skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don’t know… my grandparents were literally sharecroppers and my grandmother said it was ducking miserable. When she was a child most people lost children to disease and still in 1920, sometimes to hunger. But the economy changed and improved and they eventually owned an air conditioned home and two cars. She said the improvement in her life from childhood until I was born were almost unimaginable.
As much as you’re shitposting, I agree.

I worked my fingers to the bone for years before breaking into cushy software. Shit changes, I can change. We have to, or die.

No LLM is gonna have the upper hand on me and my bag, because I’m gonna have the upper hand on it. Simple as.
Why is your tone harsh?
>I’m excruciatingly lucky to have been in the right place at the right time

This article is just another reminder that techbros making bank can afford the luxury to save-up a few years, and spend years contemplating their self-realization. I'm glad the author was able to finance their perspective-changing journey, but reading this is less of a lesson, and more of reading that someone won the lottery.

You can only leave the rat race if you can afford to... The rest of the earth can't do this and the author is writing from a place of great (earned) privilege. Must be nice.
I think your source [1] is directionally correct but very wrong on the numbers. (It's also a decade old, but that doesn't explain these errors.) For example, it says (last sentence) that Americans average 6 tons per person per year. It's actually around 15 [2]. Also, the densest urban cores have per household (and person) carbon emissions ~half the national average. Here's a recent NYT [3].

2. https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country...

3. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/13/climate/clima...
Seconded. I don’t keep photos on my phone for very long, instead I regularly upload them to a self-hosted PhotoPrism instance via PhotoSync.
Unless you consider the Chinese to be a shining capitalism, the proportional of people in poverty hasn't been decreased by capitalism.
Damn that's chilling. Feel like I just watched a new religion be born in front of my eyes.
Minor correction: functional languages have state; they're the captured arguments to partially applied functions. After all, the lambda calculus can simulate a Turing machine.

What functional languages don't have is the ability of a function to modify state in a way that persists beyond its lifetime, which makes the temporal axis of a program more or less the same as the call tree.

State is the enemy only insofar as you need more than the call tree to figure out its value.
That’s great to hear. I’ll be doing another search for quotes this year and am hoping for change.
Similar story in Fall of '92. I was a freshman in college and this dude, Nikolai, down the hall in the dorm was one of two guys from Vladivostok on a program. Most of us in the hall bonded very quickly including Nikolai. One day, a smaller group among us were talking and somehow the topic of his cologne came up. It smelled literally like ammonia.

We wanted to give him something else, but how do you do that without being offensive? One guy had a plan. When Nikolai was showering in the hall showers, this guy went in and stole Nikolai's cologne and tossed it. The next day, he was puzzled as to who stole his cologne. We said, "it's alright, we'll get you a replacement" and took him to the mall to one of those booths with knockoff designer perfume and cologne.

The guy was just in awe of the whole place. Eyes wide open, looking at every store. At the cologne place, first sample he smelled, he lit up, smiled, and said, "Yes, this is much better than my old cologne."

The guy that tossed his old one paid like the $20 for the bottle.

Later, it turned out the guy got his girlfriend pregnant on the night he left for the US, and had to go back to marry her after the semester. Such a bummer. Hope he's doing well with a nice family because he was such a friendly and fun guy.
Be warned that even 20 years ago when I was doing research on this stuff, that it was standard procedure to exploit the kernel. This included things like read or stat showing a valid file, but exec would run an exploited file. It also allowed hidden directories and files. So you couldn't find a sub directory with ls, but you could cd into it.

So you really have to boot from trusted media with a trusted kernel and no untrusted modules to be sure what you are seeing. Generally this involves rebooting onto trusted readonly media, doing a scan, then rebooting back into production. The HOWTO mentioned finding an unused kernel module like floppy.ko and replacing it with a malicious payload and ensuring it loaded on boot.

Also keep in mind that attackers are well aware of tripwire and some attack kits I saw specifically looked for tripwire like approaches and would hook into the update the checksums process after patching so their exploited binaries would look just like valid binaries.
it's understandable why people compare - some people can only be happy if they're "at the top", which must necessitate comparison.
Show HN: I made a minimalist time blocking app 2.0
I made a time blocking app with a minimalist look & feel, only time blocking one day at a time, customisable intervals and easy to organize without overlapping with new updates:
- new minimalist design
- set colour to your time blocks
- smooth drag and drop to organize your time blocks

You can try it for free at https://timeist.app/demo. Thanks for checking out Timeist 2.0. Feel free to leave any feedback or suggestions
Do you mean the importance of not having entire industries bombed to craters? The "leftist clowns" in Europe today get most of their products from Europe, and they seem pretty content about it. Speaking for myself,the variety of cheeses in western Europe is flabbergasting.
This triggered a memory from my childhood of finding Basic programming books published by Tab in the musty corners of my town's public library. Back when both computers and books seemed to be full of mystery and wonder.
I remember when Google started penalizing some of this behavior because SEO gurus were spinning fake articles and link wheels to promote their sites.

I do not envy Google's position as it is in a constant antagonistic relationship with SEO manipulation.
AI/ML will solve some great problems, many that are critical. Similar to how Wix solves your basic webpage for the average person. Does Wix solve anything for your typical enterprise or SAAS app? Even if it did, would these institutions not manage to add a new layer to the layer cake?

It's kind of been one of my main critiques of companies like Palantir. You really can't just dump a company's data into the big ML tumbler and expect useful/sellable products to just pop out. Take a random use case like, I don't know, Pepsi. Maybe Pepsi can get some insights about their supply chain and customer preferences. Alright? Okay. Did the world end because that happened? Not really.

Shifting gears back to programmers - AI will be a super smart programmer that will write a bunch of your code. I worked with some super smart programmers, and they can manage to write a lot of super smart code that eventually becomes a clusterfuck too.

We'll just go from unwrapping human shit code, to unwrapping AI shit code (or even better, unwrapping a mix of human shit and AI shit). The job prospects here are even greater than you imagine.

Long as you maintain the belief in the fundamental truth, that anything in existence is capable of writing shit code, then the world will never end for programmers.
The author doesn’t understand the reason for the bimodal distribution of attorney compensation. If you look at a distribution of salaries overall, they are not smooth. There will be small peaks at round numbers, $60k, $70k, 80k, etc., rather than a smooth curve from 60->80. People like round numbers.

The top peak in the law is due to human bias just the same.

>Just like how a partner at Cravath likely sketches an outline of how they want to approach a particular case and swarms of largely replaceable lawyers fill in the details…

Except those “replaceable” attorneys at Cravath are the top peak of the distribution. The distribution is caused by social decisions of what firms to compete with. Top salary information is well-publicized and firms who want to be in the category of “BigLaw” basically match each other.

The lower peak of the distribution is more local attorneys. Your local estate law attorney, government workers like district attorneys/public defenders, etc. who are not competing with Cravath for talent or clients.

I would assume this is already what exists in programming with “BigTech” salaries being equivalently publicized and matched across firms concerned with being perceived to be a “FAANG+”. If it doesn’t, I would guess the reason is that not enough positions actually exist in “BigTech” to make a significant blip on a population-wide salary graph. BigLaw attorneys exist in almost every medium-large city in the US, but you can’t say the same about BigTech programmers.
There was also the economic aspect.

Inheritance to daughters and widows was developed and enforced by muslims, and I hear in turn families became motivated to marry among their own to keep the wealth in the family.
But if we're going with the "heatpumps are more than 100% efficient" that everyone brings out, then running my computer to work & heat my room is far above 200% efficiency.

If I'm running my computer to use it & it keeps me warm, there is no way turning on a natural gas heater is going to reduce my costs.
wow, i would dare to say that this is a writing level of GPT-2 :-)
There is research [1] that suggests using GPS navigation could impact your brain function negatively. I wonder how this code generation “assistant” will impact the coding skills of its users in long term.

As for the LLMs, stochastic parroting (hallucination), which is inherent to its design, makes it untrustworthy for precision work. Maybe some other architecture will prove more useful. LLMs can generate BS authoritatively which is easy to detect for toy examples and forgivable by the AI hype train but can be very costly or hard to fix in a complex system with a lot of moving parts.

I’m actually optimistic about the future of AI. At the same time I believe we should know the capabilities and understand the limitations of our tools in order to use them more effectively. Unfortunately people are misunderstanding tools like ChatGPT, etc. for we are human and vulnerable to anthropomorphism.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14652
Additionally, I would expect that AIs wouldn't fare as well in situations where footguns abound, specialization is high, and there's a much smaller body of code to learn from — think things like hardware drivers written in C or C++ or embedded firmware with restricted resources, which is much less forgiving than e.g. CRUD web app backend written in Python.
At least where I live in the US if you want a ventless natural gas heater you can just go buy one. It's not something I'd recommend.
Some packages it doesn’t matter the architecture but others it actually does. Pandas, for example.
Apparently starting with iOS 15, you can now erase your iPhone remotely and still locate it in Find My. Previously you would lose the ability to track it after wiping.

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/erase-a-device-mmfc0e...

It sounds like this might not have worked in the author's situation, where the thieves changed the phone number immediately. It sounds like at that point it was pretty much game over.
Wikipedia says there're two versions of 3060Ti, one has GDDR6 memory with 448 GB/second bandwidth, another one has GDDR6X memory with 608 GB/second bandwidth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_30_series#Desktop

The GDDR5X VRAM in 1080Ti delivers up to 484 GB/second.

I wonder whether are you using GDDR6 or 6X version of 3060Ti?
Engineers create value - making them more efficient at their work generally creates more opportunity for work.

Lawyers are an unfortunate necessity that extract value from society. Making them more efficient at their work (hopefully) creates less opportunity for work.
Well if they were any more open about how much they want to fuel the military-industrial complex through interventionism, that would turn their voter base off.
No, a ski hut or dinky dacha is not impressive in a country the size of Russia with abundant land, timber, and cheap labor.

Ending hunger is impressive.
This is incorrect. Cuba is under secondary sanctions by the US. Any entity that trades with Cuba is liable under US Federal law to get it's assets seized. Granted it doesn't happen as often as it used to, but it's still the law on the books.

Since most countries ask for US dollars in order to trade and that these have to be held by US entities, you're basically guaranteed to have assets that can be seized.
My advice is to simply start jotting down ideas. I do so in a todo app on my phone and I keep a Scanners Daybook for the detailed notes on those ideas.

Once I begin to think of ideas they cause other ideas.

My latest idea was to build a shell in Go, which isn’t a side hustle, but jotting it down (and also working on it) generated a lot of other ideas.

Here’s the shell I built in Go (which is effectively just a hello world app that runs on ssh connection and instructions on how to run it).

https://github.com/codazoda/goshell

Some ideas on my list…

- A feature flag API

- An embroidery file organizer

- Open source live web chat

- A video podcast platform

- Privacy preserving web comments
I'd love to see something like this but through a device like a smart speaker. Basically an electronic dungeon master that can generate characters, dialog, sound effects, plots, etc. Get a group of people together and play.
> I agree this sounds great in theory, but I don't think it works very well in practice.

I've actually done it once in practice myself. I forget the exact details, though. As I said, it is a niche use case, but it's a useful to have when you are in that niche.
Especially with GPT generated reviews becoming so convincing.

GPT detection is a startup idea with commercial legs I think. Reddit would want to ne able to weed them out, as not to end up with a "market of lemons" effect on the whole site's legitimacy.
Best comment I’ve read in a while. The last sentence was the cherry on the cake. I had a good time reading it, thanks!
I always assumed that "defenestration" was one of those words like under/overwhelmed where it's only ever used with a prefix. Cool to see a book with a section on fenestration
I see more of them worn than regular wrist watches. Considering they sold more watches than the Swiss watch industry (2019), it's not surprising.
I think people are more impressed than they should be because of a misconception about what programmers really do.

For most big software projects the bottleneck is not writing code and test boilerplate that runs correctly locally. Which of course LLMs can do reasonably well. Most time is spent on design, on integrations with other internal services, scaling concerns, and reasoning about other things that these models can't really reason about yet.

I'm obvious impressed that these models can generate simple client/server websites and generate code to solve competitive programming problems. But I don't think they've "solved" software engineering; they've only solved "what you boss thinks software engineering is".
Comment here seem to largely miss the point of the article, which isn't saying that nobody will employ software engineers. It is saying that instead of the current model of:

1 very highly compensated staff+ engineer

4 highly compensated senior engineers

4 pretty well-compensated mid-level engineers

2 decently compensated junior engineers

The future might look like:

1 yet-more-highly-compensated staff+ engineer who specializes in architecture

10 decently compensated junior engineers who specialize in error-checking LLMs and detail-intensive technical work

In the same way that paralegals aren't unskilled people, and aren't paid terribly -- but they aren't doing the same job as the partner-level lawyer who's crafting the legal strategy, and they don't have a simple clean progression to eventually getting his job.
Why does it have to be a drug-smuggling ring? Why cant it be a group of elitist wealthy do-gooders (elected and unelected), who don't want to invite the middle class in, and be subjected to the rules of Wall Street?
You do realize that burning natural gas for heat produces light as well right?
> If you lot are so deathly afraid of a tool taking over your job

Not at all! You'll be sorely disappointed if you do actually get rid of the humans that you pay to solve your problems.

> so we are not beholden to a bunch of overpaid pampered prima donnas

They bring the logic into existence because you couldn't.

So yes, you are beholden to them, because you are latching on to them, feeding off them like a parasite.

> Whose job a program can do ... Good riddance.

A program made by who? Trained on who? ;)

And you are definitely speaking too soon... let's try "no code" one more time!

The reality of today is you still need us to solve your many problems...

Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud though.
Given the amount of proprietary and paid-to-use COBOL compilers which run on .NET and the JVM, I would say that you're not correct. It does in fact run on .NET already.

The fact that there is a COBOL 2022 standard (yes, it's still being maintained) should have given enough of a clue that COBOL doesn't run only on legacy mainframes and tape drives anymore.

Sure, there are still companies using COBOL 85, but that's not the fault of the language. You wouldn't blame Java itself if companies used a version from the 90s intead of a newer and better version.

I find it quite absurd when people hate on COBOL based on its version from the 80s, while ignoring it's newer standards.
I love a rare inspirational story in this age of negativity! I realize that the subject is mortality, but all of us have to die sometime and some of us will have fortune or misfortune to outlive others in our immediate orbit and then we can still hope for kindness of strangers until the end.

For those of us with non-people facing jobs, it helps to remember that our products too play a lot of positive role in lives of our users, even if we are not there to see that in person. E-mail carries love letters, phone camera captures first baby photos, video consumption apps and device play romantic movies for couples. And to try a little harder to make sure these magic moments happen smoothly.
I was curious about what “Bolshevism” specifically meant in that context. Maybe it is the centrally planned part of Soviet communism as opposed to social democracy within an undirected private economy?

Bolshevism (from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevism
Those usually function as a giant hole in the house insulation when not in use.
This article is a thunderous warning of the importance of backup. In the early days of USENET I remember in one of the DEC newsgroups a question that asked how to recover an inadvertently deleted file on a PDP-11 on (I believe) an RSX-D environment.

The response read: "First, mount your backup tape..."
Presumably you could accumulate activation counts along the activation path, in this case.

It wouldn't provide any gradient at a single unit, though.
Good delegations are key to achieve healthy work life balance. Here are 5 principles that help us to achieve both effectiveness and efficiency, as well as supporting the team members to whom we delegate.
I'm not hating on COBOL... I asked who the customers are for making this a product. I guess they're out there, good luck!
The thing is, there is a selection bias at play here.

The ones who really succeed in "quitting the rat race" don't show up because they have next to no interest in discussing this with you, or anyone else online.

I don't mean the silence from HNW individuals, I mean the real quitters, who are sitting round a version of Thoreau's Walden pond NOT WRITING ABOUT IT

The "FIRE" community are the front edge. Once they get there, they stop obsessively telling people how they did it.

The best choice I made was closing out my socials. I do wonder why I keep HN open (as I am sure, do many people who choose to read what I write here) and I suspect it's also going away, when I turn off, tune out, and drop off.

My superannuation (pension in UK speak) is vesting out inside 6 months. It's not HNW. I won't be in lambos. It is more than enough for me and my partner, to be quiet, and sufficiently comfortable in our declining years.

If I misjudged the market I'll either go back to work, or not. "it depends". It might be in this field, it might be in another. A surprising number of older (and not so old) retirees work because they want to (I know many work because they have no choice)
Web3: The Good, the Bad and the Now What?
I was arrested for protesting against a government funded project just last month. This is in the US, in a small town. They likely haven't had much experience with protesters, so have no idea about the can of worms they opened.

Honestly, police will do whatever those in power want them to do, rights be damned. I'm so sick of people who abuse their power. The thing is, people keep stretching the limits of what they can get away with, until they can't get away with it anymore. If we don't use the rights we have, then we won't have them for very long.

I intend to pursue my case as far as it takes to make a point.
Write a command line tool following the Unix tooling philosophy: have it do only one thing, but do it well.

You can get inspiration from here: https://github.com/topics/command-line
you're probably right (and thanks for breaking it down), but it's more fun to engage in doom porn!
>They aren't going to take my money!

Hey! It’s me your friend.

Seriously though. They’re probably not that bad off, or the next most important lesson for them to learn is to take help when it’s offered.
What even is LLM?
People were detained for using the wrong nomenclature around communism though. Or are we brushing the whole McCarthyism era under the rug?
Been there, done that. "The rat race" is a very reductionist and naive take. What I found out is, wherever you go, there you are. You must really be at peace with yourself for a change in environment to bring you lasting peace.

Mountains, beaches, deserts, forests are all amazing. But you do get used to them and then miss the cool city life and convenience. But wherever you go, you bring your problems with you.

The drugs, alcohol,etc... in that video are solutions for the rat's unhappiness. It isn't the race that is the problem, it is the person.

There is wisdom in balance. Make a lot of money with the least amount of work-time and spend that money by traveling or living somewhere nice. Doing fun things. But none of that will solve the sickness of the human soul.
Looks great and congrats on the HN launch!

I can see myself using this to make my next screen recording.
Yeah but it doesnt seem to be selling and looks like thousands of other games released daily.
I think it's more likely media giants will reinforce copyright. Once companies like WB etc catch on that we can nearly generate unlimited art in their style, stuff that they charge us for normally, they'd put an end to this

And if OpenAI training data excludes their artwork from training data then the answer is obviously that copyright matters and they only exploit small artists unlikely to sue (which would make openai legally liable)
brilliant! many chuckles. i hope people try it out.
looks like they're down. def even more legit now.