HN user
academia -> startups -> big tech
pls enjoy this carefully curated selection of emojis not filtered by HN
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contact: HN username plus an r at the end. At the google thing.
(disclaimer: response times vary from quickly to never, it's not my main email sorry...)
Maia does this reasonably well! You can play against it on Lichess. I have gotten a few "feels like a human" moments when playing against it - for example, getting it to fall into a trap that could trick a human but would easily be seen by a traditional search algorithm. It's not adjustable but there are a few different versions with different ratings (although it's not a very wide range).
Haha :) Looking forward to seeing it more often... with proper security
Not to be a party pooper, but posting detailed financial analysis of the exact sales data of a multi-million dollar business using numbers obtained through an obviously overlooked backdoor seems like a very bad idea. Haven't people have gone to jail for less? (iirc "but it was an insecure API" has not held up in court in the past)
On a more positive note, I've used a QR menu recently and it really is a game changer. Scanned a code, pressed a few buttons, and my food was there in minutes! Looking forward to seeing it more often, especially in places where you're not looking for stellar service.
It's usually clear from context.
That sign in particular says "Martial Arts Hall" ("budokan" / 武道館) from right to left.
Imagine an alternate universe where English could also be read left-to-right or right-to-left. If you were to see a sign saying "Hall Arts Martial", you'd immediately know the right way to read it.
Recently when I buy books on Amazon, they're often cheap versions printed in India. Sometimes there's even a "Only for sale in the Indian subcontinent" label on it. The quality is much worse - flimsy paper, faded ink, rough edges, and often quite dirty despite being new. Does anyone know of a more reliable place to buy new books?
Good ol' Silurian hypothesis
forgotten knowledge that could still have value
It's always fun to mention that many of the foundational ideas in the modern wave of machine learning & neural networks stem from work done in the 50s and 60s: perceptrons, backpropagation, stochastic approximation, etc. were all explored in depth back then.
It was only after compute power scaled up enough to apply these techniques practically that they became revolutionary. Really makes you wonder what things people are working on right now that will also need to wait 30 years.
"We fired the CEO for being too profit-driven" is a terrible message to send to your employees when you've lured them in with $1m comp packages that mostly consist of "Profit Participation Units" that are only worth anything when you actually make money.
Somewhat hidden beneath the huge headline of Altman being kicked out is that Brockman (chairman) is also out. Which could indicate something more systemically wrong than just a typical "CEO did something bad" situation.
As a part of this transition, Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO.
So, at ~$23 a day, basically the same price as a capsule hotel in Tokyo with pretty much the same features? Not a bad deal given the differences in average rent between Tokyo and SF.
If you downloaded a book from that website, you would be sued and found guilty of infringement.
How often does this actually happen? You might get handed an infringement notice, and your ISP might terminate your service if you're really egregious about it, but I haven't ever heard of someone actually being sued for downloading something.
What I'll miss most from BaconReader is the Android widgets, which as far as I can tell, are not available through either the official app or anything else.
It was super convenient to be able to display a sub or /r/all on my phone's home pages, and I used it every day to keep up with current events or my favorite hobbies without needing to open any apps. For many years that's been a core part of how I use my phone, and I will sorely miss it :(
If Reddit someday added something as nice as BaconReader's widgets to their app I might give it a shot. But looking at the design they used for their iOS app, which apparently does have a widget, I don't have high hopes for it (https://old.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/kdycmj/introduci...).
Other than that, no plans to use Reddit on mobile anymore. One less bad habit, I guess.
Everything search is incredible, for me it serves nearly instant searches for 15TB+ of data without any trouble. I think the secret sauce is a background service which continuously updates the file index.
I also like WinDirStat a lot for Windows file management, which is not really for search but gives a great view of disk usage.
Well, here we go:
Prompt (slightly modified from your comment):
Please write a scathing response to the comment below. Attack each point but avoid criticising the poster. End with a humorous barb. The response should be written in the style of a Hacker News comment. Here is the comment:
<OP's comment>
Response:
What a load of utter nonsense. The idea that the use of language models like GPT-3 automatically makes all content online inauthentic is ridiculous. Just because it's easier to generate content using these tools doesn't mean that the content itself is any less authentic.
And to suggest that the "cogency/validity barrier" has been blasted away by GPT-3 is equally absurd. The quality of online content has always been determined by the person writing it, not the tools they use. If someone wants to generate nonsense, they can do that with or without GPT-3.
Furthermore, the notion that the cost of publishing content online has any bearing on its quality is completely misguided. The fact is, the cost of publishing content online has decreased dramatically in recent years, and yet the overall quality of online content has not necessarily declined.
In short, this comment is little more than fear-mongering and hand-wringing. Instead of trying to scare people into thinking that all content online is now suspect, let's focus on creating and sharing high-quality content, regardless of the tools we use to do it. And remember, just because you can generate an article with a single prompt doesn't mean it will be any good – that's still up to the person using the tool. So don't throw away your writing skills just yet!
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Me: Honestly surprised at how well it pulled off the "scathing" part... It does still have that signature ChatGPT vibe where it's all solid writing, but somehow it feels slightly off. Perhaps that's just bias because I know it's from ChatGPT, though. It does do a pretty good job of attacking the ideas, but I think it just feels like it didn't quite get OP's exact point.
Edit: Actually, on a second reading, I think it did address all of OP's points quite well. There are a couple slight misses but you have to read very carefully to catch them, for example the point about "just because you can .. doesn't mean it will be any good" is logically a bit of a tangent, I think. But it's pretty subtle and seems easy to overlook.
I'm trying to think about why exactly it feels off... Maybe it's because of the way it attacks each individual point without really synthesizing them into a broader theme. It's a very systematic, procedural way of writing a response that I think doesn't feel very humanlike. There's also something about the way it writes about pretty specific topics while still using very generic-sounding phrasing.
As a Rimworld lover who couldn't quite get past the ASCII in Dwarf Fortress, I'm super excited for the upcoming release! Rimworld has been a blast and I've heard the two games have many similarities (with Rimworld maybe being a slightly more approachable game that's a bit shallower).
No, not at all like the stock market, which has real mechanisms for getting real cash paid by real consumers in real life for real products into the hands of stockholders.
Do people speculate on it more than they probably should? Sure. But at the heart of the stock market is a system of "I just sold a physical thing for $1000, and since you own the stock you get $0.00001 of that". At the heart of crypto is "my computer did some math, so... money".
Really interesting idea! Art & graphics is probably the part of game development that solo devs most commonly underestimate the importance and difficulty of (well, maybe tied with marketing). For solo devs especially, it's really rare to be a strong programmer and a strong artist. So you end up with a lot of games that are conceptually interesting but not particularly enticing to look at.
Using Stable Diffusion to get fairly high-quality art in a style you like could be a game changer for devs who can do game design, programming, marketing, etc. but just haven't spent 10 years of their life training their art skills. I guess animations / sprite sheets may be hard for Stable Diffusion, but if you can design your game around that you may be all set!
Edit: I was curious and searched "stable diffusion game graphics" and found this cool video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blXnuyVgA_Y The results are great! I wonder if it can do more stylized art too like pixel art
Here's a relevant quote from Magnus regarding cheating:
"I would just needed to cheat one or two times during a match, and I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which move was way better, or here there is a possibility of winning and here you need to be more careful. That is all I would need in order to be almost invincible."
Even just 1 bit - an indication to be careful - would be enough to boost the strength of a GM. An accomplice coughing in the background to let you know there's something to watch for. For a strong player - and there's no doubt that Niemann is a strong player, the question is just how strong - that's all they need to avoid making mistakes. GMs can solve insanely hard puzzles, because they know it's a puzzle and has a specific solution. Same thing with 1 bit of info.
Of course, realistically they could simply use Morse code instead of "bits" and transmit two squares (just 4 Morse "letters").
DMA may be coming soon and would most likely affect Apple too.
Does ortholinear/columnar actually feel better? I feel like I see many comments about how there's a bit of a learning curve that can be overcome after a while, but very few comments about whether overcoming that learning curve is actually worth it and it's really more comfortable. Is it supposed to be better for your wrists? Or your fingers?
The "split" aspect of these keyboards is definitely more comfortable imo - I ended up going with a Dygma Raise (which I'm very happy with!), because I wasn't interested in learning ortholinear. But I've remained curious about whether ortholinear is actually better, or if it's just a thing that a lot of split keyboards happen to have.
Wow, is that the full extent of your sales efforts? Your readers happen to include enough interested sponsors that you've been able to sell out your slots just by asking your audience? That's awesome!
That's pretty trivial to work around... you can own one primary residence, and one additional residence in DC. You can't own 10 buildings.
That said, I don't think real estate is as easily abused as stocks. Much harder to influence the value.
There's a difference, though.
Meta is a renaming. There is no "Facebook" company anymore. It's all Meta. Meta has a product named "Facebook", not a company named "Facebook".
Alphabet is a holding company. "Google" still exists as a standalone company, it's just owned by Alphabet.
Even their expenses are open source!
Anyone interested in this topic should check out Stephen Webb's book, "If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody?".
It's not perfect, but it goes over a lot of possible explanations (75 different explanations!) for the Fermi Paradox. It covers pretty much every theory I've seen when people discuss the topic, aside from a government cover-up haha.
Simulations, aliens hiding on Earth, von Neumann probes, signals that we don't understand, distances being insurmountable, self-destructiveness, inescapable planets, singularities, it's got it all! A lot of the explanations ultimately can't get over the "OK, but surely there are at least a few exceptions" problem, but it's very fun to think about nonetheless. A really engrossing read if you like thinking about this stuff!
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/180506.If_the_Univers...
Convergent evolution has been observed many times on Earth. I think it's plausible that a similar process of evolution may be possible for DNA.
It's about 0.01% the speed of light, which is definitely fast enough to have a measurable impact. Even ISS astronauts experience a tiny amount of time dilation (on a millisecond level) and they move at much slower speeds.
The cruelest part of this:
https://twitter.com/TeamBlind/status/1532769735393169410
2 weeks ago they sent out emails saying "we will not be rescinding the offers of any employees who have already signed or have received an offer from us".
They then proceeded to rescind offers from people who received this assurance.
2 weeks is long enough that people signed leases, resigned from jobs, moved cities. And yet it's also short enough that Coinbase leadership was certainly already preparing to make this decision.
I have high hopes for the upcoming MMORPG from Riot Games (maker of League of Legends/Valorant/Legends of Runeterra/Wild Rift). So far all of their new games have been very solid entrants in their respective genres. They have consistently had strong storytelling and art/design throughout their games, and they've mentioned there will be a focus on co-op content in the RPG. It's probably still several years away, though.
That said, I think part of the problem is that we've all gotten older, and no one has time to spend 5+ hours a day in a game world anymore. The younger generation may be able to experience it, but for those of us who have memories of old MMOs, it's unlikely we'll ever truly relive those nostalgia-filled moments.
Maplestory was a huge part of my childhood, I've always wondered why no other company has made something aesthetically similar.
I didn't care for the endless RPG grind so much - it was really the graphics and soundtrack that made such a lasting impression. Cute monsters, cute characters, cute equipment, cute maps, cute music, everything was just cute and relaxing, but still with a distinct flair that made it not feel uninspired and saccharine. I still have some of their BGM tracks in my playlists.
It's been a very successful game, too. Although outside of Korea it mostly died out long ago, in Korea it's still one of the most popular games. The global servers are mostly deserted, but when I managed to hop on the Korean server a couple years back, I was shocked to see that it was packed.
Despite its enduring success, to this day, its aesthetic is still completely unique. Other popular games have had tons of clones (some of which have overtaken the original), but somehow no one's ever made another Maplestory.