skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My 8th post about AlphaFold’s and its impact on R&D
--> https://generativeai.net/campaigns/view-campaign/GIrZnDZREqO...

### Begin
Generative AI - Short & Sweet 08
“We (humans) are very bad judges of the impossible.”
- DeepMind.
The GAI topic of the week is ..
AlphaFold by Google DeepMind (GDM). A model that accurately generates complex 3-dimensional protein structures with correct folding from a 1-dimensional string input only. The impact this model has on research & development in all kinds of areas is unparalleled.

For visual learners, these are AlphaFold’s results of generated proteins measured against experimental results: highly accurate.

Remarkable milestones
Leading to GDM’s AlphaFold and its wide success, there are a couple of milestones worth mentioning. Disclaimer: there are many more important events that happened, but I try to stick to the newsletter’s title, which I am already bad at.

1996 - Deep Blue by IBM literally a tower computer won against Garri Kasparov the long-time world champion in chess [1].
Number of possible moves in chess: 10^120 (a one with 120 zeros) aka the Shannon number.

2016 - AlphaGo by GDM won in a series of Go matches against the former world champion Lee Sedol. Go is a complex Chinese board game with a 19x19 grid [2].
Number of possible moves in Go: 10^172 and, comparatively if not heard yet, there are 10^82 atoms in the universe.

2019 - AlphaStar by GDM reached the grandmaster status in StarCraft II. StarCraft II is one of the most challenging real-time strategy games. It has an unlimited number of moves [3].

2020 - AlphaFold 2 by GDM scored above 90 for proteins in CASP's global distance test, the Olympics of protein folding. This is a test that measures the degree to which a predicted structure is similar to the determined structure in lab experiments, with 100 being a complete match. With a score of 90, this problem is considered solved [4]. With this result, AlphaFold is around 3 times better than previous solutions.

The last one is especially interesting because everything in a prediction of protein folding has to be exactly right. Nature is much less forgiving than a game where perhaps not every move has to be executed perfectly.

AlphaFold’s gift to humanity
Usually, it goes like this: a company solves a problem and - rightfully so - monetizes it. The harder the problem solved, the higher the price. Especially, when there is demand. .... Continue on newsletter page.
First, don’t quit until your plan is at least validated by yourself and your household. If you are sincere about your reasons then you will get encouragement to make the change with stability as job 1. I know people who take the exit before having the landing and while it works for them it is hard on the people that love them who favor stability. It’s all very reasonable I’m the big picture.

Another option is to start some mental health counseling and get some tools to disconnect emotionally from work, then begin to renegotiate work conditions. Having a note from a professional helps to make your case you are doing your job but can obtain more flexibility for work-life-balance and overall health. This sets a good baseline for the next 20 years of your working career!

Personally I love a fresh start. I occasionally re arrange my furniture just for change. It also is a chance to go into a negotiation with a good list of real priorities that may have been different 10 years ago. Mine sure were. In the US in my field, the tone has changed and they want happy healthy vaccinated employees, and are willing to change their structure (more remote, 40 hours ‘whenever it works and gets it done and the team is good’) and the only way to get it is hit the market as a free agent. The last place I did a gig willingly underpaid me $10k in salary I have realized, and I’m angry at them for it but aiming for $20k more now and will likely get it.
My project is small but TS takes 4-5 seconds to compile it from scratch on each run.

The main speed impact is in developer productivity though. If something ain't working right, now I first gotta fix the types before I can see if I've fixed the actual logic.

I imagine if my codebase was more "OOP-y" (i.e. if I replaced every layer of my domain model with 3 layers of dependency injection, turning the whole thing into an inscrutable ball of spaghetti like the cartel wants me to) I could probably iterate without breaking the types.

But for any sane developer having made the mistake to touch TypeScript, the capability to strip the types and run the code with broken types, is essential.

"But then why have types at all?" Exactly. They're a crutch for people who want their IDE to understand the code instead of them.
Paypal is also completely unusable for companies that are based in country with different currency than they do bussiness in. If for example you are swiss (CHF) and do online bussiness in USD or EUR. Once you want to transfer the money to your company bank account it can be account only in CHF and Paypal will insist on doing the conversion with their very “friendly” exchange rate. Basically taking another ~5% making them much more expensive than the rest.
It is worth having a system like this. It is also worth having a shared understanding of what constitutes an emergency.
Hah. That could be a great way to use those models. "Talk to the AI until you know what you want, then I'll make it for you".

I'm totally with your wife, btw, the attitude of her customers sounds horrible. On the other hand, my experience is that one artist took my $25 and has still not produced what he agreed three months later, and yet asked me if I had more work for him. Another guy offered to do it for free and did it for free in a few days and then refused to accept my money when I explained that I was already paying another guy for the same task so it was only fair that I paid him, too. This was some cover art for a vanity project of mine and I was asking for free contributions but also paid the first artist because he was evidently trying to become a professional. Fat chance of that. Bottom line, if you want good art you have to find the people who are passionate about it.

Oh and image models can't create the art I want, because it's text-based art. Even if they could generate the images I want, they couldn't output them in ASCII or ANSI. In fact I tried and they give me kind of pixelated results, but not recognisably text-character based.
>Not true that in Austria you can be terminated for any reason at all. There are protections in place.

Not true at all what you claim about Austria. There are zero protections in place for workers here unless you're over 50 or work at a place with a union (worker's council) that will fight for you. If you work for a small tech company you have no protections against unfair dismissal. Basically your boss can tell you at any time "in 30 days you won't work here anymore, goodbye" without any reason. Unlike other EU countries where you need to provide a specific legal reason why you're letting an employee go or you can get sued for unfair dismissal like the man in the article did to his former employer.

I spoke to Arbeite Kammer after being dismissed for no reason by a douchebag boss and they told me "your employer doesn't need a reason to dismiss you according to Austrian labor law".

My jaw dropped when I realized that Austria is basically, similar to US in this regard, where you get no protection against unfair dismissal except that here you get about 30-60 day notice period to find another job while you continue to work for your current employer. Austrian employers are even allowed to dismiss you while you're on sick leave. Crazy stuff.

Very backwards employment laws for an EU county.
> the lack of hype like Rust makes me pessimist about its future

What really makes me pessimist is the fact that software development decisions are increasingly hype/marketing-driven than based on technical reasons.
Belgium has a lot of tax advantages though so just comparing the numbers like that doesn't make sense. Most people in IT get a leasing car for example, sometimes they don't even have to pay for gas.
It's like a banana (custardy) and is probably similar to figs in that they don't store long. Figs are double annoying as they have to be picked when ripe and then are only good for like a day. The ones at a grocery store are picked too early and thus nasty. Like a flavorless peach. Pawpaws also are supposedly carcinogenic and require 2 trees to fruit iirc.

If it's hard to buy, there's a reason such as: 1.) Not good to eat, 2.) Can't be grown economically due to slow growth or expensive inputs, 3.) Can't be stored for long, 4.) Superior substitutes exist (possibly mango or banana), 5.) Illegal nature...etc.

Edit:

After reading, it confirms the inability to store and need to pick on the tree (similar to figs). I have a feeling that the recently coveted nature of the pawpaw is just that people want to try it once and not a sustained need like apples. I didn't see any mentioning of them being carcinogenic though. Maybe I remembered that wrong? I do see that it has annonacin which is also pretty bad if consumed regularly (hard to do with pawpaw) and something that pregnant women should probably avoid.
>Why was it a mistake? It’s unclear what “mistake” means.

Tbh killing a million civilians for oil isn't a mistake, a mistake is like when you make spelling mistakes or trip and fall because you miscalculated, killing a million civilians for oil is just a warcrime, then the US might go on and on about Japan not apologizing for Nanjing for example, or just do business with Saudi Arabia who stone (aka THROW STONES ON WOMEN UNTIL THEY DIE) or decapitate people for adultery or some other trivial thing, or even Israel and the textbook Apartheid they subjugate the Palestinians to.

I'm saying this because I just got tired of the current narrative of the US playing the good guys and Putin being the bad guy, all politicians are bad guys, and seeing how the USSR disolved on the basis that NATO would not expand further, and it still did and now it has missiles stationed in Poland, and then the west backs a coup that resulted in Zelenskyy's predecessor then in Zelenskyy, I don't understand how that would be different as say Mexico or Canada having their government toppled by a Russian backed gov.

And spare me the "nukes" are deterrent talk, a nuclear war can escalate in 1 hour and kill >99% of humans on the planet, I love my country and other European countries, but if you made me chose between losing a chunk of it or 99% of people in the world dying? Come on...
Starting a Business Around GPT-3 Is a Bad Idea (2020)
I personally can’t agree with that. TS catches me writing numerous bugs a day, the structural typing plus static analysis is a superb combination. If your code base is in JS without types, you probably have many bugs, you just don’t know about them. Especially around undefined/null handling.

TypeScript also allows me to refactor fearlessly, which substantially improves the quality of my code as I can do mini-rewrites without worrying about breaking interfaces.
Nah, insubordination is a very common term in employment law.
I swear Confluence was designed by somebody who woke up from a coma or cryogenic sleep and brought cutting edge 1996 functions to the web. It was so sad to see people like it. Oh you poor pitiful souls…
Sometimes I don't think it's ignorance, it's willful strategy. I pay you to do X and don't care, so do X. If you burn out in the process I again don't care, I'll just replace you after because the timeliness is more important in this context.

It's like being in a race and knowing you're going to blow out a tire or something. It's a calculated risk you don't care too much about. I wish employers just treated people like humans, really, and not parts to abuse and replace.

The system has gone off the rails with never ending goals of productivity at all costs.
Sure, but that wasn't the expectation of the company at the time they called it that.

If the court ruled in their favour it would have been insubordination.
My Simple Productivity Workflow (2022)
My FM client (android) doesn't appear as a place to put contacts.

https://ibb.co/NTwM9Jm

I might be holding it wrong, but it's my only issue with FM as it is right now!
Put simply, it shouldn't. I'll help fix this when you have a chance to forward on. (We stop recurring payments when a business closes their Stripe account, which looks to not have been the case here.)
I know the changes and the dates. Each seemed reasonable at the time. But they were often missing a coordinated understanding of the platform dynamics. Then there wasn’t an organizational culture that could spot and change those mistakes. It was on to the next thing.
Your boss is just some other person. If he thinks he's superior to anyone else, he can fuck right off. He'll end up as worm food just like the rest of us.
I totally agree. The next step can be to remove most if not all notifications. If that's not enough yet, I think most phones can be switched to some kind of black-and-white-mode, which further cuts down on distractions. Never had your phone been more boring.
I quite liked extjs way before single page apps were bastardised into flying spaghetti monsters. It makes more sense than react but many struggled with basics such as function scopes and jumped the bandwagon. Whereby in extjs you can structure your js app in react you create a mess. But its free, and cheap corps prefer free labour.
Highly OT, but is there any glaring difference between FF Dev edition and the stable version? AFAIK, all the devtool features are same in both the versions and I did not find any glaring difference as such.
With thousands of employees you’re bound to get some (say 5-10%!) which are outright bad at their job or malicious.

The fact the founders quickly offered assistance directly, when they’re business is worth tens of billions is at least worth giving the benefit of the doubt. Even if it’s just for PR, they’re at least doing it.
Apart from the usual "this is something important that is happening" (which is not quite HN "intellectual curiosity" territory, what is striking is the use of what I assume is a V for Vendetta mask - with Red and Green daubing.

How culture spreads is ... fascinating.
If they closed their Stripe account I wouldn't be here ;)

The problem is they decided to leave up their Stripe account and just stop replying.
It's funny isn't it. Recently in a job with "unlimited" vacation, because of a dubious message from one of my two bosses who was a bit of a dick, I was too scared to take a real vacation. Until Christmas. Then I decided I was going to take some. It had been a rough year, isolating from Covid, not enough money, and living in shitty circumstances. It was the first PTO I'd had in over a decade, as working as a freelancer/consultant often means no PTO, so I decided to savor it, come what may.

I took just under 3 weeks, like almost everyone else: there was a shared vacation calendar where I could see everyone else's Christmas break.

My reward when I got back? Low performance metrics "in December" were cited when laying me off. It wasn't just about December, but December was the month they decided to measure and "give me a chance". They didn't take into account the break, and the only way their "assessment" could be satisfied would have been to work through Christmas.

I then worked my ass off to ship a technically difficult, world-record-beating feature during my notice month, which they told me if I delivered it would surely be impressive, and turn it around. I did ship it, but not until the very end of the notice period, which was too late. If they had cared, they would have seen it was on track.

If they had kept me on, let me relax, and worked with me rather than their choice of how to assess work, they would now have a world-beating product. It's their choice of course, and I now don't think they were serious about trying to build a real product. I think it's a bit of a smoke-and-mirrors scheme to keep grant money flowing in. After all, in about 4 years nobody has ever run the product on the real data it is designed for, except me, and I had to pay for servers from my own pocket to run those tests. Even now, I believe I'm the only person ever to run it, or even be able to run it.

It's been interesting to watch how the product has stayed in the doldrums since I left, and how the folks working on it are now starting to implement things for which I have had working, high-performance functionality for months in my private fork since leaving. (It's open source.) It will be particularly interesting to see if their version is ever able to run on the real world data it was created for, or if their perpetual optimism will be forever misplaced.

Ironically, I'd say the company had the nicest, most helpful HR, legal and accounting teams I've ever seen at any company. There was a lot to like, and I'm sad to have had to leave. But I don't miss feeling constantly afraid there.

And, as a person who really enjoys creating things, I don't miss watching another team member shipping garbage commits that usually didn't work, and doing fine, while I was the only person on the project providing real functionality but not scoring well on the right metrics, because I spent too much time solving the product's blocker problems. To score well I'd have to ship garbage too. Oh well.
Datetime.

Arrow makes the unfortunate conflation of Date, Time, and Datetime types, which causes all sorts of subtle errors when working with Dates that don't have times attached, and vice versa.

The best Datetime lib I've seen in any language is Chrono in Rust. Maybe there's a way to port it to Python via FFI.
It's always something toxic when it comes to US companies. I had to do multiple background checks. In Romania they are unheard of.
different countries use different date format and also how do you manage languages?
"can we track you" is not a scary proposition, this is the only objective fact.

"Can we show you ads that are closely related to your interests" and "Are you willing to share some data so we can improve our product?" are not facts, they are excuses like "fight terrorist" and "protect the children". And not as good, because nobody would object protecting children while some people do for the former.

The reality is rather "can we get enough data so we can manipulate you better in order to make more money?", "can we create a knowledge graph powerful enough to kill all our competition and influence democracy in our favor?" and "can we follow you everywhere to prey on you once we know enough to find a way in your life?"

You think those sentences don't reflect reality? I think they are as realistic as yours.

So the law finds a middle ground and use facts: "do you accept tracking?". Simple. Objective.

> This is still an annoying banner somewhere.

A non modal notification, just like stated in the original comment, is not a banner. It can be safely ignored, doesn't prevent you from getting to the content, nor require you to act or take a decision to progress.

I mean, you just stated that tons of people are ready to accept obnoxious interruptions in the form of ads that benefit corporations, and you think a small notification on the bottom right on the screen to benefit the consumer is unacceptable?

I'm answering your comment for the sake of other readers, but given how much bad faith I felt in it, I'm expecting any answer would be of the same caliber and will just ignore them.
Tallest tree in Amazon rainforest reached by researchers after 3 yrs, 4 attempts
...as optional hints that don't require you to buy into a whole new toolchain.
There is a mechanism to get civil lawsuits results registered accross borders for collection, I don't know how difficult it is to use.
That MinivMac Raspberry Pi looks nice. I don't quite get from your post who made it.

EDIT: nevermind, after cyberstalking you a little bit I found some more info: https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/articles/systemsix-a-modern-ho..., https://www.engineersneedart.com/systemsix/systemsix.html
If you are asked to make a news website, and you reach for multiple JS frameworks and heavy analytics engines.

That is not products fault. Take some responsibility.
The technique to transform yourself in a god by sniffing
Thanks! From the description on GitHub, vpype looks very good.

I will play around with it.
Mutability cannot be enabled thru plugin:

https://day.js.org/docs/en/plugin/bad-mutable

However it is discouraged as mutable dates often lead to less maintainable, harder to debug, code.
Yes. “Mistake” is unclear because it is unclear whether it is alluding to the Real War Aim of the Iraq War or the Stated War Aim (i.e. get rid of Hussein (who had WMDs)).

Often what people mean is indeed that US had good intentions but just went about realizing them in a stupid manner. But politics is so ideological that you kind of have to ask what they mean by their shorthands.
Why one of Europe's top airports has become a 'crazy mess'
Plus you can always fire anyone for any reason in the EU, just give them enough money to stomach it.
Would PayPal give the same response? At least with Stripe you know if you kick up a stink on Hacker News someone there will respond, not that this is ideal but I wouldn't expect to hear from any PayPal employees here.
I made Gram Jam, a challenging daily word game
I started developing Gram Jam several months ago as an educational exercise in web and game design/development. I had originally hoped to ride the coattails of all the other Wordle-likes that were popping up and then drop the project when I got bored of it like my countless other side projects. But I had so much fun working with Svelte and engaging with players that I developed it out into a fully-fledged game, with a leaderboard and curated puzzles.

This week I launched Gram Jam Daily, a new puzzle mode that challenges you to clear a 6x6 board in as few swaps as you can. Check it out and give me your feedback.
“ Also, it doesn't have to be black and white - ORM or no ORM

The sad state of the php world is that there is no other option but to use it. If something is on fashion then it _must_ be adopted. Writing your own is considered insanity and so is taking a different path than the mass, regardless of for good reason or not.
You’re welcome! I hope it goes well and that you make a Show HN next.
Simple does not mean trivial.
Möbius Transformations Revealed [video]
It depends on where you live, at least in Europe most people would find the word inappropriate. For us here "disobedience" or something alike would be a better term.
Mainly just curious what gets submitted as is, since guessing a lot of people have no idea what to expect and seeing prior examples would significantly reduce that gap.

(Also swear I have seen something like blog post that showed this before, but unable to find it.)
Opposite experience. Rust was my stepping stone into "hey, maybe JS will be better with some degree of static typing?" Yes it would. But not the way TypeScript does it though, and there aren't any other viable options, are there?

TypeScript brands itself a "superset" of JavaScript. In practice, it arbitrarily invalidates completely sensible JavaScript idioms.
So what's a better alternative to PayPal and Stripe? Plaid? Square? Do these even offer the same services?