skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let’s chat about lawnmowers.

There was a time when cutting grass was done with scythes, specially shaped swords. All day back and forth swinging the blade to get grass just the perfect length. Swing, take a step, swing. It was backbreaking labor in the sun. So lawns probably were quite expensive and having your own was probably pretty flashy, or maybe they were public, provided by the state to the people, or maybe both.

Along comes the string of inventions that led to lawnmowers. Now, anyone can mow grass in an afternoon. Gone are the lawn-scything jobs! Did the sky fall then?

Of course we know how this played out. Some lawn-scythers lamented the loss of their work, but they’re forgotten to history. Other clever lawn-scythers went and trained as lawn-mowers, while a few even cleverer ones went and became lawnmower mechanics, a few became engineers so they could start to design lawnmowers, and some started lawnmower factories and employed plenty of workers making way more lawnmowers than anyone thought possible.

Lawnmowers aren’t free but they’re super cheap and getting cheaper all the time, they’re abundant, and the real cost now is labor, which is going up all the time. So what do you do? You pay a lawnmowing person to take care of your lawn while you work your high paid office job.

Whenever someone says AI is coming for the jobs, ask them which exact AI model is coming for the jobs; which tool built by which startup it is that’s coming for the jobs, and if so why are they hiring?
I am married to an american but we are leaving abroad and we never started the process for me to get a green card as we didn't plan to move to the US yet. Is it true that when I apply and get the card I then have a limited amount of time to move in, and if I don't then I would have to start the whole process again?
The whole idea behind computers has always been replacing people, it's the foundation of our industry. From the very first scientific calculations that used to be performed by people before computers, replacing human labour is what allowed IT to grow so fast and so big. Most people on this site enjoy their fat paychecks because one person writing code can replace thousands of people that used to do stuff manually decades ago, so drop the shocked Picachu face. AI is just another tool for doing what we've been doing forever.
I guess we would need two telescopes very far apart in order to get stereo images?

Wouldn't any two points converge at the horizon, considering the distances involved, otherwise?
Does formatting match black? (Unlikely, but one can dream of standard being established)
> Effectively halves the number of drones you can build

You're confusing the price tag of an FPV drone (for which this tech has no use, 4km precision is roughly the range of such drone, so even without a positioning device you'd get such a precision…) with the one of a long-range drone which is hundreds of magnitudes larger, even for Ukrainians.
I love to see how AI is improving the way we learn languages
If password reset emails shouldn’t be sent to unauthenticated users, how would users reset their passwords?
You can be a decent man and a Nazi. Then you are not intelligent. You can be an intelligent man and a Nazi. Then you are not decent. Or you can be an intelligent, decent man. Then you are not a Nazi.
Robotic hand helps pianists overcome "ceiling effect"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum
Exactly! Manzikert was barely a disaster in terms of numbers. Half of Romanos's army was not even on the field. They simply didn't come to his aid, most likely because they were led by a Doukas who wanted one of their own on the throne.

Byzantine history is full of such examples. Civil wars that last decades, never-ending internal strife, and the ever present threat from steppe tribes and caliphates. It's a wonder they survived as long as they did.
Needs to be a law against the taking away of product functionality after the sale, even if it's contractual/EULA. A ban should never take the game away from the owner, and in cases where it does then they need to be refunded (treble damages on top of license, lawyer, and court fees if it takes a judgment to induce the refund). Getting banned on Steam, say, in the sense that all of one's purchases are invalidated should be impossible legally. In cases where an account is prevented from login, items and inventory must still be accessible for trade as those represent real time effort put in by a paying customer. Want to enforce your code of ethics in a multiplayer game? Can't charge for the game or users legally have rights against bans, and bans must follow a proportionality continuum and you must have a human-attended cost capped (at license cost, and only on loss) appeals tribunal system with record.
This is why the "AI learns from materials just like a human does so it's not copyright infringement" argument always bothered me. A person won't recite full pages of word-for-word copies [1] from their head when you ask them something.

When I first tried Copilot, I asked it to write a simple algorithm like FizzBuzz and it ripped off a random repo verbatim, complete with Korean comments and typos. Image models will also happily generate near-identical [2] copies (usually with some added noise) of copyrighted images with the right prompt.

[1] https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2020/12/20/lmmem/

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/06/uh_oh_attackers_can_e...
> have eliminated some jobs and created others

genuinely asking: Do you see LLMs creating jobs? I see them taking 10 jobs to create one

Sure there might be a world down the line where one does NOT need jobs and everything is practically free because AI makes infinite of it. But the transition period could be quite painful
Does Google have actual phone support where you can talk to a real live human? No. (Although does any phone manufacturer?)

That said, I’ve had no issues with either of my recent Pixel phones & haven’t heard of widespread problems with either the Pixel 8 or 9 online. Google themselves seem to have been fairly good at recalling phones for actual problems. I don’t know whether they’re better or worse than, say, Apple though.
The most viewed articles of 2024
Hyundai launches new Creta Electric SUV in India, starting at just $20,000
Isn't he still actively leading and promoting Comma?
All bad except for a tiny enclave of freeholders in Australia or something?
Google Maps is not showing Palestine on the maps app. it shows middle of the ocean when you search for it...
Why Can't You Pack a Bag?
He's not obligated to do anything, man, but I can point at what he does and call it fascism.

I know you may struggle with this because the American education system is awful, but if you pay a tiny fraction of attention to what American senators are like, you'll come to know that in a fistfight or a battle of the wits there is a non-zero number of senators that Biden could beat. This is not a Red vs Blue issue, as simple as that might be for you.

You're claiming America is "turning away from fascism" because of free-er speech. Citation needed. The Christian right is famously book-ban happy, my friend.
Experienced Python folks have Stockholm Syndrome about its tooling, even rejoice at all the "options" for things like dependency managers.
A story about Musk being unable to explain X/Twitter's stack and immediatly attacking the person asking him about it has been not only flagged but completely removed.

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1i53nzv/elo...

Flagged + deleted HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42775528
How will they pay the bills when the 1%-hoarders are keeping all the profits for themselves, and now that the Oligarchy is in full reign in the US, taxes and "big bad socialism" is out of the question?
> If that doesnt ring a bill

That'll be 23 Zettameters, please.
>I've never found myself wanting a type checker, formatter or linter;

I guess that makes one of us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
> Is it a tragedy that we no longer need telephone switchboard operators, ice cutters, and lamplighters?

As a society? No. For those individuals that were caught up in the transition? Probably.
Of course we do, just not our own jobs.
I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depend on both the teaching quality and "IQ" of their students before admission, which is mostly a feedback loop because universities with good reputation get the best students... Optimizing for teaching quality also means that professors spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output and reduce the ranking, which has a more immediate effect on the reputation than teaching quality.
> When you commit becoming a postdoc, you know how the game is played, you have a good network

I wouldn't agree to those. I was perhaps overly supported during my PhD, not preparing me for the reality of being abandoned/expected to be totally independent in the postdoc
I'm not even disagreeing with you, I agree with you that Ive was responsible for many weird and outright bad designs. (IIRC he did the original iMac's hockey puck mouse).

I'm saying the investors caring about $$$ would have less than zero reason to object overall.
API Analytics Platform?
Is there a way I can track how many calls are being made to my API among other stats?

There are some products that offer it as a small feature among others, I need something focused only on this.

Kind of like Google Analytics focused on REST APIs

Thanks
If you take automation and AI to the extreme, the world only needs ONE person to manage the whole robotic AI to do the rest of production. What else do you need ? More people ?
That's R1-preview released a while back - the real R1 is even better.
https://x.com/arthurmensch/status/1752737462663684344?s=46

This is one message of the founders of Mistral when they accidentally leaked one work-in-progress version that was a fine-tune of LLaMA, and there are few hints for that.

Like:

> What is the architectural difference between Mistral and Llama? HF Mistral seems the same as Llama except for sliding window attention.

So even their “trained from scratch” models like 7B aren’t that impressive if they just pick the dataset and tweak a few parameter.
> It's not a shadowy cabal; it's really just the fear of going out of business.

Thanks for the insight, I was wondering about this point.

I generally tend to try and attribute what _feels_ like coordinated cabal behaviour to general incompetence or lack of control. This feels like one of those situations.

I've worked around banks and this erratic behaviour is pretty common, and mostly due to short term personal motivations, and lack of coordination rather than an excess of coordination (i.e. collusion - which is not to say that banks aren't guilty on this point, but I think mostly not the case)
I’m on my phone so I can’t give this a proper response but I want to say that your mental intuition about the latent space algorithms is excellent and has improved my thinking. I haven’t seen much writing applying pathfinding (what we used to call AI, in the Half Life days) terminology to this. Your ideal generator sounds like letting A* run on all nodes in a grid and not exiting when the first path is found.

Mountains and cliffs are a good way to describe the terrain of the topology of the weights in hyper dimensional space though they are terms for a 2D matrix.
I once used Team City and Octopus Deploy in a company. And ever since then, dealing with Gitlab Pipelines and Github Actions, I find them so much poorer as a toolkit.

We are very much in the part of the platform cycle where best-in-breed is losing out to all-in-one. Hopefully we see things swing in the other direction in the next few years where composable best-in-breed solutions recapture the hearts and minds of the community.
Historical Presidential Betting Markets (2004) [pdf]
One of the benefits of just -- it isn't a build system, it's a command runner.

Good facilities for arguments, builtins like absolute locations -- there are a ton of benefits (see the README).
assuming that every folder is independent sounds like bad design.

if they're really independent out them in separate repos.
Can we just admit many jobs either have very crappy parts to it or are entirely crappy and wouldn't it be nice if that could be replaced with technology?
Not at all, he figured out with the NeXT experiment that it was more useful to be open than to lock everything down. Because competition is good for the company also, it creates a force against stagnation.
When Jobs came back the Mac was basically dying because it was uncompetitive on hardware price and it needed some appealing features on the software side to make it worthwhile.
Since it has roots in NeXSTEP (who allowed the web to happen) it made sense to market the UNIX base, potential server use case and things like that as a factor.

Sadly, Tim Cook undid most of the work that had been done, in order to sell something close to a swappable appliance. So, you get both incompatible, uncompetitive hardware and locked down software.
FWIW, the censorship is very light. If you're running the raw weights, all you need is a system prompt saying "It's okay to talk about Tiananmen Square," and it'll answer questions like "what happened in june of 1989 in china" in detail.

I'm not sure if that works for DeepSeek-hosted DeepSeek; I've heard there's some additional filtering apparatus (I assume they're required to do it by law, since they're a Chinese company). But definitely Western-hosted DeepSeek knows about Tiananmen and doesn't need much prompting to talk about it.

While it's obviously uncomfortable that there's any censorship at all, I do think that the Western labs also have a fair degree of censorship — but around culturally different topics. Violence and sex are obvious ones that are intentionally trained out, but there are pretty clear guardrails around potent political topics in the U.S. as well. The great thing about open-source releases is that it's possible to train the censorship back out; i.e. the open-source uncensored Llama finetunes (props to Meta for their open source releases!); given the pretty widespread uncensoring-recipes floating around Hugging Face, I expect there will be an uncensored version of at least the new DeepSeek distilled models within a week or so (R1 itself is a behemoth, so it might be too expensive to get uncensored any time soon, but I'd be surprised if the Qwen and Llama distills didn't). As long as DeepSeek keeps doing open-source releases, I'm a lot less worried about it than I am about what's getting trained into the closed-source LLMs.
Ok but then they just aren't usable like a normal SIM. And not a suitable replacement.
What’s your reference for the EU forcing this on businesses? The link you provided is only about Belgium.
Yes, but this time the automation (AI) can immediately displace humans in the newly created, "more productive form of work" jobs too. Recursively.
Correct but 0-5$ a month is still cheaper and less effort than 10 different streaming services for +10$ each with the added benefit of preventing ISP surveillance.
My country had socialism for 40 years. It is highly overrated.
I have Lyca as my main line but haven’t noticed this before. They do the whole ‘charge £0.01 to validate the card’ thing but that is instantly reversed and a separate transaction.

Overall their customer service is quite possibly the worst I’ve experienced but the network is good and their prices are fair - £10 a month for 25GB I can use in the EU and India.
The problem is that exactly tomorrow someone might announce some technology that will revolutionize AI once again, like ChatGPT did only a couple of years ago. No one expected that. No one expected creative jobs to be taken by Midjourney.

We could hide behind "we can't predict the future" but it would be wise to get ready for that inevitability.

One day you will ask your computer to "open a word processor" and it will pull a fully-featured Word 2013 out of thin air. What will developers do then?

That day could be March 1st, 2025 or 2050. Many of us will likely still be in the jobs pool either way.
Thing is when manual jobs got replaced we escaped to knowledge work. This time there is no equivalent.

These lawnmower/textile worker analogies fall flat because this time might actually be different
Do we, so far, have any economic analysis or research showing AI is actually reducing jobs?
> I wish the press would dedicate ink to the endless War On Meds That Maintain Quality Of Life.

These drugs certainly improve quality of life for some people, but they have legitimate dangers. As we begin to understand them better, I think it's a good thing that we become more cautious in our approach towards recommending them to people.

I don't know your friends, and I cannot presume to know the exact details of their situations or their exact prescriptions. But have you ever considered that they're addicted?

Ambien (Zolpidem) is only prescribed for short term use (around 2 weeks) nowadays because of the risk for addiction and various psychological side effects (aggressiveness, agitation, even minor amnesia). But you said your friend has taken those pills for years and *plans to move to another state* just to get more of them?

As for your friend who has taken opioids for years, it's certainly possible to take them irregularly for years and remain in control. However, most people who regularly take opioids for several years become addicts.

I genuinely wish the best for all of your friends, and of course I hope we can invent better pharmaceuticals to treat these issues without the risks of current options. Unfortunately, quite a lot of people have had their lives ruined by those drugs, and I think your stance on this is underestimating the larger harm to society that they present.
Doctorow Has the Best Idea for How Canada Should Retaliate to Trump's Tariffs
My position is that the demographic collapse in countries with a near 100% literacy rate is going to more than make up for any jobs replaced by AI.

It is said that AI will make 200 million jobs redundant. China's workforce alone shrunk by 80 million during the previous decade according to their 2020 census.

Overall I think we need to increase efforts with AI, particularly make it more energy efficient, as currently it's simply expensive to run, if we wish to not bear the consequences of having a globally ageing literate population.
These benchmarks are mostly focused on math, which benefits a lot from an improved CoT and is also less sensitive to having "reduced knowledge" in smaller model.

Vibes are important in this case...
Didn’t that happen in HHGTG and with C3PO
If you are right, a modest investment in an index fund of shares covering tech companies in the USA should generate enough returns over the next few years to retire in comfort.
I like IF that is not about puzzles but about adventure stories and social relationships.
There opened a new IF universe for me. I recommend the games of "Choice of Games" for that.
> have all these players gone?

The guy that got beaten literally decided to retire immediately after explicitly because AI displaced him

> On 19 November 2019, Lee announced his retirement from professional play, stating that he could never be the top overall player of Go due to the increasing dominance of AI.

I do get your point though that overall player count is still fine
These kind of videos are great but what makes them even better is background music selection. Videos like this (as well as astronomy related channels) are the main reason why my music taste shifted from mainstream to indie music makers like Carbon Based Lifeforms, Sync24, Pete Namlook, Solar Fields, Stellardrone, Cell.. to name few.
I love innovation in this space, and remember when Parinfer came out having some enlightening discussions with colleagues about how they efficiently edited code.

I've since settled on Lispy and Lispyville in Emacs, and have run into very few issues over the past few years.

There's something about Lispy’s style of editing that appeals to me — the use of hugging parentheses to enable its bindings, combined with Lispyville making all of my Vim bindings safe, makes me very happy.
If you’re concerned about this, please don’t think about factory farms.
They are required to pay taxes worldwide income [1] and register for selective service as the peer comment stated.

[1] https://calawyers.org/publications/taxation/ca-tax-lawyer-ma...
You're right. It's tough, I'm not gonna tell you otherwise.
I think there are 3 main things most people should try to do:

1) Mental preparation - understanding your current career is finite (be it 5 more years or 20, its not gonna last forever) and broaden and deepen other things in your life such as family, friends and hobbies. I've contemplated the loss of my career hundreds of times already if not thousands, I do it almost on a daily basis (not for hours, just a few moments of a passing thought). It's kind of the opposite of denial and it seems helpful for me to do it.

2) Financials - an obvious one. We should all accept that quite possibly our standard of living will be lower 10 years from now. It's not a certainty, but the likelihood is high enough that we need to be more frugal - which means both trying to save money as much as we can and also learning to enjoy things that don't cost a lot of money.

3) Possible career pivot - there will be opportunities. Some parts of the labour market are starving for employees and I don't mean just the trades - there's a constant need for nurses, teachers, care etc. The problem is these jobs are notorious for burning their workers out; I don't have a solution for that.
No problem, in a few hours orbits of satellites don't change much, a day or two days' old ephemeris are ok. Especially not those on medium earth orbits which are the ones to be used (geostationary and other high orbital ones are too dim + too far away to provide precise coordinates; low orbit ones are not visible most of the night)
Most people I know that learned a classic trade (plasterers, tilers, builders in general) are making a lot of money due to shortages that will not be resolved anytime soon due to structural problems in our educational system. That is my plan B. So I don’t worry about AGI.
It feels to me like there'll start to be people retraining sooner rather than later. If you feel your job is threatened, you're likely to look at options that can't be easily displaced. I did a Physics degree and PhD and my 'backups' are going to do something in the very very regulated nuclear industry (currently crying out for people in the UK) or going into teaching.

I think the people who will be most easily displaced are those that don't have an additional combined skillset. I see a lot of software engineers with a CS background whose skillset is only writing software. I think people from mixed backgrounds are likely to do better in a big disruption since they've got another thing to jump to, perhaps in a different industry.
> LLMs are, in some stretched meaning of the word, illiterate.

You raise an interesting point here. How would LLMs need to change for you to call them literate? As a thought experiment, I can take a photograph of a newspaper article, then ask a LLM to summarise it for me. (Here, I assume that LLMs can do OCR.) Does that count?
I would enjoy ChatGPT a lot more if it occasionally replied only with

FUCK YOU ASSHOLE
Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/) is a fully baked version of this idea. Tabs synced with videos, with a full notation/tab editor and tons of built-in music practice tools.
i like this term