skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I was paraphrasing the interview and then going into more detail on why I thought it was interesting in the sentences after the one you stopped reading on.

Honestly, I was kinda hoping to hear some better constructed and well reasoned insights & counter points beyond your “regurgitated mind swill” hot take but I guess that’s on me for not managing expectations.

Ah well, I usually comment once a year or so and then get immediately reminded why I stay off HN. See y’all in 2024!
Well its certainly entertaining writing, but I'm not so sure I understood it.

The author carefully did not identify Teams A and B, and that part worked for me. I just interpreted it as "T permute 2" for whatever Teams I cared to recognized and went on from there. But then they said

> In fact, there is no “Team A” or “Team B,” only Class A and Class B.

And I fell apart. Did they mean that I should reinterpret the teams I already recognized as classes? Or that classes A and B are separate, overlapping categories with the teams, such that a small minority of both Teams A and B are in Class A, and a vast majority of both Teams are in Class B?

The first route of reinterpreting seems more consistent with statements made throughout the piece. But then it doesn't make sense to me when I try to concretize A and B to the major political parties in my country--neither one is really dominating the other, they're in a pretty balanced arrangement and they're just being really shitty to everyone.

The second route of reclassifying maps neatly onto Marxism's bourgies and proles (sidenote: that'd be an amazing name for a folk dish). And I've tried a few different times, but I've never gotten my head around dialectical materialism and all that.
It’s not academic research, but I recommend Marianne Bellotti's "Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)" about modernization of legacy software systems and managing the teams maintaining these systems. The author worked at the United States Digital Service.

https://nostarch.com/kill-it-fire
https://www.theonion.com/apple-employee-fired-for-thinking-d...
COBOL programs will be fine. They use 4 characters just for the year since it's stored as the decimal characters. I was trained in COBOL in the late 90s to work on Y2K migrations. It's done this way so that COBOL programs stored on punched cards are readable (also why COBOL has its line-length limitations).
We've had painting robots for quite a long time now.
Your comment made me realise it would probably be fairly easy to program a ChatGPT-like model to generate its own ‘what-ifs’ for any given assertion.

Ie. The birth certificate is an ‘exception’, a safety measure for a model like this in operation could be to consider the top descending (probable * disastrous) exceptions before physically executing any plan.
At my first coding job, my CEO passed on to me his belief that code that looks ugly should be refactored asap, as the ugliness not only hides, but rather implies, bugs.

He's been right quite often, as I progress through my career.
http://web.archive.org/web/20220118051854/https://nautil.us/...
That's pretty good, actually. Not the druids part, but the location of the island.
Silicon Valley datacenter heaven vs. Balkan grim datacenter reality
There are lots of instances where Banks and/or other financial institutions close for the night 'as usual', but then never reopen. What happens to all those accounts that are never able to be accessed again by their 'owners'?

Examples: Lehmann Brothers in New York, Pyramid in Australia, that Scottish bank in England some 10 years back, Barings Bank, etc, etc. And there was also the Savings and Loan fiasco in the US around 1990.

Most people lost the lot, or at the very least lost a goodly proportion of their assets.
Perl counts from 1900, so the year 2000 was actually stored as 100. You'd get 2 digit years in the 1990s and suddenly 3 digit years after 2000. The solution was to arithmetically add 1900 to the year before rendering. Newer perl functions would handle that internally.
This person gets it. If everyone is in it solely for themselves, that's sociopathic. Companies function better when lubricated with some compassion.
Also, those people had little idea what human intelligence is like. Human introspection can only get you so far, and we still don't have the tools to probe the brain in large enough scale to be able to figure it out with anything but remote speculation.

Hubris goes both ways, but it's the use of the word "hubris" here that is eye popping. Do these guys consider themselves some High Priests of intelligence?

It's perfectly fine to dismiss linguists etc after decades of no progress. As the saying goes , every time you remove a linguist the performance goes up

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Jelinek
Doorstead closes on $21.5M to make sure you always have a tenant for your rental
I felt the same about many other subjects in the past because they were just needed at that moment. Once the need is gone, the personal demand for it disappears. So your current wish to have URNs to be more popular will be over once your current project is done.
Of course! They're an awesome project for people who enjoy high quality ebooks. I also like that I can submit typo fixes. :D
I'm kind of suspicious that neither the abstract nor the article shows a picture of anything resembling a stone tool. Perhaps the field has been defining random rocks with hammer marks as "stone tools" for excitement, and showing a picture would have made people say "well a monkey could have done THAT" all along?
so the timer only begins when you are in a certain jurisdiction? That seems unenforceable..
All these people are putting out all sorts of complex solutions, I love the simplicity of this one.
That is so true. And there is many a husband (or wife) who has come home after work to find the house completely stripped bare, and the spouse nowhere to be found.
Fair points. I think the term "processed" does have colloquial value and doesn't usually refer to things like yogurt/cheese/canned beans/etc.
Memoirs from the old web: The GateKeeper access control system
Jack Ma gives up Ant Group control restructuring largest Chinese fintech for IPO
Can you link to a sit-up? Is that a crunch? I don't understand how it is a parallel for deadlifts.
https://archive.ph/98Ozn
On wind turbines there are generally ground drag effects that reduce the wind speed closer to the ground. A 3 bladed setup minimises the wind speed (and therefore thrust) differences between blades, minimizing the off axis forces on the rotor bearings.
Fluuid – UUID readable lib in go
Interesting. As a technical product, LI utterly sucks. It is slow, buggy, crashy, leaked passwords and so on.

I always assumed Microsoft is to blame, but apparently not!
I recently flew on United from Chicago to Amsterdam. I didn't show my boarding pass to get on the plane, instead they used facial recognition. My question is, how do they know it is me? If they are using my government issued id, how is it that a private company got access to that information? If they are using something else, how reliable is it that it is me?
Salesforce is an Oracle/Java webapp from 1999 + a whole bunch of poorly integrated acquisitions. It's a miracle it works at all.
Mine is mostly oil paintings: https://dreida.com
> linguistic acquisition might have some similar innate system

I thought that was pretty well established. From memory, if certain parts of the brain are damaged at key developmental periods (generally before the age of 18), language is almost never acquired properly (even if the damage is repaired).
I don't think there's any question human brains acquire language very differently to GPT technology.
And they certainly acquire the ability to reason logically very differently - ChatGPT makes trivial errors with reasoning that it's hard to imagine an adult human doing (e.g. I just gave it a classic classification problem based on 3 made-up categories, and asked "if I see something green with three legs, what is it", and it replied (in part) "It is also not a foo, as all foos are green. Therefore, the green thing with three legs would be classified as...".
Ask HN: What progress has been made in self-driving tech over the last year?
I sometimes watch self-driving videos on YouTube. And have a quite good grasp on what the current situation is.

However, it's difficult to gauge the progress of self-driving technology because most videos on YouTube showcase novel features or test new routes.

Is there anybody who drives the same route over and over again and puts it on YouTube?

Are there any Tesla drivers on HN who can speak to the progress they have experienced on their typical routes?
Only looks at vehicles from 2022 which have been production for at least a decade. Was surprised to not see any diesels but makes sense given the criteria
At my university the math department held an annual chalkboard circle drawing competition.
Briefly looking through your posts, I'm not 100% sure what differentiates the project posts from the others. I like the idea of the project page being visually distinct from the lists of posts. One way to sort out the project page is to provide a short blurb describing each post.
Cool. Hack the planet.
Matt Levine's money stuff newsletter may be of interest for people
This is great too! Being able to draw nice straight lines with a tablet pen might debatably be even more useful than drawing a perfect circle.
Except for the programs where it was too hard to change to 4 digit years, and we just shifted the epoch ...
For the most part, whether a book has DRM is a per-publisher decision, not per-storefront. e.g. TOR books are DRM-free everywhere (including Apple).

That said, ebooks.com is great! Clean interface, easy to download old purchases, etc. It's my go-to for O'Reilly content.
Direct quote from the author:

“Archaeology is a wonderful subject, but it has an ideology, and it is presently mostly the kind of thing made to appeal to “Head Girl” IFLS types who memorized all the “correct” answers. Those sorts of people are always a squalid clerisy, and they almost never figure anything new out.”

Yeah, I’m inclined to agree with your last point.
I don’t think it’s that big of an issue, but having come back to linux via the steam deck this year I laughed that literally the first bug I encountered was an audio one. This one: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/822

Allegedly fixed now.
alcohol.
The Pantheon is a perfect example. It has survived for 2000 years because it was repurposed as a church.
First, there are of course many professions where you work day doesn't end at 18:00.

As for our industry, I don't disagree with you but I'd be a bit more nuanced. I'm not pressured to work long hours. But I often feel that if I want to reach my goals, I need an occasional coding marathon (which I don't mind because I do like coding, like everybody else doing this job I suppose).
When I was young I didn't want to give them because I thought they had to be accurate, and pined over being wrong, wasting hours trying to ensure I covered all my bases and basically doing the work to get there. I was quite good with accuracy, which helped feed my belief, but the effort to be accurate was monumental.

Thankfully, I eventually came to realize that you can choose a random number. Nobody gives it another thought after you've answered.
Afaik it's an open question what's innate and not. But it's a perfectly reasonable position that very little of it is. It seems more like what's innate is a tremendous ability to learn and shape the brain as it grows.

And it's definitely the case that human brains can learn a lot more per amount of knlut data than current neural nets. And that's the big elephant in the room with these language models. It's a huge unsolved problem in machine learning.

One clue to this is that it takes a pretty hefty artificial neural net to simulate a single cortical neuron. Neurons are a lot more intricate than a parameter in a linear equation.

My feeling is that a fundamentally new approach to neural nets is needed for them to learn as efficiently as animal brains do.
Of course there's benefit. They don't want to infect their elderly relatives when they go visit.
I can personally evaluate a specific persons skill. But doing this in a formal gradable test would be hard.
An additional pro of university is that it can teach you things that you might never learn working, and it let's you "test" your interests without having to work in a specific field.

This is invaluable as time will start slipping in front of you faster and faster, and soon you won't have time anymore to experiment and try new things.

As a general advice, I'd tell you to give college a try, and apply to something that is only tangentially close to coding. Keep working on your startup and keep improving your CS skills as you have been doing, and in College try new things. Whether you want to be a coder or an entrepreneur, you'll require many different skills. A diverse study plan that includes a bit of different subjects (economics, law and alikes) can be very useful.

Think of what you have achieved in only 17 years, and then try to picture where you'll be in another 20. And what the world will look like in 20 years. Your most valuable asset is and will be your brain, so the most you can develop it, the better.

Disclaimer: I'm a University professor
Not been an easy journey? You can say that again
Using Clerk for Advent of Code
Excellent design!
How do you mitigate the flood risk in a basement. Sewer malfuntioning, heavy rain, but also firefighters flooding your burning house?

I would think (no numbers to back it up) for most houses the risk of flooding is higher that the risk of burning down
I'll admit I'm pretty excited about this BUT I'm a little jaded about how Zep has treated Voxatron, which was meant to be the flagship product. AFAIK, Voxatron was in development and Pico-8 was created as a POC for the Lua scripting to be used in Voxatron. Well Pico-8 turned out to be super popular and almost all dev time seems to go to Pico-8 now, even though it's beyond feature complete. Meanwhile, Voxatron sits apparently stalled and not yet feature complete. You'll see plenty of disheartened users on the vox bbs lamenting this fact.

All 3 projects are SUPER cool. Make no mistake. But adding another project in the mix when Voxatron is still gathering dust doesn't sit right.
I've gone down the edge case rabbit hole of automation when I discovered AutoHotKey. I love automation, if I can get a computer to do a computer task I'm definitely not doing it manually. But I have to catch myself before I get too involved solving the problem because I want perfection at the beginning.

I'm my experience this rarely happens and I have to iterate repeatedly, I'm fully aware I'm not clever enough to cover all edge cases before they present themselves.

I remember automating one system (web interface so with AutoHotKey you're relying on tab order) that seemed to change everytime you opened it! Semi automation here was a must.
Wheat Based Nutrition Program (WBNP)
and there cannot be "consent" of minors.

Thank you for confirming my point. The legal age of consent in most states of the US is 16, with one at least being lower, and a few being at 17. So the Age of Consent all over the US is one at which all are minors.

If you are correct in that assertion that there cannot be "consent" of minors, then my assertion that laws are not able to keep up with the facts on the ground is being confirmed.
What computer science/software engineering books you've learned the most from?
GitHub operates the same way and doesn't suck :)
Real Roman engineering theory came from Marcus Vitruviouss Pollio's De Archetectura. Considered to be the ultimate reference text for building and engineering projects in Rome in 32bce, It's ten volumes cover how to build everything from temples, to aqueducts, to water mills to machines used for construction. A fascinating read, if you're curious how Romans built things.

De Architectura provides the sort of long-term perspective required to build and engineer projects that were meant to last for centuries, based on experience gathered from centuries of recorded experience.

I'm not sure if De Architectura is the only book that Roman Architects used. But it was certainly the most important.

Hundreds of pages of De Architectura list dimensions of older ancient buildings, the dimension and spacing of pillars, and failures encountered during or after construction. Something along the following lines (not actual text):

---

The second Temple at Delos was built in 432bce. It consisted of 13 x 29 doric columns, 6' in diameter, 22' high, spaced on 12' intervals, with two rows in the pro-cella. The cella measured ..... The entrance to the cella was 16' high and 12' wide with a granite lintel measuring 16' x 3' x 2'.

The lintel above the entrance cracked and had to be replaced after an earthquake in 430bce. The front-right architrave cracked in 329bce, but was not repaired. The temple was subsequently abandoned and collapsed completely after an earthquake in 327bce.

The temple of Apollo at Thebes ....

The main architrave cracked while it was being mounted, and further construction was abandoned.

---

Given a hundred or so such examples, a Roman architect of a new temple could make somewhat informed decisions about how high, how wide, and how thick he would need to build a new temple, and how afraid he should be when he was commissioned to build a new temple that was higher, wider, or taller.
If anyone wants a hear of modern jazz, I'm liking Jazzwise's "The 20 Best Jazz Albums of 2022": https://www.jazzwise.com/features/article/the-20-best-jazz-a...
I'm doing it on mobile and while I could go faster, I..... don't want to? So I also got the "too slow" and along with that, got bored
Right, that's the contrast I wanted to draw. In many other professions it is routine and expected that you're available in the evenings or in your off hours to deal with urgent (potentially life-threatening) issues. Programming is not one of those. If you're routinely being called upon to actually work on code in the evening, that's neither normal or healthy.

An occasional coding marathon is fine. I've done it myself, but I don't expect it of anyone else, and if it became a routine expectation (as it seems to be with the author of this post), I would consider it a major red flag.
You don't have to equate them, the fact is still that it's an extra step and this extra step will require extra energy input. Someone has to grow these crops, harvest them, transport them to the animals, feed them, butcher the animals and send it to the stores. A lot of extra steps that require energy compared to growing a crop and feeding ut to people directly.

Oil is a part of those numbers, just looking at it in isolation doesn't make sense. Imagine if the farmer used electrical equipment for producing and transporting his crops, then he would have used no oil at all... Yet he still uses energy and likely used oil indirectly. CO2equivalents is basically a proxy for energy use here since we're comparing two food types and we can clearly see that animal protein requires more energy input than plant protein.
It's not impossible and there are some advantages. I watched an entire apartment building in Oakland get assembled in like two weeks. The modular pieces were built at Factory OS in Vallejo and trucked in.
Given the history of technology investing, companies being valued in the 10s of billions is itself not a proof of anything other than investor excitement.

I agree that even today's "AI" can be used to cause massive societal harm, the same as many recent technologies that have yet to destroy humanity (weapons of mass destruction, for instance).

That said, I think a consensus view in the AI community is great skepticism that the current AI progress is actually a recipe for AGI. We've made great progress in AI over decades, often followed by long winters when it became clear the current methods would not get us to the next threshold.

Human intelligence is remarkable precisely because it needs extremely scarce data to generalize, and because it is self-aware. As far as I know, OpenAI's approaches aren't on a path to replicate those capabilities artificially.

I'd welcome links and articles from experts that might correct my POV on this.
>"I've not said anything."

My bad. Sorry. I did not look at the sig. You are a different person.
With regards to security, obviously it is possible to get security wrong when exposing APIs to the front end. That said, when it comes to the risk of your server being compromised, the less code running on your server the better. So if you can move some of that code onto the client, then it is a pretty significant security win. Except for XSS and DOS attacks, client code by definition doesn't bring any security risks. It is UNTRUSTED. So if you mess up your react code, there is very little that can go wrong. If you mess up server side code, however, you are asking for trouble.

I believe that minimalist, well audited REST or Websocket protocols are FAR more secure than server side rendering. How can you audit the entirety of your UI for security flaws? How can you analyze data leakage formally over such a large surface area? You cannot. But you can analyze 10 REST endpoints passing JSON. You can analyze RPC over websockets. Often times such specifications can fit on 4 sheets of printer paper. Take it on the train with you. Print out a copy and look for security flaws while you're on the toilet. You can't do that with server-side rendering.

I guess if there is not much data-flow both ways, then server-side rendering could be much more secure. For example, if you have a page live rendering stock charts on a news site. One that is complex but doesn't allow for much configuration. Server side rendering would be more secure. However, if you are creating something like a CRDT based shared spreadsheet that supports formulas, server-side rendering could basically mean that you are giving untrusted clients the ability to run Turing complete code on your server ;) . You'll be far better off having as much as possible on the client and as small and simple a protocol as you can manage between the front end and the back end.

Basically, security wize:

- If drawing the page requires a huge number of data points to create a visualization that the client cannot interact with much, then server side rendering reduces the attack surface (you're just sending display information).

- If the page allows for a lot of user control over the data, you increase your attack surface by processing more untrusted information server side.