skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have an extremely low opinion of Marc Andreesen (because of all the web3 scamming), and I actually thought that was a good article. It's almost a reframing of David Graeber's bullshit jobs in a sense, so much of what's tied up in these sectors (the ones that keep getting more expensive) is bullshit anyway, it could have been automated or just removed long before some new take on "AI" but it hasn't been, and a lifelike chatbot or whatever people think makes this time different isn't going to change that.
People will replicate LiveView in other languages but fall short in some areas. Golang might pull it off. Rust might in another 5 years.
These guys will pitch whatever sells to the gullible.
English generally allows verbing nouns.
It was interesting in the beginning, but ended with “and then I found 5 dollars”.

The term “illegal” is not explained, and the graph (which is the basis) doesn't have an “AI-services” line, so overall the dots are not connected to prove that conclusion.
I support the Chrome team with this one...

Something like an image format should either be widely used (ie. At least 5% of websites use it), or it shouldn't exist.

A format existing has a maintenance cost, a security cost, an extra barrier to people designing new browser's or web technology, etc. If fewer than 5% of sites use it, and all features can be achieved another way, then it simply isn't worth keeping support.

Sorry JPEG XL... You were a nice design, but ultimately you weren't popular enough. A bit like Server Push (web server can send your client data you'll need ahead of time saving a round trip), ScriptProcessorNode (JavaScript can mix/make audio realtime) and DANE (security with no certificate authority)... All cool tech that didn't manage to find a userbase.
I don’t know if this is the best way to frame it, but at least it’s not disconnected from reality like the article.
Honest question (willing to be consider new info): I always thought that housing, health care, and college are more expensive than TVs and cell phones because those things can't be OUTSOURCED to another country.

- If an American/Westerner wants a TV or a cell phone, Samsung or Apple can manufacture it overseas and have someone ship it here cheaply.

- If an American wants a house, they generally have to hire local labor, and pay local prices for land.

- If an American wants health care, for practical reasons, they must be treated by doctors and nurses who live here, and who are generally educated here.

- If an American wants to send his or her children to college, they often pay a huge premium for a campus in this country, with educators who also live in this country.

i.e. these are the industries where "remote work" is less appealing for inherent logistical reasons.

Andressen says that prices have increased because of regulation, but he doesn't provide evidence for these claims:

Why? The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine. Technological innovation in those sectors is virtually forbidden now

Sure, there are little mini-cartels in all those industries. But wasn't that also the case 50 years ago? (I remember watching a documentary about the Mafia in the 20th century in NYC, and even then it was common for real estate builders to have to pay the mafia for labor. The mafia controlled some union leaders.)

So how much of the tremendous price increase is due to regulation, vs. labor costs? And there are obviously more than 2 possibilities.

Anyone have real evidence to cite?
His data is meaningless without actually saying the sources for these numbers. BLS inflation data is highly criticized and it may make his entire point moot if the cost of those industries hasn't actually increased.
It's a bounty that anybody in the world can take advantage of thanks to Bitcoin. No sanctions can stop them. If that was the mission of Bitcoin, mission accomplished.

As far as the Nostr based Github goes, the features being discussed by potential users sound interesting
https://stacker.news/items/147389
It has a level of homelessness and drug use that has shocked every American I've known who has visited in the last 5 years. It is on another level.
Some people probably agree with him. I think his reasoning isn't quite right and do think that there will be people fired and replaced at least in part by AI, but I think his insistence that AI is illegal and that's the reason health, education, and housing prices are so high is kind of funny. I feel like he hasn't thought about how setting a bone, wrapping a bandage, meeting with individual students, building on finite land might not be done as relatively efficiently as the other things on that list.
It also doesn’t truly matter. It just generally leads to being able to fit the parts together fairly easily.
Sometimes I'll upvote a post where the article is essentially useless if I'm interested in seeing the hacker news community discuss the topic.

I haven't done so for this article, but it could be a similar motivator for others.
They're so cheap that I've almost completely given up on breadboarding/protoboarding hobby stuff.

Throw a design together, have it show up a week or so later, solder it together, do some testing, reorder if you goofed up too much or bodge wire the ones you did order (a component I used neglected to mention one of its output was open-collector...)

Admittedly, it does feel a bit wasteful to order 5 of something that is going to be a one-off. Problem is, ordering all the little SMT adapters modern components need and protoboarding it usually costs the same...

Examples:

https://github.com/teknoman117/P80C550-EVN

https://github.com/teknoman117/M68K-BUS-VOLTAGE-CONVERTER

https://github.com/teknoman117/ACORN-CLE-DVI

https://github.com/teknoman117/PCIEX1-SMA
Just whatever sells. Sometimes they pitch something we all want.
It's because he stopped drinking recently. https://pmarca.substack.com/p/on-pausing-alcohol

(In all seriousness, I'm very happy it's becoming more fashionable to not drink)
But this is the story of technology for two centuries or more. Somehow we kept income and aggregate growth going even as we needed far fewer farmers, factory foremen, and travel agents.
Japan is ahead of us in time. What they are we will be. Zero interest rates can’t fix massive debt, a graying population with low population growth, low immigration, and out of control property prices.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencelight/2021/02/24/will-t...
Something tells me that if someone came up with a technology that threatened to make venture capitalists unemployed and bankrupt, Andreesen would suddenly become very pro-luddite.
wait until public pension funds realize they are financing the decay of rail conditions thru private equity investments
If that were the definition of illiterate, we'd say that people who lose control of their dominant hand, or whose pencil just broke are illiterate.
> it can only get slower as it traverses all the other, new layers

We can easily budget a million cycles across those extra layers and it's still, like, a millisecond. It's not the harsh reality of layering that makes it slower, it's problems with the ways specific layers are designed.
Concentration of wealth under capitalism?
It is not imaging your face like a normal camera would. It is using an infrared camera to pick out the location of two dots (the relative position and distance of the two dots in the camera”s field of view). That information stream could be compressed to a few bytes per second without losing tracking fidelity. That does not seem very invasive. Even if a high resolution pixel stream were to be sent from the camera to an untrustworthy, persistence layer, it would be infrared, which doesn’t seem very privacy-invasive.
Crypto was a big mistake on his part, imho . Crypto is not at all like the 'next facebook' or the 'next world wide web'. At best it will be a niche and limited to gambling. Even I could have told him it was a bad idea, but it's not his money, so what does he have to lose. As long as there are people chasing the latest thing in the hope of getting rich, there will be people selling shovels and ticket.
I don’t get the argument of tech not being able to affect prices.

Having an AI research assistant or tutor surely should reduce the ridiculous prices of college textbooks and the need for TAs no?

Also how does virtual and reimagined medical care not disrupt this? Go look at OneMedical and Amazon and they seem to be bringing costs down significantly.

Didn’t Charlie Munger say something about how high prices create the illusion of scarcity and quality?
So this is interesting. It’s not like this pseudo-randomization of inputs is necessarily a good thing because you’re actually introducing non-reality into the brain (like dreaming I’m in prison or can fly) but instead we’re being prepared for possibilities so that I can wake up and think, “what if that actually had happened?” Still, not sure if this is a productive thing at this stage in human existence or not, i.e. do I need to train for if I could fly or should I focus on reality?
Married, three young kids, a "software engineer" job, no hint at any real-world { cause ==> effect } motivation or plans...

If they didn't screw up and grab the wrong guy...I'd say to start by x-raying his head. Finding a brain cancer, or "dead zone" from a silent stroke, or brain-eating amoebas would not be totally surprising. And tagging such crimes with an "extreme mentally defect" social stigma might be pretty useful, too.
I recently started ripping Mobx out of my app. Mobx solved exactly 1 problem for me, which was passing data horizontally (to siblings/cousins) and even to non-React components.

But now `useSyncExternalStore` solves that. No context needed. Can read and write state anywhere, even outside components. No "observe" or "track" shenanigans. Efficient updates (can listen to a subsection of the tree).
> A pretty naive question: what is the advantage of garbage collection over just reference counting?

It's not that naive, and the unpopular answer is "not much". A good modern GC, faced with a usage paradigm that it expects (this part is important!), is almost certainly going to be faster. It's indeed safe from circular reference leaks. Generational collectors can often compact memory better and have a smaller footprint for the same data.

Those are all real advantages. But they come at the cost of outrageous complexity and code footprint. A reference counter is probably more than an 80% solution for almost any reasonable application, and it's something college kids write in 15-20 lines in their intro course.
Here is one - I thought I remembered another essay where he said something similar as well, where he was discussing jargon, but I didn't find it yet (or I'm remembering wrong and this is the only quote)

modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I'd argue the first snap occurred years prior, proximate to A16Z's heavy investment in crypto. Web3 was part two.

Moreover, even associating with Neumann after the antics he pulled is nuts.
Another is amortization of bookkeeping: reference counting must be managed every time you record or remove a pointer while the GC does the tracing. So depending on your usage one may be faster than the other.

Another is the opportunity to do the GC on another thread (careful!), or just when you have nothing else to do, meaning your hot path can be faster.

Plus the very important case of circular or doubly linked structures that you mentioned.
Interesting look at a tough problem (OSS business models). I'm not sure I buy the solutions, but it sure doesn't hurt to take another look at the issue.
I do love a Twist-Erase in 0.7 for a pencil, but these days I only use a pencil when I'm marking cuts or otherwise doing work too harsh for a more delicate instrument.
The tag is likely just a clip on of the dog's ears.
'Project Fear’ authors discussed when to ‘deploy’ new Covid variant
It started out as just the Boehm collector but grew. And I'm always glad to see Weiser's name: he was a great guy, and quite creative.
Disagree. AI will cause mass unemployment because it’s way more efficient than a human, doesn’t get sick (relatively less than humans) and costs less. Simple economics. I’ll give you one example. The checkout counters in supermarkets, if the supermarkets would have hired young people on those positions not only we might have less young people going towards drugs and hooliganism but it would have also made them better productive citizens as they gain skills in their teen years.

Corporates need to understand that their greed for infinite profit will eventually create a singularity which will consume them one day. People without jobs buy less. May be we will finally get rid of the consumerism.
I was part of a small startup that was purchased by a big company, making me a worth a couple of million. It became a Tony Hsieh situation for me, with too much money and a large ego that told me I knew better than anyone. It wasn't until I surrendered and started doing what people told me to do to get better that I recovered. I had to be broke before that happened. It was quite a ride. I lived and survived all in one piece so I'm not complaining!

Zappos Founder Tony Hsieh Surrounded by Drugs and Nitrous Oxide Cartridges in Fatal Fire

https://www.thewrap.com/zappos-founder-tony-hsieh-surrounded...

Edit: I journaled about it recently, which I'll share in case in helps anyone:

I wasn't awake when I was younger. Like in the 80's when I suddenly made a lot of money. I didn't go to the beach and sit on a bench on a pier to think about it. What does this mean? How is this going to change my life? What do I have to do to manage a lot of money? What are my responsibilities to family that are still be struggling? That's what I mean when I say I was asleep. I was asleep in the ignorance of my youth. I did not have situational awareness. My self-awareness was low.

Bottom line: I grew up without much money. Since I was successful I thought I was smart enough to figure out how to handle a lot of money. Turns out, managing money is a skill that I don't have and wasn't going to figure out because it didn't interest me, so you know the saying "A fool and his money are soon parted"
The advent of AI will absolutely eliminate jobs, either by decimating the required headcount or by making whole professions redundant. I don’t think we can accurately predict which industries will be affected either, as surprisingly many creative disciplines are being impacted now.

How our society integrates AI and robotics technology will determine who is impacted and how we handle it. This is actually a great opportunity to find what is valuable and meaningful. For instance, what can we do to improve people’s lives with excess hands and funds?

I think the foundation will be in providing equitable access to society. For instance, greater accessibility technology will help those who are disabled or differently-abled. There is so much beyond ADA compliance that can help the blind, deaf, lame, and mentally handicapped.

Coming out of a global pandemic, we’ve also learned how crucial socialization is to mental health. Rather than using technology to cut people out of the system (self-checkout; ordering from kiosks; automated support desks), I imagine we will expand services like counseling, fitness, and social events. Places where we prefer interacting with humans to machines.

In the end, it is a bit of a reckoning - what can I do that’s meaningful when I am outperformed by a machine? It means throwing away the culture of being the best, and picking up the habits of doing the best for others.
Are those particles containing potassium citrate? Lemon is high in potassium and its citrate is known to dissolve existing kidney stones.
Not being outsourced is part of what's going on. There is more to it, and each of these different goods have their own particular factors going into the rise in their costs.

A big factor leading to this graph is labor productivity. An hour is an hour for everyone, but while we've figured out how to make a TV in a lot less labor hours, it still takes about as many labor hours to set a bone or read a book.
How is this different from previous leaps in industrialization or technological innovation? If you make widgets worse than a machine in a factory then your labor is worthless.
Looks like internally they should have named the bot with some unique string instead of "Sydney" and then simply block any user requests which mention the unique string.
Peter Watts, perhaps? https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
I missed the veil.
I mean, ideally you don't do it all at once, but if you can chug a pint of beer then you can chug a pint of water, too.

Thirst is weird. I find it manifests as an unaccountable malaise and lack of focus well before I begin to perceive the sensation I understand as thirstiness per se.
It’s called survivorship bias
A honey and lemon tea is often recommended as an aid to digestion. To be taken first thing in the morning prior to breakfast.
Great blog post! As someone who isn't particularly familiar with javascript internals (or many language internals for that matter), this was really easy to follow and a lot of fun.
Raspberry Pi 4 RAM Upgrade – Tutorial [video]
Volunteer Swe Intern
I'm a sophomore CS major and I am looking to volunteer/ work at a company where I can learn the tools of web dev in the industry setting. If this sounds like something you are looking for, send me an email and we can try to work something out.
We can only control our actions and reactions, we don’t have much control over the outcomes of those ..

So taking away the burden of specific outcomes and just keep doing whatever may be our actions as matter of duty is way to free up ourselves from stress and anxiety that comes when outcomes don’t meet our expectations..

It’s perfectly alright to expect the things to turn out in certain ways but it’s another thing to be attached to expectations of those outcomes ..

We are tiny creatures in grand scheme of world around us… accepting it and finding something to be grateful for in our everyday life is way to go IMO..

New partners will be found, new relationships will be developed, things can be studied/ researched for whole life .. what matters most in this moment to be able to acknowledge that we have very little control over things around us and being grateful for whatever we have in our life..

I found Bhagavad Gita to be very empowering.. May be you will as well ..

Good luck !
Consider activities that broaden your perspective, e.g. reading a biography or travel somewhere.

Consider journaling deeply about areas that trouble you, whether recent or distant past. Also consider journaling in detail about the best possible outcome for yourself. Forcing yourself to organize thoughts in writing can help understand confusing situations.

If therapist isn't working, find another one. It's totally normal to try several.

Best of luck and good on you asking for help.
> I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical

Like most engineers I didn't start out that way so perhaps you are right and a few grains of salt would make it better. However, I do not think the average HNer represents a weird aberration of happiness on the scale. I think most companies that hire on this site likely chronically underpay people. Not their fault most likely. HN caters to early stage startups.

However, I think my overarching message is clear. Happiness is entirely relative. At any rate, you should never prioritize happiness over financial security because you should be well compensated, first and foremost, for the time in your life you will never get back. Your compensation should be even better for dealing with a bad company. You might argue that spending those hours of your life in a relative happy state is healthier. I'd agree. But to me, that eventuality comes about after establishing good pay. I don't plan on retiring extremely wealthy but I think I'll be okay looking back at the sacrifices I've made sitting on the veranda with fewer financial worries. Perhaps this is a uniquely American perspective. I don't know.

Certainly, trading $100k and a good job for $150k and a job that gets you yelled at all the time is not a very good trade. Analyze the opportunity cost. The big point here is two things I think and I think you'd agree:

1. Analysis of opportunity cost is important. That means, to me, quantifying "happiness" with some dollar value. Is happiness worth $10k to you? $30k? I guess it depends. I'd actually quite enjoy a research position, for example, but I cannot take the make-ends-meet-and-no-retirement pay that most academic positions give.

2. People are often afraid to leap into a new position. To me, this is because they fail to quantify happiness with some dollar value. People often use qualitative metrics. Those are useful but only in the context of the quantitative reality.
how do you deal with 4-up situations - where you need the comp or design doc, the code, the test window, and the debugger / dev tools, all available for you to glance back and forth between?
I’m not sure what you are trying to say? That the term must have originated in the earliest word processors that had IME?

Or that someone just stuck a few good sounding words together to describe a modern phenomenon?
Yes. Did a double take when I saw the name of the author, which I assumed based on the article was someone in their early to mid teens who'd learned everything they knew about the world of business from a copy of Atlas Shrugged!

No adult, least of all a VC, should be citing clothing and household furnishings as shining examples of technology-driven innovation in stark contrast to the moribund world of healthcare, or implying government regulates textbooks more than new cars
> The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government

Pmarca, you're around these parts sometimes. No one wants to hear your musings on government regulation affecting housing prices until you address your own hypocritical contribution:

'Andreessen and his wife recently submitted public comments to the Atherton Town Council denouncing a plan to green-light the construction of around 130 multifamily properties in the area.

"Subject line: IMMENSELY AGAINST multifamily development!” the email from the Andreessens to the council read.

“I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton…Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July,” the couple wrote.

“They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.”'

https://nypost.com/2022/08/08/marc-andreessen-opposed-afford...
The idea he is trying to say is similar to old school investors in which the the prices continue to be hiked up in order to afford people who are willing to bribe / lobby to reduce the possibility for disruption. I think there’s a UC Santa Barbara talk by Charlie Munger on this pricing power.
Yes “because wanting something bad enough” is the key to success…