skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We software engineers have to be the stupidest "smart" people on the planet. No other occupations work so hard to destroy entire businesses including our own. I get it, I'm a software engineer who loves automation.

"But AI will just be a tool in our tool-set, software engineers will still be the system architects."

Sure, for a while and then AI will do that too.

"But eventually we will live in a fully automated world in abundance, wouldn't that be great?"

Doing what? When we get there, anything we can consider doing, an AI can do faster and better. Write a poem? Write a book? Write music? Paint a picture? Life will be like a computer game with cheat-codes, whenever we struggle with something, instead of fighting on and improving we will turn to our universal cheat-engine: AI.

Anecdotally, I did an analog mistake in my early twenties when I wrote a cheat-program for save-files. It worked like a typical cheat-engine, search the save-file for a specific value, go back to the game and change that value, go back to the save and search for the new value but only in those locations that had the original value. This is how I ruined "Heroes of Might and Magic II" :(. I used to love that game. I could spend hours playing it. Writing the cheat program was a lot of fun for a couple of hours but when it was done, there was no longer any reason for me to play the game. You might say that I didn't need to use my cheat program, but once the genie was out of the box it was too tempting to resist when I met some obstacle in the game.

This is what I fear about AI making our jobs superfluous; it will also make our hobbies or anything we enjoy doing superfluous.

Sorry for the bleak comment but this my fear and I feel the genie is already out of the box.
Suffering leads to the management side
Do you have any sources for more information about this?
TikTok ban is not if but when
All currency ultimately comes down to an act of faith. But in the case of fiat money, that faith is in a government that is already providing you a bunch of infrastructure, paid for in fiat currency and demanding the same fiat currency in return (taxes, tariffs, etc.)

It's still a kind of faith, but it's like faith in a deity that at least intermittently actually shows up to do something. Not the kind who "works in mysterious ways" that seem indistinguishable from random chance.

Cryptocurrencies rely on individuals to provide that intermittent evidence for faith. You're trusting that people will pay you for your goods and services in the currency, and will accept your currency for the goods and services they offer. (Or at least, trade it easily for a different currency that people will accept.)

In theory, that could work. In practice, those people are crypto enthusiasts, who aren't really the kind of people you have a lot of faith in. Some of them are criminals, trying to take advantage of circumventing regular channels. That is, at least, a real thing -- unlike the other enthusiasts, who are in only because "line goes up" and don't have goods or services to offer for your currency. That latter faith is easily fractured -- and exists at all only because there are a lot of such people.
Proctored tests are common for certification exams. Perhaps there's a future where candidates go to one of these exam centers for one of their technical interviews.
I couldn't help continuing with "McMurdo's Automated Teller Machines"

https://brr.fyi/posts/mcmurdo-automated-teller-machines

This is fun and fascinating. I wonder how much critical minutiae from our daily life goes undocumented.

for example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/45rpmada...
Long time dbt user since early days, 2018. I started on git ci/cd and orchestration or runs via airflow. I'm sure there are even easier ways to do it these days.

I'm hoping the silver lining is that more of the "less technical" business folks referenced in the announcement who were willing to pay $50/seat but not $100 will actually upskill, set up their own orchestration and development process, and end up not paying dbt together.
Cool. Like most of Trump's grifts, I wonder which one of his cronies will go to jail when this one eventually implodes?
> One idea is to define geographical limits to participate.

Pretty sure you just invented NextDoor.

Also, this would mean you couldn't be friends with people you meet online. You immediately would eliminate gaming communities, even closer-knit ones like in-game guilds.
You're thinking of South Pole Station. That's mostly one large building for a few dozen people, and very photogenic for snowbound isolation, so it's usually the picture used for Antarctica articles.

(McMurdo is not at the south pole, it's on the coast near New Zealand.) (Edit since I keep getting nitpicked - near in relative terms, it's at NZ's longitude and closer to NZ than to anywhere else.)
That's a weirdly paternalistic perspective. Of course climate change affects everyone, everywhere.
Why would non-investors care whether trades in something they don't participate happen in a "lit" exchange or a "dark pool"? I don't play basketball, so not concerned at all about changes to basketball rules. Now i'm very confused on your point
> a 200x greenhouse gas

I had no idea. So much for the hydrogen economy.
A craftsman in building construction values his tools as well. You will see contempt on a journeyman's face if you hand him a Harbor Freight circular saw, but he will ogle your Fesstool circular saw.

Some tools feel better in your hands.
What's the analogue for cleaning the Clydesdale stable?
A musician friend of mine told me that this is (I freely translate) a perversion, building in frequency and returning time. Don't shoot the messenger.

Personally I like the results. I'm totally untrained and couldn't hear any of the issues many comments are pointing out.

I guess that all of lounge/elevator music and probably most ad jingles will be automated soon, if automation cost less than human authors.
The Difference Between GMT and UTC
What seems more logical? I think we 'll have direct language-to-binary compilers.
Lately i've been thinking that right now may be a great time to start an oil company. Cost of solar is going down so capturing c02 and turning it into fuel is looking like a viable option. People would pay a premiun for carbon neutral fuel. Most climate companies, focused on carbon capture, tried to make the most efficient carbon capture possible, but what if one focused on scalability and reducing manufacturing costs instead? A device that loses 90%+ of the energy when converting sun to fuel, would be viable if the cost of the machine would just be low enough, and scaled up enough. Such a device would in theory have a near 0 cost of operation once installed, so with a long enough life span it would be profitable.
You probably mean Karlheinz Brandenburg, the developer of MP3, who worked on psychoacoustics. Not completely off though, as he did the research at a Fraunhofer research institute, which takes its name from Joseph von Fraunhofer, the inventor of the spectroscope.
> I remember a man on television many years ago who said he was in favor of "saving the planet", but who would pay for it? The implication was that if it cost too much money, he'd rather just let the planet die. That's a pretty wild idea, you know?

I haven't seen that, but I'm pretty sure that's not what he meant. It sounds like capability, not intent - people do need money both to live and implement the solution, so if no one's willing to pay then it can't be done.

Your example with the comet is a totally different situation, looking at the funders instead of the implementers like that first person you referred to.
Will you be happy to curate bot output?

Could the bot not curate its own output? It has been shown that back feeding into the model result in improvement. I got the idea that better results come from increments. The AI overlords (model owners) will make sure they learn from all that curating you might do too, making your job even less skilled. Read: you are more replaceable.

Please prove me wrong! I hope I am just anxious. History has proven that increases in productivity tend to go to capital owners, unless workers have bargaining power.
Mine workers were paid relatively well here, back in the day. Complete villages and cities thrived around this business. When those workers were no longer needed the government had to implement social programs to prevent a societal collapse there.

Look around, Musk wants you to work 10 hours per day already. Don't expect an early retirement or a more relaxed job..
Especially when promises and plans to use some of those windfalls of progress to help those harmed by it, seem never to see much follow-through.

Progress is cool if you're on the side of the wheel that's going up. It's the worst fucking thing in the world if you're on the side that's going down and are about to get smashed into the mud.
I love Supabase and what they're doing! I evaluated them heavily when designing architecture for a healthcare product.

I'm not sure about this one though - rust is a great systems language, but it wouldn't be my first choice for bridging the db <-> api gap.

I wonder why this wasn't built on top of, or an enhancement to, the existing (excellent) multicorn[1] project. Python seems like a better choice of language for dealing with io bound problems like talking to remote APIs.

Multicorn is mature, stable, well tested and has a ton of FDW implementations already.

The dynamic nature of python simplifies the development/debug cycle, and serialization to/from JSON is easier than in any mainstream language except for javascript.

I'd love to understand more about the technical rationale that drove this.

[1] https://multicorn.org/
Do you have any further info? I checked argos.co.uk and couldn't find anything.

I'm not really trying to call you out, I just don't think any of the Open Group certified Unix versions was ever licensed for the consumer market. I would need to see hard evidence to be proven wrong about that.

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
LLC legal challenge what do we do?
Two friends and I started a public library technology company in 2014. We are collectively majority shareholders but in 2020, we turned operations over to another shareholder, who is paid about $80k/year and has about 25% of shares. Total revenue is holding steady at ~250k/year.

In 2021, he issued an amendment to increase the number of allowed shares to dilute us out of ownership. We voted it down.

Two weeks ago, he sent out another amendment for the same thing but this time it “passed” because of new shares which he was not authorized to issue.

We are not on friendly terms with him, to say the least, but we also aren’t interested in taking over operations ourselves.

Is there anything we can do? Any advice is welcome.
I dont use telephones. Nice knowing you guys, I guess. We can still think of the good times.
Reminds me a bit of PGP and a key signing party. In that case the goal is to verify government docs to help someone verify they are who they say they are, but you can also give greater trust levels to the people you actually know.
General population needs a "desktop," I get it. But for those comfortable with the CLI, a window manager (e.g., one that does not suck [0]) should be good enough. (Coming from personal experience - used Gnome/KDE/XFCE, enjoyed them all, in the end went back to a blissful world of MWM.)

[0] http://dwm.suckless.org/
Practically that only works for European languages with extremely limited homographs and no IME prerequisites.
My impression is that the new interpretation reduces false positives but increases false negatives. It remains to be seen if that is desirable.

Sanskrit is, after all, a language which has a vast body of literature stretching for ~6000 years. It is tricky to have a perfect set of rules.

Historically Sanskrit scholars had found it difficult to accept this idea of diverging usage of the language and labelled a vast majority of contemporary literature as Apabhraṃśa (literally meaning aberration). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apabhra%E1%B9%83%C5%9Ba

This weird fixation with rules is what has caused the language to decline over the last several centuries. As you might expect, the famous ancient Sanskrit bodies of work do not really adhere to the strict rules laid out later. That is not surprising, as the rules-people were usually distinct from the poets and story tellers.
Possibly, I’m in an odd spot since the time of year makes it difficult to line up another job, but I do think I’ll start looking around at least. If nothing changes in the new year I’ll jump.

Glad I’m not being picky here! There is something off-kilter from the rest of the industry
Docked Rails: Running Rails from Docker for easy start to development
On-Chain Data Shows Crypto Exchange Binance Isn't Exhibiting ‘FTX-Like’ Behavior
> I've conducted hundreds of FAANG-level coding interviews, [...] I always loathed this interview format,*

That's impressive perseverance. Did that wear on you?
Er. Don't get me wrong, I like KDE and I like XFCE, but if you're hitting fewer bugs in KDE than XFCE then the least I can say is that your experience is very different from mine. That goes double for resource use, where KDE has made massive improvements but last I looked their file indexer was still a huge resource hog.
another possibility for application developers - mocking can be done at the "application" level. For example, using something like Jest, or Supabase can build mocking into client libs.

I'm not clear how mocking in the middleware is materially different from this approach (except perhaps you are testing network connectivity too).
> The reason the others you checked are of the same size is because they are forks of the same two browsers.

Exactly. What's the alternative? Safari is nice if you're on macOS/iOS but isn't available elsewhere. Every other browser that has any semblance of market share is a fork of Chromium and shares its size. So I'm not sure how Firefox is "overstuffed" but other browsers are not.

> The complexity of an operating system, even a simplified one, is of a completely different sort and depth.

I agree with this, and it's obviously an exaggeration, but I don't think it's an invalid comparison. The API surface area that browsers need to support is enormous, and they have even stricter backwards compatibility guarantees than most modern OSes. Any browser worth using is going to be pretty large simply because they're complex beasts.
Here's the link to Airmade SAF [1]. The company making the "net zero" fuel that Boom wants / hopes customers will use for net zero flights. Tons of marketing hype, but at least it's not a carbon offset bait and switch.

Anybody know how much this fuel is supposed to cost relative to fossil jet fuel?

Boom says they have a deal with Airmade for 5M gallons of SAF per year. [2]

[1] https://www.aircompany.com/sustainable-aviation-fuel/

[2] https://boomsupersonic.com/sustainability
> where an attacker could control any inputs

I believe the GP's point hinges on the word "attacker". If you aren't in a hostile space, like just your won file server and you are monitoring your own backups it's fine. I still use MD5s to version my own config files. For personal use in non-hostile environments these hashes are still perfectly fine.
> It requires a fundamental change from the reach model towards concentric social circles. The social network would allow users to arrange into small topical groups called social circles. These social circles would have a cap of 10 (arbitrary number) members. Each user could take part in many social circles. This inherently limits reach and therefore reduces the burden of misinformation, abuse, and moderation.

Isn't this just group messaging (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal etc.)? This is pretty much the only 'social networking' I do.

The only way I can rationalise any other sort of social network being successful is that deep down people actually want strangers or loose acquaintances to see their updates. Everything is on a parasocial scale from group messaging with an equal relationship through to Facebook, then Twitter all the way to Youtube where the relationship is completely one sided.
Yeah I can agree discipline might be a better choice of words. I guess in my mind a solid habit comes from discipline.

I can't say I've been able to apply it to everything in my life. Certain things like working out and meditating I've finally been able to make it something that's not a choice. It's pretty much like drinking water or taking a dump. It just has to be done now.
if you work for a defense contractor, it's every 6 minutes (tenths of an hour)
Bro, oligarchs would LOVE if land == vote.

You can literally buy votes with capital. What a ridiculous system (and extremely undemocratic, btw!)

Guess what? People who don't own land still contribute towards society.

It seems like you may have a lot of vested interest in BTC. If so, that is very clearly clouding your judgement on this issue.

I have friends who have lost a lot of money to various schemes, and they sounded just like you sound here when I tried to talk to them about it (from MLM to crypto yield scams to penny stock newsletters) - they lacked the capability to criticize it b/c they needed it to be true.

It's setting yourself up for a lot of pain.
That must be why every piece of painting is signed. Artists are selling a brand- Rembrandt already understood that 400 years ago.
It can also be something that looks cool and doesn't necessarily ever get past "kinda works", but piques the interest of the core dev team and they take steps to make it work even better, resulting in the ultimate "deprecation" of this sort of thing by virtue of it being even better integrated into the core.

I don't have the context to judge the probability of that in this specific case (lots of technical nitty-gritty comes in to this sort of thing), but I've certainly seen similar things happen in other communities.
A big if. A lot of ChatGPT discussions seem to take for granted that it'll always be available/free/priced low enough that ~everyone has access to it. Seems more likely that at some point OpenAI will close it up and put it back behind an API.
And presumably only accept your paper if you make all the same mistakes the currently dominant paradigm does
I've been dreaming of a platform where each post is categorized (manually, by choosing a circle/channel, or automatically detected), as I'm not interested in all the content / themes of people I'd follow. Besides G+, I remember Pownce had a similar feature.

It would also be helpful to be able to choose your feed sorting algorithm - chronologically or else.
That's because people like you and me (I'm assuming you're somewhere in the comfortable middle class) vote in for this system. Because so far we've enjoyed a reasonable quality of life.
If that's no longer the case, we can vote for other leaders and other systems.
Absolutely spot on. I actually do algorithm design, usually over a period of weeks (at least), and leet code is a joke for the serious algorist (I’m sure I’d fail an interview based on it). Nothing has so clearly illustrated the robotic nature of the leet code expert quite like this result has.
I really like how Signal implemented stories, you can post stories to a group chat.

So you can just share a story with your lads in a group.
scuttlebutt[0] is like this.

0:https://scuttlebutt.nz/about/
Not sure about this. Models like Midjourney seem to put out very consistently good images.
You may be interested in "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott, an entire book about this subject: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
This is the most depressing thing I've read on this website. There's no nobility in pointlessly dying on a rock in space.
I imagine the algorithm that Google is using to send you to that route is simply that other users before you that have used that route have progressed quicker than others that used the "safe" one.
Went to the side again and it accepted both 'a' and '-2' as quantities... illusion broken.
> We decide how to progress every step of the way.

I think the wheels are turning. It's just a resultant movement from thousands of small movements, but nobody is controlling it. If you take a look not even wars dent the steady progress of science and technology.
About VZ: No time to watch that video, but she has been proposing solar explanations for the observed temperature changes, so I assume that's the topic.

There are a lot of reasons to reject changes in solar forcing as an explanation for recent warming (as opposed to Milankovitch cycles) - and it has been rejected, although 15 years ago it was still treated seriously. Also, the CO2 rise is very real, and the link of CO2 to warming is clear.

It's easy to watch/read "point explanations" for climate phenomena, and get confused. ("I read this paper from 2015 in Nature and ...".) One reason is that laypeople, even those with physics backgrounds, just don't have enough background information to put claims in context. Earth science is hard - so many interacting systems.

A better source for motivated laypeople is the NCA - the National Climate Assessment - see https://nca2018.globalchange.gov . It's done every 5 years, and the next one is due in 2023.
A few months ago I spent three or four days putting together a website where I could store my cooking recipes in a nice, searchable format with some nice UI features that I wanted. Once AI is good enough, I'll be able to do the same without needing to brush up on how MongoDB works, or how to vertically center text in a div, or how to update the page's URL when navigating to a different recipe without triggering a full reload of the page. I couldn't care less about any of those things, I just wanted a cooking recipe website.
> But mRNA was precisely the topic that required a multi-decade commitment.

It all comes down to this ^ for me. Advances take decades from start to finish. Institutions/organziations (including funders) need to start not just funding innovation (1-5 year cycles), but investing, really committing, to 20-100 year plans, at minimum.

My biggest fear is that hands are thrown up in the air, and science turns into yet another "content" producer (there are signs, to me, that this is exactly where we are headed). Can't produce science^D content fast enough? Skip peer-review. Community of experts getting in your way? Ignore them. We need to get science into tik-tok, because think of the reach for STEM! Really, do we need science to equate to 15-second dopamine hits?

None of this to say that there aren't problems with peer review, but, at least in the field I'm in, peer review is critical, useful, and an important aspect of becoming a scientist. If anything, learning to peer-review teaches one how to critically evaluate others work. Are there people who aren't taught how to Peer review? Sure. Does this mean that we should stop peer-review? The logic doesn't follow.
Yep.. this was my second thought ... "niiice.. i want't this... " then immediately after "hmm.. this seems expensive"
The fact of the "vouch" could provide the validation without identifying the people from whose circle overlap it was derived.
If humans someday become extinct, what's the big deal?

An asteroid could wipe us out as well.

Or Nuclear Armageddon.

Climate change boondoggle spending is one of the biggest drivers of inflation right now under the Biden administration. Epidemic of retail theft that goes largely unpunished in many US cities is another.
SEEK LEGAL COUSEL
> Interview cheating has always been there, but it is generally so rare that it isn't a real concern.

You're the person they're trying to fool, so if they cheat successfully you would never know. You've never seen overt displays of bad cheating, which is different.

Think you haven't seen a stick insect in years? Likely you have, but just didn't notice it...

Cheaters will always be more motivated than those trying to detect them - because everything is on the line for them.