skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Need advise whether I should continue on the Master's degree
I have started the second semester of a master's degree in Computer science and I am unsure whether it is the right for me.

I think the subjects I have chosen are interesting and I enjoy the challenge but when I am done with the day or done preparing for the lecture, I feel 'empty' inside. I have only felt excited and wanting to learn more for few selected subjects. It feels like as I am taking the degree for the sake of it without a goal to aim for. I have had a few programming hobby projects with the goal of improving my skills and making software I would use but I have not finished any of them. I felt that the project had no purpose that deeply mattered to me.

I have been working as a software developer for a year prior starting on the master's program. The days did not feel boring and I enjoyed the challenges, discussing and drawing architecture of services I had to make. The implementation was still fun but not as enjoyable as the design part.

I have considered dropping out to try to pick a software development job which has a stronger focus on helping people, such as developing hearing aids, or with a focus on the environment to see if I enjoy the field more. And learn the skills I need as I go when I see a need for it in my career. But am I shooting myself in the foot by doing this?

Do you think I feel this because I have chosen the wrong degree? Or because I am missing a 'why'?
"Personally, I've been annoyed at how confidently wrong ChatGPT can be. Even when you point out the error and ask it to correct the mistake it comes back with an even-more-wrong answer"

That also happens with real people so...
A web search also returns wrong answers, because it is not magic. It just searches through all the garbage out there.
You just have to be aware of its flaws and limitations... as you do with you fellow humans.
I think yes, at least for coding. Pre-ChatGPT, when I was working with an unfamiliar language or framework, my workflow would be:
google something -> skim top links for what looks helpful -> click on one of them -> parse through mountains of SEO'd text -> get the answer.

The workflow I have now with ChatGPT and what I image it will look like in the new era of search is:
query -> read result written for a human, not a search engine -> (10% of the time) check if the result is hallucinated.

Especially for basic questions where I know what the answer should look like, I'm really enjoying the new workflow.
A website that breaks this easy maybe is an indication of you not caring about the little details that make the difference enough
Damn, I hate to plug products on HN, but I'd say that the New Yorker is the one subscription I've loved maintaining throughout my life. First got it right out of college and appreciate it 20 years later.

Everyone is publishing think pieces about ChatGPT - yawn. But only the New Yorker said, hmm, how about if we get frickin' Ted Chiang to write a think piece? (It is predictably very well written.)
> "How dare they make requests to 3rd parties"

That's exactly right. It's a "Personal Computer". There is no reason (that is in the best interest of the PC's "Owner") for it to connect to "Data Research" 3rd parties with a fresh install of Windows.
> the NHS does provide excellent care, but it's not free. The fact that the British won't come to terms with this is causing its collapse:

This is complete nonsense. The British public knows very well that the HNS is (or was) and should be "free at point of use", and also paid for via tax. The public want it and want it well funded. The current British political establishment does not like this state of things and seeks to privatise it, but due to the popularity of the NHS, cannot just come out and and say it.

"That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital."
I hate to see this rhetoric on HN. I considered this one of the last bastions of rational, open, and unbiased discourse. I suppose "Eternal September" comes for all.

As a member of the Black and Asian community (and others), first I'd like to say. What? Since when did Black people (en masse) begin assigning any manner of blame to the Jewish community as the "real enemies?" Aside from a one particular prominent rap artist and one very fringe religious group, no one I know or any of the Black online communities I frequent have ever said such. If there was a newsletter, I sure as hell didn't get it.

Regarding the Black on Asian violence we saw in the US. It was and is a damned shame. Again, as a member of those communities, it hurts. However, I know I walk the fine line of whataboutism here, but I have to make it known. The increase in Asian hate was not led by Black Americans (but the reporting of it sure as hell made it look that way). I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which group was the number one culprit of such vile acts -- from simple assault to mass murder. Regardless, no matter the culprit, any act of violence based on race is absolutely and utterly reprehensible.

We don't need a designated "bad guy" in order to address these horrible events. We all need to do better.

[Edit]
I seemed to have ruffled some feathers here.
Thank you! I've been using Nushell for a couple of weeks and at this point I don't see myself going back. Modern configuration. Great interactive usage (structured data, mostly!). I thought I'd like it, but more so than expected so far. The one shortcoming I've encountered so far is that some built-in functions seem to buffer all their input before producing any output, meaning I can't e.g. tail + filter logs. A fairly simple example:

journalctl -xefu systemd-networkd-wait-online.service | lines | filter {|in| $in =~ 'start'}

only produces output when I interrupt (ctrl+c). Is this expected?
What makes you think this is a relevant response? Everybody knows that the NHS is funded by taxes. This is not a secret, there's not some common misconception that health care isn't actually paid for with money. "Your fellow citizens [paid]" isn't the gotcha you seem to think it is.
Anyone questioning Lebron’s drive should rewatch the 2016 NBA Finals. It was an all-time example of an underdog willing themselves to win, in any sport.
Not a single interview since mid november.

edit: this is rapidly becoming an interview about my job search and I don't really have the energy for it. I've answered the questions I feel like answering and I'm good for now.
I am amazed with both how right and wrong it can be. It can give impressive responses and fail spectacularly
> The only economic conditions that matter to any company is whether they will be able to continue earning money the way they have been.

This is clearly not true, although it is probably the most important thing.

Interest rates matter if a company financed expansion using debt. Cost of capital matters if your plan is to grow through VC and you're not yet profitable. Changes in these areas can change a company whose books add up to one that doesn't.
So what you’re saying is that they not just trained it on text, but also verified the answers and trained it in such a way that it would get a negative feedback if the model gave the wrong answer?
> Culture is whatever bubbles up when humans do things without a purely economic or practical motive.

I think you have a good take on culture. I would suggest that culture is emergent.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259006095_The_Emerg...
This, I think, seems to be the important thing that seems glossed over in news articles. At certain income, the economy is doing great. But that is within the group that, historically, has always done well. When you have enough money, a lot of pain can be made largely removed.

Now, it is only anecdata. I am in IL. My household is above average in terms of income for US and my state. We are struggling ( not as much as so many other Americans, but I can't say I am comfortable say.. buying a new car or remodeling kitchen or even taking a vacation ) and it is not like we are throwing money at random indulgences and we did not even start school for our kid yet. By all metrics I should be in a comfortable enough position ( and I guess I am by comparison ), but to me outlook is choppy. And it is not just the boom/bust cycle. I am talking real systemic issues that will take both massive tax hikes and services reductions, but that would not be a popular message to take so no one talks about it.

I remember working sub $20k job. I remember being bumped to $30k ( ~US median? ) and I can't even begin to imagine anyone having to live on that today.

In short, I agree.
I think it's flow order.

But then you could say the same about forth.

get_users filterActiveUsers sortByDateCreated getEmail

Would be valid forth. But that doesn't seem to match people's brain in the same way.

Maybe humans are weird and inconsistent?

Or maybe it's because it would end up as
& "file" -f 5 --bar get_users?

Although the shell doesn't really parse the options so you could cheat a bit and do

&Get_users -f "file" --bar 5

Which to me seems more readable than standard shell.
I think this especially true when someone is explicitly remaking something in Rust to make it more performant

"X but in Rust" IME almost always implies something with at best feature parity, but also debloated code
> UI isn't a fashion show.

Yes, it is. At least, it is for UI designers.
Yep. The most amusing one is "Unfortunately, we didn’t figure out how to deal with slowdowns".

Come on, you would see it if you just get to any other coffee point and sit for a day looking at how it works. Like, you know, the old, pre-Google way.

Or use that Google to find out the challenges in running a coffee point. It's not like they were the first one ever doing that.
They sent the company an email at 3pm saying 8% of the company was being laid off, then sent Zoom meeting invites to the people being laid off 2 hour later. They didn’t tell us.
Also maybe: that scene in Airplane!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSi6iF9kVBs
This is cool; I got such a kick out of the rowing machine!
Because once a company becomes publicly traded, that's not what the expectations are.
Huh didn't know "eke" was the right spelling, thanks
Season 19 is where PC Principal gets introduced.

https://youtu.be/bpQj4fCG8VI
You don't need to correct every wrong thing you read. In fact you will probably feel much better if you don't ever do it at all, or at least take a break for while.
I prefer working in an office, but I don't prefer it to the tune of thousands of dollars a year in transportation costs and ~10 days per year of driving during rush hour (plus all the extra micromorts and risk of much higher costs that come with that).
Man, it's almost like black people are people too and susceptible to the same faults as those with a lighter complexion, and being part of an oppressed class does not grant you immunity to being an oppressor
Oh hell yeah !
The UI doesn't look that old fashioned to me. It doesn't look like a website - it looks like an application (which is appropriate).
Ask HN: What is the best database structure to store Big Data?
Asking HN data engineers for opinions and recommendations:

I am building on top of the blockchain data using Google Cloud and Bigquery however the queries for most of the data is just too slow and takes a long time.

I believe there is huge improvement in database tools as well as new DBs popping up. Are there any recommendations that I can implement to make my SQL queries much faster?

Two that I came across is trino.io and Apache Spark. Anyone used these before and saw noticeable performance changes?
Evidently you cannot tell the difference between scientists & policymakers being "wrong" because science is self-correcting and actively seeks out its prior wrong/less-right answers, vs people actively and knowingly spreading deliberate lies as part of campaigns for personal scams or political aggression.

There is no "appeal to authority" here; Hotez IS one of the worlds leading authorities on both vaccines and anti-science aggression, which is exactly what it is.

Of course, you are free to believe the liars over the people who are actually doing the hard work of figuring out the real science.

But do not pretend that you are doing anyone any good. I'm sure you feel all self-righteous "sticking it to the man" and aggressively countering a leading expert, and partaking of (pseudo-)"knowledge" that is exclusive to you (self-)select insiders. This is a known and scientifically studied part of the attraction of conspiracy and junk science. While you pride yourself to not being a slave to the "authorities", you are merely a slave to the scammers and hucksters.

It is not your belief in some "contrarian" tropes that makes you a free thinker.

What would make you a free thinker is the ability to look at evidence and science and freely adjust your beliefs accordingly.
I'm beginning to understand that there are many definitions of "search engine", and that has caused much confusion to me. I would say that the use case you describe here is nothing even close to the sort of problem that a search engine addresses. It's more of a knowledge engine thing (and even that's a poor fit, really).

When I think "search engine", I think of something that searches for web pages. What I want as a result isn't an answer, meal plan, grocery list, or any of that higher-order stuff. I want a list of websites.

This reinforces my fear that this sort of approach might kill actual search engines. That would be a pretty serious loss to me, and a further reduction in the usefulness of the web. But saying that is not disparaging things like ChatGPT at all. They address a different, and valid, need.

I just hope we don't lose an important tool in the process.
Yes, a great example of bullshit from ChatGPT.

For those who don't know, it is like Markov Chains: probability of next word (or a group of words encoded as a token) is calculated based on previous words and computationally intensive. It just uses not just probability between 1-2 previous tokens, it uses 2048 token window (roughly 1500 words) to predict next token, then puts next token into window and goes on.
Yeah, I guess I need to go to counseling to get rid of my addiction to food and shelter…

I have never been responsible for firing anyone in my life.
1. I don't understand how LLMs work.

2. I don't understand how ChatGPT works, but I have used it a few times.

3. I will use ChatGPT as the absolute measure of what LLMs are capable of.

---

1. I don't understand intelligence.

2. Humans are intelligent, humans can learn to do math.

3. LLMs are not good at math.

4. LLMs are not intelligent, they're just text compression.

---

1. I don't understand how LLMs work.

2. I have a decent grasp of how image compression works.

3. I will use my grasp of image compression to pretend LLMs are text compression.

4. I will apply all limitations of image compression to LLMs.

5. "What use is there in having something that rephrases the Web? If we were losing our access to the Internet forever and had to store a copy on a private server with limited space, a large-language model like ChatGPT might be a good solution, assuming that it could be kept from fabricating. But we aren’t losing our access to the Internet. So just how much use is a blurry jpeg, when you still have the original?"

---

What's funny is that the author has produced exactly what many claim LLMs to be useless for - flowery words that seem true but are not.

I don't think this should've been published.

These are both good reads if you find yourself tending to agree with the author -

- Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682

- Why Can GPT Learn In-Context? Language Models Secretly Perform Gradient Descent as Meta-Optimizers - https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10559v2
It is a very small PDF library that I have written myself in C++. I am planning to release the source, but haven't decided on the license yet. It is very limited in features compared to the whole PDF specification but I am planning to keep adding to it.
I fucking hate it when they talk about integer number of HUMANS as a mere percent (potentially a floating point value)
Does this mean vale can only support 256 memory generations? Or is there a way to handle more?

> The technique could theoretically also be used for RC'd languages to allow taking references to the interior of objects, which (I believe) would help those languages close the gap between them and high-performance languages like Rust, Zig, Vale

I don’t understand how it would make any difference. You would still need update the reference count, which is what makes rc expensive. It would make accessing slightly faster, because you don’t need to mask the top bits but that wouldn’t make up for the bigger cost.
Rape is a (reprehensible) form of sex.

I am anti-rape, but I am not anti-sex.
To be fair, it’s much easier to have a collaborative view on life once you’re financially independent or have exceeded your goals.

The unpaid college star that couldn’t make the NBA and is now struggling to make ends meet might not see life as a collaborative game.
Data Engineering Podcast with Omni Analytics
Same. Ripping the bandaid off is always better.
> We don't need a designated "bad guy" in order to address these horrible events. We all need to do better.

Also:

> I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which group was the number one culprit of such vile acts

I think everyone hates to see this on HN. Implying that your "and we know which race is responsible" is unbiased is...something else.
I mean, you wanna be a family man, ... that's great?

But yeah, of course, if we're tuning in to watch basketball .... of course we wanna watch the savage competitors like Jordan crush his competition. That's the excitement of watching sports. Not their private lives.

Nobody is tuning in nor paying expensive season tickets to watch a guy be a family man.

So yeah.... that's why people are obsessed with Jordan and every great/promising player henceforth in the NBA until the end of time will be measured against that yardstick.
It would be nice if they could work with Proton to get an integrated mail/calendar solution in place. Not a huge fan of the daemon I have to run to sync Thunderbird with Protonmail.
Yes, but not quite how some people are expecting.

Imagine asking someone with cursory knowledge of a subject matter to perform a google search for you. This person would dig through thousands of results and weed-out the junk/SEO/content farm sites, so you'd get information that's more relevant. LLMs could potentially do this quickly, separating the wheat from the chaff. Would it be perfect? No, but it would be a significant improvement over what you see on Google today.
>#2. Don't become a software company! Unless your business is software, stay out of the software business. This person built lovely software for... delivering coffee? That's expensive, not necessary, and puts you in the software development and maintenance business forever.

The shared experience seems to lead to the opposite, making money brewing and delivering coffee doesn't work, but the software can be re-purposed and re-sold (hopefully with some margin), so maybe it was a software company with a side-activity useful for field testing since the beginning.

But, honest question, aren't the resources used (and connected costs) too much?

6 or 7 programmers/engineers (including the post author) for three months (a part of them 24/7) to build the app and site?

Maybe it is ready to scale and what not, but it sounds (to me) like a pretty simple kind of software.
out of interest, what do you believe the point was?
I don't generally agree, but when I hear about the lives of members of Japan's royal family it does appear that you have something of a point. They are basically prisoners in a very gilded cage.
Yes, it is a C++ library I have created and compiled to WebAssembly.
Here is the iCalendar-file to remember the event:[0]

[0] https://osmcal.org/event/1873.ics
> In civilized countries, somebody else would pay for it.

Why is this civilized?
"Race" does not exist - it is a completely arbitrary, social construct. Genetics do exist. Different people are going to have different sets of abilities that are grounded in genetics. This is a very uncomfortable idea, for a variety of reasons, even without viewing it through the false, distorted lens of "race". Many people would rather keep their heads in the sand, simply because they wish it to be true that all people are created "equal". Indeed, this is the foundation for of the DEI movement, which puts forth that outcomes are based purely on oppression, systemic discrimination, a lack of opportunities, and so forth. This is not to say that all of those things are not issues, but it is to say that if we want a world in which everyone has an opportunity to succeed and thrive, it is not useful to keep our collective head in the sand about the reality of genetics.
All true and well said. But my crazy aunt repeating falsehoods she read on Facebook is most certainly not sciencing even up to the imperfect standards of Galileo.

Just because some legit scientists were dismissed as quacks does not make every quack a scientist.
Yeah, they should work on fixing bugs, improving performance, fixing search and adding some features. The UI is fine, it is the best thing of Thunderbird.
The Glass Onion scene with him was my favorite part of the movie.
I don't necessarily disagree about the costs of decentralization, but will say that it appears to rely on some assumptions like that the family won't be providing any care, etc.

I don't think that doctors and nurses are the limiting factor for home care, but rather CNA's and home health aides - basically people that check in on patients around the clock and make sure they're kept clean and attended to.

In the context of the US system, your original comment is just completely off the mark. Our healthcare system is universally terrible, independent of the cost ("not my job" at every level). Consigning a elderly person to that system is basically the last thing anybody wants to do, hence the focus on dying at home etc.

I can't speak about Germany's system. But it's worth remembering that money is not equivalent to resources, and that spending an imprudent amount of money on elder care right now doesn't imply that there won't be resources left for you later. Whether the system is "burnt to the ground" has more to do with if the institution is destroyed or hollowed out, rather than how much it costs.
If anything, it reflects a greater degree of logical rigor:

1) It's commonly taken as a simple fact that overrepresentation of white people among e.g. the top hedge fund managers is evidence of society being structured in those people's favor

2) Jews are way more overrepresented among top hedge fund managers than non-Jewish whites

3) ...

Obviously the missing piece here is that (taken as a whole; obviously "Jews" comprises many different groups) Jewish people, on average, are culturally and genetically predisposed to success in intellectual fields. However, if you notice this but grow up in a climate where cultural and genetic reasons for group success are verboten, the nefarious explanations are the ones left.
I love this app!! The UI is super fast and the demo is well made. I think either way you’ll find users, tho it is a crowded space - the most important part is whether you personally find it useful I think :)

I think you’d get a lot of the features people are complaining about missing, namely around mobile usage, by having this just be a GUI for editing markdown files. Markdown is amazing, it can definitely store all these states, and can be edited with a plain ol text editor if you don’t have time to write a phone app.

For an example of how powerful “a gui that stores its content as specialize markdown” can be, see obsdidian.