skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, jeez, I can't win here. The second you start to advocate for blockchain or mention its potential utility, people will glom on and mock you for being a pipe dreaming gambler. The second you start to advocate against it or mention its overvaluation, people will glom on and mock you for your bootlicking close-mindedness.

Personally, I believe in blockchain. I think Ethereum and IPFS may one day be hugely successful. I own ETH, BTC, and a few other coins that I do believe in but also would not be surprised / upset if they went to $0.00 tomorrow. Yes, I know that's gambling.

BUT, MY POINT IN MY ORIGINAL COMMENT WAS THAT NOT TO DO WITH MY BELIEF IN BLOCKCHAIN.

I was literally just trying to point out, from a journalistic standpoint, that it was odd they made no mention of anything to do with blockchain / DLT.

Seriously, I feel like one of the most damaging things to the space as a whole is that it's almost impossible to find a level-headed conversation about it.
> Or at least not the bogeyman it's made out to be

Well... why do you think it's made out to be the "bogeyman"? The reality is that people tried (and continued to try) to run software projects that way: state up-front everything you're going to do, and then do it! What could be simpler?

Anybody who's ever tried to do that has run headlong into the reality that: they didn't know up-front all the things they were going to need to do. For a long time, people believed that this was just a matter of experience and perspective and, after a reasonable amount of practice, software developers would be able to not only recite each task ahead of time, not only predict how long each was going to take, but would be able to do so in orders of magnitude less time than the actual task would take.

This view of software development imagines programming as mostly just typing without much more thought involved than, say, laying bricks. That this model, if accurate, could be automated away seems to escape the attention of the project managers who insist on managing software projects this way. If it were possible to specify software in such a way that it could be predicted and planned out the way "waterfall" demands, it could be automated to take humans out of the equation completely. (And the project managers themselves could be replaced with a spreadsheet).

If you go back and read the original Agile manifesto, it was written by people who were trying to explain that software is inherently unpredictable or - more to the point - that the parts of software that you need humans to perform are the unpredictable parts. There's an old saying, though, that nobody ever went broke telling people what they wanted to hear, so a cottage industry of agile "consultants" who'd never tried to develop software themselves made fortunes telling upper management that software is, as they wished, completely predictable, and the only reason schedules slip is because they're not mistreating their programmers harshly enough.
Obviously there are exceptions, but exurbs are basically the manifestation of the described behavior. Suburb development pattern, but because it's in the middle of nowhere & far from everything, large houses are less expensive.
If they make an aws efs like method of storage, someone might build something very interesting on it.
Nobody can argue what the next accounting rules are. Accounting practices are handed down from above and all accountants have to follow it.

Programming is not like that. If you ask 100 programmers what the new big thing is, you will get 100 different answers. I would much rather take responsibility for my own professional education than outsource it to a company that may not have my career best interests at heart.
The problem with going back to one income is cultural. Men want to be the breadwinner, so it's going to end up forcing women out of the workforce and back into the home. There's no way to have one income viable again without halving the supply of people in the workforce.
Hopefully they are too socially responsible to be “thrilled” with that.

American gas prices and vehicle fees are scandalously low, too low to pay for upkeep of car infrastructure, let alone to pay for the externalities of driving and of burning fossil fuels.
The "paper" seems to be of low quality for arxiv, not even has two column layout.
If you're not profitable while funding pensions at their present discounted value, you're not profitable to begin with, and this requirement only revealed it.
I feel like the "More Human Internet" brand made me feel like you were trying to build... that, particularly when the manifesto on the page talks about surveillance capitalism and corporate overreach. Like that HBO Silicon Valley style, you were building a new Internet, and that any sort of collaboration tools prior to that were to design that.

I do feel like a public issue tracker will have a hard time addressing those issues, because the mass surveillance platforms like Google and Facebook obviously aren't going to participate... and people are still very attached to such platforms, despite their hostility towards ordinary users.

But I like the idea in general: When I'm visiting things that are on GitHub Pages or have a GitHub linked, I'm likely to drive-by leave feedback or point out minor bugs, because the difficulty of doing so is very low. Something like that for ordinary websites would be nice too.

Related to that, I might suggest that if a site already has people reporting feedback/bugs to GitHub issues, you should incorporate support for that, such that your platform feels like a universal way of feeding feedback to site owners, regardless of what they themselves use to manage it. (Similar to how GitHub Sponsors both operates their own sponsor system, but also provides the ability to configure it to link to PayPal or Patreon or whatever.)
Well now, this is doubly frustrating :) . We’ve been trying to grow Lablabs for the past 3 years in Seattle, but they are so slow growing it is nearly impossible to get any viable beans out of them before the chilly fall weather takes them out. Before this, they were just a novelty, now they might have an actual benefit.
Interesting story, but the article reads like it was written to be used as an exercise for teaching English to 15 year olds.
Yay! Apache Arrow is great project. Whenever I use is, people think I’m some kind of genius.

It should get a lot more press.
I wonder if this could have a medical application. I'm thinking of those times when a cold, wet washcloth is placed on the forehead of people with fevers to cool them down somewhat. Then again, a wet washcloth is a lot cheaper $122.
This isn’t really new info is it? US NSA, UK GCHQ and German BND have been using this intel for years.

The article was published recently but the title says 2016 so I’m slightly confused.
TerminusDB will move from ‘master’ to ‘main’ as its principal branch
Wirecard Investors Sue Bafin over Failure to Spot Scandal
GPT-3 is not that expensive. Estimating from the paper, to train the model, the GPU hardware costs were a few million dollars, and the electricity costs were probably under 100k. This is totally feasible for many companies today, especially if the hardware is a fixed cost and can be reused for training multiple models.

And as mentioned elsewhere, inference for a trained model is much, much cheaper.
I was wondering, wouldn't it be possible to classify the voice of every celebrity based on moods so one could make the voices less monotonic? So one could then add text metadata for the text-to-speech conversion, e.g. "[Angry] I have a dream, [Calm] but it has a patent so you can't copy it! (laughter) [Calm-fade-to-angry] In reality insomnia took it from me!"
Sounds like even for a cool unique product like this, Verge authors can't be bothered to do more original investigation than a leisurely walk to the supermarket allows for.
So the government creates a natural monopoly for the shortest route from A to B, and then hands it off to a private entity to run it.

What's the mechanism in place to prevent the private road owner from charging far more than the maintenance costs of the road? The government steps in confiscates more private land to build additional less efficient routes that they refuse to sell to existing management companies to allow for some amount of competition? The government creates regulatory bodies to oversee the private road management companies and ensure they don't charge too much? The government regularly accepts bids from different companies to handle management, and somehow manages to keep this bidding process corruption free, there are no problems from regularly handing off control to different companies, and the transaction costs for switching companies don't overwhelm the savings?

The free market depends on competition to work, but with roads built through eminent domain, competition must be artificially engineered. At some point direct government ownership is the most efficient solution.
I follow this as well. It's not simply peace of mind. I have books to read, videos to watch, code to write, newbies to mentor, and kids to play with. There are two days in a weekend and the worst thing I can do is something I don't enjoy, which won't improve my salary in the future.
Yep! Republicans want to privatize the USPS. This is just one more step in that direction to get the public pissed off with USPS and blame them.
I think software professionals' problems go deeper than biased perceptions of management that undervalue experience. Unlike other forms of engineering, software hasn't developed the same feedback-driven processes to ensure efficiacy, reproducibility, safety, or reliability -- where standard metrics of practice have been developed through methodical exploration, optimization, and repetition. To wit, we still don't know how to make software 10% better. Ergo, we don't know in what way a more experienced developer can add value over a newbie. So why pay older devs more or retain them, when it's easier and cheaper to boss around neophytes who don't have family distractions or need health care?

Professional advancement in any field requires mastery. But instead of building "on the shoulders of giants", as is central to masters of science and of classic forms of engineering, the definition of software mastery remains qualitative and vague. Historically, evolution of software tools, practices and standards has been driven less by the systematic learning of what techniques work or don't, and more by adoption of styles and fashions: "This programming model/tool is better than that alternative. How do I know this? I just do, and I'm a smart guy."

Maybe it's not surprising then that even software managers, who came up through these ranks and presumably should respect the evolutionary enrichment and advancement of software pros, don't. In the end, it's cost and trendiness that rules the software dev hiring process, rather than experience-driven insights into S/W practices & principles or battle-hardened expertise in building better apps.
I personally feel with solar prices so cheap renewable power is a solved problem what market is waiting for is batteries to get cheap enough. I am expecting in the next decade tesla powerwall type batteries to be in every house even apartments for storing power for night time use now will these batteries be owned by the house/property owners or leased from the power companies that is something the market will decide.
Really? I have the opposite, not as positive impression. I hope you are right though.
Sure, which is why I edited that “algorithms” is more accurate. When I read proofs I have to go through each step and figure out what every term on either side “does” to something “going through” it to make sense of it. I’d rather have my sandwich-making instructions as instructions than a series of statements about how the sandwich looks at each stage that I have to go back and turn into instructions to actually do anything with it, if that makes sense.

I get that other people don’t have this preference, but I strongly do. Test results indicate I should be incredibly well suited to mathematical work but I feel the way I imagine a dyslexic must when I try to read math or “mathy” programming languages. Give me something more-or-less procedural and I’m totally happy (though I gather I had a much easier time understanding and getting comfortable with recursion than many people do, which seems weird given I find the languages most heavily associated with it almost unreadable).
Yes that would be nice. Thanks!
New Developments Throw in Free Parking, Maintenance Fees as Sales Concessions
for those interested, the equation for estimating if a CT would last was published by a Dr. Grimes in 2016[0], it's pretty interesting :)

[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Can you talk about how you use it? At a cursory glance, it seems like it's being used to great effect in databases, or systems designed to query data. Is that what you're using for?
Why do you think that systems like GPT-3 are approaching an asymptote? Most people I've talked to say the opposite; they wouldn't have expected GPT-3 could be so much better than GPT-2 with no major additional breakthroughs.
There are many TVCs at Google for whom the free food is a non-trivial benefit. Think about cleaning staff or other low paid jobs.
Lloyds Banking Group enters strategic partnership with fintech Form3
Hang on, I thought Docker _was_ a tool for simplifying deployments into AWS.
Note: If I come across as a hater, in my opinion, I am not. I'm a fan, a fan who is frustrated!

We moved to Cloudflare from a larger CDN and used workers to duplicate the functionality otherwise not provided by Cloudflare. The initial results were great. As our workers became more complicated, especially when interacting with CloudFlares internal stack, the cracks started to show. Specifically, when you run into a problem, the documentation being too light to resolve corner case issues yourself, and support draws a big zero when it comes to Workers. Even as an Enterprise customer, it can take months to get a clear answer/resolution, and that's if you nag them.

As a platform, workers have great promise, and Cloudflare is making strides. As with most things CloudFlare, they could spend more time improving documentation, and exposing details on their internal stacks so you can self-service and resolve your issues. What I find is that Cloudflare is on to the next thing before fully completing, polishing, documenting, the previous three things they started.

For Workers, I'd like to see a trace tool built for Workers where you can debug what happened in a Live environment. Currently, they recommend outputting debug as JSON in a header.

The linked article is worthless. See the blog post, as this poster mentioned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23965764
No, I am one of the people I just described. I dont know where I fit in with the OP. I'm struggling to keep up with the avalanche of new stuff coming along.
Maybe what you do IS cool, but you expect others don't think it is, or you don't make it sound cool when you talk about it. I've made some pretty mundane work sound cool, but it's not always easy.
When I started working remotely I felt like I had to prove myself. I had to produce something useful every day.

Whereas when I was in the office I saw lot of people doing mostly nothing but hanging out in the lunch-room. I guess they felt like if they take the trouble to arrive in the office that's a lot of work already. And they did not make the choice they are just doing it because they were told to do it.

I agree there is value in talking to people in person and having wide-ranging conversations about everything but there has to be a balance. But all in all I thought me working from home gave the employer much more than if I had come to office every day, and hung around in the lunch room with others.
It's best to assume that Google et al. Are not hiding anything "huge". What you see publicly is what there is.
Deepmind used to be years ahead, but now they appear to have been, in some very important respects at least, leapfrogged by OpenAI, initially an imitator.
It would be interesting to know if Deepmind have indeed squandered their lead away, and if so, why it happened.
I've been really digging Vincent Bevins's work recently, but I didn't realize until I looked at the link above again in order to include it here that he had written that as well. See his page for more great stuff:

https://vincentbevins.com/
Death is the price our species pay for evolution. It also brings change, which sometimes allows the situation to improve. If humans didn't die, dictators like Stalin or Mao would rule indefinitely long. Hell, humanity could still be enslaved to some powerful Pharaoh, who would see little incentive to change things, being immortal living god, and his power would not erode on an inevitable succession.
Curious what motivated folks to downvote this.
Sea of Nodes (2015)
I've also heard of a lot of employers that are pushing the 20% policy for their software engineers or providing some other time allocated towards upskilling.

My employer requires us to do one hour of training per day. We are allowed to study whatever we want or work on personal projects. I personally don't think it's weird for an engineer to keep up with emerging tech and trends. I'm sure a lot of engineers outside of software do this.
BackerKit (YC S12) is hiring our second Product Manager
Curious what motivated folks to downvote this. Both points I made are pretty straightforward facts.
The programming course at my university taught us the fundamental paradigmens. The languages were chosen only as examples.

Imperativ / OOP => Java

Functional => Haskell

Logic => Prolgo
I've been wondering about something:
(I only know the basics of AI, this might be kinda incoherent)

Right now if you look at GTP-3's output it seems like it's approaching a convincing approximation of a bluffing college student writing a bad paper, correct sentences and stuff but very 'cocky'. It cannot tell right from wrong, and it will just make up convincing rubbish, 'hoping' to fool the reader. (I know I'm anthropomorphizing but bear with me).

Current models are being trained on a huge amount of internet text. As smarmy denizens of hackernews we know that people are very often wrong (or 'not even wrong') on the internet. It seems to me that anything trained on internet data is kinda doomed to poison itself on the high ratio of garbage floating around here?

We've seen with a lot of machine-learning stuff that biased data will create biased models, so you have to be really careful what you train it on. The dataset on which GTP-n has to be trained has to be pretty huge(?); and moderation is hard(?) and doesn't scale; it's easier to generate falsehood than truth; and the further we go along the more of internet data will be (weaponized?) output of GTP-(n-1); So won't the arrival of AGI just be sabotaged by the arrival of AGI?

Has anyone written something about the process of building AGI that deals with this?
What is your use case? In my experience it's hard to use them properly. I failed to use modern GPU's (V100's) effectively for even large computing tasks. I found good compiler producing AVX2 on many cores to be easier and cheaper.
Qwant has a reputation on r/france for being completely awful. Not sure how justified that reputation is.

Also, for non-trivial results, Qwant is mostly a fancy Bing front-end, so you might as well use Bing.
> On resumes, don't advertise your age if you're a bit older. We don't need to list that internship, first job out of school, or graduation dates from college. List 15-20 years of your career and leave the rest off. It isn't a biography.

I started doing this years ago. If I listed every job on my resume, it'd be 4-5 pages long. Most of them aren't relevant to what I'm doing now, and only serve to make me look old, or like a job-hopper (which I am--about every three years--but job-hopping in tech isn't a negative unless your list grows too long). At first, I compressed older jobs into one-liners at the end, but now I leave them off entirely. I list 4-5 of the six jobs I've held in the past 22 years.

I have no way of knowing what impact this has on my employability, or how people interpret my age based on it, but I'm 47 years old with 22 years of experience on my resume, so I assume I come off as both old and senior-skilled. I never have to try hard to find jobs.
If you didn't graduate, omitting dates is not at all suspicious. I rarely see someone writing "Earned 80 credits at UCLA (2011-2013)".
Ask HN: Deep Fake potential impact on upcoming US election
Biden appears to be leading substantially, but surprisingly enough Trump leads substantially in many states and seems to be holding his own in several key swing states.

Due to all the recent reports of possible foreign election interference I think most people are probably focused on hacking of the machines that will be used for voting.

However, I'm trying to think outside the box. Deep fakes, given that probably the majority of the US population are not knowledgeable in this area, feels like a very likely potential attack vector (assuming the voting machines will be secured). Imagine the night before the election WikiLeaks posts new (deep fake) audio of Biden in what could be the biggest scandal in American history.

There will be no time for anyone to research the findings, and by then (if the audio feels genuine) it's likely to sway many swing voters back to Trump.

My thinking is that somehow we may need to try to educate people on how good this technology has gotten and to be wary of last-minute "discoveries" as the election approaches.

What do you all think (besides voting machines) could be the new attack vector used for this coming election? And what steps do you all think, within the next ~100 days, could be taken to mitigate them?
You can actually change the scroll direction of a mouse in Windows with a registry edit: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...
Lablab can be poisonous, so people should be careful about selfmedication
From the "applied physics" department of John Hopkins university in Baltimore (last stronghold of the JASONs) south to Virginia and the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina you will find people who know things about practical NLP systems that aren't in the open literature. They could tell you about it but they'd have to kill you.

Around Mumbai I know there is a crew that can really use UIMA, and there are other Indians I know who do intelligence and defense work.
>>> Whether you think that regulations that appear to require local data storage and processing are a good idea or not — and I personally think they are bad policies that will stifle innovation — my sense is the momentum behind them is significant enough that they are, at this point, likely inevitable

Agree it's stealth protectionism and security overreach. But do data sovereignty laws really form the basis of an inevitable future federated internet? Trade agreements like CPPTPA and USAMCA seem to prohibit. Or restrict sensitive finance or health data. And most users of consumer internet apps like TikTok aren't too concerned. They just want fresh memes ;)

Just signed up to Cloudflare Unbounded private beta (feel free to fast track). And thanks for all your hard work. $NET has been a stand out performer!
Someone has probably already done this, but you could write a dashboard generator for all the services that can be configured with just YAML files and another generator to glue them all together into one page.

Then you'd have your own NoCode startup generator