skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Under these new filters, residents will be able to drive freely around their own neighbourhoods but will be fined up to £70 for driving into other neighbourhoods through the filters. The plan’s aim is to create neighbourhoods in Oxford where ‘essential’ facilities are accessible by a walking distance of up to 15 minutes.

Controversy? I suspect most outside of this community will perceive this as straight up dystopian government sanctioned thuggery shake-downs. Should such fines make their way to the US I would expect to see ear-to-ear grins on the faces of all-the-lawyers if governments are lucky.

Instead of these shenanigans implement the end-goals into the designs of new cities and neighborhoods so that the end goal is the least path of resistance that people just naturally choose the desired result. In other words, favoring engineering before rule of law. In existing cities think-tank ideas for positive incentives so that people decide for themselves to choose the optimal or desired path.
Some nerd on here called it a human "stranglehold" on creativity and art and it's one of the funniest most brain-dead things I have read about AI. It's like so many of these programmers out here can only see programs and tech, and have completely lost touch with their humanity. Another even went so far as to say that, given enough billions of dollars, AI will be churning out art as good as anything fine arts. It's an unbelievably funny take
I've been developing a methodology around prompt engineering that I have found very useful:

From Prompt Alchemy to Prompt Engineering: An Introduction to Analytic Augmentation:

https://github.com/williamcotton/empirical-philosophy/blob/m...

A few more edits and it's ready for me to submit to HN and then get literally no further attention!
26 years ago I wrote this short story for publication in some random SF zine that later got published elsewhere.

https://justinlloyd.li/blog/the-greatest-story-never-sold/
Online fashion retailer Zalando to cut hundreds of jobs
We already know what the post mortems look like. AI black boxes will look a lot like declarative programming black boxes. We don't really know how the code runs, we just ask it nicely to do what we want and then stare at the config files and the docs if it doesn't.

Low code and AI are going to have many of the same failure modes. Until someone combines them and then they'll have exactly the same failure modes.
The nulled instance continues to be available in production, which has different pros and cons than a conventional mock class which is only available when running tests. Seems worth a different name so we can compare and contrast the two.
Accessing the host filesystem from a Nanos guest using 9P
I wonder whether this will change when we get self-aware sentient AIs. What if e.g. Koko the gorilla [0] had made a painting? Could they have claimed copyright with their limited sign language capability?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)
For some majors that 1 semester you had is the entire program.
>> It might be more accurate to say its accepted that it may be involved in particular cases,

It has been confirmed in at least one case "see Glenn Close schizophrenia relative" or something. I think genetic susceptibility IS involved in some cases and presumed to be a factor in many. But this all feels like splitting hairs on words describing probability ;-)
I'm not invested into this future of AI via text yet
Obviously, you produce the less hazardous precursors off premises.
Some of us have families.
Lawyers behaving this way should be forced to earn their keep by registering the copyright. Otherwise it's a pointless flex to exploit those powerless to refuse.
How are you going to show how much a human vs machine wrote? (generally speaking)
At the very least it seems like it's useful for fooling the first tier recruiters who filter people out based on things like resume gaps or not having a particular keyword. It keeps your resume out of the wastebin, at least until you get to chat with the next tier recruiter.
Why would a COVID denier be concerned about vaccine safety? They already didn’t take the vaccine. I think somebody who’d taken the vaccine might be concerned.
Can you provide some? None of those studies ever say “go to bed earlier and wake up earlier” they always say “shoulder shrug make things later”.
"Sutrayana" meaning "not Vajrayana" is typical for Tibetan Buddhism.
‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: Myspace Is a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation

‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: Friendster Is a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation

‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: AOL Instant Messenger Is a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation

‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: Chat rooms are a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation

‘Every Parent’s Nightmare’: Bulletin board systems are a Venue for Child Sexual Exploitation
Sure, but most authors aren't payed for their writing style, they are paid for what they say, for a unique insight, good research, or, if fictional, for a good story arc and suspense. I haven't seen purely AI written pieces that have that. And I am not sure they will with the current approach, which produces mostly bland and generic text. We would need an AI that does some actual creative thinking first.

I think (hope) that AI, in the interim, will provide actual authors ways to get inspired by its random nature. Like painters might start with an ink blob and then paint over it. Or let AI fill in some gaps, like description of people or places, etc.
Content got an order of magnitude cheaper to create so now nobody cares about their copyrights and at the same time nobody cares about ripping it off. Strange times.
Everyone has their own unique experience. I bought an IdeaPad in 2012 and to this day it is working well enough that I haven't replaced it (though when I'm home I have a modern tower I built 2 years ago). I could not be happier with the build quality and longevity. I must have 10 000 hours absolute minimum on that device, I really wish there was a counter in the BIOS I could check.
This is excellent.

I also think that the people who most need to read it are unlikely to read something longer than (insert today's Twitter character limit here) characters long.
It reads like he just discovered Graham Hancock.
I do agree that the ancient peoples were not dumb, in fact as smart as we are today.

So we should really think about why they decided on certain cultural traditions.
Last year I upgraded to a Thinkpad Carbon. Almost immediately, I couldn't stand the keyboard. This sent me down a rabbit-hole of what was wrong with the keyboard (as it looked almost identical to my previous Thinkpad).

The answer is that Thinkpad has slowly evolved their keyboards to be slimmer. Reducing the travel on the keys with each step.

Some of the new ones are down to 1.3mm of travel. I realize this is a personal preference, but I noticeably make more errors under anything less than 1.8mm of travel.

Hence, I got rid of the Carbon and bought a Thinkpad T14 Gen 2 which is pretty much the latest model with 1.8mm. The Gen 3 was available, but they trimmed it down to 1.5mm.

I realize this is a pretty picky hill to die on, but I can't express how significant it is for the reliable use of keyboard for me. I'll be buying T14 Gen 2's until I die it seems from here on out. Everything else about the laptop is just fine. Runs any linux I throw at it, 4k screen if desired, all the upgrade-ability I might want.

(If you get lucky, you can even find one with a proper Ethernet port. Some come without because apparently during the chip-shortage, they removed that feature)
Hi everyone, author here. This article tends to raise a lot of questions. I'm happy to answer them.

(The most common question: isn't it the same as a mock? The answer is no, mocks are used for isolated, interaction-based testing, and this is for sociable, state-based testing. These are polar opposite approaches to testing with distinct tradeoffs. If you're not familiar with those terms, they're defined in the article in the "Foundational Patterns" section.)
do you try to match descriptions to existing products? for example, if there is a item of furniture that is also sold on other sites, will the description be consistent?

Or is this just naiive generation?
Even though you may not feel good at LeetCode type questions, study algorithms and data structures anyways!

Try watching YouTube videos, reading 'Cracking the Coding Interview' and get familiar with the programing language you are most competent with already or are trying to get a job with.

The best way to make up for a gap in resume or short stints at other companies is to prove you have the technical knowledge anyways.
I've been looking for an opportunity to try out a pattern where the two approaches improve each other:

1. Generate a 95% accurate model

2. Use it to generate test cases

3. Code the thing, with the help of the cases

4. Manually remove cases in the 5%

I image steps 1 and 2 being completed by a product owner and 3 and 4 being completed by a software engineer.

We're so horrifically bad at communicating a requirement's intent, I wonder what would happen if we tried to use AI to communicate them via their extent instead.
Languages with very high degrees of static analysis are basically making you write the tests in the code. We have people who think they can keep extending that until there's barely any code, but they haven't been proven right or wrong yet.
Then you have not understand what (pure) functional programming is and how it works.

I recommend you to have a look at Haskell, probably the most famous language for enforcing only pure functions in your program. And I took this example from Haskell.

Here is a good starting point for this concrete example:
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59035420/understanding-p...

Quote (from the course 'Haskell Fundamentals Part 1' mentioned in the post):

> This example helps illustrate that putStrLn is not a function with side effects.

The answers explain the concept quite well.
What Would Earth’s Temperature Be Like Without an Atmosphere?
Except not at all. XML is harder to enter by hand than CSV and not mess it up. CSV optimizes for the easiest cases and performs well on them. XML optimizes for the most complicated cases and therefore performs poorly on the easiest cases. JSON is somewhere in the middle. The main problems with CSV have to do with 1) MS Excel and 2) some kind of delusion among programmers that formatting or parsing arbitrary data is easy and you don't need a library for it, so you get hand-rolled generators and parsers that emit broken files.

Otherwise, the problem with CSV has little to do with the CSV format as such and more to do with the fact that the data is stringly-typed. XML has the same problem. JSON interestingly does not. Everything has tradeoffs.
This is neat due to the commands. You’ll probably want to look into prompt-toolkit aka ptpython for the repl part. Surprised no one has mentioned it, it is quite robust and I thought well-known.
They offer “express replacements” with applecare, I did it for my broken ipad. They overnighted me a new one and I sent the old one back to them in the included box/label.
I would suggest doing exactly what you’re doing here but reaching out to hiring managers to talk to them about what it would take for them to consider you.

If you reach out asking for help on getting back into the market and start some conversations about your real world experience and what you already do know it may help getting your foot in the door.

Go ask via LinkedIn for 15 minute chats with some leaders, come prepared with poignant questions and suggest keeping in touch. Referrals go a long way here and building up some relationships will help.
Heaven forbid we have websites with semi standard form factors and layouts so you can actually use them without having to click around randomly for 10 minutes or hope the fancy design doesn’t break your browser.

I have zero desire to bring back the exciting mess of flash websites, vrml, etc etc. it’s bad enough that everything is endless scrolling now.
IANAL, but showing different years to different users vibely seems like a bad idea, especially based on something the user can pick.

If it did matter then you might as well just show the default date, cause any adversary could pick to be shown it, no?
For a good chunk of this country if you have to be somewhere from like 8-5, you just don't see the sunlight in winter, maybe you catch the tail end of the sunset on your way home or the rise on the way in.
My Lifelong Quest for Silence
Show HN: 50 word puzzles based on graph theory
I made this word game while writing a tool to do graph visualization. Would love any thoughts and suggestions for puzzles!
Engineer brains are just a type of neural network too, which also have a probability of putting out bad code. Space exploration budgets run into the hundreds of millions of dollars each and recruit the brightest people on the planet to design and program software, yet there is a long list of projects that failed due to code errors. Mars probes have failed to reach the planet, orbited too low and burned up, crashed into the surface, or landed successfully but later overwrote critical memory due to a flawed software update.

The AI doesn't have to be perfect, but only offer a lower error rate than humans.
The FT source article had an Albanian representative saying not all cameras were tied to organized crime but they were all set up illegally. If the cameras themselves were illegal, they're necessarily for criminal purposes even if being used in an innocent manner.

That said I have no idea what Albanian law they were breaking. Mounted to public property is my guess, but it's based on nothing.
If you worry about backblaze, the solution isn't to have yet another backup, it's to test your backup recovery process regularly

The risk from not being able to recover your data because of something wrong with your process (like, you are not backing up all the data you need) dwarfs the risk from backblaze to lose your data
I have coworkers who also hallucinate tests. Now they'll have someone to go out to lunch with.
The patent expired in 2018.
Could it work on Google Colab?
> Across many applications areas, we’ll be left with a choice of using a 90% accurate model we understand, or 99% accurate model we don’t.

And how do you show that it is 99% accurate besides creating enough automated tests to the point that you could write the procedural version?

I think what I was missing from this article is how to evaluate a domain where neural nets or LLMs can be applied. Image-from-text generation is a great one because accuracy isn't strictly defined. However, telling ChatGPT "code this pacemaker for me" would have a real accuracy attached to it that you could confirm with unit tests.
Of course. There is a world of difference between understanding something on an intellectual level and engaging in serious insight practice. Unlike insight meditation itself, there isn't really any evidence that the path I suggested is "possibly harmful".
Large language models will probably never be reliable computers. The solution is either providing translation examples (aka, in-context learning, few-shot) or fine tuning a model to return some symbolic method to tell an associated computing environment to evaluate a given bit of math or code.
Myths tech companies believe about the world
Found the Kremlin talking-point.
The idea of getting inside an enemy's decision loop means that you are iterating OODA faster than they are.

OODA is sometimes paraphrased by cynics as 'Observe, Overreact, Deny, Apologise'.
Happy to offer my input!

If nothing else, I hope getting in the process will help alleviate some apprehension.

You likely will find some questions about the gap, but realistically - life happens. Most people understand this, at least the places where you want to work.

This approach is on my mind because of similar thinking patterns. My current employer is so dysfunctional that I've regressed skill-wise, but oddly found comfort.

I know how to fix our problems, but my ability to troubleshoot has diminished incredibly. Now I'm terrified of trying to survive 'in the cold', so to speak.

Anyway, the thing to do here is be brave - the good thing is, there's not a lot at risk besides time/effort.
Get some certs in current tech and go for contract jobs. The hiring bar for contract is lower, but they'll drop you faster too if it's not working.

Even an entry level AWS or GCP cert is good.
My brother the academic librarian / archivist has, for many years, been warning about this kind of obsolescence. It's necessary for we software folk to ask ourselves "two centuries from now, how will people make sense of our digital files?"

One of the challenges is, of course, that it isn't obvious to any generation of creators what will be of lasting value.

Academic archivists and MLS degree holders can't do it all, any more than they could control the 19th-century paper factories that churned out all that junk paper that turned brittle in a few decades.
If they were broken, they are deterministically broken, unless they are really poorly written the calculator won't randomize the answers to the same inputs.
> Thank you for adding a correction. I shouldn’t have been so flippant: OpenAI did not invent transformers

BTW you answer structure is very similar to ChatGPT’s when you point it to a mistake.
You should be able to convert them to OTF files with Fontforge. OTF supports both Postscript outlines (cubic bézier) and TrueType outlines (quadratic bézier). That should be lossless for the curves, however does someone know if it’s the case for the kerning data as well?
Yeah, I tried repeatedly with an IBM laptop years ago to get used to the nub, and couldn't get accurate with it without dropping to like 1/20th my mouse-using speed. Even the shit-tastic trackpad was way, way better. But of course I just did what a lot of PC laptop owners do and ended up carting a mouse everywhere (I'd have to have the power brick anyway, and once you're in "I'll need a bag" territory you may as well toss the mouse in)
Code generation is an epicycle.

My dad was worried about whether I should go into a CS degree because there was a code generation cycle going on at the time and people thought the computers would be programming themselves. We've had a few since, and my skills are more valuable than ever.
Honestly-- lie. It's none of their business. If they comment on the work hiatus and choppy history simply tell them it was family related. You had to take time off to take care of your family.
That ruling just says a person has to claim copyright. Whoever game the prompt to the AI is the "author" for copyright purposes
Columns Me Maybe
Well… it's literally a religion. And those are just foreign words.

McMindfulness (the stuff you'd get corporate trainings about) doesn't teach you any of those words, uses several different techniques at once, gives regular people little bits of the techniques used for monks to develop revulsion for all earthly things, etc.
This has been going on for a while. They refer to it (themselves) as low-content publishing and it's popular among the same crowd as the content marketing/low-content website ad farms. Before ChatGPT people used tools like Writter AI and Jarvis AI (now Jasper AI), but the newer models are much better and incorporate their own, possibly incorrect, knowledge.
> What should I do to get to a point where I feel confident enough to actually send in applications?

Change how you think about applying for jobs. A job application is not a one-shot inflection point for the rest of your life. Instead, think about them as mini-experiments. Send out lots of applications, tweak your CV for some of them, try different keywords and cover letters, get ChatGPT to write a few for you. Treat it like any other skill that requires practice to improve. This works best for jobs you sort of don't want anyway, so you don't get spun out of your head trying to get everything dialed in perfectly for the jobs you do want. (I am also bad at this.)

> Will the 4-year gap and my choppy CV be a major hindrance to my hirability?

Yes.

> how do I minimise its debilitating effects?

Do you have time to contribute to some open source projects? Lots of FOSS is written in C, and they can always use more contributors. This is a great way to sharpen lots of the skills you need in good work environments anyway: collaboration, modern tooling and techniques, communication.

And then you can add, "Contributor to ... ... ..." to your CV and that will help.

> Should I be spending my time in expanding my knowledge areas?

Always. But, focus some of that energy on deepening your knowledge in areas where you're already strong. Usually, deep knowledge gets more money. But you should also have some working knowledge of stuff outside your specialization. Cross-pollination is cool.
The source you provided is the CDC. The CDC is controlled by deep state lizard people and cannot be trusted.

/s
Damn, I hadn't thought of that. I was thinking I could stay safe by just sticking with already known authors. But apparently even that won't work.
ZeroSSL is at least one other provider I know of that supports ACME for this: https://zerossl.com/features/acme/
Sure, it takes two to tango. VCs aren't going to push outlandishly unpalatable narratives.
The switches on the Ineos Grenadier look great - reminiscent of airplane cockpit. There's still a touchscreen but seems to be controllable by a rotary controller.

https://ineosgrenadier.com/en/us/the-vehicle/the-grenadier
Then perhaps we agree, it is the size of the systems, and the assistive technologies, compounding on each other that have lead us here.
I liked this phrase "revenge bedtime procrastination". In my case there is often this parameter that I do not want the day to end, I feel I did not accomplish enough during the day or that I did not have enough "me" time and I spend the nights in front of my PC or watching a movie/series.
it takes descriptions of other similar products into account. it uses a database of product descriptions layered on top of GTP-3 and some interesting prompt engineering.
I think they're trying to capitalize the hype around it before Trough of Disillusionment (hype cycle).
4 years career gap is not uncommon for a mother of two, so your situation is definitely not unusual and not a red flag of any sort. I personally wouldn’t care much about it as long as you can show your skills on the interview. My advice would be to catch up with some modern stack and look for a junior to mid-level position in some established company, ideally European one — they usually respect work-life balance more. Don’t try to get a lot of money quickly, build confidence in yourself first and make sure you have a job that doesn’t stress you out. Look for diverse and inclusive teams, they have less potential for developing toxic culture than boys-only friday-pizza-and-beer ones.

What stack to choose? I’d go for the one that offers more choice (i.e. good old Java), but you may also follow the Haskell advice - maybe there are great teams in this field too.
Companies that use newer or niche languages are more forgiving and understand that there's fewer specialists, therefore they are more accepting of people who don't have much experience in the language.

Competition is still high in companies with high hiring standards. I wouldn't say that it's easy to get hired. You just have many more chances to prove that you're good, even if your resume seems lackluster, as companies are more eager to talk to you.

I don't know enough about the market to suggest any specific languages.
There's definitely a community out there for Mastodon, but it isn't the same one as Twitter.

Twitter is all about the reach beyond your followers, and that's why most twitter users won't ever consider a switch.