MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-28 14:45:57+00:00
Sorry for any misunderstanding. To be clear, there are two problems:

1. Students going into debt to get a degree simply because a job req calls for it, but potentially doesn't use the degree. Think "business administration" amongst others. The "Bachelor's Checkbox" on an application if you will. The debt they incur is the cost to increase their white collar lottery odds.

2. Degrees in domains that are crucial for the work to be done, but the financing model is fucked. Engineering, MD, etc.

Both require solving for, but in this context, I am addressing the former.
by watwut | 2025-04-28 14:46:00+00:00
I am not saying they are super savy. I am saying they were right about the right.

They were right, because they were not determined to excuse dveryone on the right up to absurdum and because they read what right actually said.

Moderate right and center consistently and always excused far right and refused to beloeve it exists even when it was completely apparent. And consistently deployed double standards where right was excused and left acts massively exaggerated.
by dkarl | 2025-04-28 14:46:01+00:00
> I do think its interesting how much more pacifist older scifi seems to be then modern scifi

Optimism is powerful, but it usually comes with impatience. We've shown an ability to decrease the prevalence of war globally, but the fact that improvements have taken longer than a generation and have not been monotonic or absolute makes it very hard to maintain a belief in the possibility of future improvements. The pace of change in the world can't keep up with the emotional rhythm of human optimism, disappointment, and disillusionment.

Also, many well-meaning people fight to tear down optimism because they identify it with complacency. Other well-meaning people fight to tear down optimism because they want people to focus on a different problem, so they want them to believe that there can be no progress on X without progress on Y.

As a result it is fashionable to deny that anything done in centuries of human struggle has made any positive difference in the world. How that is supposed to motivate anybody to add their own efforts to the struggle is left as an exercise for the reader I guess.
by cml123 | 2025-04-28 14:46:07+00:00
I'll share my own story and try to answer your question in that context.

I was working as an underwriting assistant at an insurance company and became interested in landing a job as a software engineer. I took a Visual Basic class in high school and a Java class in college. I dropped out of a biology degree late during my second year of college. I managed to get a job at my company's IT helpdesk, supporting a specific application on a level 2 team.

I did a 6 month coding bootcamp for node/react, which I left feeling like I had a good baseline in coding ability. While working on the IT helpdesk, I built a webapp that allowed external insurance agents to submit tickets online by integrating with our ticket system API, but I still couldn't get an interview for a dev gig. I eventually asked an internal recruiter why I was never hearing back, and they stated that they were only interested in hiring straight from our college hire program. I was pretty crushed. Out of the blue, six months after coding bootcamp ended, a project manager whom I had known in the past asked me if I'd be interested in a SQL-heavy systems analyst job. I happily took that, and while on the job, I did some internal instructor-led Java training.

While I was an analyst, I was able to start taking on some small pieces of work on a Spring Java backend. I was able to get employed as an engineer on my team after working a little over a year as an analyst.

I am currently working on finishing up a dual Comp Sci and Math degree. This is to better my long term job safety and career prospects. I am going at a pace where my entire degree will be paid for by my company, without me fronting any money. Ultimately I was able to get employed as an engineer having done a coding bootcamp without a degree, but I think that was only possible because:

- I was well networked at my company and maintained relationships over years with prior colleagues

- I had substantial domain experience, in insurance, in my company's systems, its business processes, etc

- I developed a career path that spanned multiple steps to get to engineer, with each role building on the prior

I don't think I would have been able to get employed as an engineer outside my company without some in-between steps
by maccard | 2025-04-28 14:46:31+00:00
I agree with everything you’ve said.

But, the sort of person who gets 12 points isn’t exactly the sort of person who you would expect to actually stop driving once they’ve got there. They’ve already been in court for speeding (or worse) at least twice, possibly 4 times. Maybe more if they were offered a speed awareness course the first time. If the goal is to stop them speeding then these devices might actually do it…
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-28 14:46:54+00:00
The public doesn't take "reckless driving" seriously because it is not defined in a serious manner.

It encompass people who are going 60/65/75 (depending on state) in a 55 on the interstate that's actually a 45 because of an inactive construction zone and also people who are going 60mph on 30mph city streets (probably genuinely reckless per common usage of the word). They're two very different degrees of misconduct and the former vastly outnumbers the latter and everyone knows it and political will for penalties is based off this.

You wanna see reckless driving taken seriously the first step is to stop advocating for definitions of reckless that include behavior the general public doesn't see as reckless.
by danudey | 2025-04-28 14:47:12+00:00
Not to pointlessly nitpick, but:

> HFS improved upon the Macintosh File System by adding—wait for it—hierarchy! No longer would files accumulate in a single pile; you could organize them in folders.

MFS did allow you to organize your files into folders, but on-disk they were represented as a single list of files with unique filenames - meaning you could have 'resume.txt' in a folder called 'Jan's Docs' but you couldn't also have 'resume.txt' in a folder called 'Jake's Docs' - every file on the disk needed to have a unique filename.

Not so much an issue in the days of 400KB floppy drives, but once people started getting 20 MB hard drives that was going to be an unacceptable limitation.

The other major benefit of HFS was that it stored file data in a B-tree, which allowed directory information to be stored effectively hierarchically, meaning you could find a directory's contents very quickly. With MFS, every file being stored in a single list meant that any time you wanted to get a directory's contents you had to read through that list of every file on the disk to see which ones were stored in that directory, so every listing of any directory was O(n) for the total number of files on the disk.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-28 14:47:16+00:00
Going to the 65C816 CPU like the Apple // would be an obvious choice but a terrible choice. In particular the 65C816 had a 24-bit address space but only had 16-bit index registers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDC_65C816

also you still have too few registers and not enough addressing modes so compilers for languages like Pascal and C are still problematic. [1] The 6502 never got a good extension to the 24-bit world, and of course not to 32-bits. There's a commonly discussed alternate timeline where Apple had skipped the Mac and shipped the //gs a year earlier; superficially the //gs looked like a mac, even though the software development situation was atrocious for the Mac in the first two years, mac programmers had a decent compiled Pascal whereas the most popular Pascal on the ][ used a bytecode interpreter. The 6502 did not have a good forward compatible story to go into the future, any more than did the PDP-11.

The Z-80 in the C-128 was little used. Around that time CP/M was drying up but hardware was getting cheaper so getting access to all that business software had some appeal. The way it was wired into the machine to share the video memory cut drastically into the effective speed of the CPU, I don't know what could have been done about it.

The Z-80 did have good extensions into the 24-bit world though, today we have

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80

(since 2001) which extends all the registers to 24 bit so you can do address arithmetic, plus the Z-80 always had more registers and better addressing modes so it better supported compiled languages. Some of the best contemporary retrocomputers use it

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/AgonLight2/o...

At the time there was a Z180, Z280, etc. I can certainly imagine a timeline where Zilog's priorities were a little different and something like the eZ80 came out circa 1984 and that would have made for a sweet machine.

[1] you could move the zero page around though which could have maybe been used to give each subroutine an activation record of 256 bytes
by troupo | 2025-04-28 14:47:21+00:00
> Also nesting is syntactic sugar, nice, but orthogonal to these discussions.

What is it with you and nesting? We were talking about scoping styles to a component.

> CSS isn’t an imperative language. It’s a declarative one.

So what? Doesn't mean you can't provide nice declarative ways of doing things. Like SASS has provided for 20+ years.

> Which is what Tailwind is replicating.

I fail to see the logic or, indeed, the meaning of your assertion.
by lutusp | 2025-04-28 14:47:54+00:00
> I don't think a scientist assumes a theory is false until it is proven true.

It's called the "null hypothesis." It's the gold standard of scientific experimental design.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis : "The null hypothesis (often denoted H0) is the claim in scientific research that the effect being studied does not exist."

> There are some weird things out in this wide universe of ours that happen on the tails of observability.

Yes, that is true. And in science, we assume such things are not real until positive evidence leads us to a different conclusion. Consider the ether theory, the idea that an evanescent substance filled all of space and was responsible for the propagation of light. But because it had not been directly observed, scientists invoked the null hypothesis to assume it wasn't real. Tests then confirmed that it wasn't real, and this led to relativity theory.
by the_sleaze_ | 2025-04-28 14:47:54+00:00
> as useless

It's not useless, it's arid.

> which plays a key role in how the climate works

As does ever other square meter on Earth, and its natural abundant resource could be leveraged to even greater overall good.

> Extractive industry ... like yet more colonialism.

I'm not sure how we got here, or what your actual concern is.
by watwut | 2025-04-28 14:48:14+00:00
I don't need to know OP personally. The knee jerk "right is the way they are because of the left" gives the game away.

Left is responsible for ehat they so and never ever excused with "right made them do it". Not even when they were 100% right in the hindsight.

Right is not responsible for what they do. They are victims of circumstances even when they caused the circumstances.
by baranul | 2025-04-28 14:48:26+00:00
V's GC can be turned off. V's libraries do not rely on the GC. Check out their Vinix[0] project (where they built an OS). They have other such projects.

Better to review more balanced and neutral takes on V[1][2], where the reviewers are not just stirring up drama with their community or funneling traffic to their site.

[0] https://github.com/vlang/vinix

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puy77WfM1Tg (Anthony GG reviews Vlang)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmVKerNY-fQ (Mike Shah reviews Vlang)
by yojo | 2025-04-28 14:49:20+00:00
LLMs already have a confidence score when printing the next token. When confidence drops, that can indicate that your session has strayed outside the training data.

Re:contradictory things: as LLM digest increasingly large corpuses, they presumably distill some kind of consensus truth out of the word soup. A few falsehoods aren’t going to lead it astray, unless they happen to pertain to a subject that is otherwise poorly represented in the training data.
by pxdm | 2025-04-28 14:49:32+00:00
I can speak for the GB case. Low Frequency Demand Disconnection (LFDD) occurs automatically and in stages when the frequency drops until it stabilises. The substations or feeders that are tripped off are not currently determined by real-time metering - instead they are pre-allocated based on their typical demand. This means that the system operator does not really know how much demand will be disconnected at any given time. If it's sunny, you could easily trip off a lot of solar generation connected on the low voltage network, causing the frequency to drop further. It is far from optimal!
by mapt | 2025-04-28 14:49:39+00:00
In terms of social demographic equality, I'm explicitly not saying that it was equal, just "more equal". The differences between a white minimum wage worker and a black minimum wage worker in the 60's were significant, but...

A minimum wage worker in the 60's, whatever their race, is a hell of a lot closer to indentured/enslaved servitude than to a billionaire.

"In this America, the three wealthiest men (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg) own more wealth than the bottom half of our society – over 165 million people."

Our political system appears to be aimed squarely at redistributing all human agency and happiness into one utility monster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
by sgarland | 2025-04-28 14:50:11+00:00
That’s great, good for New York. Now go get Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Washington to do the same. Also, remember that licensing reciprocity means that if I have a vehicle titled in South Carolina, nothing stops me from driving it into North Carolina.

I think you missed the entire part of my post where I discussed how a significant portion of the population is unable to properly maintain their vehicles, and also lack access to reliable public transit.

Re: Newton, you said that “Actual data does not support the idea of low speed limits.” You did not cite your source, and without that, I am defaulting to the basic physics principle that an object moving faster will impart more force on another if they collide.
by sephalon | 2025-04-28 14:50:41+00:00
The firmware is based on ESPHome, which integrates particularly well into Home Assistant, a popular home automation software; therefore I would recommend to implement such features on a higher layer than the firmware. See here how to e.g. implement a "sundial" function: https://gitlab.com/sephalon/deathstar_lamp#home-assistant-in...
by torarnv | 2025-04-28 14:50:53+00:00
Does anyone have suggestions for tools similar to this/Screen Studio that works as a webcam on macOS? I'd like to share 2-3 windows, with those fancy backgrounds, and a camera overlay, in a 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio, without needing to change the resolution of my ultra wide monitor or move/close all other windows etc.
by freedomben | 2025-04-28 14:51:04+00:00
I have to strongly disagree with you that GPL is a religion. While there Are certainly people who sound religious in nature when they talk about the GPL, The real reason it is important is because of what it forces developers to do on behalf of the users. It balances somewhat the power between the developer and the user.

Under other licensing, developers wield an extraordinary amount of power over the users. Yes, The user could opt not to run that code, but realistically that isn't an option in the modern day. Developers can and will abuse their access to your machine to serve their ends regardless of whether it adds value to you or not. For example, how much data collection is in nearly all modern software?

Perhaps you would argue that what I've said above only applies to a very tiny minority of users who have the technical skills to actually utilize the code, and everyone else It's just a religious argument. I don't fully disagree with that. There is another clear benefit That even those untechnical users received from the GPL, and that is the essentially forced contribution back from companies who want to build on top of it. I don't think there's any better example than the Linux kernel, which has gotten lots of contributions from companies that are otherwise very proprietary in nature and would never have open sourced things. This has benefited everyone and has acted as a rising tide lifting All boats. Without the requirements in the GPL, this most certainly would not happen.

My response to it however, is that those users still get a good amount of protection because The code is out there
by constantcrying | 2025-04-28 14:51:26+00:00
But humans can't really model friction either. Humans use their perception of the interaction to optimize for the desired behavior, for that it is enough to know that more pressure means higher friction. Even subconsciously there is no model of this, it is fine tuned on the fly and in response to external circumstances.

I think the answer to your question is that robots actually need to have complex friction models. If your planning has a need to actually know beforehand how to materials interact, you already lost.
by poincaredisk | 2025-04-28 14:51:42+00:00
>Not worth it

We live in a completely different world now. Imagine: you just bought a game, that was probably not cheap, and you won't play it because it requires opening a printed booklet you got with installation media and already have next to you? Sounds unlikely, especially since you already went through the trouble of going/driving to a physical store and installing the game (often from multiple cds/floppies, and it often took a long time). And it's not like you had a choice - another game was another drive away, and there were no refunds.

And yeah, we were younger.

Today we live in a world of constant connectivity and instant gratification. It's a better world, but a little nostalgia won't hurt
by skocznymroczny | 2025-04-28 14:52:06+00:00
Interesting, I remember the speed skating issue being a problem in the copy I had back in the 1990s, but I don't remember the issues in other games like downhill and such.

People usually find these gameplay based copy protections amusing as in "hehe stupid pirates let them play a broken game", but I have bad memories of them because I often had them trigger when playing legit copies of the game. All it took was having CD emulation software installed (not even running) and some games would already flag you as a pirate.
by sshine | 2025-04-28 14:52:13+00:00
I’m a Musk fanboy.

I drive a Tesla.

And I generally try to balance the online debate when suddenly it’s okay to scratch swastikas into private people’s property.

But to be perfectly clear: I would never ride a Robotaxi, either. Musk definitely ruined Tesla’s FSD reputation by over-selling FSD and cost-cutting the sensor quality.

I use AutoSteer every time I’m on the highway. Because I know under what conditions it will definitely kill me. I just wouldn’t sit in a Tesla with someone at the wheel who is delusional about its capability.

Any signal about the maturity of Tesla’s self-driving has been ruined by now.

I’m not sure what could bring them back to credibility.
by vacuity | 2025-04-28 14:52:24+00:00
The Chinese room experiment was originally intended by Searle to (IIUC) do as you claim and justify computers as being capable of understanding like humans do. Since then, it has been used both in this pro-computer, "black box" sense and in the anti-computer, "white box" sense. Personally, I think both are relevant, and the issue with LLMs currently is not a theoretical failing but rather that they aren't convincing when viewed as black boxes (e.g. the Turing test fails).
by ryandv | 2025-04-28 14:52:28+00:00
> the conclusion to take from the "Chinese room"

We can hem and haw about whether or not there are others, but the particular conclusion I am drawing from is that computers lack "intentionality" regarding language, and indeed about anything at all. Symbol shunting, pencil pushing, and the mechanics of syntax are insufficient for the production of meaning and understanding.

That is, to oversimplify, the broad distinction drawn in Naur's article regarding the "programming as text manipulation" view vis-a-vis "programming as theory building."

> That's very much unclear at this point.

It's certainly a central point of contention.
by codazoda | 2025-04-28 14:52:53+00:00
I've been trying things for 25+ years and I'm about to kick off a test of a whole bunch of new business ideas. You might have read my article, How to Lose Money with 25 Years of Failed Businesses.

https://joeldare.com/how-to-lose-money-with-25-years-of-fail...

I've created a mailing list. Please sign-up if seeing all my new business tries is something you might be interested in.

https://tally.so/r/wvggOX
by fipar | 2025-04-28 14:52:55+00:00
Not mentioned in the article is Sid Meyer's Pirates! (the exclamation mark was part of the name, though I do get excited when talking about the game so I'd add it myself if it weren't).

This was one of the 2 (!) games I had as original at that time(the other being Sub Battle Simulator), and it had a beautiful map and book. The book would include some details that were asked before the first fencing fight, like "When did ship X leave port Y?" and if you got the answer wrong, as best as I could try (and I did intentionally try to beat that part after giving the wrong answer) you'd always lose it and not be able to start your career.
by boutell | 2025-04-28 14:53:23+00:00
This is very, very cool. Impressive work.

I'm interested to see whether the final feature set will be larger than what you'd get by creating a type-safe language with a pythonic syntax and compiling that to native, rather than building custom hardware.

The background garbage collection thing is easier said than done, but I'm talking to someone who has already done something impressively difficult, so...
by CamperBob2 | 2025-04-28 14:53:38+00:00
It would probably provide at least the semblance of greater insight into these topics.

That's very safe to say. You should try it. Then ask yourself how a real Chinese Room would have responded.

Why?

My beef with the argument is that simulating intelligence well enough to get a given job done is indistinguishable from intelligence itself, with respect to the job in question.

More specific arguments along the lines of "Humans can do job X but computers cannot" have not held up well lately, but they were never on solid logical ground. Searle set out to construct such a logical ground, but he obviously failed. If you took today's LLMs back to the 1960s when he proposed that argument, either Searle would be laughed out of town, or you would be burned as a witch.

Arguments along the lines of "Machines can never do X, only humans can do that" never belonged in the scientific literature in the first place, and I think the Chinese Room falls into that class. I believe that any such argument needs to begin by explaining what's special about human thought. Right now, the only thing you can say about human thought that you can't say about AI is that humans have real-time sensory input and can perform long-term memory consolidation.

Those advantages impose real limitations on what current-generation LLM-based technology can do compared to humans, but they sound like temporary ones to me.
by nluken | 2025-04-28 14:54:03+00:00
This scandal should be a wake up call for anyone who reads or writes comment on the internet, including folks on this site. As good as the moderators here are, there's no avoiding the deluge of bots that have rapidly proliferated across the internet. Post history, while not a silver bullet, might be a decent way of spotting the bots for now, but in time that too will be harder to detect.