d2049

Reminder that Sam Altman chose to rush the safety process for GPT-4o so that he could launch before Gemini, which then led directly to this teen's suicide:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026886

This was more than several years prior to that, I just tried to look up the financial aid of previous years and for some reason couldn't find it. If someone else finds it, I'd be curious to take a look.

I met him when I was at MIT for Campus Preview Weekend when accepted students visit the school. Is it necessary to assume things in such a cynical fashion?

I'm a bit hesitant to give my voice away to really any company. Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine the ways this could go wrong?

When I was touring colleges as a high school senior I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. He decided to go to a state school which was a lot less expensive but whose academics weren't close to the same level. This stuff matters to people.

> build a mini-app from scratch in just a few hours

It depends on what kind of functionality we're talking about, but this kind of task is exactly what people at my current startup have been assigned at times. It is absolutely possible to build a CRUD web app with reactive UI using modern tools in a few hours.

> This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility

Again it depends on what the debugging task is. At every startup I've worked at, it's expected that an engineer is able to jump into a task that they know very little about. Granted it becomes less reasonable the more niche the task, but PHP and Ruby are not particularly far apart in skillsets in the grand scheme of things. I would expect any web engineer to be able to do this.

> Hiring processes should focus on problem-solving, collaboration, and growth in relevant areas

I agree with this. And, hiring should also focus on technical ability which does include working through difficult and unknown problems by oneself.

Just out of curiosity, where do you live?

This is the person who was in the news a few years ago for commuting to Google campus using 19 different methods in 19 days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZWftDrwY2U

Probably the phrase "you hold the keys to your clone" should give anyone pause.

I once worked at a company where the head of security gave a talk to every incoming technical staff member and the gist was, "You can't trust anyone who says they take privacy seriously. You must be paranoid at all times." When you've been around the block enough times, you realize they were right.

You can guarantee you won't be hacked? You can guarantee that if the company becomes massively successful, you won't start selling data to third parties ten years down the road?

Is anyone else thinking that it might not be a good idea to give away your voice and face to a startup that is making digital clones of people?

For this interested in topic, you might enjoy reading The Anxious Generation, which has been on the NYT nonfiction bestseller list for a while. It goes into the data on how teen mental illness rates greatly increased when smartphones (apps + the front-facing camera) and social media algorithms were developed. The harmful effects are obvious to anyone who ever interacts with kids. The book also proposes several basic changes like delaying when kids are given smartphones and disallowing phones in schools, as well as advocating for play-based schools.

I would have presumed that security-minded people, which includes those who work in tech, would not so easily give away their genome, and that most of 23andMe's customers are a slice of the general population. But then I read about things like WorldCoin and that people who go to startup parties jump at the chance to give away scans of their retinas and I'm befuddled. Why would anyone willingly do that?

A couple questions —

Could you link to the film you used, and also the curtains?

Did this at all block your ability to use your own cellphone?

The world you propose sounds good in theory, but we are starting at a point where certain groups of people have been discriminated against (or enslaved) for the better part of two centuries. So some argue that we cannot simply treat everyone "equitably" when our society has been decidedly inequitable up to this point.

I guess there's no unions for VFX work? They're meant to prevent companies from making unreasonable demands of workers, that are described many times in the article.

That's Max Park. I'm not a cuber but I recognize him from the excellent short documentary The Speed Cubers, on Netflix. It's nerdy, engaging, and heartwarming — perfect for HN.

Is it lawful for an employer to factor in criminal history when choosing employees? Asking for my own education.

What are the reasons you've heard your friends give? I don't know anyone who's done it.

Many companies have skilled engineers and enough hardware, and still have outages. It's an expected part of running any software service. Outages can be minimized, but the idea that they can be eliminated with enough people and computing resources is not how things work, from my experience.

This post strongly resonated with me. Recently I have had no external life commitments for an extended period and I've constantly had the impression that I'm wasting my life. Most days I wake up trying to grasp at something meaningful to do with my time, but no matter what I accomplish - say on personal projects that I more often than not eventually abandon - it doesn't feel enough. I routinely ask myself, "What am I doing with my life" but I don't know how to answer these questions. I tend to fill my days with consuming media, personal hobbies, socializing and physical survival (cooking, eating, sleeping) but it all seems trivial. I wish I had something meaningful to do, like working towards a cause that I deeply believe in, or raising a family, but those things just haven't happened for me yet.

Reminds me of Paul Graham's essay about why the Segway failed. http://www.paulgraham.com/segway.html

Same principle here. People don't look cool wearing strange robot sandal shoes.

I would hire a security consulting firm to do the work for you. This is not the kind of thing you can learn overnight, or even in a short to medium timeframe. Countless startups have experienced security teams and yet were still breached - just do a quick google search. It's unrealistic to think an inexperienced engineer can do better.

Similar to “not your keys, not your crypto” is there not an analogy to be made for passwords? Genuinely interested in the reasoning of people who store their passwords in a cloud service they don’t control.

Multiple engineering teams I’ve worked on have used per-individual “preview” environments as early as 15 years ago, and I’m sure they were widely used far earlier than that. The claim that this idea is suddenly on the rise strikes me as completely false.

The parent comment did not mention factory farming. Only you did. This is classic whataboutism.

> To be able to tell if Scala 3 itself is faster, we would have to rollback to Scala 2 and try it with the proper JVM tuning. I'm not willing to do that, sorry! Once you've tried Scala 3, there's no going back.

Pardon my ignorance. Why can't you set up a performance test in both environments and measure the speed?

Everything Chamath says is purely out of his own self-interest. He's been a hypocrite for years.

It defines that term at the top of the article

In my limited few years of doing undergraduate / graduate research in this kind of field, and thus having to read research papers like this, I can say that this is BY FAR the longest paper I have ever encountered. Several times over. Forget writing a 177-page paper, how do you even begin to read this? Yes there is a helpful outline on page 6, but sheesh!

>> I try to make it clean and simple, without all the bells and whistles.

>> Apart from team collaboration, I added many personal productivity features, including Weekly/Daily planner, Time blocking, Pomodoro Timer, Daily Journal, etc.

I'm having a hard time understanding how both statements can be compatible together. Open-minded to an explanation.