Recent submissions

Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 9 months ago
Performance and efficiency are important, but we need you to invent the monitoring tools and visualisations that will underpin alignment!
Comment · 9 months ago
Yes there are metabolic changes in the mother herself during pregnancy but that's not why it's hard to research. The main fear is that drugs will cross the placenta and affect the growing fetus, or similarly be transmitted through breast milk to an infant. Very young humans are uniquely vulnerable to disruption in their growth that can cause life-long problems.
Comment · 1 year ago
Maybe not due to attention, but it is certainly possible for chat content to get leaked into other conversations due to bugs in the stack, and in fact it has happened before.

https://openai.com/index/march-20-chatgpt-outage/

"We took ChatGPT offline earlier this week due to a bug in an open-source library which allowed some users to see titles from another active user’s chat history. It’s also possible that the first message of a newly-created conversation was visible in someone else’s chat history if both users were active around the same time."

You are probably right about this particular LaTeX issue though.

Comment · 1 year ago
In my case I had hundreds of invoices in a not-very-consistent PDF format which I had contemporaneously tracked in spreadsheets. After data extraction (pdftotext + OpenAI API), I cross-checked against the spreadsheets, and for any discrepancies I reviewed the original PDFs and old bank statements.

The main issue I had was it was surprisingly hard to get the model to consistently strip commas from dollar values, which broke the csv output I asked for. I gave up on prompt engineering it to perfection, and just looped around it with a regex check.

Otherwise, accuracy was extremely good and it surfaced a few errors in my spreadsheets over the years.

Comment · 2 years ago
If you're trying to say that immunostimulant is a term of art distinct from immune checkpoint inhibitor, then fair point.

But what it seems like you're saying is checkpoint inhibitors don't "enrage/activate" the immune system, and they only target tumours, and both points are misleading if not outright wrong.

Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
I have very quickly picked up the habit of pasting snippets of my code into GPT-4 and simply asking "Why is this not working?" Almost every time, it succinctly explains the apparent purpose of the code, and how it is subtly wrong.

It's so good that I often do this preemptively to avoid a compile/deploy/test cycle.

Comment · 3 years ago
I was dying on the GPT-4 API waitlist too. I built a proof-of-concept with GPT-3.5, got some ada embeddings, played around with some common patterns for a couple of weeks, spent less than $20. I then applied to the waitlist again with a few short sentences about what I'd done, how GPT-4 would make it better, and how it would enable something new and valuable for a particular market. Approved that day.

It's not exactly a shortcut, and maybe it was just luck, but I suspect the key is just to start building with what you have and show a trajectory. The best part is that coding with ChatGPT-4 as a "colleague" has made the whole thing super fun.

Comment · 3 years ago
Same for me. I see it as the combination of 5 things:

1. It lowers the activation energy of getting started; for me motivation tends to come after action, and it gets me to that point.

2. It taps into the intense drive of "someone is wrong on the internet!" as per https://xkcd.com/386/

3. It's a new and different way of working so it doesn't trigger the same mental scar tissue.

4. It's vaguely social and high-status (delegating tasks, correcting and reviewing), as opposed to feeling solitary, so it tickles different reward centres.

5. More gets done for the same effort, so the cost/benefit equation is better and the feedback loop tighter.

Comment · 3 years ago
I just spent a month doing an E-Business Suite platform migration and it was very similar: follow the step-by-step instructions to apply patches and run commands. Each patch has a README file with dependent patches or commands which need to be completed first. It works mind-numbingly great until you run into the first of many circular dependencies.

That's one problem with treating the implementer as a machine to run code. The whole procedure can't be tested, so when parts are changed they can break the whole. It relies on the human in the loop to resolve the conflicts, which is not repeatable.

The other problem is the "mind-numbing" part. No-one can maintain 100% perfection all of the time. And in the context of presenting to people who don't know what it all means, I can see why mistakes would be made.

Comment · 4 years ago
It's ok, because they often make you give your postcode as a second factor.
Comment · 4 years ago
As a native speaker of English, I didn't know about mass nouns until I was an adult and I was trying to explain to a non-native speaker that they were using "the" too much.
Comment · 4 years ago
ProxyJump (or the -J option as a shortcut) plus TCP port forwarding (-L/-R) is ridiculously powerful. You can chain jump hosts with commas, threading a port forward deep into (or out of) multiple server hops with a single command.
Comment · 4 years ago

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton