Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
I would hope this results in criminal charges and jail time. Honestly, even if it's by negligence and not deliberate. Fines are not enough to abate this kind of despicable behavior.
Comment · 3 years ago
The only possible reason for barriers to entry is regulation? There are many industries where startup costs are high for reasons intrinsic to the business and margins are relatively low so you are unlikely to get investment from outside sources. Grocery stores for example. You are trying to apply a toy model from econ 101 to explain the behavior of complex real world markets, and when the model doesn't fit you invent bogeymen to blame. This is more like religious fundamentalism than any kind of science.
Comment · 3 years ago
What was the controversy?
Comment · 3 years ago
Every post that is even remotely critical of ChatGPT has someone posting this exact sentiment like clockwork. It's probably just mindless fanboys, but I'm genuinely starting to wonder if it's some kind of astroturfed ad campaign for OpenAI.
Comment · 3 years ago
Worth pointing out that sometimes things really are impossible. If an MBA tells you something is impossible, it is probably just really hard. If a physicist tells you your idea violates conservation of energy, it is probably not worth wasting your life chasing it.
Comment · 3 years ago
There should be criminal liability not just monetary.
Comment · 3 years ago
This is a really fun use of language models. I wonder if more capable models would be better or worse in this kind of application? To some extent the charm comes from the whimsical aspect of it.
Comment · 3 years ago
Did you read the article or just the title? They mention the specific models the researchers were testing and note that increasing model size did not seem to offer much improvement on this metric. It also ends with a discussion of research into methods for improving performance on queries involving negation.
Comment · 3 years ago
Even if we accept their motivations at face value (which is naive), it's a totally incoherent morality. There are infinitely many future states with trillions of of lives. Which one is the one we attach moral value to? If it's all of them, then every single decision you make is equivalent to killing infinitely many future people. If it's one particular future state how do we decide which one? (I am not, of course, saying that you shouldn't value making the future better, just that applying this specific kind of utilitarian calculus to future humans is childish nonsense.)
Comment · 3 years ago
It gets reposted because it confirms the biases of right-wing posters and is an easy way for them to farm positive engagement and feel like they have some special insight into current events.
Comment · 3 years ago
If the OpenAI is using a machine learning system to flag comments as hateful there is a simple and parsimonious explanation: it simply had more examples of hate speech directed at minority groups and people with left-leaning politics. Interesting that the author never considers this and instead implies some nefarious political intent on the part of OpenAI.
Comment · 3 years ago
I'm all for people pursuing amateur chemistry if they want to, but they should be doing so with accurate resources. The Anarchist Cookbook is not reckless. It's just straight up wrong in a lot of places in ways that very well could get you killed. Making homemade explosives is reckless, doing it poorly is just stupid. If you want to make explosives there are better guides on YouTube of all places. There is no reason at all to use this dated book full of inaccuracies.
Comment · 3 years ago
I would tend to agree. The only people I saw really struggle with learning Fourier series and the Fourier transform were people who had struggled with more basic concepts and failed to internalize them. This kind of explanation might be helpful to build someone's intuition up a bit but is not a substitute for a proper education on the subject and definitely not some magic key to understanding.
Comment · 3 years ago
The methodology they describe seems like it would be prone to the multiple comparisons problem. Time to dredge up the actual study and see what's going on.
Comment · 3 years ago
I hope this is sarcasm.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton