skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that no-code and low-code a real movements, and are going to be popular. But the terms are too broad to have a productive discussion about what their power really is.

Are all tools with programmatic capabilities low-code? Where do we draw the line? Or is this just a new paradigm, and eventually all platforms/tools/products/SaaS-companies are low/no-code? It seems like there's room for distinction here.
The Mike Wallace Interview Featuring Rod Serling (1959)
And they are false. "There are not enough programmers in the world that are willing to work for free" might be closer to the truth.

I know unemployed programmers so it's no shortage of supply.
This article seems a bit simplistic. It really depends on whether your current and near-future tax rate is less than your tax rate in retirement. Consider that politically, taxes may be lower now than they will be in 30 years. Your tax rate typically increases as you progress in an industry.

In my case, I max out a 401k that is split 2/3 Roth, 1/3 Traditional. I also max out a Roth IRA every year. Additionally, I'm stuffing all excess cash in a taxable brokerage account. The taxable account is growing faster than the Roth IRA because I'm limiting discretionary spending and buying equities whenever I have extra cash.

I expect my tax rate to be higher in retirement since I'm saving like crazy as a 25 year old (and have been for years already) and expect to continue to do so for decades.

(I wouldn't even be surprised if some politicians decide to bludgeon me for being a responsible saver by voiding the tax-free withdrawals of Roths in the future. But that's a bit paranoid and hopefully won't happen.)
I was in an airport in China. A screen said "Walk up to the camera and we'll tell you which way to your gate.". I did so, the screen highlighted my face on the camera feed, showed me my name and my gate. Geezus Christ, they don't hide the fact that they're tracking faces...

When you first enter China, you have to let a machine scan your face (IIRC fingerprints too?), and locals have to scan their (RFID-enabled) IDs to enter airports or train stations; so they seem to really have total control.
It is insane how symmetrical these are, for something so large drawn at such a relatively local/minute scale. Here's the spider: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/L%...

I imagine there had to be a feedback loop here, perhaps climbing a neighboring mountain to see the progress and correct deviations? I find the logistics of it all far more interesting than reasoning about why the drawings were made.
> We need to do a lot better than UBI for FOSS to keep advancing. A caste of code monks who forgo a comfortable life to write free software from their Mom's basement, or a cabin in the woods, isn't nearly good enough.

I think you underestimate what UBI would do, or you are only looking at very narrow direct effects. There probably wouldn’t be that many coders that would directly move to 100% coding while living off $1,500 a month UBI. But there would be lots of people already making decent money that would be able to rely on that extra $18k a year cushion to start their own business, or reduce their hours to work on a passion project. All the people that could go to school full time to learn skills useful to society because they didn’t have to also work full time. All the people that could afford to take a pay cut to take a more fulfilling job. All the people that could step back and take meaningful steps to get a higher skill job because they were not 2 paychecks away from homelessness. All the business that could push automation because they were no longer the only thing standing between thousands of minimum wage employees and poverty. Things like Wikipedia are just examples at the extreme end of the spectrum. UBI would free up an almost unimaginable amount of human potential to try new things and start the process of decoupling us from having to find some sort of drudgery for every single person in exchange for not starving.
What about PayPal? I think they provide a unique link
An advertisement for pivot tables of all things. What an oddly specific concept to fixate on as an example of shifting technical competence.
In that sense, any no code platform is also code.
I think we give ourselves more credit than it's due. Average users get Chrome shoved down their throats. Plenty of users are happy to use Edge or even IE until they update Adobe Reader and find Chrome is now their default browser.

Or how when I signed into a Google account once for five minutes on my iPhone in a private Safari window and immediately got an email from Google inviting me to set up Chrome on my new iPhone...
Awesome Eiffel – a curated list of Eiffel libraries, resources and tools
A key difference is that spinning the full satellite with the arm extended and measuring the center of rotation measures the mass of the samples collected regardless of the thrusters/reaction wheels.

Measuring the trajectory of the reentry vehicle gives a parameter that can be used to estimate the sample mass assuming nominal thrust values, but you can't distinguish between an underperforming or overperforming rocket engine and heavier or lighter samples. This ambiguity doesn't really matter for the purposes of burn correction - you need to get to the correct reentry trajectory no matter what caused the deviation - but your sample mass estimate may be off.

I don't think there's a whole lot of utility in knowing the sample mass, as long as you've got enough (and they've definitely got enough!), it would just help satiate the curiosity of the scientists and engineers who otherwise have to wait a few more years to see their results.
Hold the Line: A Guide for Defending Democracy
Yes, there are tall, athletic guys who never reach their potential. On the other hand, there must be thousands of guys who have great day to day habits and are 5'10". How many of them make it into the NBA?
Notice that the article doesn't say when they actually discovered those smaller sections. It could have a few months or a couple of decades ago.
Almost everything in tech crunch reads like marketing copy these days it seems!
Agreed, it is a completely ridiculous assertion by Scheidel. You have to wonder at the shallow knowledge of the particulars that would have lead him to this conclusion and the confidence with which he makes it.
The Mongols left because their attention was diverted by leadership succession issues. Castles did not stop them in China or the Middle East. Fragmentation did not stop them in Central Asia or the Rus.
It may be an age/experience thing. I spent many years coding in my free time, worked on all parts of the stack from boot loaders to single page applications. The magic is kind of gone for me now and I prefer to try to expand my physics and math skills which capture how I used to feel about code.
There's (was?) https://framatalk.org/ which is jitsi meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet
I cannon't implement smart road construction without telling the user that they need to describe which tile is what: a straight road from top to bottom, a left curve, a cross section... and was having trouble even with getting people to use it when they had to import their own textures (because you need to specify the tile measures - real ones and grid size).

I definitely thinks the UI needs better naming and maybe a total refactor, so I'll keep that in mind.
Yes, constantly. For instance I wander around the house listening to an audiobook on bluetooth headphones, walk into a weak signal zone, and the audiobook stops, and I hear in the bedroom that the bluetooth speaker next to the bed has mysteriously started to play a youtube video from my phone. So a momentary loss of signal causes the software to change both input and output. This is with a Samsung S9+.
Jesus Christ. This is the Red Scare all over again.
I've never understood this idea.

If you believe we should never use nuclear weapons, then don't have them at all.

If you believe there is a case where it may be moral and rational to use nuclear weapons, why would you want to put a potential barrier in the way of their use? You could have a situation where everyone was agreed to use them but the president was physically unable to harm the aide to use them.

You can know that something is the right thing to do but not have the courage to physically harm someone to do it.

An interlock that you may not be able to unlock for reasons unrelated to the task at hand is a bad interlock.
Pushing emotions (your own or others) into the right/wrong binary is what is worth avoiding.
Were there any concerns about GPT-3's latency? It looks like it takes a long time for online use cases.
No code can be great if you want to spin up something simple quickly.

Once it grows to any reasonable level of complexity it becomes more of a hindrance than a help.

Access was actually a great tool for allowing semi-technical people make quick apps, but almost every shop I've been in has needed to convert Access to grown-up software.
Fear of failure or unknown.
Performant drag & drop + FLIP animations were not trivial to implement (naive approaches like re-render fully on each mousemove fail spectacularly). I needed to see FPS on a couple different devices so I added the counter. Also, since I claim good rendering performance in the case study, I just kept it there as "proof" :)
I was in the same boat until i realized emacs key bindings are not adhoc. It falls in to place once the basic emacs key binding conventions are understood.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Ke...

https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/a5j3lc/emacs_key_bin...
This is true, sad to say. "Big new discovery about Altzheimer's Disease (in mice)" is pretty much on a par with "Amazing new battery (in lab)". You see articles like this a couple of times a year, but they never pan out.

Thats not to say that this research isn't worth-while, just don't expect it to turn into a cure for humans.
Notably, Discord does something like this when you @everyone in a large channel: "You're about to push a notification to 12,000 people, are you sure you want to do that...?"
The no-code generation was always here, even before the advent of coding.

It would make more sense to say that the more we code, the more possibilities for no-coders.
Investors line up for Ant Group's record $34.4B IPO
Launch HN: Builder.io Theme Studio – no-code for your entire Shopify storefront
Stadium Effect in the Eye of a Hurricane (2018)
Instead of adjusting fuel you can probably compensate by changing when you do the burn. And there are likely to be midcourse corrections anyways.
The biggest problem with Notion IMO is the overuse of Emojis in written documentation. It serves little purpose unlike in conversations to convey emotions; here they’re primarily used as a decorative element. It’s the same in a lot of Javascript library docs on GitHub. Is it fine for a scrap book? Sure. I strongly believe it has no place in professional documentation or pretty much anywhere else.

Notion is perpetuating this idea that it’s cute to put distracting colorful symbols in text.
No-code is useful for building enough of the app to figure out whether there's a market for it in the first place. It's not fair to compare it to building the actual product with an actual team -- a more realistic alternative would be outsourcing the prototype/beta to some random team.
I'm not reducing GPT-3 to the extent that you're suggesting. I'm pointing out (and so does LeCun in his post) that it's a language model designed to continue a sequence of words. It has no understanding of the world and is no particularly suited for knowledge extraction or conversation.

> GPT-3 is a really impressive milestone towards AGI

We really don't know this. It's a big step for the field of language models, that's for sure. But we're so far from AGI that nobody knows which direction it's in and whether it exists at all.
Needless extremism? Tell me, if something similar happened in your company, or god forbid, to somebody on your team, what would you like to happen?
I like the wording in the dish mounting guide PDF:

Ensure the power is disconnected before accessing, moving or installing the Starlink (aka“Dishy McFlatface”)

https://www.docdroid.net/Wc9unhw/ridgeline-mount-guide-pdf#p...
Even if imperceptible slow (to our human senses), there would eventually a point of "ice free in October". A simple report about that event doesn't tell me anything about the rate.
> There is a strange tendency in modern scholarship to try to say, "actually the fall of Rome wasn't that bad".

Not sure why that is particularly strange. In the age of overt empire, Gibbon wrote an explicitly cautionary tale, like the momento mori that accompanied a triumph. But we aren't in that same age.

From a broader perspective, the nature of "structural" Rome, especially once Octavian (Augustus) took control, lead to sclerosis as the control and wealth and power overwhelmed other activities of state and society. For example the literature of the republic and early empire is greater than that of later periods not because people became dumber but because society, even if richer over all, could not afford it.

Arguably the empire continued, not just in the east but through what remains of Charlemagne's realm (more diffuse yet of greater scope): hundreds of millions of people speak a form of Latin (we call it Spanish or French or other names); many legal systems contain roman influences (though sometimes vestigial, with a legislative chamber called a "Senate"), and many cultural norms trace back to or through Roman times.

==

You can see this today, writ small (I'll ignore the politics of the larger scope). The older megacorps (think US Chamber of Commerce members) are focused more on extraction (of rents or of re-mining the same seams) rather than customer benefit. The "newer" (only a few decades old) tech upstarts themselves have largely entered late middle age and are heading to the same fate. Google, once an admirable innovator, is regularly pilloried on this site for having lost its way; some companies required a near death experience (Apple) or spell of privation (Microsoft, IBM) which may help (MS) or may not (IBM). Even in the old guard, GE is haeding downward, and though they've been around for a while and have in the past been a force for good, will anyone mourn?

I've long believed there's a Hayflick limit for both companies and social systems. And as it is for humans, it's a good thing.
I don't know if i'd go as far as to agree that "there is no knowledge, only language" .. but I 100% agree one of the key insights from GPT-3 -- why training on language is so effective in the first place -- is that language is tightly coupled to reality
Goodbye Lenovo
Tracking users isn't new, but it is new to politics. After 2016's analytics and advert debacle, it's interesting to see how both candidates are using analytics this time around.
> tools take a lot to learn well and it rarely transfers between roles at the same job

So, great lock-in capabilities? I can see why money is pouring into these tools.
The ancient Peruvian version of cat videos.
Article TLDR: Workers over ~30 love Excel. Younger workers are willing to try new webapps that are like Excel, but with squircles and in the cloud.

These tools include a number of SAAS startups whose marketing departments definitely did not pay Techcrunch any money to get plugged in this article.

Your job or career as a software engineer is not threatened, though the title was intended to make you feel that way in order to bait clicks. Assuming you don’t work on Excel, that is.
Mongols did have a primitive form of artillery which they used on the Song. Most large cities were well fortified back at that time, none of that stopped the Mongols from laying siege to them and decimating them.

In short they would have laid waste to Europe.
Addressing climate change in a post-pandemic world
Intersectional Disparities Among Hispanic Groups in Covid-19 Outcomes
A fact that shocked me is bats species make up 20% of all species of mammals.

https://www.fws.gov/refuges/features/Bats-Coolest-Mammals-On...
Really? All immunity is limited in time. That’s why we give booster shots.
Should social media dampen uncertain stories?
His next paragraph claims that Nabla "debunks" the idea that "large language models" can be used in healthcare.

That's not just "some people have unrealistic expectations" it's "this tool, when when more advanced and find tuned, will never be appropriate to use in a very broad class of use cases".

He also says "GPT-3 has no knowledge of how the world works", which is clearly an overstatement meant to clear up hype, but is untrue. For example, GPT-3 knows more trivia than I do.
I use QRhi for the shader pipeline in https://ossia.io which is a QWidget desktop app
No-coders No-coders No-coders
Study shows how exercise stalls cancer growth through the immune system
these companies only need to move the needle a little bit to be wildly successful and usher a new set of internal applications that end-users can put together. Will it be children programming our internal enterprise apps? Maybe not. But there are a whole lot of folks who have the need and the desire to get some internal things built, and with these new tools (retool especially), it's not that hard. Calling it no-code does these tools a disservice. It's really block-oriented programming with a variety of complex blocks.
BTW, world, please stop eating them.
I love it! It's definitely an exercise worth taking. Nice transfer size, and I'm happy to see that the code is quite maintainable.

I do my wordsandbuttons.online in similar spirit: no dependencies, and all the pages are kept below 64KB. However, as the code base grows, I'm starting to employ scripts to do the grunt work for me. So while I don't have dependencies per se, code patterns become dependency it its own right.
What is the harm?
Being able to code is an essential part of complete integration with the next stage of development for the human mind: attaching a computer to your brain.

No-code will be like not having a pre-frontal cortex... (not that everyone engages it that often). Anyone who can code is already part way towards being able to "think with a computer." Coders can solve problems that brains alone can not.
I think the Chinese govt sometimes does overreact. Banning people/companies over tweets, urgh. But whereas many westerners view this as a morality/value issue ("censorship bad") I see this as clumsiness, and generally being bad at understanding western perspectives. The way they behave wrt public communications is not in their best interest. They can get what they want without triggering so much outrage.

With regards to nationalism, it's true that it's not an all or nothing thing. In general however, I think that many people overestimate the amount of nationalism that they deliberately stir up, as opposed to nationalism that was already there. I think the western understanding of the CCP vastly underestimates the legitimacy that they enjoy, and where that legitimacy comes from. The CCP owes its very legitimacy to nationalism: people chose the CCP over the KMT because the KMT was corrupt and incompetent, and they expect the CCP to do a better job, "or else".

With regards to how China views the world vs how the west does, I'm hoping that China and the west can move towards each other, rather than it manifesting as a conflict. There is both value and problems in both the western and the Chinese viewpoints. They should understand and learn from each other.
Could a nasal spray repair brain cells?
Sorry :D nothing wrong with server-rendered HTML and forms for many use cases. Unfortunately, by the limits of connectivity, if you want to build something that is interactive, data-driven, and responsive at the same time you will always be forced to render on the client-side at some point.
Learning Rust as Gopher – Lesson 1
Hey, I'm Emil, a resident at the Google Arts & Culture Lab.

This project started as an endeavour to get an overview of what creators were doing at the intersection of creativity and machine learning.

I thought I was up to date with the latest, but my reference list kept growing and I realised I was unaware of many projects by the community.

Once I reached a few hundred, I thought it could be useful for others, so I turned my spreadsheet into a visual database with Spreadsimple.

Something missing? Just comment with a link to the project or portfolio below, and I'll review it.

More projects coming every week!!
From a personal point of view of somebody who just upgraded to an AMD-based desktop from an Intel one, the CPUs work great. It's the software support that feels half-baked. Enabling memory integrity blue-screens my computer. I need to update the chipset drivers every month because AMD is still dialing in their scheduler and frequency scaling over a year after release, and the idle power usage is inexcusable.

AMD's performance is fantastic, which is why I was fine getting it for a home gaming desktop, but I'm not sure I'd be willing to pull the trigger on AMD on an enterprise server buildout. Intel still simply (actually or otherwise) feels more reliable.
GPT-3 is a generative model, isn't it? Can you explain how you converted GPT-3 to a classification model?
Twitter's official reason would require it to block the NYT for posting the story about Trump's tax returns since it is based on illegally-leaked private documents.

Yet Twitter did not block the NYT or its story. Instead, it blocked NYP, even though it had no evidence the NYP story was based on "stolen private documents", while the NYT story clearly and admittedly was.

Again, the double standard couldn't be more obvious.
My question was more about hard splits: what to do when you have 2 DC's and they lose connectivity between them?

The larger pool can still have majority, but the smaller pool can not. Does the smaller pool change membership (because it can't see the larger pool) and continues on it's own?
What if the smaller pool has a cold start and has no idea about the larger pool?

My point is that there needs to be some consensus on pool size to decide what constitutes a majority vote.

Implementations can make reasonable assumptions and rules for this, but afaict it's not covered by the protocol itself.
Sounds like a yes/no answer is expected? If so, that is exactly what Rachel is suggesting is not enough.
Then again NASA has a $22B budget.
Damn what country? Maybe just go for some hikes around and try some mushrooms.
My experience with SSIS 2012, Microsoft's low-code ETL tool, suggests that you're trading code for a giant config file.

Unless carefully planned out to be modular, you end up with a giant pile of technical debt that is

(a) pretty opaque in its error messages

(b) has poor error handling systems

(c) is brittle in its ability to handle changing file formats or business needs

(d) can only be tested end-to-end, with no space for small unit tests to act as guide rails

(e) makes it very easy to hide business logic all throughout the ETL process

Upside to this tool: It seems to be handling a lot of simple parallelization speedups behind the scenes for you, and catches most type-conversion errors.