skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a term for it: JAQing off. Just Asking Questions. It's used to put forward a distasteful argument without actually standing behind it.

As in, "Why are you getting heated? I'm not condoning [whatever], I'm just asking questions."
Take your pick. As soon as I mention one your lack-of-interest meter will immediately shut it down.

How about campaign finance? How about the fact that it is against the interest of the two American political parties to solve any politicized problem? Immigration, for instance, will never be solved because as long as it remains a political issue it brings in money to both parties. Nobody will harm that golden goose. It's the same reason that nobody inside Facebook will solve the problems with Facebook. Because those very problems are what fund the income of everyone who works there. Ergo, it will never be solved, at least not from within.
Yes this is a concern, but I'm not sure if the AI is actually able to "generate" a non-trivial piece of code.

If you tell it to generate "a function for calculating the barycentric coordinates of a ray-triangle intersection", you might get a working implementation of a popular algorithm, adapted to your language and existing class/function/variable names.

But if you tell it to generate "a smartphone operating system", it probably won't work...and if it does, it would most likely use giant chunks of Android's codebase.

And if that's true, it means that copilot isn't really generating anything. It's just a (high-tech) search engine that knows how to adapt the code it finds to fit your codebase. That's still a really cool technology and worth exploring, but it doesn't do enough to justify ignoring software licenses.
Hi HN, PrettyPrintPlease is a small weekend project that I’m excited to share.

I work at a hardware company and spent a few months with our logistics team integrating a lot of outdated APIs to automate moving hardware around the world. APIs to check shipping rates, taxes/duties, international banned entity lists, etc!

You wouldn’t imagine the horrendous software these logistics companies use. Pretty printing invalid json has been tremendously helpful for debugging issues!
Checkly raises $10M Series A for Developer Owned Operations
Bans this far into the future are the only thing that's practical. Now that a line has been drawn in the sand it's easier for people, in both the public and private sectors, to successfully advocate for further investment into the infrastructure and technology research needed to make this transition happen. This then creates a snowball effect where manufacturers and consumers naturally gravitate away from internal combustion engines. By the time 2035 arrives this will be a non-event.
There is cregit:

https://github.com/cregit/cregit
https://lwn.net/Articles/698425/
I'm a government employee. I work with a few dozen people across multiple locations doing actual work. Not one of us is a contractor. Zero contactors are involved in any real work. The few we have are in support positions. We have some contracted IT people who manage some of our computer systems but don't have any access to what those computers actually do. We have contacted security guards at the front gate. And I think the cleaners are contracted out but as they have NEVER cleaned my office I don't see them much.

I think there is some observational bias going on in this thread.
>how do we even prove it if we're only given the trained model and it generalizes well?

Someone's going to have to audit the model the training and the data that does it. There's a documentary on black holes on Netflix that did something similar (no idea if it was AI) but each team wrote code to interpret the data independently and without collaboration or hints or information leakage, and they were all within a certain accuracy of one-another for interpreting the raw data at the end of it.

So, as an example, if I can't train something in parallel and get similar results to an already trained model, we know something is up and there is missing or altered data (at least I think that's how it works).
Thanks for your book.

A friend recommended it to me as a “beach book” and I bought it not knowing anything about it. Best beach book ever.
This feature is effectively impossible to replicate. Only Microsoft positioned itself to have:
- dataset (GitHub)
- tech (openai)
- training (azure)
- platform (vscode)

I'm impressed. They did an amazing job from a corporate strategy standpoint. Also directionally things are getting interesting
One afternoon? Hm, it depends on the paper really and how close it is to your daily work.

2 pages in FoundationDB paper (https://www.foundationdb.org/files/fdb-paper.pdf) I knew I was looking at one month's reading material if I really was to grasp everything. It'd be much easier if I worked with DBs and Distributed daily but I don't.

But, yes, I see your point.
One of my (very sincerely held) goals in life is to be as excited about _something_ as Cliff Stoll is about _everything_.
Cregit – token-based authorship information from Git
The vast majority of people reading and handling classified information are government employees? That's not the case. I was cleared at TS/SCI + polygraph and many many contractors work in that environment.
You’re not alone. Those gratuitous, unimaginative photographs (one mirror-flipped, suggesting obliviousness somewhere in the assembly line process), combined with the prolix, buzzword laden, soggy prose, emit a strong corporate odor that made me want to turn away. Pity, because the core of the content is somewhat interesting.
Software as Infrastructure: Where do you live?
Wish we could throw all these brand thrives into a Klein bottle.
gonna develop my own linux-like kernel soon, with my own AI model trained on public repositories

wanna see the source code of my AI model? oh, it's closed source

it's just coincidence that nearly 100% of my future linux-like kernel code looks the same as linux the kernel, bear in mind that my closed-source AI model takes inspiration from GitHub Copilot, there is no way that it will copy any source code
>>a whopping 95% of workers are now considering changing jobs, and 92% are even willing to switch industries to find the right position, according to a recent report by jobs site Monster.com.

This seems very high to me and little suspect, what is even more suspect is that they didn't link the report.

I have seen a few of these articles, but no good report that tracks this over time and all the articles dismiss or omit the possibility that more people are quitting because there is build from the past year and half where people were afraid to switch jobs. I think this is most likely.
Like it or not, COVID is a politically charged topic (in the US). One side of the political spectrum vehemently opposed mask mandates, while the other said we should wear them. If the two major political parties can’t agree on something, it’s a political topic.

It’s sad that as millions of people were dying, the two parties couldn’t agree on the simplest of things, but it is what it is.
This sounds related: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html
It’s the ereader for phones. Sure you can read books on your phone or tablet, but having a separate, dedicated device that is free of other distractions and optimized for the specific task is incredibly useful for a lot of people. But I don’t really see it as technology going around, but more as trial and error for what is better bundled and what isn’t. Like I don’t see the calculator or voice recorder making a huge comeback for your average person.
Intelligence agencies have used all the recipes in the book to take a hit at each other, so there is that as well.
Show HN: Glassmorphism CSS Generator
I guess that tends to happen at lousy universities.

Most of the ones I would consider worthwhile attending, do have a polyglot curriculum.
On your second point I agree -- the distribution within a sector matters, and most of them at the moment are disturbingly top-heavy.

On the first though, we have little reason to think tech will systematically diminish the roles people can fill. In the broad, the opposite has tended to happen throughout history -- although the narrow exceptions, like factory workers losing their jobs to robots, are real, and deserve more of a response than almost every government in the world has provided. For political stability, let alone justice.
The potential inclusion of GPL'd code, and potentially even unlicensed code, is making me wary of using it. Fair Use doesn't exist here and if someone was to accuse me of stealing code, saying "I pressed a button and some computer somewhere in the world, that has potentially seen your code as well, generated it for me" is probably not the greatest defense.
Smart, pythonic, ad-hoc, typed polymorphism for Python
How to detect the enemy when they are underground
I'm sorry but I think your views are too idealistic.

Based on your standards nobody would be on the roads.

You've also moved the goalpost, I haven't talked about browsing instagram while driving, in that case I agree with you, those people who cannot resist doing so should not be allowed to drive.
Robert Hanssen was a government employee after all. It's incredibly naive to think that your employer makes any difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen
If you put a hunter/gather in my shoes they'd say I "work" about an hour a day - in the morning when I go out for a run; that's work.

The rest of the day I read bit, type on a keyboard and talk to people occasionally. For me the rest of the day is work but honestly it's only a bit stressful and has an element of fun to it. If I didn't need the money I'd probably be doing something that's equivalent to the same thing.
I’ve read both books. I consider Ousterhout’s to be one of the better recent books on software development, though as mentioned in my other comment, this is more because of the earlier content than the later chapters. I have been critical of Clean Code since before it was cool and I actively recommend against junior developers reading it.

I would have liked to see Ousterhout make a more thorough argument if he was going to criticise TDD. His central criticism — that TDD results in what he calls tactical programming, prioritising the implementation of specific features over good design — is certainly defensible. However, I think he was too superficial in what he actually wrote on the TDD section, and consequently I don’t think he made a particularly convincing connection with the ideas developed earlier in the book.

I think you’re slightly unfairly misrepresenting his position on large or small classes. He makes a solid case that what he calls deep modules are better for managing complexity than shallow ones. He also identifies a correlation with size because small modules tend to be shallow. That’s not the same as arguing for large classes or against small classes just because of their size, though.
Are you ready to become a TV company? The future of tech events is media
In my experience, the HRD makes it look like crap. Seriously, I don’t know how they can mangle such a nicely formatted document so badly.
I find estimations a useful process (on user story level). Sometimes team members will have wildly different estimations, and then there is discussion why, and often new information is learned. I know this is basic agile stuff, but I find in practice it works well.
> They are occupying the area to assert their claim. I don't see how that would change.

They can stop expanding military bases in contested areas for a start. That's already a big change in policy.

> A period of absolute Western dominance that started almost 500 years ago is coming to an end.

What makes China a superpower and Japan not? What economic indicators are you using? Or the UK, France, and India for that matter? Nuclear powers that are able to flatten the population centres of countries on command.

Treating 'The West' as a monolithic entity is just the mirror image of neo-orientalism. In terms of alignment, the ideological chasm between the 1st World / 2nd World during the cold war was larger than the gap between China and the other advanced economies currently. China, having reformed its economy, is more similar to Spain, which resolved a lot of its geopolitical problems after the transition to democracy in the late 70s and early 80s.

The only baggage that China has in terms of geopolitics is the constant navel gazing at the 1800s and Qing's humiliation by the colonial powers. This is a Chinese nationalist narrative that is stoked by the party, but one that doesn't resonate at all with the younger generations.
Also, Walmart.com has similar prices and selection. Free shipping is $35 though. I’ve had much better results with Walmart packaging and shipping lately.
Previous post appears to have been removed
> a very lazy and flawed system.

That's how you make $100B, not by "doing things that don't scale" like handwriting thankyou notes to every customer.
Multihash: Future-proof hashes and allow multiple hash functions to coexist
> In particular the disruptor wouldn't be appropriate to implement io_uring

Completely agree. It's at a higher level of abstraction and intersects only in some conceptual ways with how the OS operates.

> [...] where there is only one consumer, only one producer[1] and packet loss is not tolerated.

My agreement above still standing, I feel like this case is actually covered by the disruptor as well. It is a trivial subset of the multi-producer, single-consumer problem that it was originally built to handle. If you made some minor modification like "packet loss is tolerated", then you have a solid case.
That looks pretty cool! But I meant papers and essays from the likes of Edsger Dijsktra, Gerald Sussman, Alan Kay, Joe Armstrong, Daniel Ingalls, Peter Naur, Tony Hoare, Niklaus Wirth, Betrand Meyer, John McCarthy... and many, many others[0], including ones that are not necessarily as known but have discovered deep and useful insights into programming and computers.

Blog articles are really useful too, especially if they concentrate on say something more specifically practical that doesn't warrant the same polish and rigor of a paper or essay. Also something I noticed is that many, who will make more general assertions in these articles, are typically echoing something that has been written down by researchers quite a while ago, so why not go to the source?

[0] Apparently I can't stop writing down names because it feels like I'm leaving out too many...
One thing I've noticed when coping with severe heat, and often get laughed at, is to wear a wet t-shirt. It's incredible how instantaneous the relief is. I just take an ordinary cotton shirt, fold it neatly into a small packet and run it under the tap. Press it a few times so the water runs through the folded package and then unfold. Don't wring it as it will stretch the cloth beyond repair, and put it on. Initially it will feel weird and uncomfortable, but once it's on I feel my head getting more relaxed by the instant. You can even take a comfortable jog outside in 35C in the blasting sun for up to 10 minutes. The shirt will be near dry by than and it will get uncomfortable very quickly, but think of the possibilities! On extreme days I just wetten the shirt for 4-5 times a day and put a fan on me. No sweat when facing >35 degrees inside.

I tried it with pants as well but if you do so, don't wetten it above the pockets as the multi-layer will make it damp without much of the adiabatic cooling perks.
If interested, this is the study paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w28854
>But if you tell it to generate "a smartphone operating system", it probably won't work...and if it does, it would most likely use giant chunks of Android's codebase.

But since now APIs are unprotected you could feed it all of the class structure and method signatures to have it fill in the blanks. I don't know if that gets you a working operating system but it seems like it will get you quite a long way
Smartwatches are the opposite for me. It feels so oppressive to have a notification machine actually tethered to my body.
Their blackhead remover product might be brand hijacking, but their ACME Remover Product! it's the real deal. Just see this review of their product:

"100% success at removing ACME (Klein bottles) from some kids, parents, even works on some websites!"
-Cliff Stoll
(He did not say this, its a joke!)
You’re insane to recommend emacs and vim to beginners. You’re right that you dont need IntelliJ, but vi and emacs for complete beginners seems a bit stretched.

The better recommendation would be VsCode or Sublime using the eclipse language server.
> Which makes it problematic when we make HR people do the initial screening. They would filter out a lot of good candidates just because they used Python instead of Java, or had been working on a C++ project one year less than the person leaving the team.

Companies paying top dollar for the best engineering talent aren’t having inexperienced HR drones or automated software filter resumes. They have dedicated recruiters who have a proven track record of being able to properly interpret resumes and work with candidates to accurately understand their backgrounds. They’re also very good at working with engineering hiring managers to understand the actual requirements of the job.

That’s more or less what John Carmack is trying to say here: The requirements aren’t being used internally as a strict pass/fail criteria before anyone is considered for the position.

I’ve only worked for one company that had inexperienced HR people screen resumes. It was standard practice among engineering hiring managers at that company to use external recruiters for this reason.

Hiring managers aren’t dumb. Companies paying high six figures or more for engineers aren’t dumb. We don’t want to miss out on good candidates. I personally read every single resume that comes through applications to my job postings, and I know I’m not alone. Hiring is hard, and it’s not worth letting someone else screw it up just to save a little bit of time.

On the other hand, if you’re applying to a local dinosaur of a tech company that pays below-average compensation and takes 3 months to respond to candidates, all bets are off. You could indeed be up against automated hiring software and people who don’t know how to read resumes. But you also don’t want to work there if you can avoid it.
The real question is whether it constitutes derived work, though. And that is not a question of similarity so much so as provenance - if you start with a codebase that is GPL originally, and it gets gradually modified to the point where it doesn't really look anything like the original, it's still a derived work, and is still subject to the license.

Similarity can be used to prove derivation, but it's not the only way to do so. In this case, all the code that went into the model is (presumably) known, so you don't really need any sort of analysis to prove or disprove it. It is, rather, a legal question - whether the definition on the books applies here, or not.
> Computers cannot parse culture because culture is comprised of arbitrary, contradictory paradigms. Cultural values can only be resolved in an individual context as an integration of a lifetime of experiences.

Eh, GPT-3 is pretty good at imitating (some parts of) culture already.

> A computer can only be programmed to operate in that environment with respect to some externally programmed objective. e.g. if the computer were programmed to maximise its chances of being offered a ride home from a party, it might select which person to talk to based on factors such as sobriety, and an observation of factors indicating who had driven to the party in their own vehicle.

Have you ever tried debugging a program? Programs can do stuff that's really hard to predict, even if you wrote them specifically to be easy to predict (ie understandable).
It would be great if job ads were actually honest and gave a real minimum, maximum, and typical qualifications.
Overall it's about finding new generalizations and collapse your extensive complexity by new abstraction.

For example, you build a Todo-list software (everybody does). You have requests from customers "I want to be notified 3 days before due date", "I want to be notified 1 day before due date" and "I don't need notifications".

OK, so you are adding a new setting "[ON/OFF] Notify me [X] days before due date".

Then you get feedback "I want to be notified when someone unassigned me" and "I want to be notified when someone assigns me".

OK. You're adding new setting "[ON/OF] Notify me about changes of my assignments"

Then you receive feedback like "I want to be notified about important tasks assigned to me only".

You say "Fuck it" and implement a notification engine where every user can set up own notification rules.

X notifications settings were collapsed into a new more abstract (but more complex) solution. You have to choose abstractions carefully and be aware that premature abstractization is as bad as premature optimization. This is hard.
Pull the HTML and CSS out into a Jekyll layout.
Can someone help me understand how we aren’t totally screwed?

We’re on track to pass the limits set by the Paris agreement so why shouldn’t we expect to see record temps near 150-175F by the end of the century?
And all the while, a certain political party can't agree amongst themselves that climate change is actually happening.
Yeah, I mean from a IDE/developer point of view reflection is fantastic - really can't argue with that. At dev time it's a life saver. But coming from C++ my gut reaction is that for compilation/distribution time this is mostly a crutch/code-smell with a huge price. I've for instance noticed there is seemingly a lot of library rewriteing and fragmentation. It's common for people to choose a smaller one-trick-pony library instead of a more mature large library - to avoid dragging in a enormous dependency. That ends up as a huge bummer for the ecosystem

Thanks for the insight into Java internals and Android. It's a shame it's so tightly coupled at the roots but it's pure fantasy on my part to have a reflection-less JVM :) At the end of the day, there isn't really anything else like Clojure, so I just try to accept the warts and features.

Out of curiosity I took a cursory look at Qt and they seem to handle QML without using RTTI - so think it's all solvable - at least in most cases (I'm guessing by enumerating your possible types at compile time?)
You sort of need a condo savings account that can be invested where the premiums you pay get invested. You need some laws or state regulations to make sure some minimums are maintained. The gains would then offset a potentially lower selling price since the HOA would have enough money to cover repairs.

But at the same time for a single family home, it is not unusual to invest 100k in a remodel if the location supports it on a 40 year old house. A condo should operate similarly although the scope of changes you can make is different obviously.
It's the everything always part of the argument that's unreasonable. You realise that that's impossible? You can't vet and control the whole stack. And, if you could, it would be prohibitively expensive.
That's super cool. As long as you do the things you specify at the bottom of that doc (provide attribution if copied so people can know if it's OK to use) then a lot of the concerns of people on these threads are going to be resolved.
Extending the arithmetic-geometric mean to three variables
He completely missed the boat about how Moore's Law would improve upon the power of early prototypes. It's a classic case of underestimating the power of exponential growth by visualizing it as low-order polynomial, and missing that "digital is worse than analog" is a problem that can be solved by increasing the scale of digital power.

But he was right about tech will enable and amplify the worst in social behaviors.
In a nice graph:

https://twitter.com/RARohde/status/1410157638109872134?s=19
Abrasion Holography (hand-drawn holograms) [1995]