skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>shows that just 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members to institutions across the country between 2011 and 2020

I feel like this is not the best representation here as they sorta switched what they are measuring. Imagine if every single PhD from every single university became a tenured professor at the exact same rate. We'd still see a pretty big imbalance because presumably there are some universities which give out 300+ PhDs per year because they have a ton of programs/departments and others that give out 30+ per year because they have very limited grad programs.

Surely there is a skew but it just seems like a very deceptive way to look at it.

Would be like saying that 50% of all Americans who become teachers come from just 20% of the states - but not adjusting for the fact that 50% of the population lives in the top 10 largest states.
Forums are something possible alongside chat but it isn’t for everyone. Just like chat isn’t for everyone.

This is besides the point completely but HN isn’t a community in the same way. No one really gets to know any one else on HN. Since there’s so many usernames and most are anon. There is no DMing. Chat is totally diff.
I agree with you. I think lockdowns destroyed the economy, such measures put a lot of people out of business. My story was just an example of how businesses influenced politics. The grandparent poster wanted to hear more about how it happens.
> especially in the presence of C++ copy constructors, move constructors, etc,

You only mean the former, not both. The only reason for the existence of the giant rats' nest of complexity that is C++ move semantics is eliminating this particular mistake.
Do you have any examples of how std::optional could be implemented more simply?
We've all seen unmaintainable monstruosities in any language. I think maintainability is a subject that goes way beyond language features. But if I were to relate a language feature to maintainability, that would be proper typing, not variable accessibility. Even though it's not enforced at runtime, a Python code base with type hints makes a huge difference in maintainability compared to one without. Of course Java has that by default and it's nice.
> best networked

I think if this part ends up too high of a weight you'll end up with a lack of diversity of ideas and ultimately a decay into nepotism.
Only in fields where there’s no demand for their skills outside academia, like English literature or History, or vastly more supply than demand, like most of the sciences. Fields like Economics or Computer Science have post docs but they’re not normative. Most people who end up with tenure track jobs never do one.
I started checking Facebook only on the computer and only when it organically comes up in my daily browsing (like now!). As it happens, I check Facebook about 3-4 times a week now, and it's basically just to Mark as Read my notifications (which are largely useless).
Can you name something that is not damaging to someone? Excessive salt consumption is linked over a million annual deaths worldwide. Even water kills thousands of people per year (drowning).

If your rule is "we can't have things that may hurt some people" then you're going to live in a pretty bland world. Gonna be especially tough without water.
Tangential, but wasn’t the entire male population of the UK killed and taken over by the Indo-Europeans 3000 years ago around the same time as they showed up in India?
The phone companies and utilities are natural monopolies. Creating a social media platform isn’t. Doesn’t every senior developer interview at a BigTech company involve a question “how would you design Twitter?”.
Children of immigrants are the real difference makers. They natively speak the language and understand the culture but also have the "immigrant" mentality instilled in them by their parents.
> I mean, have you looked at them?

Last time I looked at Rust's std::Result, it's implemented as a tagged union.

Most of C++'s implementations of a Result data type are implemented as tagged unions as well.

What's your point?

> This isn't a criticism of the team behind this code, it's just what it takes to do this in C++.

The only conceivable argument you can possibly make is argue that Rust might support tagged unions as language primitives, but that would be totally pointless as Result types are relevant for the interfaces and higher level abstraction they provide, not your personal opinion of how hard someone else had to work to implement them.

I've developed Result and Either types in a few languages, including C++, and the only hard thing about C++ is doing the usual homework to handle lvalur/revalue/revalue well.
Bears proven to shit in woods.
>Evolution works through tiny incremental changes, but this flight sounds like an all-or-nothing scenario.

I never confirmed one way or the other, but I'm fairly positive evolution operates by large sudden changes followed by incremental improvements/optimizations -- it's difficult to explain many "weird" traits through incremental improvements, because most of them would get stuck in local maxima's before achieving any real benefit over the prior state.

Like you can't evolve a third arm by slowly iterating towards it, from a lump to a stump to a limb to a functional limb; it'd be entirely a loss until it becomes fully functional. You have to grow a shitty yet complete third arm first, but not so shitty that it doesn't offer benefit, and then iteratively improve it into a pretty nice arm
TBF, that is actually a situation where the big pattern-matching trained system would probably easily find and regurgitate the correct answer, just from prior exposure to a very distinctive bit of code.
Hey, about the column-wide data compression thing. If I have a column with strings that are highly similar to each other (maybe they are urls, maybe they are HTML documents that were scraped from the same site, but they are expected to contain redundancies)

What's the best approach to get excellent compression? Can I exploit this redundancy within the column somehow? I don't even know the right search terms for this.

TimescaleDB compression will work only for integer columns, right? And in any case, this is not a time series.
Right? Like...a series of passwords or something...alongside some big red warning screen...idk...

The feature, as-is - is not just useless; but borderline hilarious.
There are a lot of high-end niche magazines around. You just have to know where to find them. Some off the top of my head:

Field Ethos

The Modern Luxury (house, https://modernluxurymedia.com/Advertise#print)

The Scout Guide (house)

Etc
Are you really comparing the level of effort of setting a phone company to creating a social media platform or a website to get your ideas out there?
No, they're not fined regularly, only when they knowingly violate the law.

And it's $4B after 4 years since the beginning of the investigation, a tiny increase to an already massive EU budget.
It's a bunch of libraries for Java for making big enterprise web apps and the like.
I was thinking ivy league. smaller, more selective schools.
Yes, but this is a heap, not a VM. You're not streaming through the cache into DRAM, you're polluting the cache with dirty lines that the app would presumably like to be using for near-future loads. The performance impact is obviously going to depend on usage patterns, but it certainly could be much higher.
It should be incredibly obvious to just about anyone that this sort of law is untenable and would just lead to social media companies either completely banning anyone from Florida from posting on their platform or putting them into their own special space completely separated from the rest of the world.

Someone in Florida will issue a terrorism threat that goes afoul of European laws or something and social media platforms will sooner side with the rest of the world than Florida. And how is Florida going to have any standing to try and sue a company in compliance that does not operate in or offer service to Florida?

It's the same as what's going down in Texas. Never mind that as another commentator mentioned these same state governments are also busy burning books and censoring other individuals so it's not a matter of equal freedom. They want the ability to threaten minorities.
> Ignoring network effects and existing libraries

aka Ignoring the fact that it's easy to hire developers that already have widespread experience in C++, and ignoring the cumulative effort that thousands, if not millions of developers have put into writing and testing code that I don't have to... wait, why would I ignore both of those things?

If I'm creating software in a vacuum, such that I don't have to think about things like developer experience or time-to-market, then sure, let's say that Go or Rust is definitely better for many use cases. Very few people create software in a vacuum!
Because Canada is woefully underpopulated and the South Asians basically create a massively disproportionate amount of our wealth. It would be the dumbest fix to the problem considering building new housing is easy.
There's a "yo dawg" joke in here somewhere.
Agreed (especially since I just got a third A6000 this week), but by the time they come out the faster training/inference time might be enticing to some. I would love to see an 80GB workstation card though...
How is an email server a common carrier? People have been setting up email servers for decades and there are plenty of alternatives.
In the Netherlands, the teachers unions campaigned to keep schools open for kids during Covid. Honorable, IMO.

We need a postmortem of the whole Covid event.
That's like saying "we should all drive hydrogen cars because you can just replace all the existing petroleum infrastructure with hydrogen infrastructure." Yes, but you have to execute on that. Any practical use of digital multichannel audio must consider bandwidth and decoding power as constraints.
> It's like how political prisoners are the easiest sign a place is a dictatorship.

That’s an easy sign right up until you have to define “political prisoner”. According to some, people convicted of crimes committed during the January 6th insanity are “political prisoners”.
What's your favorite snowy mountain onsen in Japan?
Thinking of going to meditate for ten days for New Years.
Sketch is Mac-only though. I work in environments where Macs are very rare and I've seen a lot of people using Figma for all sorts of things.
The first amendment case law recognizes that protection for political speech is the very core of the First Amendment. It’s the whole point.

Indeed, prior to the mid-20th century, it was understood that other kinds of expressive speech (pornography, etc.) did not receive as much, if any, protection.
To paraphrase Charlie Munger, the bees buzz.

To draw on Robin Hanson, the less you understand why you did something, the better you project to others you did it for the right reasons.
Stop the professionals that create a vast majority of the wealth or build more housing? It’s not really a tough decision.
No system is perfect. There will always be certain ideas that remain in favor versus others, and a minority of them will be misallocated. Time eventually sorts this out. Having the opposite approach (aka lowest common denominator) will almost certainly be much worse off. We’ve seen this in places like China and Cambodia where cultural revolutions have eliminated the smartest people, and society/progress has suffered greatly from it.
Hahaha holy shit is GSMIS still running? In all it’s TUI glory?

When I left, the mobile division had its customers split between three different systems; GSMIS, Focus and Arbor. The poor customer service reps would have no idea which one any given user was in when the phone rang. The only way to figure it out was to ask the person for their phone number, then type that number into each backend and see which one returned a result.
Broadcast TV only exists because they license the public airwaves and the spectrum they use is of limited supply and is again a natural monopoly. Cable TV networks have no such restrictions.
> How many chat channels/DM/etc do you still message with 10 years later?

Not OP, but I’m decade plus on here. I am on good terms with people from the internet from back then still. it will be a lot more in a couple more years. Like the person says, OTOH they don’t know a single HNer. Same with me.

—

In regards to your last paragraph. Good Q.
Please tell me about the medical and sociological research you do in your IT job.
North Carolina fits. As a native chicagoan I can tell you that the weather and proximity to interesting places is pretty damn bad. The midwest is flat as hell and generally the landscape is very similar throughout. Skiing in michigan is a joke, there's pretty much nothing to do outside during the winter.
Because modern American public schools are basically prisons and traumatized kids.
Ditto, although I was thinking of a slightly different approach. I didn't think anyone was actively doing anything but I love when I have ideas that seem independent and they magically become 'realized' from my ignorance because someone else did it already.
This is what amazes me, since it seems like such big news, and people in the field are just not aware of it. Just for reference of what I am talking about, here is a piece of code that was generated, without any cherry picking at all (you just have to trust me on this, sorry) by allowing Codex to be aware of the database with some smart prompting (this is on a DB with music store data):

Q: Best selling artist per country

A: https://pastebin.com/qBVu2mvc

Needless to say, this query works and returns the data I wanted. Whether this is useful or not is up for discussion. But I cannot understand how it's not amazing.
Do you want a law telling you what you can publish on your website?
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32913221
Finding an 80/20 rule (this one literally 80% from 20%) ought to be expected, not “jarring.” It’s natural and not sinister.

If something other than the 80/20 rule was found, that might be cause for alarm or further exploration
> CORS is something I 'fixed' once, five years ago

I'm careful that I don't demand anyone go into depth on any particular subject. CORS is just one opportunity that seems to need a fix with every new project. It also has a variety of solutions, which is again opportunity to show what they know.

There is little point in looking for what a client doesn't know. I've got that covered.
When a state is against net neutrality, pro super PACs, pro hobby lobby/religious tests in employment, pro book banning in libraries, but wants to regulate social networks because "political freedom", their motivations are a bit suspect.
What’s interesting about datasets like this is that you can likely use it to distil an even more compressed SD generator from it.
That depends on the video game:

https://www.verywellmind.com/video-games-could-treat-mental-...

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/mental-health-benefits-o...

https://english.umd.edu/research-innovation/journals/interpo...

EDIT: formatting
It's because school is a shitty, shitty place no matter if you go to a good one or a bad one.

No, there are no good schools.

High schools went downhill when teachers stopped spinning homespun silk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
I think the soleus helps to pump blood. Flexing the soleus could be improving circulation, which is responsible for some of the allegedly observed effects.

In Japanese there is a saying "ふくらはぎは第二の心臓" (fukurahagi wa, dai-ni no shinzou: the calves are a second heart).

Calf-io-vascular workout? Haha.
I think starlink is a bigger deal by far.
To fellow American HN people.

Right now USD/JPY is around 145, and it was about 100 in 2020, which means almost 30% discount for everything!
(Please note that CPI of Japan is not so high)

Come to Japan, and enjoy!
Yep. PTSD.

Future generations will look back in horror, if we're lucky.
Cant speak for OP specifically, but in general, it’s not..
In isolation that's true. If it's strongly correlated with other assertions like 'it's just a cold', 'only people with unhealthy lifestyles are at risk', 'it's a bioweapon' etc. then people may justifiably suspect it's part of a broad-spectrum attack on public health messaging.
I want to use the site without getting a banner. Some require me to agree to cookies. I don't care what they do with the cookies. Almost nobody does.
You don't need a license from Dolby to encode or play 5.1 audio unless you are using a format that Dolby owns (like AC-3, TrueHD, etc). Plenty of free and non-Dolby proprietary audio formats support arbitrary numbers of audio channels.
I can only speak for myself, but it just hasn't been around long enough for me to properly trust any AI-driven tool to give me correct output for anything important.

I'll admit I haven't played with Copilot yet (since I don't think my employer would be happy for me to send off proprietary code to third-party servers, so I've effectively self-banned myself from using it at work*), but I'd feel that for anything non-trivial like your example of complex SQL queries I'd be reluctant to use the generated output without extra scrutiny (essentially a very fine-toothed code review, which is exhausting).

My opinion will probably change as the tools become more mature, but for now I'm treating them as toys primarily which limits the excitement.

Something like TLDR is less risky as it's not producing code, just summarising it, but I'd still feel wary to trust it since it's such a new field. Maybe this speaks more to my own paranoia than anything else!

EDIT: *and on this topic while I'm here: I'm actually a bit confused (and honestly... jealous?) on the topic of privacy for these kinds of external models. Is everyone who's using Copilot and tools like this working at non-Bigcos? Or just ignoring that it's sending off your source code to a third party server? Or am I missing something here?

It'd be against the rules to use external pastebins or other online tools that send off private source code to a server, so I'm kind of shocked how many devs are talking about how they use AI tools like this at work... is this just a case of "ask for forgiveness, not permission"?
I do still keep my Dropbox because it has better sharing features. But I only use that with my wife and we haven’t used it to collaborate since she finished her Masters degree. If anyone has the edge with features, it probably is them. Some of the lesser known names I have accounts worth as well, but they’ve had sketchier history with storage issues. OneDrive simply gave me the most space for free, and I usually pimp myself out to the highest bidder.
That is so fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

I was pretty traumatized with parental expectations in school. Starting from high school, to college, to graduate school, I always had the same dream at the start of semesters - I'm incredibly late to the first class to the point I basically miss it. It has a cascading effect where in the dream, I basically feel doomed to be behind all semester. I've never had this dream outside of when I was a student, and that includes a very long hiatus in finishing college.

This is story is one of those things where you read it and the explanation is so obvious, but it never hit you until you see it written out.
So in that case, why not let the government just take over any company it sees fit?

If you’re okay with the government controlling any legal organization do yoh feel the same way about government controlling churches? Advocacy groups?
The road to realistic full-body deepfakes will be through the adult entertainment industry because of course it will. Some academics may begin the discussion but at the end of the day this is one part of AI image generation that has a clear and extremely large profit motive and won't struggle to find funding in any way.

I'm pretty sure Slashdot is willing to put up the money for thousands of renders of "Natalie Portman pours Hot Grits over <thing>" alone.
> It’s all fun and games until you find the need to unsafe Rust, which opens up a bunch of eldritch monstrosities that are sometimes even harder to tame than C++

Lol what? Unsafe is literally the only "mode" in C++. I'm not trying to shill Rust, but this is not true, and I don't know where you've read that opinion. Unsafe Rust is just Rust with the ability to use "C++ style" pointers.

> The happiness people get from Rust was achieved by the incredibly hard work of library developers

I'll give you that writing Rust libraries is harder, but that's true for any language. Even C++. Do Rust developers go the extra mile to make libraries ergonomic and have nice APIs? Yes! But that's not really a "problem" with Rust, it's something Rust enables, and now the community expects. C++ libraries in my experience tend to be a very bare minimum, and to use some of them it requires hundreds of lines of set up code. In cases where Rust libs require that much set up code, the authors go the extra mile to create macros or additional succinct APIs. So, yeah, their job is harder because they are held to a higher standard than C++ libraries, if anything.

Also, most of the effort with authoring Rust libraries is writing documentation, which is practically a requirement, whereas with most C++ libs (even some sections of boost!) you practically weep tears of joy when you see five lines written above a one class in a sea of classes.

> who had to deal with all sorts of complex semantics under the hood to make safe Rust safe. The knowledge gap between library user and library writer is even worse than C++, where most people do not feel comfortable enough to actually write low-level libraries (custom data structures, bindings from C, optimized routines) in Rust.

Sorry to be so blunt and call you out, but this is just so devoid of any sensible thought.

Most people don't feel comfortable writing low level libraries. Period. Regardless of language. For every library author, there's dozens of not hundreds of non-libray developers. Hell, most developers don't even contribute anything to open source in general, but just consume it.

So pretending C++ is this magical fairytale land where everyone produces libraries with the flick of a wrist is just bullshit.
I actually dislike any extended conversation on losing weight. Just stop eating is basically the answer. It sounds blunt but it feels like we need to hammer the message in.
Well, I can turn Find My off. I cannot reset this crap.

Also it makes zero difference in stealing an iPhone as even iCloud locked iPhone is easily useable for parts.

So no, it is not like that at all.
Last month Lexica served a little over 1 billion images and the Cloudflare bill (I'm using R2 + workers) was a little over $5k. I've since gotten it down to a more reasonable amount after spending some time to re-encode the images to reduce our bandwidth usage significantly. If Lexica were running on AWS/S3 I imagine our first month's bill would be closer to $100k rather than $5k. This is only image serving, so not including costs to run the beefy CPU servers to run CLIP search, frontend, DB, backend, etc.
This is quite real. I did EECS at Berkeley Engineering and I still have nightmares about not finishing something and this is close to 20 years later. I’m going to a BBQ next week with some of my classmates and I’m going going to ask them. A buddy went to West Point and he had similar nightmares. My guess is that it’s more prevalent in the very demanding and competitive STEM majors and probably architecture. I remember humanities classes as being a lot of work, nothing at Berkeley was easy, but manageable and nothing like the STEM load.

For my EE120 review session when we staggered in, the GSI consoled us saying if it meant anything, we’d done as much in one semester as he’d done in two and a half at his school and he was a Berkeley grad student which is insanely competitive to get into in its own right.