skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We (the authors of this website) have at times sought insight into the inner workings of an LLM by asking it “why did you just do that?”

> But the LLM can’t tell us. It’s not a person. It doesn’t have the metacognitive abilities necessary to reflect on its past actions and report the motivations underlying them*.

> With no clue why it did whatever it just did, the LLM is forced to guess wildly at a plausible explanation, like the ill-fated Leonard Shelby in Christopher Nolan's film Memento.

> And we, gullible humans that we are, often believe its bullshit.

---

I am almost convinced that we ourselves are a narrator riding along inside an animal's mind, trying desperately to put together explanations for our actions, mostly just to convince others, just as though an LLM were running on our own senses trying to portray some deep semblance of consciousness. I don't think we'll find a super smart AI, we'll just realize we were not very sophisticated all along. The power of speech for information and culture transfer, writing, inspiration, and coordination is just awe inspiring, evolutionary speaking, so once we could talk we had to, because the "better" talker almost always won. It's an arms race.
Old enough to do the job, too young to ask the right questions.
> Fish is the only source of EPA and DHA.

Algae oil [0] which is plant based is also a source of EPA and DHA.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaweed_oil
The democratic leadership has allegedly advised the members on congress to not get arrested, as they are already in the minority. Given too many arrests, the republican majority will be able to easily pass nearly anything through congress.

Now it's my understanding that members of congress can't be truly arrested during session; so the above argument doesn't entirely stick for me.
He's got enough hustle to get funded by a16z to build yet another blockchain scam if he so chose. You better believe he's siphoning your government records to use for his own purposes later. Ask for forgiveness, not for permission, as they say; but with this government, you don't even need to ask for forgiveness.
The stance that we should never reward a journalist for “trying to ruin someone’s life” seems effectively to mean that we should never hold people accountable for their own words or actions, if those are reported by a journalist?

What if we didn’t worry about whether we’re “rewarding” the journalist, and just evaluated people’s actions and deeds when we decide how much public trust we want to extend to them?
Yeah... so re-reading that, I don't know what I was thinking. Uploading a rewrite of that bad crap now.
Wow, haha. A real one. Never imagined I'd see a comment like this in the wild. I do think it's a stretch to, say, blame the community, but what breaks my head is how everyone is acting like this is normal? Kids going in and Ctrl-F'ing "dei" and "gender," deleting the former and replacing the latter with "sex." Making false claims about government spending about things that have been online for years and available to see... Never realized what a cult was until now!
I am glad the article finally made it through who/whatever is trying to keep it down.

But, c'mon Dan. I posted this 23 hours ago. That post is 2 hours old. How did it get flagged as a dupe? I searched before posting and could not find it anywhere.

Relatedly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42990030
What the media is reporting isn't relevant. We have Elons own word where he is saying he shut downtown various departments, intends to or canceling payments, having people arrested. Others are trying to cause a scene on social media by sharing cut out spreadsheets.
If you are mad at your AWS bill, do you slide to your 10th line item? That is effectively what going after USAID is.

To give you an idea of how poorly this has been handled, my wife's friend is an attorney working in non-profit immigration.

She got told on Monday that her company is going to lay off 50% of their staff because they have no more money from USAID. Her boss found her a job at another firm a week later thankfully. Then Friday she got called by the CEO to come back since it turns out they were not going to get cut. Obviously, she declined.

They are messing with real peoples lives and destroying businesses that help people.

Is the goal to save money? Balance the budget? If so, fixing tax loop holes and going after waste in the military will yield more than 10x what cutting USAID does.

FWIW I'm all for fixing government spending, but treating it like a CI/CD pipeline where you will just "rollback" is idiotic.
Nothing I said was inaccurate, and the fact that Vance also whinges about journalists accurately reporting the publicly expressed views of a person in a position of responsibility does not change the fact he referred to the twentysomething who resigned from that position as a "kid" somehow more deserving of a government job than the thousands of blameless individuals he was originally tasked with firing.

I appreciate that people who concur with Vance's objection to journalists reporting the truth are going to tune me and most things out, but that says more about your own lack of intellectual honesty than anyone else's...
I attended an Intel "AI day" in London back in about 2018, before they bought Habana and had all of their focus on Nervana (mentioned in the article) and Saffron - which I've basically never heard mention of again since that day. seems a shame; while the AI accelerators have obvious utility, it was Saffron which sounded like it might be a game-changer.
Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are.

If you know more than someone else, two good options are (1) to share some of what you know, so we all can learn; or (2) not post. Snarky putdowns are not a good option.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
This, plus you must consider the risks of taking bold action that can be framed as insurrectionary. I don't see a lot of haste to immediately and unequivocally declare the elected President, a usurper. Some would say the trouble is, the man got large numbers of legitimate votes under false pretenses, in a system where such an act is expected to lead to buyers' remorse and midterm losses through the political system.

Instead, we have whatever this is. Doesn't look like it's complying with the normal process of the political system, which is designed to punish an electoral bait-and-switch. Looks more like Russian elections and populace-management.
In context, I read that as describing the future he could have had in brighter terms to increase the contrast with the following description of the future he probably has. Like, being generous because it doesn't matter now anyway.
So....
The US government was designed to -deny- the executive branch
oversight and answers from the departments and agencies that
the exutive branch runs?

Or it was designed such that the exutive branch may not
appoint or use independent organisations or consultants
to perform audits?

I dont think that is accurate.
All these replies trying to justify the title... absolutely bonkers. Should be ashamed.

Literally has nothing to do with faking data, hacking data, changing data or trying to influence any outcome whatsoever. The title is 100% not what his code is about.

But yall keep on trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and wonder why no one cares about your outrage.

Use it on something legitimate, not something 100% made up.
> Others say they are nothing but bullshit machines.

Simply ignore anyone who says this and go about your business.

Doubly so if they bring up the environmental impact of AI.
Show HN: Locksmith – detect locks taken by Postgres migrations
Techniques (eg., of ML or non-ML) do not decide between explanation and prediction. It's common in ML to speak like many computer scientists do, completely ignorantly of science, and suppose somehow it is the algorithm or how we "care about" it which matters -- no.

It is entirely due to the experimental conditions which are a causal semantics on the data, not given in the data or in the algorithm -- something the experimenter or scientist will be aware of, but nothing the computer scientist will even have access to.

Regression is explanatory if the data set is causal, has been causally controlled, the data represents measures of causal properties, these measures are reliable in the experimental conditions, the variables under question each have causal relationship, and so on. Conditions entirely absent in the data and in the algorithm, and in anything to do with ML.

In a large number majority of cases where ML is applied, the data might as well be a teen survey in cosmo magazine and the line drawn an instrumental bit of pseudoscience. This is why the field is not part of scientific statistics -- because it aims to address "data as number" not "data as casual measure". The computer scientist thinks that ML can be applied to mathematics, or games like chess which is a nonsense scientifically (since there are no empirical measures of the causal properties of chess).

ML is the algorithms of statistics without any awareness, or use of, any scientific conditions on the data generating process.
I'm currently reading Startupland by Mikkel Svane. While I'm not fully done with the book yet, I think its content resonates with what you're looking for. After all, Zendesk was self-funded and 100% focused on building something its customers loved (back in that day and age). Perhaps give it a try?
1) memory safety at compiler level, 2) type systems that have dependent types or similar such features, are both things people have gotten interested in again recently, especially because of the excitement around Rust. (you can see this connection from the use of the word "crate" here, which is a Rust term originally.)

Ada is a language that had features dealing with these problems way back in the 1980s, so people have suddenly become interested in revisiting it.
In what context?

I’ve never seen any read notifications on HN.
I am completely convinced that what we call consciousness is as you say.

this means that it really exists in retrospect (20ms ? i recall some neuroscience articles from the 00s). nonetheless its whole reason for existing (retrospectively) is planning the future
Regardless of what the media is reporting, the head of DOGE is gleefully gloating about all the departments he’s “deleting” on Twitter. No hint of collaboration, just attack after attack. And he keeps framing federal workers as the enemy.
It's because there's this pernicious meme throughout the tech world that political aloofness is a sign of intelligence. It was pathetic years ago and repugnant today.
I used to hang around with the late 90s's versions of these guys. I grew up, had a family, have had a successful career. They went to prison. I expect the same will happen to this lot.
How do I access this "Com"? I'm curious.
> It’s hard to be outraged now when we’ve been selectively told to ignore the past of others.

A key tactic of the current administration is to pretend that all politicians are massively corrupt. This cynicism is easy to digest, but it normalizes bad behavior. Then when this team does it, they can pretend they’re behaving normally.

Anyone paying attention can recognize the difference, but to casual observers who like cynical takes it’s easy to take the “both sides bad” bait and become numb to it.

Regardless, the logic doesn’t even make sense. It’s literally the “two wrongs don’t make a right” fallacy to try to defend this by saying that you didn’t like something the other side did in the past. In the process, you admit this is actually bad too.
That's funny because I am disappointed that so many people talk as if socialized healthcare is the miracle cure for all our woes.

There are a couple things you just can't get around in any society. The Law of Supply and Demand, and that corporations serve their customers.

That second one is the number one problem we have currently in the US. We, the patients, are not the customer. We are are basically a cost of doing business for the "insurance" companies and medical providers.

Socialized medicine aims to solve this problem by removing all insurance companies and becoming the single customer for all medical providers, and then dictating how much they will pay. Due to Supply and Demand, if this single customer doesn't offer to pay enough, then the supply of medical care will go down. Again in this scenario, you and I are not the customer. If we don't like this reduction in supply, we don't have much we can do. We aren't allowed to offer to pay more to get what we want. If the government offers to pay more, the supply of medical care will go up, but where does that money come from? You and I, but again, we have almost no say in this.
Another thing big programs have is a huge ramp-up phase where they construct the main guts of their massive heap. Splay, for example, benefits from have an enormous nursery in the beginning because for the startup phase the generational hypothesis doesn't really hold; most objects survive. So the first copy or couple of copies are a waste. V8 had at one time a "high promotion mode" that would kick in for such programs at the start, using various heuristics. In high promotion mode, entire pages are simply promoted en masse to the old gen, and nursery size gets quickly enlarged.
If my point didn't make sense, it may be because I compressed it too much. Here's some background information followed by a decompressed version of that specific point.

The optimal HN front page is not one consisting of stories that the strongest-feeling subsets of users feel strongest about. That would optimize for indignation and sensationalism—definitely incompatible with HN's mandate.

The tug-of-war between upvotes and flags is core to HN's functioning. Indignant and/or sensational stories are often propelled onto the frontpage by 'hot' upvotes and then demoted by 'cold' flags. For the most part, that's the system working as intended. Not having flags at all, which is (I think?) what you're arguing for, would definitely not be in the interests of the site.

There's unfortunately* still a need for moderation, though, because some stories stay on the front page even though they're not so good (I mean 'good' in the specific sense of 'in keeping with the site mandate), and some stories get flagged off the front page even though they are legit submissions that could produce good-for-HN threads.

Now here's a decompressed version of the point you quoted:

If it were a rare thing for a topic to get flagged even though some users care strongly about it, we could just turn off the flags whenever that happened. However, there are always topics going on that some users care strongly about, which other users want to flag. To unflag all of them would (practically) amount to not having flags at all, and that's not an option. Therefore, there needs to be some way of deciding which ones to unflag vs. to leave flagged; and the argument for this cannot just be "please turn off the flags because I really care about this story"—that would be treating one subset of users more favorably than others. Similarly, it can't be "let's turn off the flags because we (the mods) personally care about the story". There needs to be an argument from principle about why a given story is a good candidate for turning off flags (or not turning off flags). If people want to argue that about a particular story, then, they need to either show how (1) this is desirable given HN's principles as I've explained them; or (2) there could be different principles that are better at realizing the site mandate. Does that make more sense now?

* unfortunately, because it would be so much less work if there weren't!
it's an example of the type of knee-jerk reactions, not a claim that people are literally saying that in every comment thread, however you're welcome to see for yourself how musk and hitler are discussed in the same comment constantly. it happens basically every day:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The bigger question is whether there is currently any personnel physically even allowed to do such thing.
I blog on technical topics as a reminder to my future self. I increasingly find myself needing the details of some command line or process from long ago, and having my own notes easily searchable is a great time saver. Hopefully it helps someone else too.
while I agree there's typically a big event where the state has incredible leverage over the subject that is part of the flip. As far as we can see in this story; there is no leverage. So for all we know this guy is doing what he did in his last job and selling secrets gained working here to competitors.

Imagine if DOGE feeds all the data they get their hands on into an LLM and he sells a copy of that to a foreign nation, allowing any other government a text-based interface to ask any questions of any of the internal workings of the US administration, government, citizens or even some of its secrets.
Intel is #1 example of why you don’t let management consultants come inside your company. They are simply the worst. Why do you let a bunch of PE/VC-rejects dictate your corporate strategy?
The key distinctions are: we can hold people accountable, and the amount of shit produced by one person is limited. Neither of those are true for LLMs.
Some of these individuals also want to cause pain to others, and feel it is unjust if the pain comes to them:

> A federal prison here in Florida’s rural Panhandle lost much of its roof and fence during Hurricane Michael in October, forcing hundreds of inmates to relocate to a facility in Yazoo City, Miss., more than 400 miles away.

> Since then, corrections officers have had to commute there to work, a seven-hour drive, for two-week stints. As of this week, thanks to the partial federal government shutdown, they will be doing it without pay — no paychecks and no reimbursement for gas, meals and laundry, expenses that can run hundreds of dollars per trip.

[…]

> The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/flo...

“He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

As Adam Serwer observed, the cruelty is the point:

> We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated[1] from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists[2] when he mocked a child with down syndrome[3] who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse[4] suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre[5] (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting Senator Jeff Flake,[6] the women who said the president sexually assaulted them,[7] and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting.[8] There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents[9] shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by police, the women of the #MeToo movement[10] who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that they enjoy this cruelty, it is that they enjoy it with each other. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to each other, and to Trump.

[…]

> This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

* http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/...

* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665171/the-cruelty-...
There is a trend of building hard benchmarks for LLMs, such as GPQA or Humanity's Last Exam, with questions crafted by PhDs. Ergo, most people cannot understand what these benchmarks are testing. If you're an expert in something, and if you're on HN you may be an expert in some sub-field of CS, I recommend trying to solve the questions from your field on Humanity's Last Exam. I took a crack at the Programming Languages questions myself.
> not an inherently necessary part of most data analysis

You do realize that the LLMs did not find the data suspicious, right? I think your answer is appropriate if they answered (without follow-up prompting which is leaking information to the LLM!) that the data was suspicious. But in fact, all models are saying that the data is normally distributed. Sure, the author said this, but they confirmed it. If you run normaltest on any BMI or steps, you'll find that they are very NOT normal. In fact, you can also see this from the histograms.

So honestly, this isn't even about the Gorilla. You're hyper focused there because you're looking for a way to make the LLM right while not looking for why the LLM got it wrong (it did, there's no denying it, so we should understand why it is wrong, right?). The problem isn't so much about expecting it to be human, the problem is if it can do data analysis. The problem here is that the LLM will not correct you, it will not "trust but verify" you. It is a "yes man" and is trained to generate outputs that optimize human preference. That last part alone should make you extremely suspicious, as it means when it is wrong, it is more likely to be in exactly the way you won't notice.
Fifteen years ago, in Spain, there was a calendar with events about free software, it named Libro Blanco. It was great.
If that were the case, why lock out democratic law makers from the building(s)?
For security work maybe but ostensibly this is accounting work. We are still claiming this is all an audit right?

I'm not aware of anyone questioning his skillset beyond basic questions of experience. Rather what's being questioned is this person's access to highly sensitive data given his shady recent history.

Like sure, maybe I'll hire an ex bank robber to help improve my security, but do I give him the code to the vault and write access to the inventory a year after he broke in?
That's canonicalization, and the article does mention it (but unfortunately does not offer much insight other than that it's hard).
Depending on the customs duties.
> We really don’t know what data is being accessed. We have a lot of people saying lots of things about the access. Such as he will block payments or tarter people based on how they vote. You have not claimed those so I won’t rebuttal then here. But “all this data” I will.

We do know that they got admin rights to several IT systems. Are you saying that giving admin rights to government IT systems to people with dubious backgrounds is fine, because the guys at the top have been voted in?

> As a tax payer I am appalled that this data is not already public and broadcasted live. Even more so that the specific legislation that granted the money was already public.

As appalled as by the fact that the people who are supposedly doing the auditing are completely intransparent, trying to obscure who is doing the auditing and threatening people who are trying to name people involved? Or is that ok for you?
Given Intel's string of failures with nearly everything outside their core competency (and in the past decade stumbling even there), I don't understand giving them the benefit of the doubt in this. What at Intel would have changed between all their failures, Habana Labs and the following failures that would make Habana Labs not their fault?