skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Finding My Purpose as a Programmer?
I’m 28 and did traditional BS/MS in comp sci route, grinded leetcode and did several (and current) stints at big tech companies as a senior engineer.

I’ve always wanted to be a master of the craft, but have become more of a well paid hamster. The downside is I’m constantly studying CS things to find something to focus on that would allow me to repurpose my career, but not getting very far. I’ve considered grad school, but that’s a big move as well.

How did you guys repurpose meaning in your career?
Expanding on this history for readers here who are just catching up on this stuff, modern feedforward NNs descended from the Perceptron paper by Rosenblatt and friends from 1957. This was the first paper that really tried to position "learning machines" based on accumulated stimulus activations, and it built off of a previous paper from 1943, "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity." So yes it's true that the field borrowed ideas from the brain and it was positioned that way from the start, though Perceptrons totally weren't a very similar implementation to what Nature herself designs...

A Perceptron model is just a dot product: one multiply+add, summed to one output scalar value. Modern nomenclature might consider Perceptrons to just be "one channel of a single layer," or like "one fully-connected layer with a single output." In fact, that's where the old-fashioned name for neural networks came from: "Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs)" are a bunch of these arranged on top of each other. The older 1943 work showed that in some sense lots of possible arrangements are roughly equivalent to each other so it made sense for Rosenblatt and friends to start from the simplest model with the understanding that the field would build from there. (Our feedforward model ancestry is just one branch of the tree rooted in this work; there's a completely separate geneology for other possible arrangements of modeling components, like recurrent Boltzmann machines that simply haven't been so well studied/understood... :-)

The generality of Perceptrons made room for a lot of interpretive flexibility. Right from the start, news reporters saw the theory, attended academic conferences, and started writing about it. The NYTimes had an article in 1958 that spoke of the Perceptron as "the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence."

In fact there was a very famous kerfuffle between Rosenblatt (Perceptron authors) and Minsky & Papert (another AI researchers). The latter two published a spicy book in 1969 saying that a single Perceptron wasn't general enough because linear models can't even learn an XOR function. Everyone who read this book misinterpreted it as a takedown of Perceptrons; this book inadvertantly dried up interest, choked funding across the board, and ultimately caused the first AI winter which didn't get resolved until well into the '80s when these ideas started to be revitalized. You can read about the spilled tea here, it's quite fascinating: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F030631296026003005
My experience recently with the train going up the east coast during snow storms on my travel to US: you don't want to be stuck for hours in the middle of nowhere, imo.
Ooh the post author! I have a question. When I buy light bulbs they always list the color temperature but not the lumineous flux, what's the relationship?

I buy dim bulbs that have a temperature of 2700K for evening applications precisely because of this belief that brightness and color impacts sleep quality, am I right or is it just placebo? It seems to help...
They may have realised they're playing a bad bet and won't let you play again.

I kid of course, but the implicit aim of these exercises is always to maximise expected value. The underlying assumption is that you can make a lot of independent bets and the results will average out thanks to the law of large numbers. Suppose you were playing this game 1000 times in parallel. Would you rather average zero profit at the end or $667?
me too, always learn something new everyday. thanks HN!
I just want a browser extension that not only lets you create little css snippets for sites you browse, but also see the most popular snippets shared by other users. Maybe an up/downvote system too
Nicely written !

Now, did she use chatGPT ? ;)
Exponentials always look flat from where you stand.
How does this improve one's writing skills? I could see the argument for an improvement to the writing environment, but I'm having a hard time seeing how it could improve skills.
> Imagine you are operating with good intent, and are now personally liable for every call you make under duress trying to fight crime. Batman has to crack a few eggs.

Batman isn't a cop, Batman is a vigilante sociopath with a bat fetish who assaults the poor and the mentally ill because he can't process trauma like a normal person. Batman is only allowed to exist in the context of a corrupt justice system that wants someone like him and his circus of violence to distract the citizens of Gotham from their own systemic corruption. In a just society he'd be in a padded cell where he belongs.

We shouldn't want police to be Batman. We shouldn't just accept the premise that the cops just have to "crack a few eggs" now and then. That's just conceding to authoritarianism.
Sure, Substack is better than Medium. But for a reader, it's worse than, IMO, Ghost, Wordpress, etc. Anything where, when you click a link to a blogpost, the first thing you see is the blogpost
Any of these work for you? And because hate speech isn't a direct threat of violence.

The UN: Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law.

Canada: Every one who, by communicating statements in any public place, incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace. Every one who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against any identifiable group. Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust

Germany: Whoever, in a manner suited to causing a disturbance of the public peace incites hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origin, against sections of the population or individuals on account of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or sections of the population, or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them or violates the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning or defaming one of the aforementioned groups, sections of the population or individuals on account of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or sections of the population.

Russia: Actions aimed at the incitement of hatred or enmity, as well as abasement of dignity of
a person or a group of persons on the basis of sex, race, nationality, language, origin,
attitude to religion, as well as affiliation to any social group, if these acts have been
committed in public or with the use of mass media.

South Africa: No person may publish, propagate, advocate or communicate words based on one or more of the prohibited grounds, against any person, that could reasonably be construed to demonstrate a clear intention to be hurtful, be harmful or to incite harm, promote or propagate hatred.

Sweden: Anyone who, in a statement or in another message that is disseminated, threatens or expresses disrespect for a people group or another such group of persons with allusion to race, skin colour, national or ethnic origin, creed, sexual orientation or gender-transgender identity or expression

[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...

[2] https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/section-319.ht...

[3] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...

[4] https://www.imolin.org/doc/amlid/Russian_Federation_Criminal...

[5] http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/2000-004.pdf

[6] https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K16P8S1
74% of women in software development have experienced gender discrimination, as opposed to 50% of women in all STEM professions: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/01/09/women-a...
Generally you can do this if the network is software defined. The boundaries between networks aren’t actually real, which means you can load balance by simply determining if the packets should be able to route then letting them route for the rest of the flow.
If you read the USCO administrative letter [1], it wasn't complexity that killed the claim, it was stochasticity. That's a much shakier ground to stand on and only serves to highlight the deciding officer's inability to grasp how creative input, partial information, and stochasticity do not conflict with each other. The decision is full of holes because of the officer's narrow conception of mechanical devices. Probably a boomer.

[1] https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/klpygnkyrpg/...

Instead, as explained above, Midjourney begins the image generation process with a field of visual “noise,” which is refined based on tokens created from user prompts that relate to Midjourney’s training database. The information in the prompt may “influence” generated image, but prompt text does not dictate a specific result... Because of the significant distance between what a user may direct Midjourney to create and the visual material Midjourney actually produces, Midjourney users lack sufficient control over generated images to be treated as the “master mind” behind them.
I'm not sure what you do besides networking in some form.
Yeah, I just mean: it's a pretty marginal case. He spent 4 days in prison --- a travesty, to be sure --- and was then acquitted of any wrongdoing. It's not that there isn't a wrong to right here, but righting wrongs isn't so much the day-to-day purpose of SCOTUS so much as righting the law, and if they're going to pick up the QI hot potato, maybe they'd choose to do it in a case where the stakes are higher than some guy's Facebook parody site.

All the rest of the surrounding context of the case will matter too: precisely the laws he was accused of violating, and how sane those laws are, &c. Maybe, regardless of how they feel about QI, the fact pattern here is just messy; they're not going to put a case that boils entirely down to the legality of Facebook parodies on their docket.
Goddamn kids never change. Booze, drugs, and the make out cave with graffiti all over it.

Viking resumes and Viking guidance counselors must've been interesting.

"I'm sorry, I lied. I only have 1 year of experience of plundering at sea. And I wasn't captain of a fleet of pirate ships. My references are real though."
Mermaid Cheat Sheet
But in the carriage with privileged drug abusing fashionistas, just like real life
Cage free simply means they aren't in individual cages. ISTR that free range means there's an open door to the outdoors. But take any animal with flocking/herding behavior and if the group is inside, no more than one or two individuals will venture out for a few seconds before running back inside to the safety of the group.

I don't know of any large producers of pasture raised eggs. They all seem to be small, regional outfits, but then again, I haven't really looked hard.
One boarding school has gone as far as to ban smartphones for students AND teachers due to this issue.

ABC story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSUrE4-zYzg
On the other hand, it could give nonprofit, noncommercial hosts an unprecedented advantage since there is less incentive to spam there.
It's actually snowing in (parts of) the Bay Area. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpkpxDCaEAUKbIc?format=jpg&name=...
I agree that it is subject to moral judgements but that doesn’t make two distinct events explicitly coupled. You’re even conceding the point by needing to describe the two events with different terms.

I am being pedantic here but you are factually incorrect in saying that consenting to one is consenting to the other as a factual statement when the two events can be separated.
"Why not Rust?" is a question I ask about game development a lot these days.

I'm an engineer with a decade of experience as a web services engineer, and 5 years of game development engineering. Rust seems like the right direction for game developers -- safer code, faster compile times, more portable binaries.

Ambient looks very cool, but I had some questions --

1) WebAssembly, but no native web player? One of the most powerful things a game dev can do is provide a link to a game and just let people play it on itch or other space. Having a binary you have to download to play is a major turn off for small time games. It looks like it's on the roadmap, but without a clear target?

2) No editor/tooling yet? What's the plan for a unity-like editor interface? How do non-developers (designers, artists, audio folks) interact with a game made with ambient? Is that in the plans for the future? Could you expand on it a bit more?

3) Sustainability? A five person crew working on a free product, how do you plan on monetizing it?

4) Single executable? One concern that jumps out right away is the single executable for server and client. Often in multiplayer games you want to avoid shipping server binaries (for cheat protection, for instance, or to avoid the cost of deploying a large client to a headless server environment). Are there plans to provide the ability to separate client and server builds?

5) HTML for front end? Games are increasingly moving to HTML to power their UI. Given you are already using WebAssembly, it seems like it wouldn't be that far off to enable an interface so that UI could be handled in JS/HTML. (Yes, this is performant enough for games. Yes, it's being done in AAA games. No, you aren't the first commenter who thinks that UI shouldn't be done in HTML. No, I'm not interested in hearing complaints about it.)

Nevertheless, this looks neat,
I stated the problem with custom locations already.
Strangely I don't think public schools do a good job teaching children how to write. I chalk this up to the fact that most school are testing and metrics driven and writing is somewhat more subjective.
Why would castration be necessary if they are imprisoned for life?
Are you sure that is the case? My understanding was that if any court had litigated the issue at all, then the QI drops away. The big loophole though is how narrowly the issue is interpreted. "Oh, I can't violate the rights of someone wearing a _yellow_ jumpsuit; I didn't know this applied to people also wearing yellow and not just blue! We never had a court case about that!"

My understanding comes from having listened to far too many 'Audit the Audit' videos while doing work. I could be mistaken, this is my understanding of the issue though.
Biohazard: Iconic symbol designed to be “memorable but meaningless” (2016)
I’m listening to the ice storm out my window in Ontario. It’s a nasty one!

It’s also wild that last week it was +14C and on Monday it was above freezing and 100% of the snow on my street was gone. February is typically incredibly cold and am used to there being a ridiculous amount of accumulated snow. But we got a reset.

That reset has one silver lining: spring flooding is likely to be unlikely.
74% of women in software development have experienced gender discrimination, compared to 50% of women in all STEM professions: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/01/09/women-a...
Do you think the talent pool of people that want to live in germany and don’t want to make substantially more working for american companies is large?
Enough to make an important discovery in math, which gets citations and such. Having read math papers, there is a wide range of ability. Compare the stuff featured in Quanta magazine to your typical pdf in google. 130 is probably the min. to maybe get a master's degree.
Age may be a factor. Falling asleep wasn't an issue when I was younger, but it did get tougher in middle age.
Thomas is the biggest QI critic on the court (along with Sotomayor). I don’t see strong evidence for the others you listed.
I wonder if Google Summer of Code is next.
The European Union’s Official Site Has a Persistent ‘Piracy’ Problem
The European Union warns that pirate sites can lead users to malware and other unwanted content. Unfortunately, the EU also has its own piracy problem; its official website continues to be exploited by bad actors to advertise piracy-related scams.
Do you know what the child will be like before you have sex? What if they turn out to be the kind of person who says that if you consent to sex you consent to bearing a child? That seems equivalent to purchasing a lemon in my view.
Substack is high status. When I read Substack I feel like a high status Silicon Valley dweller Thielian. It’s all about the customer experience.
https://archive.ph/yNn4h
I feel like programmer discourse goes in a circle every five years on agreeableness/human factors when hiring. You can say "rigid process and blind hiring!" And then you hire someone you knew was, er , difficult, and it sucks and they get fired and you have to adjust. Then on the other side of the spectrum, you have grumpy people pointing out that it turns out agreeableness turns out to mean coethnic drinking buddies, and how could you?
Unless you're way up in the corner, where we're getting 6-9 inches of snow plus some sleet on top. We'll be in the mid-20's and falling to near 0 Friday night.
I currently have 41 reputation on SO. 1 silver badge and 5 bronze badges. Almost all of which I recently earned by answering an obscure Vim configuration question.

And here's the thing: I've been on the site for 12 years and 4 months.

Of course, that means that I mostly use SO as read-only. I've found that it just isn't worth it to use it any other way. Since a lot of other users share my attitude, it seems like a terrible way for SO to operate and attempt to create engagement.
Ditto in the area of New York sharing a border with Ontario :)

What are the odds of a snow day tomorrow?
I don't think this works well in terms of safety. If it's a low light area, it's beacon to your location. Only thing that would be worse is lights turning on headed in my direction!

Even if it was a simple car headed down the street, I'd be nothing but paranoid. Great stuff for horror movies though.
I wonder what would happen if they spun stuff off instead of killing stuff. Keep 20% ownership, it's an alternative to layoffs.
That's Baltimore weather for you.
Anyone here know how to generate subtitles automatically using AI when a video is playing on the web?

Was planning to see how I can build something like these sites but without the need to regularly update the subtitles catalog:
https://subscene.be
https://subtitlecat.com
https://subtitletrans.com
https://my-subs.co
Twice as many whites as blacks are shot to death by police
Currently snowing north of Boston
Collusion and price fixing in the food industry is not without precedence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine_price-fixing_conspira...
I dont know what to make of this article in particular. It's an interesting idea, and I believe the malleability aspect a lot. I think there's some very interesting suggestions here, and potential, but Im still pretty hesitant to speak for this.

But I do think it's remarkable & ultra noteworthy how vastly more plausible this suggestion is for the web than any other comparable computing system. The web has the malleable genetics to at least begin to entertain these ideas. Doing this anywhere else would require access to source, recompiling apps, or obscenely gross & mangled OCR+++ capabilities. The web attempt would be a high fidelity output, where-as all alternatives (other than being able to recompile arbitrary apps) would be incredibly funky.

The web has some really amazing pro-human superpowers, abilities ro be reshaped. The suggestions here of style transfer & api-itication are incredibly real potentials, bcause the web is so surpassing more human & rich than the typical computing world, where processes are isolated & secured compiled-down products uninterested in participating openly with the world.

Meanwhile & in-contrast, the former html5 editor is proposing a new world where all this creativity & flexibility is utterly impossible. Along with flutter/canvaskit already shipping this "new" anti-malleable bold-new-vision. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696
I think the cause of the first AI winter had more to do with some of the early researchers suggesting they'd have solutions to problems within a few months to years that are just now becoming tractable. In retrospect it doesn't seem like they could've gone much faster than they did. New ideas mattered but increased computing speeds probably mattered more. It's not like we would have been able to get dramatically better results than those researchers did by taking what we know now and running it on the same hardware they had back then.
Gnn once told me , about how he had to work on plan9 . It’s an interesting topic . It’s good to see how other people think about this cs topic and see if you can borrow some ideas .
I think that's what they sell to writers. Does a reader experience this? I sure don't
This is an important argument and I agree with many of the problems they mention. The problem is always identifying an alternative. You could say just don't do it but people will probably do it anyway in a black box kind of way, and so the question becomes what then? What is the implicit alternative, and can it be made explicit or replaced?
So at what point does something become special purpose? Is L1, L2 or L3 cache special purpose? What about io chips? What about the firmware inside ethernet cards, harddrives or the video chips (not even talking about GPUs).

I'm not trying to be combatitive, but it seems completely arbitrary where one would draw a line and taken to the extreme one is essentially left with a CPU and possibly some RAM that might be some ideal computing machine, but can't even talk to the outside world.
> (For e-ink ebook readers, can't they just be read without backlight, with just reflected light?)

Usually you need more reflected light to read from e-paper because of worse contrast.
I was curious what actually happened to cause this situation since this article and the ones that it linked to are quite light on details. This article from 2021 paints a better background: https://www.internetgovernance.org/2021/08/19/a-fight-over-c...

The article that is linked to in the original article also points to some really shady behavior by the parties involved: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/22/afrinic_failure_warni...
Qualified Immunity is a step toward tyranny
4 and 6 year old insist it’s guaranteed, and as the only two family members currently in school, I have to defer to their expertise on the matter.
This is sadly common. I have a compound that I'll likely have to take for life. Compounds are freaking hard, most pharmacies act clueless when asking. And they're regulated by state, so when you move, you often have to find a new one.

Anyhow, our insurance decided everything should be done via Walgreens or CVS(don't remember now), or denied. They had no idea about it, and said they don't do compounding.

Like you, I called insurance co, and they said oh, we'll just opt you out no problem. Why wasn't that the default?

Anyhow, I found it easier to just pay cash anymore. 600/yr, but still somehow less frustrating than dealing with insurance that just finds ways to try to screw you constantly.
> I checked his work, and its mostly wrong

Can you show some examples that make you draw this conclusion?
Thanks!
Wikipedia says that he was charged of multiple crimes, and was dismissed/declared not guilty of all of them. Which specific charges do you think were unfairly acquitted/dismissed?