skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The average person 100 years ago could hardly imagine the way we live.

Serendipitously, Karel Capek's "R.U.R.", the book which popularised the concepts both of robots and of androids, was first published in 1921, 100 years ago this year.

I dunno. I think people from 100 years ago could likely imagine our current lifestyle just fine.

I mean, some of them are still alive, even, and many were involved in making our current lifestyle.
It seems to me many software engineering types vastly under kL
estimate the difficulty of automation in a lot of different fields. Why do you think this is? I suppose I could come up with some hypotheses but I am interested in what other people think. "Edge conditions" are actually core conditions for automation. If your automated process can't self-regulate it often negates the point of automation. If your process costs more than human labor then it may not be price competitive.
You can only run so much code with so many electrons. At a certain point, you run out of electrons.

Imagine a world in which there is just one person and the economy is just how big of a number this person can make on a computer.

If there is more than one person or more than one computer - you have less electrons at your disposal - because they're making up other people & computers respectively.

This is obviously very far into the future - but so is 8000 years!

Between 1960 and 1970 - global GDP increased by about ~$1T. That was about the same increase between 2018 and 2019 - even after adjusting for inflation.

That was a low-growth year for the last decade.

In the 1960s we had the entire space race and a lot of the modern computer (including the Internet).

If the trend continues, in another 60 years, we could accomplish about as much in a month. In another 120 years, about as much in a day. In another 120 years, about as much in an hour. Another 180 years, about as much in a minute, and in another 180 years, about as much in a second.

It's hard to argue you haven't hit the singularity at that point - and that's only 660 years away.

8000 years at this current growth rate would be truly unimaginably alien - and I'm not sure why everyone is convinced it could keep growing or would even need to.

If the population keeps growing at current rates - we'd have enough productivity for everyone to have a higher quality of life than Jeff Bezos does today in <700 years - at least, inflation adjusted, the average person on the planet would have >$15Bn in annual income.
Mature red-tailed hawks can hover or soar with only the slightest movements but the juveniles are comically bad at it.
Building meta megastore for effective AWS management
And Elon could have avoided the whole thing in the first place and not put himself in a position where some guy in Thailand was telling him to cram a submarine up his ass and the news media was taking notice of it.
Sorry, you misunderstood me. My argument was not that they should've introduced Chrome bookmarks and then merged them together.

My argument was that they should not have introduced two separate things when improving the one that already existed to simply work offline would have sufficed.
Comic books (and manga/graphic novels/etc.) sound like a good plan, especially during a pandemic where much of live performance either has shut down or remains risky.

Getting more kids into physical book and record stores seems like a nice effect as well. Not everything needs to be purchased from Amazon or streamed on Spotify.

I'd also expect to see more live events as the pandemic (hopefully) wanes.

> And while the Culture Pass can be spent on video games, the game’s publisher must be French, and the game must not feature violence — conditions so restrictive that most popular titles are unavailable.

Ah, I was wondering why games weren't higher on the list.
Science fiction would never exist with this attitude and we can read early science fiction and see that much of it was in fact quite correct. The speculation gets us to thinking about what is coming and what we can do to make it better.
Actually it really reflects poorly on their intelligence when they fail to conceptualise the complexity of the real world.
And this is where I think of the game-side of games programming to be more an art form (I say this as an ex-professional game developer). GPT-3 could be used for narrative generation, environment generation, and adaptive AI, and these are all exciting areas for research and experimentation. But as you say, underneath is a solid engine, and one day an AI could feasibly build an engine from scratch, but I think that day is decades away. The AI that we have today are just toys.
that's great and all but not everyone has an HP...once we have better driver support, sure. Or am I misunderstanding something?
I don't mean to hammer this point too hard, but when Chrome released click-to-play breaking changes for web audio, they broke alarms/timers on Google search.

So the "you'd catch all these changes if you were testing" excuse honestly kind of rubs me the wrong way, because as far as I can tell Google itself has trouble meeting that standard for even its biggest products.
I don't think you can separate the two. It's like separating Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and giving 100% of the credit to Woz or Jobs.

Certainly Shotwell has made the business and operational side of the Space Falcon business smooth and helped win commercial/government contracts. But do you really think it is shotwell who is aggressively asking people to throw away designs, delete components, and iterate quickly by getting rid of testing steps? She is more of a Tim Cook than a Steve Jobs.

Look at this 1 hour q&A at Starbase, time index 13:30, there's no way this five stages of engineering comes from Shotwell. It's not her personality, but Musk's instincts here are absolutely correct.

And it's the number one reason why SpaceX made it to orbit, and Blue Origin didn't, and why Starliner is taking forever. Musk doesn't care about blowing up 29 raptors and blowing $50 million on a test that will most likely result in a RUD. Shotwell would never have authorized that, she is much more concerned with keeping SpaceX's finances in order and the contracts flowing, and Starship simply doesn't have many launch customers who need 100t in orbit, and where launching on Falcon 9, or Electron's is good enough.

> Shotwell is the reason that SpaceX was able to install 29 Raptor engines in a single night to satisfy Musk's whims.

Really? Based on what? The reason why they could pull that off is because Elon forced a shitload of SpaceX employees to be relocated from other parts of SpaceX to meet an arbitrary and unnecessary deadline. You think Shotwell would have ordered 24/7 round the clock booster assembly?

Keep in mind that it is Musk who insists on production automation, because his #1 priority is $/kg thrust, and so Raptor engines are pointless if you can't mass manufacture them. There is currently no economic reason for SpaceX, as a business, to mass manufacture these engines which have never been to orbit, even on a prototype demonstrator. Again, this had to have been Musk pushing for this, not a seasoned CEO/businesswoman looking to keep the company on track.

The entire Starbase is like a Google X, or Xerox PARC, it's a CEO running a big profitable company smoothly, so it can fund the crazy R&D ambitions of something else. That part Shotwell is responsible for, but there's no evidence of her involvement at all @ Starbase. She's never even been recorded being there AFAIK.
Do you recall no-fly lists when Ebola broke out, because I don't.

Flying in a plane at all adds risk. Radiation, personal injury, death, etc.

Should we ban everyone with any sort of transmissible disease from flights? Do we ban people with Influenza from flying, if there are elderly on a flight?
Three reasons: timezones, language barrier and legal barrier. First two are clear. As for the last one, if you do anything remotely important and sensitive to your business, you don't want a dude from Bogota to have access to your project.

Edit. I should add that if your project really matters, the dude from Bogota will be a spy or a blackhat with nearly complete certainty. He will be well spoken, likeable, presentable, competent, he will even appear to believe in your company values and will ask for a very moderate salary. And you will brag about how you've got such a superstar for 10% of going payrate here, except that one day he'll stop responding to emails after having collected all the info he needed.
P.S. Having a parallel tag symbol table means doubling the work in creating and tearing down symbol tables. Adding another member to the Symbol struct means lots of extra memory allocated.

Tag symbols are relatively rare, so I was willing to trade lookup times for reduced memory consumption. Wound up adding a pointer to a hash table in each symbol table, where the tag symbols would be stored. Only when tag symbols are actually used is it ever accessed or even initialized. It works a treat.
Haskell automates a lot of programming but it sure isn't easy
Engineers are socially inept and oppressed. Until that changes, they will continue to be exploited.
Some of us like it that way, Gary.
Shipping costs from China are going through the roof
I think the generally acknowledged approach if you work on a trading desk at a bank want to put on some trade with desk-blowup potential is you first send out an email to your boss/head-of-desk outlying the trade and targets and stop loss and whatever, even if he sits right next to you. Once he replies in agreement, he's on the hook and you have the evidence. This makes it perfectly reasonable to argue that its the desk head's responsibility to make sure these kind of blowups don't happen. If head of trading also feels that head of desk wasn't exactly a stellar performer anyways, then poof he's gone. It just so happens in this case that they didn't want to replace headcount anyways so the trader next in line, the guy who actually blew the desk up, got promoted. Maybe it was just the bank I worked at but I saw enough of these charades and couldn't take the job seriously anymore. It was too much of a farce for me so I quite Lol, but hey I guess there are people who enjoy playing that game, nothing wrong with that.
Can you disable Unicode (UTF-8) with the screenreader.

What happens if you remove "meta-charset=UTF-8" from the Content-Type header and "<meta-charset=UTF-8>" from the HTML.

I use a text-only browser and keep it set on 7-bit ASCII.
I wish more people understood this.

I spent the first twenty years of my career as a public school teacher, and the last four as a software engineer.

Most of the teachers I knew worked _literally_ twice as hard as the average software engineer I know now, even though they're paid one third as much.

And finding good teachers is just as difficult as finding good ICs. I think the ONLY difference is that it is possible for a lot more people to teach badly than to code badly. And of course that society has decided that teachers aren't worth paying very much.
Some of this is the industry’s fault. There are many companies still building lame stuff. In other words, they kind of don’t need the new you, they just need the old you (no pun intended). The old you is now easily created in Bootcamps and new grads.

There are fewer jobs that need the new you. Your dilemma right now is that you have to present this new (older) you as the best older (newer) you. Subconsciously most companies see through this and are making a simple business decision (just get the cheaper stuff, it’s the same old you). Sucks to be you.
That describes inflation, not a bubble, unless you mean a bubble in $USD.

If I then go to trade my million-dollar IOU for a house that now costs a million dollars because everybody has a million, that's a price increase. More dollars in circulation means higher prices for everything, which is inflation.

A bubble would be if I went to go buy a house and then found that your IOU was good for nothing and you didn't actually have a million dollars to give me. This was the situation in 2009 but doesn't appear to be the situation today.
I agree with you that most developers do their best work after 6-8 months and that developers get less productive after 24-36 months but for totally different reasons. Developers don't get 'lazy', 'bored' or 'comfortable', they get overburdened by the company.

It is common knowledge that the average developer leaves after the 2 year mark. When that happens, everyone else is left holding the bag and they become the new experts.

Companies are full of self created abandonware.

Another person leaves and it is now two extra things that the vet has to become the expert on. Then three, then four and on and on. Next thing you know, your vet isn't getting any work done because they are holding too many bags. As the expert, they are in too many meetings trying to keep other people productive. They are pulled into too many critical issues and they are trying to mentor new developers in your ever revolving door of new people.

But they are unproductive

No. They are keeping your company afloat and you aren't compensating them for it.
To follow on your point, it's interesting how much people take the results of unionization for granted.

Do people not enjoy two day weekends? 8 hour workdays? Workplace safety regulations? Prohibitions on child labor? It wasn't unbridled capitalism that gave us those things, it was organized labor. Union membership strongly correlates with a healthy middle class.
> And yet, almost no houses at all are 3D printed.

It's brand new, give it a minute.
I’m curious why the fact checking industry is experiencing a downturn.

Trump not being president is the easy answer, but it’s not so obvious to me - even though he lied constantly, he was only one person. There are still hundreds of other politicians and public figures telling lies and distortions.
Actually it is realy different since games like chess or go are closed problems, i.e. they are deterministic. The number of parameters necessary to integrate to turn an ostensibly open real world problem like "driving" into a deterministic game like computer chess or go is far greater.
> also use no more than 5 plugins to be safe

Within reasonable bounds, I dont think the numbers matter as much as the business behind them. Using large scale and reputable plugins is the main thing.

Also Id suggest hooking in with some alert system that tells you when there is a known vulnerability. So many sites site un-updated for years with open flaws. Auto update probably helps this for low maintaince types, personally I dont auto-update most plugins to avoid the occasional release issues but use centralised management software so Im updating close to real time.
The Japanese university where I work is similar.

Much of the administrative work related to educational and research program management is handled by the tenured faculty, and we get rotated regularly through administrative positions. In the sixteen years I've been there, I have, like most of my colleagues, served on a dozen or more committees and have managed programs for periods of several years each. The result of this process is that faculty members tend to become, over time, reasonably competent administrators with a broad understanding of how the university functions, and that in turn helps the university—a large, necessarily complex bureaucracy—to function reasonably well.

We also have a small professional administrative staff, and they also get rotated through positions every few years. They must keep really good documentation of what they do, as staff members are usually able to get up to speed on their new jobs very quickly.
> the anti-glyphosate crowd has completely failed for the last 40 years to provide any definitive proof that it causes cancer

Have they?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-monsanto-cancer-lawsuit-i...

“ A California jury on Friday found Monsanto liable in a lawsuit filed by a man who alleged the company’s glyphosate-based weed-killers, including Roundup, caused his cancer and ordered the company to pay $289 million in damages.”
Interestingly enough, the kernel has broken my (userspace) programs at two different occasions. Both times were knowing and intentional, as in the commit messages acknowledged that they were making breaking changes, and they weren't because of security either.

But these were only two occasions over ~10 years, so it's not too big of a deal.
Well yeah but there are 50 United States, they picked that one.
Predicting the next frame from previous frames and learnt sequences is a neat trick, but I think automated game development is already very possible with simple techniques like genetic algorithms, or even a PRNG. I mean Rogue and it's descendants are very much automated game development, but GPT-3 could be useful for something like dynamic quest generation, world-building, narrative, adaptive NPCs (including dialogue) etc.
As I understand it, the current CCP is a product of the cultural revolution being widely recognized as a mistake and consequently people with different ideas coming to power after Mao was dead.

It seems too glib to say "oh they're not communist" as it sounds to me like saying they're just not true to the revolution for no particular reason.
For software devs? Yeah, absolutely. We aren't talking about cleaning crews here.
Is it really an industry? Outside of Snopes what else is there? I know when Instagram and Facebook rolled out fact checking it was basically a joke. People would post obvious memes in order to attract “fact checking” from sources that didn’t seem real at all.
I haven't read Hex, but I just read Children of Time, and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (1979) plays around with the loosely computational nature of an ant colony. Probably a few people thought about it before then, but it's getting closer to the dawn of general computation at that point
In some senses it’s differently complex, but WireGuard or similar may be simpler since it’s lower on the OSI and every application gets it “for free”.
Australia uses soldiers to enforce stay-at-home lockdowns
Does this...scare anyone else? Is this actually a zombie apocalypse and we just don't know?
That doesn't sound like a recipe for sanity.
“f/8 and be there” is a common expression that describes these situations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ƒ/8_and_be_there
That's a good question. I wasn't reviewing the code he pushed.
Maybe the line is the number of deaths prevented by a terrorism no-fly list.
There is great contempt for "computer people" in this post.
Has anyone ever done a study on the costs/benefits of funding public defenders? Better funded public defenders, I imagine, would result in fewer and shorter prison sentences (saving money), but I guess also have some potential for an increase in crime (costing money).
Org-mode has had nested collapsible chceklists since its inception, and you can do a lot of fancy stuff with it too.
Mine Captcha
As a potential law student how would you frame your argument against lockdowns in a world where trust in subject matter experts is down across the board (on both side, pro and against lockdowns)?
Oh my god. This movie has been one of my favorites for a long time. Most people have no idea Dr Seuss ever did any live action and it's as trippy as you'd think with a dose of weird 50s nuclear paranoia ("ITS ATOMIC!") Even cooler, I found out my uncle was an extra in it as a child actor!!
To try and restate this, in case I misunderstand:

You believe that Apple and Mozilla are rubber-stamping anything Google asks for because they’re afraid of a Google marketing campaign.

Have I accurately represented your beliefs?
That's not a sensible limit to worry about, at this stage, unless there's some reason to believe that economic growth is doubly exponential.
They are particularly nice when processing a recursive datastructure such as a tree. The technique can make for some very short and readeable code.
I wonder if there's some tacit understanding between HR/recruiting/biz at tech companies that paying for retention will lead to engineering comp running wild across the board and make all of these businesses more expensive to run.

Feel free to teach me a lesson, but I feel this could be possible because:

- If people were paid to stay, then the supply of engineers in recruiting pipelines would decrease.

- If top performers were paid to stay, then the mere existence of a "counter-offer" mechanism would open up the door for bidding wars, where each bid is actually positive indicator for the quality of the talent. Today bidding wars largely only exist for somebody with multiple new offers, where neither company actually has a great measure of the talent.

- Retention pay is likely a compounding expense for the employer. Finance departments hates compounding liabilities.

Altogether would it make the labor market more efficient? Probably.
Would it make businesses less profitable? Probably.
What to expect from the likes of someone like Juliette Kayyem. She is a danger to democracy and if she gave a shit she would be writing about closing the southern boarder where thousands of Covid Infected Illegals are streaming across every day.

Lets fucking ban Americans but let in 1000's of infected illegally. What a POS this bitch is.

Junk away...

Disclaimer: Vaccinated.
There was a better article about this on The City: https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/8/1/22604814/nyc-airport-high-p...
That would be an amazing discovery if it's true.
When I was considering going to law school I learned some sobering facts:

- something like 75% of lawyers would not recommend their children go in to law

- there is a high rate of burnout among lawyers

- while the public perception is that lawyers are extremely high paid, that's only the case some elite lawyers that went to elite schools and work for elite firms[1]

For someone like me, who doesn't just want to help the rich get richer, working in, say, a public defender's office will probably mean being really overworked and underpaid and not even be able to devote a reasonable amount of time to the people I was defending because of the workload.

This made me wonder: do I really want to go from being burnt out in IT to being burnt out in law? It didn't sound very appealing.

I'd love to hear a lawyer or someone else who knows more about this to correct me, if I've been mislead.

[1] - Just today on HN I was reading someone say that they pay their software developers "much much more" than their they do their legal department: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28050106
Kanopy is the best! I used to use a service called Juststreamit, to find what streaming service something was on, now there's an app called Justwatch. I'd signed up for a Kanopy account years ago and was able to put it good use. It has so many indie films that I'd been waiting to watch and you can also sort by language which is great for learning.
Philosophers Should Care about Computational Complexity [pdf]
>>Notwithstanding skill, because immigration isn't just about low-skilled workers (Canada doesn't prioritize it for instance), high supply of workers is lobbied for on the part of companies in order to suppress wages.

Maybe I misunderstood your comment but Canada does prioritize high(er)-skilled immgrants over low-skilled immigrants as per the Canadian Federal Skilled Workers points system used to score potential immigrants applying to enter the country on a long-term basis.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
These are predatory prices because Americans drink a lot. As that buzz builds up, you won’t be thinking too much about continuously paying for a few more drinks. I’d love to know their cocktail prices.

If you’ve ever spent any time going to bars regularly, here’s a pro tip:

Just hit up the liquor store and buy a few 2 dollar shots. Keep asking for a soda at the bar. At most, the night may cost you 20-30 dollars. The only downside to this is that it’s very easy to pick up a drinking habit on the cheap.