skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, lack of powerful tools in a language is not limited to library authors.

If authors can not use powerful tools, they cannot create powerful libraries for other developers to use. Everybody is then pushed down to the low expressiveness level. Case in point: Golang until recently, Java before version 5. Copy-paste programming is as prone to bugs as stringly-typed programming.

If there needs to be a strict separation between powerful tools and easy tools, using two different languages works well enough. Many game engines allow level designers write small Lua scripts, for instance. Or the whole Visual Basic thing which allows to glue together powerful COM components. Also, nearly every templating language allows for simple data manipulation (iteration, filters) while not being Turing-complete.

(That works until the users of the simple glue language require enough features for the glue language to become a principal tools for developing increasingly complex things, and we're in square one. Could have started with a proper language...)
100%

I think I understand what OP is getting at, but if an AI lawyer proves to be both cheaper to hire and more effective at defending me... it's a no-brainer IMO.

Then after my AI lawyer and I win my jaywalking hearing or whatever, I can meet up with friends and talk about things like humans do.
the carbon cost of this crap
"Engineers" were originally just eccentric noblemen who liked to tinker around with engines. Kind of an awesome hobby if you think about it, combining clockwork and fire in a cool way. Hence the "eer" suffix implying that they are just really into engines, like a "Mouseketeer" is someone who is really into Mickey Mouse.

It didn't acquire its self-righteously gatekept meaning implying having passed some kind of technical examination to be allowed to draft plans for roads until much later.
It can also be useful if you can make Mars better than Earth. That obviously can't be done, but deterioration of Earth is not logically required.
Here's a quick thought experiment. If you give $1 to everyone in the world, and if everyone uses that money over and over to play a double-or-nothing game, you will end up with around eight billionaires in expectation who did nothing but gamble with their money.

Now, you start with people with a million dollars, and all of a sudden you can reach eight billionaires with far fewer gamblers (proportionally fewer, in fact). So, given sufficient gambling tendency among millionaires, you will definitely find a handful of quite rich billionaires whose only skill is (1) being born rich, (2) getting lucky on the gambles.
His books are fantastic and his writing is captivating. It's such a shame he passed -- cancer is a bitch, but the blog post about the radiators in the hospice that he died in are one of the most heart rending pieces of writing I've come across from a mathematician.
> rather than dumping so much of it into that incinerator.

It's strange to me that people think Reality Labs is an incinerator. Truly, without exaggeration, I think this entire perception is based on the ridiculous early Horizon Worlds screenshots Mark Zuckerberg posted, which did a ton of damage to Meta.

But Horizon Worlds is not The Metaverse, and it's not Reality Labs! It's one part of it. Reality Labs has game studios, the leading VR/AR hardware, all kinds of software packages to make working in the Metaverse possible, like Horizon Workrooms, Horizon Remote Desktop, and quite a bit more. They are quickly developing a fairly insurmountable moat.

Meanwhile, Apple is also dumping billions into AR, but they don't break it out in earnings reports, so no one talks about it.

There are lots of execution risks in Meta's VR strategy. Obviously, if no one ever wants their products for games, work, entertainment, or whatever else, then they will have incinerated an awful lot of money. But I think that's actually the unlikely scenario.

The quarterly losses are very large, but it's an entirely new product line with a very large potential market.
> How [is an AI artist] taking in data and producing an output different than a human learning a skill and making prose/code/art?

There may be a misalignment in intent of the claim and interpretation of the claim. As someone that researches generative modeling I actually think there is an important aspect to this question, but I do not think that this question has anything to do with how the brain or the machine learn art. It has to do with legality and morals.

So I'll break it down. We believe that it is morally and legally acceptable for a human to look at copyrighted artwork and even mimic it in the process of learning how to become a better artist (sales are where the morality breaks down and especially with impersonation). The question is "where is the nuanced difference between a machine using that data and a human using that data to learn?" This doesn't depend on the learning techniques just like how no one cares if one person learns differently than another person. Obviously no one thinks AI art should impersonate real artists nor do they think people should sell this work if it contains copyrighted material. That's in line with the human artist values (fine to draw Mickey Mouse, not fine to sell a drawing of Mickey Mouse and worse to sell that drawing and claim it is official Disney art).

This is a very important question because we need to create laws about how we can train these systems and how we handle the data that they produce (two very different things!). The line between human and machine is a lot thinner than people think (think digital painting and CGI), and it doesn't matter that stochastic algorithms learn differently than humans learn. The question is about how/if learning material can be used and if machines should be treated differently. And if so, why.

But this is way more than one sentence.
As I said, last I read - that was at the outset of this fiasco. So much has changed in so few months.
That's impossible, but that's not what's happening here. There is no "-> b" at the end of the type signature upthread.

The example in the thread is more like

foo :: Either (b -> Int) b

which is much easier:

foo = Left (const 1) :: Either (b -> Int) b
That they should go directly to Apple for targeted advertising when iAd 2.0 launches.
I think it's easy to see it as a toy, that's basically how I played with it to start with, it's fun to get it to write stuff about all kinds of things. But it actually has a fair amount of knowledge that has crossed over a threshold where it is useful to ask it questions on a bunch of topics, including programming.
If you're using nix to build your repo, it's worth adding scripts for releases etc and run them locally and as part of the ci https://determinate.systems/posts/nix-github-actions
And therefore has demonstrated that 90% of modern life and work are bullshit.
You seem to have a total misunderstanding about the threats this person faces.

If your job is running seminars about IT security to random companies, taking the projector with you to the bathroom is ridiculous and your clients will think you're a tin foil hat weirdo to boot.

Of course, if you're Snowden or Assange, your threat landscape is quite different and this would not be paranoid at all.
I mean, I used Copilot more, but it's 99% bullshit. The only Ai I paid for was Wolfram Alpha and that's the only AI that outperform me.

Even for dumb react code, it will use classes rather than hooks. It's basically useless with dynamically typed languages and use old syntaxes. I do not see the use case right now. At all.
My manager sends me videos of particularly challenging video game things he's accomplished. And links to fun games. Managers are people, too; there's plenty of good ones.
SerpApi | https://serpapi.com | Senior Ruby Engineer | Senior UI/UX Web Designer | Based in Austin, TX but everyone is remote | Full-time | ONSITE or FULLY REMOTE (We're a remote first company) | $180k 1099 for US or ex-US guidelines are local avg + 20-30%

SerpApi is the leading API to scrape and parse search engine results. We deeply support Google, Google Maps, Google Images, Bing, Baidu, and a lot more.

Our current stack is Ruby, Rails, MongoDB, and React.JS. We are looking for a senior web designer, a senior Front End Engineer, and a Senior Backend Engineer. For the senior web designer position, we're looking for someone to give us a strong visual direction and experience in CSS, JS, or React are definitely plusses but not required.

We have an awesome work environment: We are a remote first company. We do continuous integration, continuous deployments, code reviews, code pairings, profit sharing, and most of communication is async via GitHub.

We value super strongly transparency, do open books, have a public roadmap, and contribute to the EFF.

Apply at: https://serpapi.com/team
Government could enforce both of these. Threaten universities to either split off their commercial activities or to lose tax benefits. And tax endowments.
see: http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html

It’s not said very much, but this style of dehumanization is really corrosive in a way that directly benefits the worst forms of human governments and structures, and this fact goes i think genuinely unrecognized too often in tech-land.

if we really are p-zombies, then those people aren’t really suffering, right, so it’s fine …
Colorado River deadline passes with no deal on voluntary water cuts
KEY POINTS

- The seven states that rely on the drought-stricken Colorado River failed to meet a Jan. 31 federal deadline to strike a deal on voluntarily cutting their water use.

- After negotiations reached a standstill, six of the seven states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — submitted a “consensus-based modeling alternative.”

- The proposal notably excludes California, the largest user of the Colorado River. Officials said the state will release its own plan.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/31/colorado-river-shortage-stat...
I always assumed this started as a USSR psyops.
In that case we are basically fucked. Nobody is going to be elected on a platform of banning things that are fun.

All human action is individual human action. It got us into this problem, and is the only thing thay will fix it.
When you have a team with predominantly back-end knowledge expertise using a templating language they are familiar with plays to their strengths. MVC applications were written for over a decade. Perhaps it is a subjective thing because I don't see any logical difficulty in a web page that exchanges partials instead of JSON. I was programming that way for over 10 years.

Svelte really sounds compelling from what you're telling me. I'll check it out. But unless it is a drastic simplification it brings with it the fundamentals of effectively writing a thick client in JavaScript or TypeScript and all the things that come with it. React and angular have left a very bad taste in my mouth. The time and code cost for building basic user interfaces should go down not up. We should be spending less time talking about how to do something and more time talking about what to do
Location: NYC

Remote: Only

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Mac, Adobe Suite, Davinci Resolve, Maya, Blackmagic Pocket 6k

Résumé/CV: https://www.dynomikeprods.com/gallery

Email: mikey@dynomikeprods.com

Hello! Just thought I'd put my info out here. I am motion graphics artist and filmmaker. I have freelancing for three years. I have eleven years of experience using After Effects. I work with artists, companies, and everyone in between. Looking for freelance or full time positions.
b-but... I thought being technically correct was the best kind of correct! /s

Seriously though thanks for articulating the tree-like nature of truth. Being an expert requires the ability to understand a topic at all levels in a consistent manner. ChatGPT just models the language, not the actual concepts.
yeah. the "grow at any cost" mindset that used all this water unwisely will ultimately lead to many problems.

another example of short-term thinking and decision making resulting in severe long-term loss.

"The bill comes due. Always."
On the Internet, all the output we have is text on a page. We may be quickly approaching a world where it is impossible to distinguish a human on the Internet from a bot on the Internet. If the output cannot be used to distinguish bot vs. human, does it really matter who created that output?

Did ChatGPT generate the above output?
That's what I mean exactly.

I'm glad we were never in the situation where this would have been thinkable. Because it would mean direct war between superpowers.
"Fortunately, there are many ways to prevent such banners from infecting your computer. One could give Microsoft a taste of its own medicine by disabling TPM to render the computer "incompatible" with Windows 11 (this potentially increases security risks, so proceed only if you are 100% sure turning off TPM will not break anything on your system). Also, paying attention and reading what your computer tries to say, regardless of how vague the descriptions are, dramatically reduces the chances of getting unplanned upgrades"
It's not. Zoos are depressing as hell.
I had a bad experience using Dr. Bronner's as body soap. It really disrupted my natural barrier. However, for non-skin purposes, I think it's an excellent general purpose soap.
Can you write a function in a REPL and run it instantly? Can you easily inspect intermediate results?

In this regard I love Haskell's REPL mode, it's really productive for prototyping. It has a worse discoverability / autocompletion story than Python REPL though.
Have you made any attempt to determine how effective such "personal responsibility" methods are at actually avoiding surveillance, and/or do you have any thoughts on how you might go about finding out? A follow-up on this topic, perhaps interviews with people who'd know, might be of interest.

I do like the piece, as a demonstration of the difficulty / cost / inconvenience of actually opting out of pervasive surveillance. As a work of performance art your blog post is excellent. (A point several people commenting in this thread seem to have spectacularly missed.)
Rails , it has everything you need to build a reliable MVP fast, with good test coverage and solid architecture design.
A lack of compassion when it comes to automation replacing professionals like lawyers, accountants, and even doctors is understandable.

Dealing with those kinds of professionals as a client is often a dehumanizing and unpleasant experience for many people.

Much of the time, such dealings aren't particularly wanted to begin with. Those seeking the services of such professionals have often been forced into it in some way, many times by government or by government-imposed systems.

Not only are such dealings an unwanted burden, but they're often extremely costly (financially, and in terms of time and effort), with the clients sometimes receiving poor service, as well as little, if any, real benefit in the end.

It doesn't surprise me at all that people would be eager to see technologies that may help them avoid, or potentially reduce the cost of, having to deal with those kinds of professionals.
That would be an instant chargeback on my part
Maybe. The mass of an explosive could be pretty small compared to the mass of a satellite. And even if you do notice that your (secret military) satellite is slightly heavier than the spec says, what would you do about it?
Conspiracy theories are like crack cocaine for some humans - they get stuck in the quick dopamine cycle of self-actualization of "knowing" something most people don't.
From Wikipedia:

> A NASA history of the Hubble,[24] in discussing the reasons for switching from a 3-meter main mirror to a 2.4-meter (94 in) design, states: "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites".

This, to me, says that KH-11 came first...
> You think Elon Musk, of PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and many more, doesn't know that a business has to make money?

The problem with this argument is that there is no certain attribution, except in the case of Twitter. The only property of his where we are certain that it is him making the decisions is Twitter.

Musk has some extremely talented individuals under his employment at his other properties.

And to be clear, the only thing he has ever founded is SpaceX.

Musk's comments in the past few months have shown exactly how intelligent he is. He is nothing more than a rich kid, who made some good investments, and then claimed the work of his employees as his own.

The man purchased the company stock at a meme price.
Hey OP, I emailed you.
I remember when I started programming this was one of the first quirks that really surprised me, I can just hear myself exclaiming "This is meant to be random! Why do I keep getting the same result?!"

I feel strangely vindicated seeing this change.
Does that napkin math subtract the cost of the same delivery flight but without the stunt?

I didn't read about the flight but I assume that delivery was happening anyway, with or without the stunt. I am guessing it took an hour or two extra, so the fuel and pilot salary cost should only be what was extra in addition to the regular flight amount?
But it's not memorized. The "poem" in the case of the machine learning model is constructed from a general algorithm. Similar to how 2x+1 has no concept of 3.

When you input a 1, it does a *2 operation and a +1 operation and produces a 3. Nothing is memorized. 3 arises as a side effect of unrelated transformation operations.
Yes. Make sure you are sending people notifications that are relevant to them, instead of sending all your employees the firehose and relying on them to pay close attention on the off chance something they need to know actually slips in.
Seems like I just read on HN an article on Antarctic weather patterns (but not ice floes) are self-reinforcing.
Tested just now:

Q: In kotlin, how would you implement a function that takes a string and returns boolean true iff the string is palindromic, otherwise false?

A:

> Here is an example implementation of a palindrome checking function in Kotlin:

kotlin

fun isPalindrome(s: String): Boolean {
val cleaned = s.filter { it.isLetterOrDigit() }.toLowerCase()
return cleaned == cleaned.reversed()
}

> This implementation first removes any non-letter and non-digit characters and converts the string to lowercase. Then, it checks if the cleaned string is equal to its reversed form. If they are equal, the function returns true, otherwise false.

Bonus test of the 'new mathematical ability and accuracy' claimed in the modal intro on login:

Q: what's 16 times 9 times 5 times 7?

A: The expression 16 * 9 * 5 * 7 evaluates to 7560.

Oops!
> Relaxing neck is... checks notes gendered somehow?

Yup, lots of things are gendered. I know it's a bummer, but here we are.

This, for example, would not be considered a traditionally masculine pose, despite the facial hair:

https://media.phillyvoice.com/media/images/JVNPhotoCourtesy....
Trying similar tactics in Vegas and reporting on the shenanigans might be amusinteresting.
For the most part, the dams don't ultimately effect how much water comes down the Colorado--please correct if I'm wrong. It's more a question of controlling flows and generating electricity.

Although a lot of people would argue that, in retrospect, the Glen Canyon Dam was not a good tradeoff. (And there were serious studies around building at least one dam in the Grand Canyon itself.)
> The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discovery, acceptance, mutual aid, egalitarianism, free thought.

I tend to disagree that these are objectively good.

One argument against is that any society that holds these as ideals will quickly be over run by societies that don't.

Being disagreeable can have adaptive advantages.
Well at least now future readers will know you view project [file] management as yak shaving.

My work here is done. Whoever reads this will know what is there and what is not there with one setup or the other.
I'm not sure many people who actually worked on reliability expected imminent implosion.

It's more like thinking the seed of eventual destruction was probably planted.

From a reliability perspective, there's probably two interesting forms of failure here.

One is latent, like shutting off backups. Like yeah, you can shut them off and nothing bad will happen imminently, but eventually something bad will happen, and that will be a very bad day. Firing an entire team of experts in a system is kinda like getting rid of backups or probably closer to making backups but not testing them. If you don't test your backups, maybe you will be fine, or maybe you won't.

The other is corrosive. Imagine upsetting a companies most impactful devs while simultaneously shrinking growth prospects. How are you going to hire amazing devs when the devs you have left are kinda mediocre or working due to coercion (h1b) rather than more positive reasons? What do you think Twitters sales pitch is to potential new hires?

Reliability/security/etc are all types of maintenance where most of the time you don't have a problem, but sometimes the little hook on your power line fails, resulting in the live cable hitting trees that weren't trimmed, on a forest rife with fuel that results in billions of dollars of damage. The lower the investment, the higher the chance of failure, every individual failure has the chance to compound with other failures into catastrophic failure.
Not all of us can be making new things and solving new problems, however..
> It is naive in the sense in that it actively tries to discourage people from trying and learning including the ones who can because they will have this brain virus implanted into their minds that they can't do something because of some unchangeable factor

No one's discouraging anything. Differences in cognitive abilities should be no more surprising than differences in ability to jump and run, thus resulting in differences in one's ability to be a professional basketball player.

It is simply a fact that most people cannot play in the college level basketball, let alone the NBA. This should not be surprising, nor does this fact discourage people from playing basketball causally for fun or fitness. I'm not sure why this exact same argument would suddenly be discouraging when applied to cognitive activities.
Disneyland is a metaphor for 21st century life.

Avoiding that last comes at rather higher costs.
Flightaware link: https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N863GT

(FR24 makes it difficult to see on mobile & in general)
Yeah that's fine. But you have to consider that an article called "LLM discourse needs more nuance" will never make it in the /new sub page on HN. There is so much competition that uses the same tricks but potentially less apparent than what meets the eye. Please try writing something meaningful yourself and make it work. Headline is the only thing that defines the CTR on HN, so a submitter has to make it stand out, there is no other way.
I have the top-left corner on MacOS set to act as a "hot corner." Whenever my mouse goes there, it triggers exposé, showing all my windows to me. I got the habit from using gnome3, which does this by default, and find it quite handy with muscle memory.
If a developer coded a slow app in react they will code a slow app in svelte. We need to stop blaming the language.
Imagine being the people knowing how beautiful the canyon is still deciding to flood it and, for all they know, hide the canyon forever. I couldn't do it.