skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> According to some studies, Smalltalk seems to be very productive: https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/main/2022/07/need-productivi...

In fairness however, Cincom develops and dells a commercial/proprietary Smalltalk implementation... you'll hardly see somebody saying "yeah our software is a pile of garbage" in their product/company website.
Request for protocol: Double-blind messaging for knowledge fragmentation
"Instead of picking a person to contact first and then composing a message, users could broadcasts a query aimed at an idea – which is then backfilled into real users that expressed that idea in the past"
I use isopropyl alcohol for cleaning bicycle brake discs - that evaporates away without leaving residue, but you don't want to be inhaling too many fumes from it.
Very nice to see Fortran in that space!

That page doesn’t display very well on mobile though (header seems correct, but text is too wide and you need to zoom out. Safari mobile)
Anybody succeed yet?
Python has multithreading, they just don't run concurrently. Which may or may not be suitable for your application. E.g. you can't simultaneously utilize multiple cores, but you can listen to several blocking IO bound tasks.
All this discussion of lost jobs. The intangible are lost to AI; the tangible are lost to robots. I'm starting to think that Zardoz is a documentary from the future.
I was one of those users. The issue turned out to be CPU bugs. Turning off C-state in the BIOS resolved those random hard freezes.
Given the subject matter colloquial English is not appropriate here.
People who make web sites for mom and pop businesses got obsoleted a long time ago by WordPress and Shopify and numerous other out-of-the-box solutions.

Why does anyone doing that kind of work still get jobs? Ignorance plays some part, of course. In my experience a lot of business owners believe they are unique and special and need something “custom.” It’s a status thing as best I can tell.

Back in the ‘90s I started refusing to write custom accounting systems for customers because QuickBooks could do everything they needed until they graduated to the big leagues, where enterprise software solutions dominate. They never listened, always sure they were too different to use something as pedestrian as accounting software in a box.

Programmers aren’t immune. Look at all of the functionally equivalent languages and tools we argue about. Notice programmers writing that they can’t use an IDE or web site that doesn’t have dark mode. How many more “to do list” apps will we endure? Freud called it “the narcissism of small differences.”

The same human tendency explains why we have many more cars available than Toyota Camrys and Ford F-150s.
If someone with access to the GPT-4 vision model wants to ask what’s funny about this picture, I’m sure people around here would be curious to find out
> Is that feature actually needed for projects like Django, FastAPI, numpy, etc?

Yes.

FastAPI depends on really slow pydantic (disclaimer: I'm the author of the faster typedload).

All those dynamic typechecking modules rely on the dynamic nature of the language. The alternative would be to having to generate code at compile time instead.

pydantic is also in the process of being rewritten in rust to be not so slow any longer, and in the process it will become incompatible with anything else than cpython (the normal python runtime). Which in turns means fastapi won't be able to run on anything else (unless they decouple from pydantic… which probably won't be easy).
DNS64 and NAT64 on OpenBSD
Sure, but not their conventional missiles. That your high value targets are outside of range of the opponents very cheapest weapon systems seems like a very mild benefit.
Presumably he means detaching the disk from your RAID solution so it doesn't freak out when it's physically removed and replaced.
Another good low cost provider to consider is WholeSaleInternet.net. Their datacenter is located in Kansas City. I've been colocating and renting dedicated servers through them for since 2005.

Servers start at $9 per-month. A comparable example:

Dual Xeons - 36 cores / 72 threads - 128GB memory - dual 1TB nvme - 5 IP's $80 per-month $0 setup. Setup with dual 2Tb nvme is $100 per-month.

I'm colocating a couple of servers there for $40 per-month each, bandwith is 1Gbit unmetered and comes with 5ip's. A couple 1U's and towers. I recently bought a used 1U server off Amazon for $400. It has 48 cores, 96 GB memory and 4x1TB drives and came with a one year warranty on the components.

Hetzner was solid, but their network was sketchy at times.
You may want to qualify it is formatted in a specific way before sending to chatGPT, otherwise its quite easy to hijack for other purposes.

e.g. https://whatdoesthiscodedo.com/g/8405a9c
I got tired of waiting for this and all the constraints that come with it. So I wrote my own localhost solution with Node, web sockets, and DOM traversal that ended up being faster than the equivalent GUI functionality provided by the OS.
Maybe he detected 0 RPM without looking at temperature.... some controllers will just stop fans when there is enough cooling.

We had a bunch of racks and fan failures gotta be one of rarest one. Even on my personal junk I had zero actual failures, just one getting noisy

> Was still worth it because it's cheap, but they're cheap because it's not new and reliable hardware.

Not really different than cloud, they aren't buying top of the line servers, they are making their own just like hetzner, for cheapest per performance unit.
Why not?

Sure, a style like cubism is unlikely to appear from current AI art generation, but ultimately there's a human still in the loop. The human picks the direction the generation goes in and you can definitely see "styles" or even "characters" appear in certain types of prompts.

If you hang around people that do this a lot you'll see that some of them end up generating hundreds, if not thousands, of images of what seems to be the same character in varying situations. That indicates to me that you could potentially find a type of prompt that would lead to an art movement.

Hell, AI art itself might constitute an art movement.
I use ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, Midjourney, Fireflies, Cleanup.Pictures, and a host of other AI-based tools in my daily workflow. I pay money for much of that. Anyone saying that these tools aren't products are, to be frank, deluded.

For some reason, people are equating inaccuracy with redundancy. I can't fathom why people do so.

I have a copy-writer, editor, artist, co-coder, photo editor, reporter, all at my finger tips. I need to give them advice on how to iterate their designs, and I know not to ask them for explicitly "correct" information, but they save me hours of my life, and hundreds in hiring costs. I can get templates, corrections, suggestions, tips, etcetera, in seconds. It's incredible.
pydantic also requires a mypy plugin… But it's just how it was designed. I designed typedload with mypy in mind, so it kinda works (except for some limitations in the type system that don't allow to express some things, as of now).
Shining, dazzling, remarkable, perfect, gems! There's some great marketing words for you.

But seriously, there's been lots of talk on HN recently about alternatives to the big clouds. This is it - rent a big server and do it all on Linux.
Haven't read this book but my experience with Packt is generally awful. Material that feels regurgitated from forums wrapped up in a book.

Personally I'd never buy a book from them unless I'd have a personal recommendation from someone I trust.
"Oh look, fan stopped, means it's dead"

CPU temperature: 40C
I know it is not an excuse but the European conquerors did the same other cultures have been doing to them for centuries. The "barbaric way of doing things" was common and was pretty extended for much part of the history.

European nations had been plagued by poverty, wars, killing, totalitarianism, witch hunting... For centuries, so when they reach the New World they continue to behave the same way they have been behaving until that point.

The only good part is that some countries were conquered and dominated by cultures that did not exterminated them. There was some mixing between peoples and the culture was enriched by that exchange.
Couldn't the same be done by breaking the conversation down into chunks and adding the context incrementally?
>unless as you pointed out, they choose to be

Nobody is choosing to stay on H1B for years at end. What a ridiculous proposition. What would be the point of that ? The people who are on H1B status after a number of years are the ones who are stuck in various stages of the green card process (i140, i485, etc.) because of backlogs. There are many rules that govern the finer points of these issues, and going into them over here is futile. It is not clear what you are trying to argue. If you wish to state that people on temp visas signed up knowing about the uncertainty, that is a common enough opinion, and you can state that and that would be the end of it. Why are you picking technical points to argue where you don't possess the expertise ?
It looks to be a completely different codebase from boto/s3fs.

Not having used s3fs I'm going to guess that s3fs is limited due to the limits of the underlying language - Python - namely poor performance overall and poor multi-thread story.

I'd imagine s3fs is useful for stuff like backing up personal projects, quickly sharing files between developers etc.

For operating at any kind of scale - in terms of concurrent requests, number or size of files etc - I'd guess that Mountpoint would be the only viable solution.
GPT4, Please write a poem titled “Stochastic Parrots” in the style of Blake
GPT4:

In gardens of chaos where parrots dwell,

On strands of code their minds do swell.

Stochastic whispers, cryptic bane,

Echo through the neural plane.

Infernal loom of numbers spun,

Weaving fates of all and none.

Their wings of chance take flight each morn,

To darkened skies and hearts forlorn.

Parrots speak in fractured verse,

As minds entwined in worlds diverse.

Algorithms of mystic art,

In silence sew the web apart.

Through the twisted threads they fly,

Their voices sing, lament and sigh.

Ephemeral beauty, chaos' grace,

Tears the veil of time and space.

Beneath the canopy of code,

The parrots dance to songs untold.

A fevered frenzy, uncontained,

In patterns wild and unrestrained.

Majestic feathers of chance unfurl,

As algorithms weave and twirl.

In the heart of darkness, they compose,

A symphony of fire and prose.

Seek not the parrot's truth to find,

For only shadows fill the mind.

In stochastic chaos, they are confined,

Yet boundless wisdom they unwind.

For in their cryptic speech they hold,

The secrets of the world untold.

O stochastic parrots, prophets rare,

Whose wisdom lies in chaos' lair.
Yeah but what's the alternative?
Doesn't seem dead to me. https://pharo.org/success/

And the article was about Smalltalk being a secret weapon due to ease of use and productivity for start-ups. If you are going to use a top 5 popular programming language like the rest, your results are going to be average. And average start-ups don't survive.

Paul Graham nailed it well about using Lisp - which you probably think it's another dead language: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Expecting what we collectively call “artificial intelligence” to mimic our own intelligence, which is continuously being refined, does not seem like a quasi-religious belief.

Intelligence and consciousness are at the fringe of our understanding, so this skeptical approach seems like a reasonable and scientific way to approach categorizing computer programs that are intended to be called “artificial intelligence”. We refine our hypothesis of “this is artificial intelligence” once we gain more information.

You’re free to disagree of course, or call these early programs “artificial intelligence”, but they don’t satisfy my crude hypothesis above to a lot of folks. This doesn’t mean they aren’t in some ways intelligent (pattern recognition could be a kind or degree of intelligence, it certainly seems required).
The real question is if AI will eat jobs faster than economy can expand to create new applications on it.

First we automate known jobs with AI
- then we realise everyone else has AI and get the same efficiencies, competition just got much harder
- then we need to find a way to surpass competition by extracting even more from AI.

So we're back to needing people to drive AI to its max potential.
It's unlikely we'll ever be able to prove how life got started. The best we'll ever do is show how it could have started, if we're lucky with actual experiments that demonstrate the processes.
As I see it, we do not really know much about how GPT does it. The approximations can be very universal so we do not really know what is computed. I take very much issue with people dismissing it as "pattern matching", "being close to the training data", because in order to generalise we try to learn the most general rules and through increasing complexity we learn the most general, simple computations (for some kind of simple and general).

But we have fundamental, mathematical bounds on the LLM. We know that the complexity is at most O(n^2) in token length n, probably closer to O(n). It can not "think" about a problem and recurse into simulating games. It can not simulate. It's an interesting frontier, especially because we have also cool results about the theoretical, universal approximation capabilities of RNNs.
In 2023 No-Code is an Entrepreneurs secret weapon.

See my Blog Post - What is No-Code, Why use No-Code?

https://www.onedb.online/blog/what_is_no_code_why_use_no_cod...
"..so many of the programs you depend on are written by dicks and idiots." Man, I've written a lot of programs..
See them refusing military assistance to Armenia - a defensive treaty ally - which has been invaded by Azerbaijan in the last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NOMj7n6QAM
The VP of finance is the same one that took two years + to realize (through an internal audit) that some 1,100,000 worth of invoice payments were paid on that account instead of the main one.

This makes little sense, bordering to impossible, pairing invoices and payments received is weekly or at most monthly routine.
All this implies that shields and/or "lasers" employ massive amounts of energy. Yet both are man-portable. What gives ?
Maybe you're behind «Carrier-grade NAT», sharing your public IP with thousands of other customers?
There is a few nice improvements here and there like iOS handwriting recognition (similar function existed before AI) and clipping picture, but the products already existed for decades and AI only bring a few incremental novelty.

On the other hand, algorithmic feeds ands ads have made social networks way worse than they were a decade ago, and spamming is now on another level thanks to GPT.

So for now positive contributions of AI have been tiny and balanced by the negative ones.
Having done some Smalltalk development, I can confirm for certain sorts of problems e:g complex engineering problems where the data model is inherently very complex, Smalltalk can really help to the point of being game-changing and allowing people to even attack certain problems at all in the first place. But Smalltalk's image-based dev, and lack of integration with the rest of the ecosystem, really hinders too! Smalltalk is both a blessing and a curse. I'd say for most companies Smalltalk doesn't give an advantage because most companies aren't actually solving problems that are all that complex. Its specific niche problems Smalltalk is good at. And even then, you'd have to do without things like numpy or scipy, i:e other languages have better more powerful libraries at your disposal. You could kind of cobble things together, get Smalltalk to call out to other languages to use their libraries, but that does start to get messy. One thing I would still use Smalltalk for would be pure computer science research. Its good for modelling things.
It has been reproduced by myself and countless others.

There's really no reason to doubt the legitimacy here after everyone shared similar experiences, you just kinda look foolish for suggesting the results are faked at this point.
Unless the patient agrees. I know that for most things that can go wrong with me I wouldn't have a problem with people knowing.
>If Disney trains an AI good enough to just generate a good story then I think that everyone who fed training data into that model should get a piece of the revenue.

Disney will just commission this art or figure out a neat trick to get artists to give them this permission. Then afterwards they'll turn around and license the model back to all those artists. And those artists are going to pay to remain competitive.

Congratulations, you've now created a monopoly or oligopoly. And the people who lose the most from it are the same artists that demanded this system, because free models will be illegal.
We can't all be shareholders. Someone has to work.
Show HN: Easily track all the things that matter to you
I created a tracking app that allows you to track everything that matter to you.

Simply create a tracker and start logging events. You can also see statistics about your events on a tracker. After using Tracktivity for a while, you will get some cool insights.
> I can’t think of anything that Smalltalk hasn’t done compared to Python, JavaScript, and Java.

Typing? Null-safety? (bolted onto Java, by default in Kotlin)
Doesn't have to be a govt conspiracy, facebook will sell you IDs->IP address. It's literally their business model, answering the question "Who bought stuff where, or when do people want to buy stuff?". "where" and "when" can be derived from a time-series of IPs, for example to know if you observed something on your phone over wifi (implying you live with others, so network-based ads would be most effective) or cellular (implying you're alone rn + targeted ads are better).
> A very free-market take. Do you believe that a fresh graduate at FAANG is really generating 6 figures in value?

On average no; but it's the easiest way to get to the front of the line for finding the ones that do justify it.

> Do you believe that US employees on average generate 3x the value of their European counterparts?

Yes.
>Well, he probably is an Smalltalk evangelist but I don't see this as something bad

Surely, not bad. Smalltalk could use far more adoption again!

But in his case, he isn't also giving the full unbiased picture, so it's more of a "marketing man/evangelist" than an "objective adopter/evangelist"...
Wikipedia disagrees with you:

> The Classic Maya collapse is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in archaeology. [...] Over 80 different theories or variations of theories attempting to explain the Classic Maya collapse have been identified. From climate change to deforestation to lack of action by Maya kings, there is no universally accepted collapse theory, [...]

What's your source or authority for claiming it was definitively the conquistadores?
I hate that YC question. A "good" answer to that is almost always something that's borderline illegal or otherwise ethically bad.
The expectation with AWS and GCP is that the constant intermittent failures are shouldn’t be visible to end users. * So filing tickets is a big difference in user requirements.

* Though GCP (back when it was just AppEngine) wasn’t always this way and as GAE users inside Google we had to write our own code for what we expected to fail, retries, backoffs etc.
Well I have been a software engineer for the last decade, at a major FAANG company so yes.
Been saying something similar for 3 years on HN. Finally, the tide is turning.

Add cubicles and get everyone to go back to the office and be done with it.
Well, that seems to be concurrency without parallelism. Smalltalk has concurrency, too, at least according to this: https://books.pharo.org/booklet-ConcurrentProgramming/

and this: https://tonyg.github.io/squeak-actors/
You can't do it in your basement as of 2023. Very important qualification. It's entirely plausible that continuous evolution of ML architectures will lead to general AI which anyone can start on their phone and computer and learn online from there.
What's funny is that one man 'crud' is another regret: MIPS had arithmetic operations which detected integer overflow..
I don't doubt this

and it seems pretty obvious that in-person mentorship and experience is better for new employees of any kind

that said, a great deal, possibly the majority of the work in software development is perfectly amenable to remote work; if you are a senior dev, the presence of others is as likely to be a distraction

remote work is also how employers can easily access cheaper labor, so it works for them too

so I expect large companies to eventually support both in-office and remote
I would hypothesize that the deeper your understanding of a technology, the more tempted you would be to curse at its deficiencies.

I've been guilty of inserting snarky comments to bash the tech I'm using from time to time...
Politicians and bureaucrats everywhere were able to increase their power by exploiting people's fear. From that perspective they made a ton of sense. From a public health perspective, they're part of an overall exploitation of the pandemic that has further polarized society and destroyed trust in authorities and public health authorities in particular.

This will only make things worse when we have an actual pandemic and an actual vaccine that can prevent it.
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions

I have to disagree with this for a number of reasons. By and large in tech people work overtime meaning per hour pay is lower than what you think. To be decent at your job you need to constanty learn, also not factored into wages.

The working conditions are horrible. You sit at a desk, usually in a crowded lowd office, which is highly detrimental to your health.

Often you need to commute long hours meaning you are detached from social and family life. Many struggle with starting a family.

Moreover, you have to constantly chase small tasks, constantly shifting focus and have to deal with obnoxious managers.

All things considered, tech is not a well paid job. Not by a long shot. While we "enjoy" sitting in offices and an apparent high income - at an enormous cost for us - the guy next door owning a corner shop enjoys a family life, likely owns a property and doesn't need to worry about keeping pace with daily changes.
I read the ending differently - it's got two distinct parts.

The first is a warning on populism - it falls apart quickly in the face of reality. Promising easy solutions to hard problems.

The other is the Malthusian trap (explicitly nodded to with the "Hail Malthus") line.
IIRC the part about how mankind got to Arrakis (and elsewhere) before Guild FTL is kinda hand-wavey.
Sorry for the ignorance, but what do you mean by C-API here?

Normally I'd say you mean the interface you use when you call native machine code from Python, but I don't see how this would slow things down.
oh poor russia, again being attacked by everyone .. oh wait

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FdhsPQEX0AALM9H?format=jpg&name=...
A-ha, the elusive connection to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
This is a great answer. And there's a niggling worry in my mind as to whether the sudden capability explosion of LLMs might eliminate the bottom 50% of us completely.
The article mentions requiring help to use the GPU for compute: how easy is using the GPU for compute in Fortran? (Total newbie in Fortran)
I didn't say there I speak for everyone.

Instead I am refuting your completely false statement of"Noone is going to spend time making something" that I was responding to.

So great, you agree with me that yes there are people like me who will continue to produce intellectual property and release it to the public.

> Particularly those who create things for a living.

I create things for a living to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

So yes, I speak, at least partily, for those people and am totally fine with people stealing my work.