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