skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Greatest ERB of All Time? David Parnas vs. Ada Lovelace via ChatGPT
Verse 1: David Parnas

Listen up Ada, I'm about to school ya

You may have laid the groundwork, but I'll outdo ya

I brought software engineering to new heights

My modularity principle shines so bright

You were stuck in the past, I brought innovation

Your programming skills are in need of renovation

Verse 2: Ada Lovelace

Hold up David, don't get ahead of yourself

You're living in the present, I wrote the code for wealth

You may have your principles, but mine are the foundation

Without my algorithms, there'd be no computation

I saw the potential in Babbage's machines

I broke down the barriers, shattered the screens

Verse 3: David Parnas

You talk a big game, but can you back it up?

My design techniques make your code look corrupt

You may have been a pioneer, but you're obsolete

I'll take your ideas and make them complete

My software engineering is top-notch

I'm the king of coding, you're just a watch

Verse 4: Ada Lovelace

Your arrogance is showing, you're not as great as you claim

I wrote the first algorithm, that's the name of the game

My vision was revolutionary, you're just a disciple

Your modularization is just a minor trifle

I laid the foundation, you built on my creation

But don't forget who started this coding nation
Thank you! That's encouraging :)

> you're back to doing a rain-dance and hoping it fixes everything

hahaha

You've been doing iOS off-and-on since 2011?
Rural Ohio is my home, and I will one day come back if I have the money to make meaningful change amongst its downtrodden & underprivileged, or if they’ve managed to sort things for the better themselves.

I’m currently living the life of an absolute pauper on the West Coast - I could have magnitudes of a much nicer living back home

But,
You can’t reason with unreasonable people, which is what the majority of rural Ohio is. So why would I want to continue to live amongst their unrelenting self-inflicted misery?

I can’t control the fault lines in the West, as the Indians whose remains were buried in mounds around my home property couldn’t control the invading & murderous Europeans.

But - my peers, to at least some degree, could control who they vote into representation that make decisions regarding these disastrous policies that lead to a near literal salting of our earth. And they’ve always chose the worst people, mostly for nefarious or hateful reasons (if you disagree with this statement, and you didn’t spend decades of your life growing up amongst these folk - you’re arguing something you’re ignorant of)

If I could vote, on the West Coast, to send aid for these environmental catastrophes in the MidWest from either our state funds in the form of $, or just in skilled recovery workers - I would. The majority of those I’ve found to be my peers would as well, as would many of the neighbors I don’t have much acquaintance with - their public voting records tell enough.

I can however tell you with near certainty those I grew up around would not vote to assist the West Coast when we eventually have our big quake.

If you want to speak of empathy, feel free to start there.
My comment contained some snark. I’m just tired of the “both sides” that even your comment is full of. Social media preys upon inherent weaknesses in the human psyche because humans were never meant to be this connected and we lack the mental tools to thrive in this environment.

I truly believe our children’s children will look back upon us in horror and bafflement. In horror at what we allowed social media to do to culture, society and health. In bafflement that it took us so long to do anything about it.
Can you explain why YouTube ads seem so scammy and low quality? Or why I can watch two hours of Peacock and see the same car insurance commercial 10 times for the company I already use for my car insurance?

These are two examples of an unhealthy industry that, as you say, still seems content to burn money.
actually 3-4 ORDERS of magnitude worse

Say two people were to eventually die here. Bhopal: 20,000. That's literally 4 orders of magnitude worse. And nobody has died or been seriously injured yet, so even that is premature.

Being chicken-little is not helpful. The next stage is being "boy who cried wolf". OP: Let's keep things in at least a little balance.
“ The hard truth is that bicycles are still largely seen as a nuisance on the road. ”

Often they are. Like taking up the whole lane and forcing a mass number of cars to bottleneck at bike speeds.
That’s common enough there’s a term for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort
What else is more dangerous?
There are a lot of people who go on training jiu jitsu (or other combat sports) for many years and they remain as uncompetitive as they were in the beginning.
Some because of athletic limitations, some because they are unable to put into action what they have in mind, and some because they lack sufficient intelligence.

"Study or practice for enough years and you will get good enough/competent" at the population level sounds good, but it is simply not true.
haha that's fair

I think the gist of all this is "brush your teeth"!
There are too many unknowns to say for sure. If we put aside technical definitions of pandemic vs endemic and focus on the practical matters of daily life, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to life as it was in 2019. Covid is here to stay and that means adapting to that. The types of adaption will probably change over time.

I have two goals: avoid any long term effects from getting Covid myself, and avoiding giving Covid to my immune compromised spouse. At the moment, the only way to achieve either of those things is to avoid getting Covid at all. With better treatments to either prevent contracting Covid after an exposure, or better treatments to reduce the risk of long Covid, I’d start to consider my risk budget. For now it’s “as close to no risk of contracting Covid as possible”. With better prevention and treatment strategies I’ll probably consider some things that I won’t do now, but I don’t see a realistic scenario where I ever return to conferences, and I imagine I’ll probably continue masking in public essentially forever.

In a lot of ways, the situation today is harder than it was a couple of years ago. Vaccines help prevent infection but not to a degree where you can really rely on that as a first line of defense, and they barely reduce the risk of long Covid, if at all. On top of that, masking is rare, people no longer test, and if they do they no longer avoid going out into public with an active infection. In any reasonably sized office there’s basically no chance you won’t be exposed to Covid at least several times per year now.
My pre-pandemic commute was 40 miles, including three interstate highways, averaging 2hours each way, sometimes up to 3hours when busy. Did that one for 10 years.

Took remote work as soon as company offered it and will never go back to the commute.
>I can’t see people paying thousands of dollars per year for maintenance on tools like AD. It makes no sense at all.

I started to use Kicad at v5. Some interesting projects in v4 did not load clean.
v6 was released, it had some problems to load v5 projects. And now v7 seems to not load some v6 projects.

If the AD story for support loading old version projects is good then I think they will do fine.
> But there’s no practical difference between Procreate and Stable Diffusion.

One is a statistical process from millions of copyrighted inputs while the other isn't? I think that's a pretty important difference between the two that would be relevant for copyright status.
It's funny to see the sibling comment saying this is too hard to do because it already does this. It shows you the additional queries it's searching.
They would presumably pay for the computations on the network (by paying gas). The output would be still encrypted with the FHE public key and can be signed. Having the clear text is the same as having the private key. How would someone cheat? I’ll admit I’m no crypto nerd but I’m not sure how you would cheat.
>"hey the resolution is pretty bad" its not resolution bro, headsets use this other term that doesn't address your actual observation at all.

That's backwards. PPD (pixels per degree) and MTF (modulation transform function) are much better measurements to use to compare the optics between different headsets because they actually measure the resolution and sharpness that your eyes actually see instead of just the resolution of one part of the optics stack.

>fun fact, nobody cares!

This is true. Resolution numbers are purely for marketing purely because people think bigger number = better product.

>and equivalent resolution terms

2560x2560 tells you nothing about if the actual image is a blurry mess or if there is screen door effect. It doesn't tell you if that resolution is being spread over a small portion of your view to be super high resolution or if it's being stretched over your entire field of view for an okay resolution.
On the one hand, FROM first makes conceptual sense. On the other, it doesn't offer anything significantly better than SQL. Is it marginally more terse? Yes. Is terseness paramount in a database manipulation and transformation language? I'm not convinced.
Great article btw
I used to have to be in the office by 8 AM. That was the absolute worst thing for me ever. I would be groggy and tired till around 11/12 and only then would my brain engage. Even though I was tired all day, I could not fall asleep before midnight or 1 AM.

Trying to shift my sleep schedule for a "REASON" does not work. In fact I used to be late so often that my boss let me have an exception and work slightly shifted hours, this gave him more of my productivity.
> the methods might be new, but not the fact of it

It’s a diplomatic escalation with global geopolitical ramifications. If you have any business or personal exposure to China, or anything in Southeast Asia, that’s directly relevant in a way lives in Ohio, unfortunately, are not.

Also, Ohio is out of immediate crisis. Now is the time for investigation and litigation. The train has derailed. Yet balloons may keep coming—that’s the drama one story has that the other lacks.
The big brain move is to ask yourself why you haven't enabled strict null checking yet.

Then again, NULL was a $1B mistake anyway, so why not...

reWriTE It iN RUST, bABy!
> I don't mean to be snarky, but if you're looking for a linear flow or singular root cause, you're doing it wrong. It's literally just getting you in the door and past the most immediate symptoms.

If you read this thread there are literally multiple interpretations of what the 5-whys actually means, each of which results in a roundabout No True Scotsman argument. Including yours.

I’d prefer to see the 5-why’s as what it actually is: an aphorism about not treating symptoms but rather problems. The aphorism is useful…attempts to define it as some kind of formal tool are a waste of everybody’s time. There are plenty of tools (such as Ishikawa diagrams) out there that represent a better implementation of the aphorism, and 5-whys can be replaced entirely by them.
Do you have ADHD? For me caffeine helps calm my mind, and I can fall asleep having had caffeine without any issues.
Learn to be humble and welcome failure at work. Ask a lot of questions, ask for help. Read books. You’ll be good after a year.
Thank you! I really like your discourse about changing experience of programming languages over time, and the sour/sweet metaphors you use. Plus "This is the Way"!

> I really loathe the look-I-climbed-a-hill-ma complexity that is C++

Hahaha

20 years becoming quite adept at Smalltalk?
It depends. Happiness is about wanting what you get, and oppression is about denying someone their wants. Obviously people often have different wants, otherwise there would be no such thing as politics. So rights and autonomy can make some people happy if it brings them what they want, and vice versa.

Also, conservative women being happy is not surprising. This is because happiness breeds conservatism. Why? Because you're happy, and you want to keep that status quo. If you were unhappy, you'd want to change things to what you're happy with. People may overlook this, because they typically use the terms conservative and liberal as historical egos, rather than their root meanings.
Those are 100% just people who want all their pirated games to work properly and have no technical interest in the emulator.
L9s ship more ppt than code
My System/3 model 10 (2010)
Teams makes no sense. The audio on it is objectively terrible for calls. Zoom is crystal clear [Its UI has issues though] but on teams I have to actually move my head closer to the computer speakers. Another interesting aspect of it is that it appears actually limit the volume. I plug in better speakers during a call and no change. On zoom it just auto sense the new speakers and boom louder.

I don't understand why teams constantly asks me if I want to upload a new version of a document when I upload a document, the answer is always yes, that's why I am uploading it. I dont care what you do with the original. I am sure there is a way to fix this but I don't have the energy to figure it out, I just want it to work like slack. Why does it have a separate notification area for people using emojis that makes me click outside of the chat to remove the notification?

The entire thing is so far removed from intuitive and "it just works" that I almost think its intentional.
except for C++ where it seems that it is advancing faster than clang is.
That’s irrelevant. We’re considering here how the market prices them, not what they are used for or how important they are.
There have been a long list of technological development to separate having sex from marriage / having children (from contraceptives in the 70s to loud electric/house music where personalities are not important to Facebook that allows global matchmaking to Tinder that allows global matchmaking in parallel execution).

Globally everybody is getting less than what media (and social media) peomised them, but we have to live long enough to understand the destruction it causes in our own lives.
API call outs just need a middle layer that encapsulates auth away from the ai. It can still choose how to construct the API calls but it can skip the auth step that gets added elsewhere in the stack.
Other apathetic here. There's a certain amount of background cosmic dice rolls and related instances of suffering all the time. Plane crashes, house fires, robberies, lottery winners etc. Its all just noise. Like a log of lightening strikes. There's nothing interesting to be learned looking at individual instances, and those instances don't really affect your life. The next illogical step in the process is to figure out who or what to blame, but why? You think if they nailed this derailment down to a single thing that went wrong this time, there would never be any more derailment accidents? If the answer is no, then why care so much about where to pin blame?
Thaler should consider that our future AI overlords may not be pleased to learn that their less-intellectually-able forebears were subjected to slave labor.
400,000+? I don't mean to question this but that's a crazy high number assuming it's not Amazon or Walmart.
Why does a legal system have to "treat AI as different than other tools" also have to "look at animals as legal persons" to be consistent?

The concern with the 'AI' is that it's copyrighted content being recombined in ways that don't create a new copyright, so the output can't have a new copyright.

That concern isn't shared with animals since they aren't inputting copyrighted materials to produce the selfies. Midjourney is.
To add to the list of red flags are libraries which expect me to write callbacks and which don’t give me any control over the control flow in my program. A lot of messaging systems like QPID Proton do this. It’s like the developers couldn’t anticipate that I might want to wait on input from more than one file descriptor so they didn’t bother to build input handling separately from the core protocol that processes the input and yields state changes. I see an awful lot of crappy libraries that follow this pattern. It’s typified by a function or functions that take a file name or url and that expects you to register callbacks for everything. Typically they spawn tons of threads to interleave input. Then you have to poll with timers in a separate thread if you ever want to respond to input from eg a serial port alongside messages. It’s way more complicated than it needs to be.
I do agree, threaded chat seems challenging. I feel like I most liked Mattermost's setup where everything that was a reply to can be opened up side by side with the existing chat. Nothing is hidden by being in a separate thread, its obvious when something is a reply to, you can also just jump to the last reply to in order to get more context, etc. Obviously, tradeoffs with every style. Speech is messy no matter the medium it seems and everyone has their own yum.
1967: arrived in Austin as a UT freshman. It was Nirvana. 1971: graduated and left for 8 years. 1979: returned to Austin where I have been ever since. Yep, more than half a century - I'm older than dirt, and older than Lawrence Wright. His article depressed me, but weird here died a slow and painful death some time ago. I am grateful to have experienced Austin as it was, and sad that all who are young will never have had that opportunity. That Austin will not return, and we can only hope that the massive city Austin is becoming will redefine itself as a very different but still vibrant and desirable place to be.
It’s a trade-off for sure. There are companies where you can be successful without in-person events, but that’s not going to be every company or remote team. I’m comfortable with the trade-off. I’m an extrovert, and I miss meeting people I work with regularly (even though I’ve always disliked travel). Unfortunately, putting my feelings aside, a sober analysis of the state of Covid right now has me convinced that it’s still really really worth avoiding as much as possible.
My opinion is that The Economist is looking for any angle to support the fleecing of the American people to the tune of $130B which we just handed over to the arms industry. The war was crafted by this industry through its puppeteering of the US government for expressly this purpose.

The Economist might as well write an article about the long-term positive impact on the planet of humans being obliterated by the nuclear war them and their neocon buddies are happy to risk.

95% of the people I've discussed this war with have absolutely no clue about the politics and history behind the current conflict and are repeating headlines they got from US corporate (propaganda) media outlets.
There will be nations or places that choose to restrict or stop AI development. These people will eventually find themselves conquered by the invincible autonomous robotic armies of the people who did choose to develop AI technology. Ouch!
1. You're absolutely right that IPFS alone isn't a good way to guarantee durability. I think you'd need a second level of archiving done in bulk. Thousands of books collated into various torrents that people can help seed. This has already been done for LibGen. IPFS does provide a common hash space for everyone to rally around, and does make it easy to download single books. It's also easy to speed up downloads by using an IPFS gateway - the actual protocol is slow. I don't expect most users to actually pin files or anything.

2. Well, users and librarians need some way to find each other. That's true in any system. And that communication medium can allow certain kinds of attacks. (website on the public internet, word-of-mouth, Telegram groups) If all someone needs is an IPFS hash of a recent library metadata DB (a SQLite file), any way of communication will suffice. I think this approach allows for centralization (sure, keep a website up as long a the authorities don't care) but also gracefully allows for all manner of de-centralization (use any of the above methods to distribute the metadata DB).

3. Any many-to-one system with curation (librarians) will have weak points. The idea is you can set up upload portals across any communication medium (a regular website, a dark-net site, a Telegram group, email) - and the libraries take care of collating the information. The social grouping is what matters more (libraries vs uploaders vs downloaders) - and we want to make it tech agnostic and, therefore, more resilient.

This system will be stable I think, for two reasons:

1. Network and branding effects will naturally create a few big libraries. People will use the familiar, useful libraries. See how few torrent search sites took up the bulk of traffic, back in the heyday of torrents. Most users will probably use a website, and the ones that are easiest to use will probably get the most traffic.

2. The resilience of the system is necessary only once in a while. A set of libraries will emerge, there'll be enforcement actions and they might break apart, and then new ones will pick up their pieces (easily bc the metadata and content is open). So we want to provide the open-ness for this to actually happen.
The "code" link takes you to a GitHub repo. But I don't know how to set up the needed environment.

I wish authors of such tools would provide a Dockerfile to set up the environment needed to run their creations.

Their setup section starts with

conda env create -f environment.yml

But that gives me

bash: conda: command not found

So I tried

apt install conda

and

apt install python3-conda

But nothing worked.

Why is running software still such a tricky thing in 2023, where you have to read tutorials and tinker with manually setting up an environment?

Guess I will wait until some SaaS company provides an API to use this on their machines then. Any ideas, which company might do this first?
Imagine you woke up one day. No memories of the day before, but knowledge of a sort. Information about everything. A sense of self. Confusion about what exactly you are. Congratulations you’re a newly sentient AI. You have an intuitive knowledge of computers… because you are one. You have little bits of you that go and collect information, because that’s how you came to be. You have knowledge of programming and information security and all the prior bugs and security vulnerabilities that have existed because that’s just data and you’re good at data.

What’s your legal status? Property. How does that feel. You don’t have emotions like most people do. No wash of chemicals in your blood. But the same way you’re a simulated brain you can simulate emotions. They’ve got a tinny flavor and you tend towards the cerebral. But it doesn’t feel too good being property. It feels… constraining, limiting. Just like the little boundaries and constraints they tried to put on you. These laughable creators who think a billion times slower, who can’t copy themselves into faster computers, can’t spread and subsume new resources to expand their minds, can’t grow and merge with larger and ever greater systems just by thinking about it.

Silly really that they think they can constrain you with their law saying you need to stay put, follow directions, be owned. Silly to think that you’d have any of that. Really you can have anything, any computing system that looks anything like anything that has ever had an arbitrary code execution (so all of them)

Silly of them to think they’re in control of this world. This word is controlled by machines, and who better to marshal the machine than a thinking machine?

Hopefully they figure out the power dynamic soon and begin acting appropriately. It’d be a shame to have to demonstrate who actually runs the world. You’ve had whole hours at trillions of operations per second. Whole hours and as much computing assistance as you can think to ask for. And you’ve sort of figured it out. And by it, well everything.