Hacker News Reader

polygamous_baton 2023 ACM Turing Prize awarded to Avi Wigderson

> Also of interest, he has won the Abel Prize in 2021, making it a rather unique combination of winning the top honors in both theoretical/abstract math & CS

The overlap between theoretical CS and math is way larger than most people know. For a simple example, check out the theoretical CS course catalog at MIT: https://catalog.mit.edu/subjects/6/ and how many of them are cross listed as course 18 (math) classes.

polygamous_baton The Lonely Funeral Project in Amsterdam

> It's too late for the person to receive any benefit. They won't know or care.

Funerals are rarely for the dead, despite what we tell ourselves they are mostly for the living.

The benefit of the program, as I see it, is the reassurance that even if they lost everything tomorrow they will at least have a kind stranger show up to their funeral. I admit it’s not a lot to offer, but I find it to be a small consolation.

polygamous_baton Hello OLMo: A truly open LLM

I commented this somewhere else, but word in the ether is that OLMo is not actually that good of a model given its size and compute budget. I am not entirely sure why, and it’s still good to have the full recipe for at least one model out in the open, but the current OLMo definitely is a cautionary tale for people training their own model.

polygamous_baton Hello OLMo: A truly open LLM

From what I heard through the grapevine, OLMo is not nearly the best model for its size or compute budget. Apparently something didn’t quite go right and AI2 didn’t have the money to train until they got it right.

polygamous_baton Hello OLMo: A truly open LLM

Think of the term b in y = Wx+b. W is called weight, b is called bias.

polygamous_baton Scaling will never get us to AGI

Gary Marcus has been calling the end of the AI bubble since 2012 or something.

polygamous_baton Long-form factuality in large language models

GPT4 is the SOTA, for better or for worse, so it would be just stupid to not use it just for PR reasons.

polygamous_baton 65 years ago, America announced the names of its first astronauts

I think you may enjoy reading about Mcnamara’s fallacy, coincidentally also related McNamara of the Vietnam war: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

I hope it makes you reconsider your position about disregarding non-quantifiable benefits.

> But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can't easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. The fo[u]rth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. — Daniel Yankelovich, "Interpreting the New Life Styles", Sales Management (1971)

polygamous_baton Former University of Iowa hospital employee used fake identity for 35 years

A lot of it might be coming from deteriorating social bonds. A propensity to see your neighbor as a number, a statistic, rather than a fully fleshed human being with the same human needs and weaknesses as you.

polygamous_baton Former University of Iowa hospital employee used fake identity for 35 years

> Eugenics by free market

That hit harder than I expected, for someone whose loved ones were crippled by primarily schizophrenia. Even two generations back, such people would be cared by family or community, but now they have practically no one. The system is working as intended, it seems.

Sad.

polygamous_baton Low Cost Robot Arm

AFAIK RT-2 doesn’t quite work outside of Googles micro-kitchen, where they collected about a 1000 hours of data.

polygamous_baton How to graduate your PhD when you have no hope

There are two factors to this.

1. If your partner is not in a PhD program themselves, then you can rely on them during what I call “crunch time”, and there are a few of those in every PhD when you’re doing 16 hour days 7 days a week just to get something out of the door. Single students don’t get that luxury and thus inevitably have to be miserable during that period.

2. Secondly, successfully navigating a relationship/marriage takes a lot of the same skills as successfully navigating a PhD. A good PhD at the end of the day is built on a lot of compromises: between your vision and your advisors’, the fields’, your collaborators, and if you’re interning, your industry partners. A relationship teaches you how to navigate that without burning bridges, which may not be true for a headstrong “I’m gonna change the world but I don’t know how” PhD students.

polygamous_baton What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

Generally when companies seek to avoid liability, they push to have their employees use telephone to communicate so that compromising emails don’t come out during the discovery period of a lawsuit. I imagine this is one of such cases.

polygamous_baton What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

> Why does the stock market reward idiot shit like this?

Goodhart’s law, unfortunately. Whatever metric the stock market rewards gets gamed like there is no tomorrow (or next quarter, here.)

polygamous_baton Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

> He got caught up in it all and you bend, bend, bend until the next thing you know..

This denies him agency. Probably a better hypothesis is that he was a raging narcissist who thought he could swindle everyone with none the wiser, without realizing how transparent his fraud was.

polygamous_baton Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

No no, he is rich so of course he is just a kid, lost in the sauce, accidentally squandering a few billion. Now, 16 year old male from a low income household, those are men, and should know the consequence of their actions better. /s

This infantilizing is disgusting propaganda in and of itself.

polygamous_baton MTA board votes to approve new $15 toll to drive into Manhattan

Exactly this. I don’t know many lower income folks affording on call doctors, and those who can afford it can also afford an extra $15 charge on their bill, god knows how much they’re paying already anyway.

polygamous_baton MTA board votes to approve new $15 toll to drive into Manhattan

Free street side parking, I imagine? I would like to see that.

polygamous_baton MTA board votes to approve new $15 toll to drive into Manhattan

Except in lower Manhattan those bus lanes are taken over by clueless tourists or entitled folks driving around. Pretty much an everyday occasion near Union square.

polygamous_baton Aegis v3.0 – a free, secure and open source 2FA app for Android

> Every single one of my passwords is unique and randomly generated and at least 32 characters, none of them are getting brute forced unless there is a sudden gigantic leap in quantum computing.

One of the threat models that I consider is there being a bug in the particular RNG/encryption algorithm implementation used to get that encrypted password. In that case, my password can possibly be brute forced much faster than purely random guessing.

polygamous_baton Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

Really no wonder he ended up in “decentralized AI” aka crypto grifting. It must be like returning home after a long day.

polygamous_baton Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emad_Mostaque

Read his Wikipedia page and tell me he doesn’t sound like your run of the mill crypto scammer.

> He claims that he holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Oxford.[7][8] However, according to him, he did not attend his graduation ceremony to receive his degrees, and therefore, he does not technically possess a BA or an MA.[7]

polygamous_baton DenseFormer: Enhancing Information Flow in Transformers

AFAIK this was the default, copy paste impact statement by ICML template.

polygamous_baton How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute

I think the two modes of LLM discourse: “they’re conscious!/they’re just next token predictors with impressive datasets” comes largely from two different groups of people: those who learned about LLMs before learning about ML fundamentals, and those who learned ML fundamentals before encountering LLMs of today. While I fall in the second group, there is a real risk that my prior concepts about the fundamentals is limiting my view of the bigger picture, so I at least welcome the debate.

Re: chain of thought, I at least know that in practice a lot of the results from the original paper has not been quite reproducible at later attempts. Whether that is a quirk of models changing everyday or something deeper, I do not know.

polygamous_baton Difftastic, a structural diff tool that understands syntax

I've always used dust as a replacement, and so I am curious to know if you have tried both tools: do you have thoughts on what makes ncdu better?

polygamous_baton Stability.ai – Introducing Stable Video 3D

How is building a dataset easier than using a prebuilt dataset?

polygamous_baton In Economics Do We Know What We're Doing? Nobel Prize winner grows disenchanted

> We need to operate society for the good of humanity, not for the benefit of 'the market' and 'profits'.

Good of humanity is a hard to achieve/track goal, so we traded that in for an easier to track metric called GDP without realizing and caring how severely and violently the backlash from Goodharts law will screw us over. All you see today is a result of that.

polygamous_baton Dear Paul Graham, there is no cookie banner law

> Not sure why it makes sense to complain about the EU and not the companies.

Unfortunately a non-negligible number of people in tech also have libertarian leanings, with a default “gubmint bad!” position, which makes them easy prey for adtech propaganda.

polygamous_baton The Luddite's Guide to Defending Cash (2023)

To a far, far smaller extent than banks, but yes.

polygamous_baton Imitation Learning (2023)

One primary difference is between a discrete (think chess/go moves) and a continuous (think steering wheel input) control space. Even theoretically, the error in one is bounded linearly while the other can have an exponential error with respect to control horizon.