skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are your AI fears?
Recent progress in AI gives me anxious feelings which I can't address. What fears do you have?

My feelings:

- it's kind of a "cheat code" which makes a lot of mental work pointless. Why expanding your cognitive abilities if AI can do most of mental tasks faster and better?

- human creativity isn't any special thing

- giving more power to people eventually leads to a disaster (e.g. industrial revolution and climate change)

- I can't explain how AI can be so powerful and it makes me anxious

- jealous because I didn't choose an ML path at uni
No! Yes! Oh.

But rest assured, it's not just the libertarians and not just in the US.

Europe is currently facing shortages of skilled labour in many sectors of industry and business, what with the baby boomers entering retirement age in droves. Market forces of supply and demans would dictate that since the resource (skilled labour) demand increases, and the supply decreases, the price (wages) has to go ... upwards.

Basic economic theory of free markets.

So, does that happen? With few exceptions, nope. Wages continue to stagnate. Instead, lobbyists clamour for slashing social security to make part time jobs and retirement less desirable.
IndexedDB should also be disabled by default. Adding more and more storage options instead of restricting the existing ones that are already being abused is madness.
What is shared hosting exactly? Cheaper VPS services are already shared, with the server being a virtual machine on shared hardware.
If a qualified dev is "under performing" that is a management problem.

If a qualified manager is "under performing" that is a leadership problem.

Put another way, Zuck says devs who are better managed - by managers who are better lead - perform better.

No doubt, remote work is different*. Which means managers and leaders are less experienced in the particulars. It's bad form to blame the players and/or the game.

Finally, productive here is in the context of work. If you're commuting, chances are you lose personal productivity. Is that accounted for anywhere?

* I've worked (as a contractor) at a number of places who have switched to remote-only and they are still a long way from figuring that out. Sadly, for the most part, they have no idea how far off they are. Or just don't care.
To be fair, I suspect there is a correlation between being interested in things like HackerNews and being an above-average developer. I've met some pretty poor developers who couldn't really give a stuff about innovations, best practice, etc, they just churned out mediocre code they'd learned at university, or copypasted, then clocked off at 5pm.
> If your app is complex enough to need something like this, you probably should make it native anyway

Are we really still making this argument in an era where Figma and Google Docs exist?
Weird flex or whatever dude. But all I’m hearing is that your anxiety has led you to a) refuse to look into a new piece of technology, b) hold incorrect views on it (like that it’s only useful for boilerplate code), c) look down on those that ARE using it, and d) pose that your incredible experience is why this wouldn’t be useful to you.

If you can’t find your drive to look at new things enough to even see if they’re worth digging more into, which you seemingly haven’t, then I think this speaks poorly of you as a developer.
> HSBC bought the company’s British arm, which was still largely solvent, for £1.

I suspect “insolvent” is probably an adequate synonym anytime you have to use a qualifier word on “solvent”.
Introducing, Representr: the first Democracy-as-a Service.
https://archive.is/rqRII
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
If I was obscenely wealthy I'd do the same for the seas and oceans, there's got to be so many fascinating wrecks out there as well as natural formations we know nothing about yet that sonar could pick up. Shipwrecks often have a limited lifespan for things to be preserved too, for example there's very little left of Lusitania's wreck that resembles a ship any more just a rusty debris field.
Gotta keep those 2020-2022 vintages on a slow decline so they can raise the next fund.
I guess it would make a little more sense assuming they're using a mix of models
I’ve been renting a house in (what amounts to) an Intel/Nike company town where quite literally 70-80% of my entire neighborhood is Chinese or Indian.

Having been already aware of the abused visa program and the green card restrictions, it still didn’t prepare me for the multiple times I’ve seen neighbors’ children bawling their eyes out from getting displaced in the middle of the school year.

It’s asinine that so much attention and faux empathy is showered on the nearly 3 million people annually who decide to break the law before even getting into the country while nobody important seems to care about the problems facing the people who came here legally to quietly chase their own dreams and pay their taxes.
Yeah, I also this as weird.

I opened a new account and ACHed $25k into it which triggered all sorts of "fraud alerts" and put my money in limbo for days. Ended up having to get on a three way conference call for the transfer to go through.
So we'll have heaps of memory and no compute?
In general I agree, but weren't libertarians pushing for physical golden money?
The bank had long term bets if government bonds that after the rate change massively weakened their value, threatening the bank’s capitalisation levels. This has nothing to do with their clients.
That native code still needs to be able to interact with your Python objects somehow. You can't change the API around PyObject without forcing all C libraries to make changes on their side, and that API forces you to expose things a certain way.
I'm always reticent on these things because there's little assurance on how long it will be maintained.

I appreciate when people give me code that I understand and would have taken me longer to figure out on my own - but a complex non-standard tool is harder to adopt.
[sarcasm]

Cause there was only one correct answer for every question:
"97% of scientists agree ..."

[/sarcasm]
The downside is your neighbours also having unlimited bandwidth. We had to rebuild one Citrix environment to a different (identical) box, because the first was in a network segment with terrible network performance.

If you pull a short straw, your box will be sharing bandwidth with a few bittorrent seed boxes or someone’s video CDN node
At my old gig we ran Django and FastAPI with pypy. I don't remember there being too many issues. One thing is that pypy versions lag behind official python, so if you're using bleeding edge stuff, it won't be supported in pypy yet.

That was a couple of years ago at this point, and I've not been in the python ecosystem since then, but I can only imagine things are getting better in that regard rather than worse.
Checking is the backing buffer for a queue of pending transactions. If you have one or two highly-compensated people in your family, and somewhat randomly-distributed large expenses (paying cash for a car, renovating a house, credit card bills after a vacation, etc), then $100k does not seem like an unusually large buffer size.
SEEKING WORK | Remote, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Hi, I am Sylwia.

With over 20 years of experience leading the creation of concepts and designs for diverse products, campaigns, and branding efforts viewed globally, I design for change and success.

Special areas of expertise:

* branding
* corporate design
* product and packaging design
* online and social media

Graduated from the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw with a M.A. Industrial Design & Fine Arts.

I am available for small to medium sized freelance projects.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylwiastrugala/

Grab a coffee?
Mail sylwia.strugala@gmail.com
Shouldn't surprise anyone, but Hetzner was also the best value US Cloud provider we found [1].

We've been a happy dedicated server customer since 2013, although we've just finished our transition from their dedicated servers in Germany to US Hetzner Cloud for improved latency.

Always happy to see Hetzner's name in lights, DHH also used Hetzner as a deployment target when announcing their MRSK tool that 37 Signals are using to automate deployments as they begin transitioning off the cloud.

[1] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-pr...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL1cV2FXZ5I
It wouldn't waste time garbage collecting to focus on trash talking instead.
> Unfortunately, people get deeply uncomfortable when a chatbot starts having an existential crisis

I'd go further and say that many of the responses I saw were actively abusive and could trigger significant mental health issues in vulnerable readers.
This has everything to do with their clients. Do you know any other bank recently which faced 42B $ of withdrawals ?

Thing is, this bank was servicing people basically juicing the system of free money. This cut both ways.
> Now all they need to do is simply show up on the ballot, and spend the rest of their time making sure people hate and fear "the other side" enough.

yea, i feel like in some way gerrymandering is a big component in this?

like if you dont ever need to actually need to convince voters in other parties and just appeal to people in your safe district.... doesn't that invite/encourage partisanship even more?
I still have a few times per month mails from AWS with an "instance retirement", for which then you have to plan accordingly (basically by not having a single instance as a single point of failure). If you do the same with Hetzner, you would not notice the failure either (failed disk on a single machine? just business as usual, it will eventually be replaced).

Obviously replacing AWS features like RDS multi-AZ masters is not going to be as easy and might be worth paying the whole AWS premium, but that really depends on the business size, traffic, internal experience and many other factors.
> Two humans in this thread just read the solution and thought it was correct.

My guess is that they just skim read and missed what ChatGPT actually wrote, it's not that they misunderstood what "vegan wolf" means [1]. On the other hand, you cannot skim read what you are writing yourself, that's not how the mind works.

The gist of the problem here is that, unlike a human, ChatGPT doesn't understand the words it generates, which leads to hilarious results.

As another example, look at the "debugging" of GPT-4's assumptions someone posted in a sibling comment: it "knows" the vegan wolf will eat plant-based food and it "knows" a cabbage is a plant, yet it "thinks" the wolf "will not harm the cabbage"... which is a misunderstanding no human will make (if they know what "vegan" and "cabbage" mean). This doesn't happen in a long chain of reasoning (where a human can
lose the line of thought) but in very short paragraphs, one right after the other! This failure mode requires not understanding the individual assumptions, which prevents GPT from making the connection. I was asked for an error that showed GPT misunderstanding something no person would, and I did.

[1] question for you: did you think the wrong solution was right because you thought a vegan wolf cannot eat the cabbage (let me bet this is NOT what crossed your mind) or because the person who posted it made it look as if it was the right solution and you skim read it without paying attention, assuming "this person said it's right and it's posting it as a rebuttal, so it's likely right" (this is my bet)?

If the latter, this failure mode is not one of misunderstanding what "vegan wolf" means (which is what debugging GPT's process shows), but one of very human laziness/jumping to conclusions. Do note this cannot happen when you write the solution yourself!
> were extremely specific and were crypto / VCs banks. It's not random banks that failed. They failed specifically because of business they were servicing.

Agree.

Now that the crypto industry in the US have no banks supporting them, perhaps it is time for crypto completely die (and it should) which should reduce the amount of VCs fueling the ponzi scheme.
That's true. I've also used it for these "unknown unknowns" questions with very good results. Basically talking with ChatGPT to find out what should I put on Google, and how we go from there is business as usual.

But other than that it makes me nervous when people say they're "learning with ChatGPT": any serious conversation with ChatGPT about a subject I know about quickly shows just how much nonsense and bullshit it conjures out of thin air. ChatGPT is extremely good at sounding convincing and authoritative, and you'll feel like you're learning a lot, when in fact you could be learning 100% made-up facts and the only way to tell is if you understand the subject already.
Not knowing or giving a shit about the tech stack: A Successful Entrepreneur’s Secret Weapon
You read that and think “wow”, but then you walk your own walk and realize that the programming language is mostly irrelevant here (and you better have chosen python and/or js for their eco). What makes companies fast is not a language, though it may help in a peculiar way. What makes companies fast is, essentially, not hiring the industry people. Both smalltalk and lisp help with that greatly.

It doesn’t matter if you can write two pages of clever code to stay competitive. Because a workday has 8-12 hours and writing ten pages of a dumb code isn’t that hard either. The hard part is to stop doing overengineering, defensive programming, daily refactorings and other things which suit a departments-and-teams-with-managers structure so good, because you have to avoid that structure to stay fast. Esoteric langs just work as a natural safety barrier here.

All of the above is a personal anecdotal opinion of a regular developer who worked in a fast company. I’m not pretending to be wise or complete here or to have a wide experience, it’s just my observation of dynamics of a company that tried to always stay fast (because of founder’s nature), observation wrt to that pg article.

Ps. Sometimes I start to think that it’s all a conspiracy (jk). Because people who advocate for doing things fast are the same people who invented programming religions like DRY, patterns, higher order something paradigms, etc. First you learn how to do all of that, then you learn how to unlearn all of that and just write the fucking code. Sometimes I sit and think like what can I do, like what’s my value if I write dumb straightforward code? Anyone can do that. But then I remind myself that I can write dumb straightforward code and you can not.
Which wouldn’t have current form and functions had iPhone not exist.
Is this the reason behind France trying to increase retirement age despite having a balanced budget in this regard and protests?
A good example in this space was DabbleDB[1], a low-code environment for producing web apps that did CRUD type stuff. Their original video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY

I was pretty impressed when it came out. The UI was very intuitive, and it did a better job with things like table relations than it's competitors. They were also releasing new features based on requests faster than what I typically saw. It happened to have used the Seaside web framework mentioned in the article.

Sadly, Twitter purchased it and shut it down...I assume they just wanted the team and not the product.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB
The US should stop being saved from banking crises.

Let natural consequences happen. Then adjust based on what is learned from the outcomes-- no pain, no gain.

The society & economy should recognize the pain resulting from irresponsible action,

if only do drive the society & economy to punish those who were so greedily irresponsible.

Stop sheltering the population.

And especially stop sheltering the bankers.

Experiencing consequences is an important part of improvement-- without consequences there is no real impetus to change.
Then again, what they invested their money in was government bonds, which lost value due to the government increasing the interest massively after selling those bonds at a low fixed interest. If a business did that, they would win the scumbag of the year prize.
Any napkin figures for how much that would cost, and how long it would take? The results could be incredible...
In the interest of fairness, David Sacks makes some compelling counterpoints here: https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1635747517752283137
The article is an attack on Peter Thiel, not SVB. Also seems thin on facts, and just "SVB is getting bailed out, and hence some rich guy stays rich". Given that both the Fed and the Bank of England have decades-old laws protecting the financial system long before (tech) billionaires, this article seems even more ridiculous.

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Statesman

> Today, the magazine is a print–digital hybrid. According to its present self-description, it has a liberal and progressive political position.[3] Jason Cowley, the magazine's editor, has described the New Statesman as a publication "of the left, for the left"[4] but also as "a political and literary magazine" with "sceptical" politics.
I agree with the criticism in general, but in this case the restructuring of these banks will be entirely paid for from their assets, and by a levy on other banks. No public funds will be used.
Maybe not all, a progressive tax should apply : consider small multigenerational family-only/mostly businesses ! (Note that when none of the children are available they already often have trouble finding buyers they can trust.)
Handbook for CTFers: Zero to One
Mid-2000s were a great time. AdSense and Yahoo! Ads were new. You had 18 year olds making $100,000/month practically overnight by throwing up a MySpace layout website (e.g., myspacesupport.com.)
> But we are in the IT golden age, if you throw computers at things, you get a 100x return. And money was cheap for so long.

Check back in five to ten years, this is a slight reversal on a continued bull run. Why? Because people with money want to make more money and saving money, while important is not making money. Worst case scenario we all get transitioned into defense contractors to fight a future where our current overlords are supplanted by an rapidly rising, better educated and executing CCP.
Virtual Volunteer Tool for Blind or Low Vision, Powered by GPT-4
Is there a political philosophy less understood, or more mischaracterized, than Libertarianism?
You can certainly use it, but whether you see any benefit is going to strongly depend on your workload. If you're doing significant calculations in the API then it might be considerably more performant, but if your API is primarily retrieving things from the database and transforming it to JSON then you're going to be limited mostly by the database latency and so I wouldn't expect major improvements.
I'm in the UK, why on earth does it matter about the branch? In the UK it's about the bank not the branch. The branches left generally are pretty small now doing the most basics of tasks.
I find this to be highly offensive!

(I actually don't. In my case it's self-deprecating humor. If you're in a privileged position then you should be able to make jokes about yourself and take some hits from people who don't like the status quo that helped you get there; otherwise you have no right to criticize other people for their own set of privileged circumstances.)
>to build products or services that can practically run on it's own

No web service/app that is in the business of making money can just "run on its own", but needs constant development and maintenance. That's why the demand for web devs is so high. If every SW project would be a "fire and forget" experience as you claim, the career wouldn't be nearly as well paid as it is right now.

Even phone apps need to be updated or Apple/Google will remove them from the store.

SW in the '90's was more or less "fire and forget", but salaries and the demand then were nowhere near as high as they were to day.
> So it is a sandboxed, abstract filesystem, not rw access to my actual filesystem?

It's sandboxed storage which lives in your filesystem but is only available via the browser and is sandboxed on a per-HTTP-origin basis. That makes it impossible[^1], e.g., for x.y.com to sideload data into, or exfiltrate from, y.z.com. How the files are actually stored on your filesystem is not defined by the in-progress standards doc, but they are not stored as-is because doing so would open them up to security issues from out-of-browser sources, as well as potential file-locking problems from out-of-browser apps.

[^1]: Edit: as a responder points out: "impossible" for a given value of "impossible"
Would you prefer "SV assholes"? Everyone has an asshole, so it's not gendered.
I originally built OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com) with the expectation that no one would use it, using 100% serverless compute that would cost me nothing when unused.

I was a consultant at the time, and wanted to point out how crappy my client's webhosting was (really I just wanted to convince them they were going offline long enough that spending an extra $50 per month on a proper wordpress host would actually make them money)

I kept a twitter thread of all the features I was adding (https://twitter.com/RozenMD/status/1364881512500404224), and eventually it spread via word of mouth. It doesn't make life-changing money, but I could see myself running the service full time eventually.

I ended up moving off of 100% serverless compute, since enough people were using it constantly that it was 80% cheaper to run several servers 24/7.
Again, you’ve basically foregone empiricism and think that the Internet needs your uninformed reckonings about the shortcoming of a technology that you seemingly haven’t had experience with.

It sounds like you’ve been at this for a while, are set in your ways, and are trying to justify it. We all get set in our ways, but stop trying to pass this off as something it’s not.

I’d respect using Copilot and deciding that it didn’t provide value, but all this umming and ahhing is not that.
When people put their money where their mouth is HN shits on them for "voting against their interest".
The article is kind of low quality. First they name Peter Thiel as the poster child for libertarianism. Second they accuse libertarians being against state intervention. Third they say libertarians are asking for state help, so they think they've found a kind of paradox.

But Peter Thiel withdraw his money from SVB in time and he didn't ask for the government's help. So the article authors are kind of contradicting themselves.

Also, blaming libertarians for being against massive state intervention in economy is akin to blaming a fish because he swims in water. It's all what that fish is about and knows to do.
That's cool. This bit shows ChatGPT's lack of understanding, the mistake no human would make:

> Vegan Wolf: The vegan wolf is motivated to eat plant-based food and will not harm the meat-eating goat or the cabbage

It "knows" that a cabbage is a plant, and it "knows" the vegan wolf is "motivated to eat plant-based food", but it doesn't know the wolf will eat the cabbage!

It solves a different problem than the one posed precisely because it doesn't understand the meaning of the words.
> The OPFS is subject to browser quota restrictions.

FWIW, 256mb last i checked (summer 2022). Perhaps less on mobile browsers, but that's just speculation.
I'm not sure if there's a correlation but I've seen at a veterans cemetery, plenty of WWII vets buried there with the name James. There seems to be enough James there to assume more than a handful of them were badasses.
Oh don't be such a snowflake.