skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't help but be annoyed by the flock of pretentious hackers painting every Infosys/TCS employee with a broad brush. One might say this particular leak is bad on part of Infosys and they must be held accountable for this. But calling the entire company incompetent is just lazy and stupid.

They make more than $3B in free cash flow, they are worth more than $80B in market-cap and they gainfully employ more than 100k people. Folks commenting here about the "competency" of a company should realize this. Most of their clients are based in US and UK. These companies have been using Infosys' services for decades and also have locked in deals for the coming decade. If a company was really that incompetent, it really wouldn't be on the scale they are today.

You might call them a "boring services company" but they matter a great deal to a lot of people. Less pretension, more focus on "value", please? :)
No when you have ADHD it's really really hard to get started on a new task, but you do obsess over a task once you get started on it.

You'll do everything you can to avoid it first though, until the stress of the deadline overweighs the dread to start.
>As a Canadian this is like a story from some 3rd world country. I remember frequently walking to school that distance as a kid. It wasn't abnormal nor dangerous.

I'm American, and grew up there several decades ago. I also walked/biked that distance to school as a kid.

Things in America are completely different from those times. That's one of the big reasons I left.
what if we make them bigger than insects but still relatively small? just an arm on a track. heck, we can put the energy in the track too. boom, no battery.
What is this now, the 3rd or 4th move to trim Twitter's headcount without having to fire anyone? I no longer try to speculate on what EM's endgame is, but he's clearly trying to cut staff without the downside of actually firing any more than he has to.
What about the Cryogenian period 720-635 MYA? Major glaciations, probably covering the entire globe.
At least for my company's app, 100% of logins for the Google Play reviewer account come from IP addresses which geolocate to various cities in India. These are absolutely human reviewers because they have to use backup codes for TOTP. I don't know if the reviewers have a contractual or employee relationship with Google, though.
I'll go further. Comments are a code smell. They mean you've probably not modularized your code enough, or named your functions and variables descriptively enough. As I've approached 20 years of coding, I began to be able to count on one hand the times when I truly need to add a comment.

(I don't mean the DocBlock type comments for describing functions and class interfaces, that get compiled into docs.)

To all you downvoters: please do respond with examples of comments that are are counterexamples to what I said!
GP has a good point in that there's an overall stigma against medication, particularly psychiatric medication, in our society.

People say, medication is an aid, a crutch. Well guess what, when your leg is broken, you kind of need that crutch to move around. There's no shame in using a crutch. And if you lost your leg, or happened to be born without one, then guess what, using crutch for the rest of your life is not anything to be ashamed of, and it's rude to suggest it is.
No, it's just a well-written a piece of software.

Thanks :)
Maybe the acquisition will change the nummber of devices to > 2??
> I think there could be lots of applications for “long extension cords”

Ok, now I'm wondering how much one can decrease the weight of a rocket if it starts plugged to some cable.

Any ISP gain at the beginning of the trip helps decreasing a lot of weight, but cables weight something too, and 1km or 2 of cable falling vertically is a hell of a hazard...
It's Stripe for Play Store reviewer sandbox detection and anti-analysis!

I'm ready to invest.
"Poorly labeled @fiat accounts" oh my God.
"Psych PhDs generally don't do frontline stuff"

Ok, to be fair, I did roll my eyes at a few of their terms. However, you are mostly arguing out of scope/training.

Psychiatrists are not researchers, they are MDs.

They are generally pretty smart people, and I admire their work.

But MDs have next to zero formal training in research, methodology, or statistics, and even fewer have taken courses in the theory or philosophy of science or knowledge.

That's why MD/PhD programs exist, or MPh degrees, so the MDs can learn how to do research properly.
I’m skeptical since we’ve heard the same promises of how chatbots will replace our computer interfaces for years now. The systems always seem to break down when the user needs to do something surprising. Think about trying to navigate an automated phone menu when your option isn’t available.

Transformers seem incredibly good at picking up patterns and repeating them, and combining them in new and surprising ways, but my intuition says that the unpredictability of the real world will cause the required training set to grow faster than the models can keep up, at least to get close to anything that “looks a lot like AGI.”
>all those things have sale values that DIFFER based on that creativity and beauty. Code does not.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. I certainly prefer to use software that has a nice interface, is fast and responsive and has thoughtful features. I remember the first time my iPhone opened a pop up at just the right time asking if I wanted to share a wifi password with my Mac. Wow! Delightful. And I am willing to pay more money for such things.

>But the customer of my B2B CRUD app does not care if my code looks like a FLW or a mcmansion. They care if it works.

What is "works"? I'm not being disingenuous here. The software development process is often plagued by things like scope creep, unreasonable asks from stakeholders, cutting things for budget or time etc...

"works" is a subjective concept in your hypothetical customer's mind. Likely molded by you or your project manager setting expectations, pushing back on feature requests, etc...

My real point is, it's not just the value of the consumer or "customer". But the artist as well. It's the satisfaction you can get from designing a performant service that handles requirements and has the capacity for future expansion, etc...

Just because some people are philistines doesn't make the creation any less valuable as a piece of art.
> In my view, America as a society became paranoid after 9/11.

Oh, it was on this track well before 9/11. Satanic Panic and Stranger Danger as concepts were there long before terrorist attacks on American soil, for a lot longer duration, and were largely explicitly about the dangers to children.

I don't know how accurate it is, but an FBI investigator by the name of Ken Lanning links Satanic Panic to the development of X-Rays and the discovery by doctors of evidence of rampant child abuse.[1] The idea being that people just couldn't accept that kids were being abused at such high rates at home, therefore there must be this secretive "other" harming the children.

People have been primed by the media to be this paranoid for a long time, because it gets attention.

[1]: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/satanic-panic
Curiously this seems like exactly the story of thing that code ML should be able to identify and flag. 'Hey, the comment says this, but the code is doing something totally different.'
Yeah, you have to digitally sign a Business Associate Addemdum in your AWS account to handle HIPAA data in it. If they didnt, they're double screwed
Robotics is a big field and encompasses a huge range of things. Similarly a lot of computer vision is pretty technical, particularly for robotics applications. Have a look at ROS and play around, you can simulate a lot of stuff. I'd also suggest Nvidia's Jetbot but the chip shortage has killed it.

AI-wise, nowadays model training stacks are practically codeless. Training a state of the art model on custom data usually boils down to changing some parameters in a config file, plus some boilerplate code. Not always that easy of course, but training an image classifier today can be a single line of Python.

It's not so much piping data around but dealing with datasets in any kind of non-trivial problem is where the hard work is. Neural nets are just another tool for most data scientists. For example exploring Kaggle will get you familiar with weird datasets, but actually collecting, arranging for data to be labelled, and then cleaning it is a skill on its own.

That's usually where experience comes in. Hence there are a lot of startups charging frankly obscene amounts of money for data labelling and curation tools.
Oh yeah! You are in the area even. Last year that time was pretty crazy because we had just finished up our transaction. Small world some days :)
Not quite. SpaceX is willing to be push the limits of cash incineration where others are not, and that explains all of their progress. They boldly go where no-one has gone before, raising $10B so far and looking to raise more as we speak. This is standard operating procedure for Musk companies; burn cash to attempt to boil the ocean, then brag brag brag about how far ahead they are.
How are you able to sign your own APKs? Are you grandfathered in before the change to require Google Play app signing?
Aren't pretty much all post-docs in the field over 30?
No, anything describable in BNF is at most as high on the Chomsky-Schutzenberg hierarchy as context-free grammars, regardless of size. BNF is also not a normal form, so you can't really compare rules written in BNF to one another that way. There is Chomsky Normal Form, which you could use to compare sizes. But natural languages have been shown to be non-context-free, so they aren't describable in CNF.

You might be thinking of the notion of MDL (minimum description length), which is an information-theoretic notion of complexity which boils down to the question "how long is the program that generates this data". To use minimum description length, however, you need to have a fixed programming language. So if you have a Python program that generates all of English and all of Japanese, then you could compare the complexity of those two languages.

However, this measure of complexity can't be stated absent the assumption that these languages are generated using Python -- that is, the fact that language A is more complex than language B in Python does not entail that language A is more complex than language B in the mind (using the "mind's programming language").

And herein lies the big question for a lot of linguists: what's the programming language that the mind uses to generate language?
This is a pretty context-free take on the matter. Elon Musk effectively slandered the engineers on the team with incorrect technical statements that implied they were incompetent. He told all future employers that the engs from Twitter did something stupid that they didn't actually do.

It might make sense for the company to fire employees for public corrections, but it also makes sense for the employees to correct these lies for their long term career prospects. This entire scenario was created by Elon Musk. Your context-free take implies that the employees damaged the company unnecessarily when it was a reasonable reaction to targeted slander. Avoiding the liability of this public correction was easy, none of these employees were new, what was new was Elon's unprovoked slander. Maybe if you don't want the legal liability of an employee saying things that might be ammunition, don't do it to them first.

If you want to know what happens when this kind of slander goes unchecked, look up Mick Gordon. On top of his professional reputation being muddied, he received harassment and death threats over a company's false allegation that he was responsible for the incompetent failure of the Doom Eternal soundtrack.
Just look at their salaries [oublic school system]. Their pay weeds out quite a lot of good people
Epstein the guy friends with every other powerful person was shady? Is every powerful person shady then?
Absolutely. And, a ton of valuable tools can be made. Make no mistake about it!
I’d flag this if I saw this in a code review. It’s to cute and hard to see what’s happening. Would much rather just see someone prefix with an underscore if they don’t need the variable (const [id, _email, name] = loadUserInfo(…); is preferable to const [id, , name]).
Perhaps it's targeted at psych professionals in respect of their discussions with non-psych professionals e.g. patients and their families.
N=1, I can confirm this effect. I started to call stimulant medication "sticky". As in, when they kick in, I find it much easier to focus on doing whatever it is I am doing at that time. So, if they kick in while I'm on HN, I can kiss the next couple hours goodbye.

It's a trap that took me too long to figure out, and one I still fall into quite often (the period between taking a pill and it kicking in is long enough that I may habitually start procrastinating), but wrt. differences in my life on vs. off meds, in times when I feel similar to what GP described, I'm reassured by my wife who can smell me taking a med break even if I don't tell her, because from her POV, I change for the worse in the scope of a day or two. She sees the change even before I feel it.

> I really think we're doing a disservice to all the people who get a prescription and get sent out the door without a more involved framework for how to use the meds as part of their ADHD treatment strategy rather than a presumed cure in a pill.

As much as I believe the meds are a net benefit overall (they definitely are for me), I 100% agree with this sentiment.
I probably shouldn't have mentioned batteries at all considering that we're comparing hydrogen generation technologies. But the review I found shows cycle life is variable in existing commercial batteries, and generally not much higher than 2000:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-019-0356-8

The interest in hydrogen is for thermal processes (cement, alumina) and weight-sensitive applications as far as I can see. For electricity storage the fuel cell efficiency is prohibitive.
Software development, on Android at least, is already free. It only takes a few clicks to enable third-party apt files, and then you can install software from any source. (And if you complain that this is too complex.. well, it is simpler than many Windows InstallShield wizards at least). You can even install f-droid and then you have appstore experience without a review.

What Google controls is "endorsement" and that's where Google is rejecting things. If you want to reject it, go ahead... but a lot of people actually want it.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/

https://tonyortega.substack.com/
I code typescript every day. I don't really hate javascript. This is terrible.
It's probably someone who is really into productivity and self-improvement, makes it part of their identity, mentions it to their family... and then has 10 pairs gifted every xmas.
CN: Verifying Systems C Code with Separation-Logic Refinement Types [pdf]
Or a chicken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock#Chicken-powered_n...
Or the two hours south of Calgary method: just wait a few hours and it will blow away.
> This is not quite true; it is widely accepted that certain languages are less complex than most others.

This is just false, it is not widely accepted.
I mean, of course. That's part of the job: you can't search for multiplier effects without knowing what they are.
I'm also on Concerta, taking 45mg. I started at 27 which was too low for me and went up to 54 which was too high; so we came down to 45 which seems to be a Goldie locks for me (they don't make a 45mg pill so I take an 18 and a 27). I also take 150mg Wellbutrin for depression and balance it all off with a nightly 300mg of Gabapentin to help me sleep (coincidentally my cat is prescribed the same amount of gaba to take before the vet because she's a terror on her check ups).

This is all is relatively new for me (got diagnosed this year after being misdiagnosed with depression for a very long time) and it's working out OK. One thing I'm still struggling with is break days. They seem to supercharge my (inattentive) ADHD, and I'm kind of dead all day long; maybe there's still room for adjustment and I go back to 36mg Concerta.
This is reminding me of the demise of AOL. Suddenly ads were everywhere. Then AOL was nowhere.
National governments.
Nobody wants firefox to stay around more than google. Its one of their few escape cards in an antitrust trial for browser monopoly.

And the woke thing is non sense.
"modern and liberal claim"

It feels like you didn't read or understand the article.

Techincal fields (other than yours) also have rules for how to use techincal terms.

Arguing for clarity is not a "liberal" point of view (it's actually rather prescriptive, which is associated with more "convervative" viewpoints, but whatever).
Every company has its culture. It's up to you to decide if that's what you want to join. If working "hardcore" is something you and your family is willing to accept, by all means, go for it.
Great take. Off topic, but I really love the post-history vibes from this guy, elon, even trump a bit. There's something beautiful about living in public, and not hiding your flaws. No PR or corpo speak or defensible positions, just rawdogging life. And not even behind the 7-11 dumpster, right out there in broad daylight.
I've been at AWS for almost 6 years now. It depends on what you mean by "internal tooling". But considering all the tooling I've used over the years at least 75% of the internal tooling that was in use when I joined is no longer in use as it has been replaced by newer, better versions of what came before.

Things definitely move at a slower pace than at new startups, but systems within AWS still change at a pretty fast pace for such a large organization. A fair number of employees don't stay past two years because of how compensation works, so they don't stay long enough to observe tooling changes, and are left with the assumption that tools are sacred. The reality is that it takes about two years between major rewritten versions of most tools. Then there is a leap forward, stasis for a while while feedback is gathered and the limits of the existing tooling are found, then in roughly two years there is another leap forward, etc. This churn requires work to keep up with, so some teams also fall behind if their product team prioritizes features over keeping up, so they may also be stuck on old versions of tooling for even longer.

So in summary I'd say yes in the short term some of the tools appear sacred. In the long term pretty much every internal tool or framework is discarded and replaced by newer versions on a fairly regular cadence.
Basically, conductor weight is proportional to the current, while insulator weight is proportional to the voltage.

It turns out that our insulators are much more efficient than our conductors, so the trade-off is a non-brainier up to extremely high voltages.
Why learn complex stuff when you can zip thru coursework and party with friends, and get laid every week with different chicks, away from parents’ watching eye?

For a teenager with bursting hormones this becomes a trivial choice
If you're on the correct plan it's a permanent record. We insist people default to asking questions in public channels instead of DMs for this very reason (so others can search and find the answer).
Would be really nice to have these Voice Assistants not be dumber than a pile of rocks. Seems like the article suggests this will be the case in the near future.
Tons!

Jack Gallant's group at UC Berkley has done a lot of interesting fMRI decoding. The approach in their earlier papers (e.g., Kay et al, 2008 [0]) is neat because it uses some knowledge of how early visual areas represent information, rather than just flinging a decoder at it. They later extended this to movies (Nishimoto et al., 2011 [1]), and have subsequently moved a bit away from sensory information to "semantic" decoding. Jack has a TED talk about this [2] and Kendrick Kay has written some News and Views/Perspective pieces [e.g., 3] that might be interesting too, as it links to other groups' work.

I like their approach because it ties into neuroscience rather than just throwing ML at the wall and seeing what sticks, but there's also a huge cottage industry of "Blackbox ML" + MRI to do decoding. My sense is that this has moved slightly out of the limelight and into the stage where people incrementally improve it with newer ML techniques like GANs [4] and diffusion (this link), but it might just be me.

For sleep specifically, you might be interested in Horikawa et al. (2013)[5], who could predict words associated with dream contents (e.g., "Car" but didn't try to reconstruct them). There's also a very short perspective on it [6].

[0] Kay, K., Naselaris, T., Prenger, R. et al. Identifying natural images from human brain activity. Nature 452, 352–355 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06713

[1] Nishimoto, S., Vu, A. T., Naselaris, T., Benjamini, Y., Yu, B., & Gallant, J. L. (2011). Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies. Current biology : CB, 21(19), 1641–1646. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.08.031

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecvv-EvOj8M

[3] Kay, K. N., & Gallant, J. L. (2009). I can see what you see. Nature neuroscience, 12(3), 245. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0309-245

[4] Seeliger, K., Güçlü, U., Ambrogioni, L., Güçlütürk, Y., & van Gerven, M. A. J. (2018). Generative adversarial networks for reconstructing natural images from brain activity. NeuroImage, 181, 775–785. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.07.043

[5] Horikawa, T., Tamaki, M., Miyawaki, Y., & Kamitani, Y. (2013). Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep. Science (New York, N.Y.), 340(6132), 639–642. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1234330

[6] https://www.nature.com/articles/nmeth.2504
That already happens -- google already allows both users & app developers to proceed if they have sufficiently high intent. Here is one example:

https://www.expressvpn.com/support/vpn-setup/enable-apk-inst...
Code isn't Art, it's Craft, or, to use the current buzzword "artisinal".

Software development isn't "engineering" by a long stretch. There is still another 40-50 years of development and consolidation before it could be considered the equivalent of other engineering practice.

I've lived through numerous lifecycles of "this time for sure" regarding software as engineering, from "modular programming" to "CASE" to "iterative development" to "UML" to (god help us all) "Agile".

What a lot of practitioners think of as "engineering" is actually "project management". Engineering is about defined practise, measurable inputs and outcomes, responsibility for signoffs and approvals that ensure that the defined practise has been followed.
Multiply out the states, "all prior states" is then the "previous one". Easy to model as Markov chain.
It's a lot less expensive and lower liability when an employee departs voluntarily.

(This may not be obvious to some, but anyone who's been around is aware of this one weird trick.)
I canceled my APA membership over this. People asked APA to condemn it and they did not. Weak sauce on my part (to just cancel) but yeah, that was not cool.
Out of all the "tech" companies, SpaceX actually has a goal of getting people to Mars. In my view, it's not about age or headcount, it's about the stated goal of the company. Most companies don't really have a grand goal anymore. SpaceX is still far far away from that goal, so in a way, they are still in the startup stage.
The Invasion of the Super Insects
I would pay for Substack feeds if I was able to read the paid feed via RSS - unfortunately it doesn't support this feature.
Durangaldea (Eastern Biscaian part for HN readers) would be hell for you I guess.

On diffs on writting in "Standard" and speaking, Andalusia can be hardcore mode too, specially Cadiz. A Uni student can have a vastly different register on writting for terms at class compared to the day to day speaking.