the 50g UI improvements on the 48GX — 49g/50g OS is based on Meta Kernel — but installing Meta Kernel in RAM requires a memory expansion card that, at current used prices, costs nearly as much as a used 50g (plus a steady [semi-yearly IIRC] supply of CR2016 coin cells to sustain the RAM card when the calculator is powered off).

While I also prefer the aesthetics and keyboard layout of the 48 series, the 50g with its bundled software suite stands as one of the most hacker-friendly handheld computing devices of all time: while documentation and development tools for the 48 series were widely available, it wasn't until the 49g that self-hosted versions of these tools (System RPL (de)?compiler, Saturn (dis)?assembler, library creation and extraction tools) were bundled with the base OS.

[1] https://www.hpcalc.org/details/213
Well, there's a leading Postgres company which is owned by not one but two PE firms...
I find it really engaging, there's something about it that lets me really easily envision the world and the characters in my mind's eye, and to put myself into the narrative when I'm listening to a book. I get lost in it more than I do while reading a physical book, so much so that at times it can be almost disorienting when someone interrupts me while I'm engulfed.
Excuse my ignorance, but is this a real website or a parody? I cannot tell...because quite frankly, the solution is a couple of lines, markup combined with a single line of JS.
Use an Android smartphone as a "serial modem" with DOS
This is a great application of various domains of ML. This reminds me of Vesuvius Challenge. This kid of thing is accessible to beginners too since the data by definition are pretty limitted.
Make it 10000x easier and I’d use it haha
This, although we don't even need to agree to do anything (just agree to so nothing before some threshold).

Setting timezones is inherently political, so politicians are free to decide what to do when (as long as we can agree that shifting timezones a second at a time is silly).

When the time comes they may even decide to do nothing at all, or delay things until 15 min have passed, or who cares…
o3 is what i’m referring to and it is 2700
Borgo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40211891
So how does your IDE pick up on the tooling inside the VM? E.g if you build Python projects, how does it pick up the Python executable, .venv, etc? Or if PHP, then the PHP runtime, or if C then its stuff ... etc? If you install these on your host machine to make your IDE work well then I'm afraid that defeats the point of having a VM.
You realize that the copywrite date means something right? If you have something original you want to protect it and your date just rolls forward you loose the protection and significance for prior years.

If you just roll the date forward you basically say you invented this today which mostly defeats the purpose of the declaration in my opinion.

Might just as well remove it entirely.

Note IANAL
And recently, many payloads had their booster fly exactly once because the payload needed some extra 'oomph' to get into orbit so the booster was going to fast and to high to re-enter. When you are pricing for an average of 10x booster re-use you need boosters to go much more than 10x because one booster going 1x is going to bring your average down quickly.
This isn't a "house", this is the contents of a house.
Dupe: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42568936>
Litestack provides numerous benefits, but the largest is live replication to S3-compatible storage, which SQLite will not do by default.
This is why it's important to recruit allies in social circles.

There is always someone in the group who gets away with this, mostly because no one challenges them on it.

Allies are important because as soon as they are challenged they almost immediately gaslight and manipulate their target.

IME most of this happens on accident.
o1 crushes your variant. Here's the response.

Step-by-Step Reasoning
1. Clarify what is being compared
The question asks us to compare two bags: one containing steel ingots weighing 9.99 pounds and another containing fluffy cotton weighing 10.01 pounds.
2. Check the actual weight
Despite our intuition that steel is “heavier” than cotton by density, the problem specifically states the total weight in pounds of each bag. Since 9.99 < 10.01, the 10.01-pound bag of cotton is heavier in total mass than the 9.99-pound bag of steel.
3. No trick in the measurement
Each weight is given in the same units (pounds). This is crucial because if different units or measurement standards were used (e.g., 9.99 kilograms versus 10.01 pounds), we would need to convert them to the same unit to compare. But here, both are simply in pounds.
4. Conclusion
The bag of cotton weighing 10.01 pounds is heavier than the bag of steel weighing 9.99 pounds—even though steel is denser than cotton. The numeric value of the total weight is the deciding factor.

Answer

A 10.01-pound bag of fluffy cotton is heavier than a 9.99-pound bag of steel ingots, because 10.01 pounds is strictly greater than 9.99 pounds.

Reference
• Basic arithmetic: 10.01 is greater than 9.99.
• For a playful twist on a similar concept, see any version of the riddle “What weighs more—a pound of feathers or a pound of lead?” In that classic riddle, both weigh the same; here, the numbers differ.
Technology scales lots of things. Including business models based on conflict of interest.

There were corporate conflicts of interest with respect to customers long before technology. But it took tech to create a community scrapbook, tied to a mass surveillance, psychology hacking and coercion flywheel, powered by hundreds of billions of dollars from third parties, and motivated by trillions of dollars of potential market cap.

Something has to give. Society is eventually going to have to come to terms with the fact that minor incidents of poor behavior, when scaled up with technology, can significantly degrade society.

Many things are illegal now, that in the far past would never have been considered a problem. Scale matters. And Internet tech scales.
I find it to be a mixed bag. Better than nothing, but doesn't come anywhere close to what something like typescript can do for example.
Yep. It's probably rooted in our psychology as primates. I'm not saying this is good, but psychology is often ugly.

Men want to compete for status against other men. If women are present, it's not quite seen as a venue for male intrasexual competition in the same way. It's also possible that the greatest status in society can be found where males compete (unless you're dealing with a matriarchal society).
Don’t like porn? Then don’t use it. Forcing your personal views on others by banning things you don’t agree with is bullshit.
How could you know that there was "only one thing going around?" That would be kind of weird. Maybe you and your friends got a cold?
I have another suggestion which I'm sure played a large part in this.

SVC was an unwanted child. It wasn't their "product". One employee was tasked to write it to save paying money to a "seemingly innocuous middleware SaaS".

To anyone in ORG working on it, it was a dead end. No one wanted to own it and perhaps no one did. A team was asked to add features to it.

Doing the ground work of actually understanding SVC had many negative consequences:

* It would take a very long time, making managers not happy. It would be largely a wasted effort, since no further work was then needed on SVG.

* If you became an expert on SVG, it would be yours to keep and no one wanted that.
The paper is here: http://www.daemonology.net/hyperthreading-considered-harmful...

As its author noted, the paper has done fine ciation- and impact-wise.
iKOOLCORE R2 Max 10GbE Mini PC Review
I find this incredibly exciting. There could be some truly remarkable works whose contents are about to be revealed, and we don’t really know what we might find. Histories of the ancient (more ancient) world. Accounts of contact with cultures and civilizations that are currently lost to history. Scientific and mathematical discoveries. And what I often find to be the most moving: stories of daily life that illuminate what regular people thought and felt and experienced thousands of years ago.
At the risk of being "that guy", a day is not the time it takes the earth to rotate on its axis.
You lament the world we exist in, I am only making observations. Can't change the winds, can only adjust our sails. I am simply a scholar of demographic, social, and economic systems.

(partnered for 20+ years, this is not my problem luckily)