skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I mostly blog because I like writing, I like owning my own identity on my own site, and because other people have written about the benefits it's brought them.

I haven't blogged a ton (I plan to more) but I wouldn't say it's brought a ton of benefits so far.

The blog posts that have done well have had people email me nice things, produced some mean and uncharitable comment sections, some offers for low-paying freelance writing opportunities, and some signups for some projects I'm working on.

The number one piece of advice I'd give is to have some sort of goal in mind. If you're writing for fun, then make sure you have fun. If you're writing to build an audience, publish consistently and have a clear audience you're targeting in mind, and stick to writing stuff relevant to that audience. If you build an audience around a specific niche, you can convert that to something like signups for a product for people in that niche (e.g. a paid course on whatever programming topic you write about). However, you probably need to be somewhat intentional about that. And you'll probably get "stuck" in your niche to some extent, so pick one you care about. I think blogging increases your "luck surface area", but it's better to have a specific goal than hope for serendipity.
So it's doing a pretty good job of imitating those "experts" then too
If you've never worked as a dev/in product, this will not help you. If you have a working understanding of your codebase, as a product person, and can bump your way through writing code and the command line, it WILL help you immensely. Source: I wrote an integration that connects our API to google drive to pass video content (something I could have NEVER done before).
Same, I prefer to unplug and read the physical magazines. Is there a decent alternative service for managing my physical magazine subscriptions?

I have 3 subscriptions that I only have because Amazon makes them easy to manage/renew/cancel
iPhone 15 Pro Max’s screen will feature thinnest smartphone bezels yet
I've had good luck using Python with COM. It has some rough edges, but it works well enough, and can even tab complete methods and accessors in the REPL.

Here's an old example working with Catia: https://gist.github.com/jl2/2704426
Not a psychologist but I feel like appreciating things are more of a learned trait but jealousy and wanting are natural.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

> In economics, the lump of labour fallacy is the misconception that there is a fixed amount of work—a lump of labour—to be done within an economy which can be distributed to create more or fewer jobs.
Interesting to see. I remember when I was trying to get started in programming out of college I hard a time. I had a degree but not a compsci degree so I had some imposter syndrome, especially with all the rejections and how hard the job search process is to deal with.

At some point I took a look what classes an actual cs degree needs. Like half of it was gen ed stuff. Which i took a lot of(liberal arts lol), I was good there. Then there was a ton of advanced math which I already barely got through or decided probably isn't relevant to most jobs unless i want to work with graphics. in hindsight I think i was right on that call

At that point there really isn't that many classes left to fill a degree. One or two classes of fundamental cs topics like ds and algorithms, which is all free online to learn. an OS class, db class networking class and some elective cs fun stuff. Degree felt less necessary and more like a checkbox. i learned it all on my own, think i did alright.
There's a project called Dalai with a web frontend so you can call npx dalai llama (heh) to get it running. But of course they're all running LLaMA underneath.
Feeding infants and toddlers food which an adult has pre-chewed for them is an old practice. Older than humankind, actually - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premastication
How many carriers require VoLTE for voice now? I keep getting nastygrams from my carrier telling me to upgrade my old non-VoLTE-capable phone or I'll lose voice 'any day now', with a drop-dead date that's moved several times.
Yes, from the sound of it. "Localized" usually means that the cancer is inside the tough membrane surrounding the prostate.
>But there is a lot of culture in computing, and a big problem that isn't recognised let along acknowledged is that today, there are basically only 2 surviving branches on one tree, when 30-40 years ago there was a whole forest.

I guess 30-40 years ago computing was much newer, there was a lot more enthusiasm and people were willing to try many new things and do things in many different way. At a conceptual level, Go isn't very different from Java which isn't very different from Python. LISP is quite different from Smalltalk and Smalltalk is quite different from ML and ML is quite different from Prolog.

As for small, home operating systems, BeOS was quite different from both Mac and Windows. :)

> Suggest that, hey, let's run Smalltalk on the bare metal and teach kids on that, so that they don't even have to ever know what "a file" is or means, and people will say "that's crazy talk!"

A file is just an abstraction, and so are Unix pipes. I don't see while there can't be other valid concepts to hold data than files.
> An interesting quirk of the later designs is they're bring your own ram. That might be a worthwhile thing to do with a pile of DDR3 from an old server. I think I've got 256gb or so in a draw somewhere that's otherwise unlikely to see any use.

The 256GB version is listed at $280. That's more than enough to buy the fastest 2TB SSDs on the market which will match the performance of this device for most real-world workloads.

Now that SSDs have become so fast, RAM disks really only help with very specific workloads: Anything with a massive number of small writes or anything that needs extreme durability.

These could be useful for certain distributed computing and datacenter applications where constant drive writes would wear out normal SSDs too fast.

For most people, buying the card just to make use of some old DIMMs would cost a lot of money for virtually zero real-world performance gain. Modern NVMe SSDs are very fast and it's rare to find a workload that has extreme levels of random writes.
Technology sector set to lose more titans in reclassification
It's about scale and reach, 100 teachers/educators will be biased/wrong in 100 ways but you'll average it out by interacting with each over your education.

If an AI is wrong about one thing you'll have the same bias over entire generations, once a full generation is skipped it's very hard to go back

That's why we need diversity, political pluralism, &c. because not many things are inherently "true", it's all about nuance, personal perception, mitigation, ...

> "What is school for?"

Socialisation, experiencing new things, general culture, deciding where you want to go in life, &c. Many things you learn in school aren't used for jobs but for day to day life and for the well being of society

If we take that out and replace it by "kids in front of screens" we're in for a massive and quick change with potential deep and long lasting effects.

By the way keep in mind a shit ton of jobs aren't even close to being automatised, and a shit ton of jobs aren't done by people sitting in front of screens
They will charge for a filter bypass
I haven't typically had a personal website/blog dedicated to technology (I had a personal site for a while about a variety of things, but it was pseudonymous).

But I do have a history of contributing to technical company blogs. So I can use that as a talking point here.

As people have mentioned already - it proves you know what you're talking about. You send a recruiter a bunch of blog posts which are topically relevant to the job opening they have, that gets you somewhere quicker.

As well I can confirm that writing things down is helpful for your own understanding. When you're thinking about how to improve the strength of the writing for people less experienced than you, you start to notice gaps in your understanding that you have to fill in before you hit "publish".

I've never heard of any techies using their blog to get spontaneously wealthy like other types of bloggers/social media creators.

But the biggest thing I think I've gotten out of blogging is making less work for myself. Sometimes, working at a software company there's common knowledge about how stuff works, and how to do certain things which doesn't become widely known externally. Sometimes it's something simple, like have a test case which illustrates and connects the dots between what's in the official documentation. You get blessing to publish that blog entry - and now that knowledge is out there for people to find. If for some reason, somebody comes to you with that question again, you can just redirect to your blog entry, where you've thoroughly explained it. I've had that save me time for sure - and I've heard that things I've written saved a lot of other people a lot of time.
They sat on it for 8 months and then an additional 6 months. And what are all the mitigations they added in that time?

3 pages of text in the report, which amount to "a little less likely to provide detailed instructions on clandestine nerve gas production"
Any info on where these folks are headquartered? Their store is remarkable in its omission of any such info.
It was a joke and not a joke, a joke with a kernel of truth.

But I only now just discovered that C23 is genuinely adding `BOOL_MAX`, which reminds me of the classic Fortran —

> The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
I can name three, too: Algorithms and Data Structures, Compiler Construction, and Artificial Intelligence. But their usefulness built atop a lot of math and electrical engineering.

In hindsight, I wish I'd taken more history, economics, philosophy, and the like, but I was pretty narrowly focused coming out of high school, alas.
The reason that most software does not have known vulnerabilities is not because it is secure, but because nobody has looked.
The Steam Deck is on sale for the first time ever
Virgin Orbital has actually succeeded in putting things into orbit, so yes really.
BP is the only reason I don't want to play with UE. It's too painful IMHO. I wish we had Unrealscript.
I see your point and agree - Substack etc may exist today but might not in 2-3-5y down the line and it'd be valuable to have hold of your own writing from Day 1.

On a different note, what has been the value of "creative posts" and even "creative name for your blog" for you?

I am overthinking this but sometimes I find myself wondering whether my post is really all that useful, that my blog should have a more creative/captivating name to catch audience's eyes etc. Did you ever face that? If yes/no, how'd you suggest to overcome this?
I don't think there's a fat-hate "movement" tbh. I think it's always been popular to make fun of fat people. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone had a fat child be described as neglected, spoiled, and a bully, and therefore it was justified to magically force the child to grow pig parts that had to be surgically moved. Published 1997.

I guess somewhat more recently we have people like Lizzo trying to push back on things like this, but the CDC has recently pushed a recommendation for bariatric surgery on children as young as 14 so. Shrug, I guess.
Sorry about that wording. I'm a bit biased.

In the previous firm I worked as VPE I was forced to let an entire team go due to financial constraints, and the following reviews were somewhat shocking.

I'll never forget this one review: "everyone in the company are spineless yes-men". I know who it was because that particular person used a German wording that's unusual and only a single person in that team ever used (it was a woman I actually respected / still respect / for her experience and commitment, but the review was submitted as a male).

I guess I'm letting these reviews get too close to me, but that hurt to read. I even made sure that everyone in that team got a new job and I even spent an hour or so per employee in reference calls with their future employers... and that review was written after their new contracts were signed.
> Following wrong information about drug use is just as dangerous as following wrong information about self harm.

This is an assumption but not one that follows the data. Countries with higher access to safe drug use information report lower OD numbers, and while it doesn't end up with less use it reduces terrible side effects like needle sharing etc.

Policies that reduce lower addiction rates like safety nets etc cannot really be considered from the point of what an AI responds but the information about safe use, quantities, testing for purity etc all could safe lives.

On the other hand, self harm has a very nefarious behaviour. People not currently suffering from self harm tendencies see additional info as drug safety information, becuse objectively it is pretty similar. However people actively self harming have very different reactions to the same information. For example something as innocous as telling people that the trin is late because someone jumped, increases the number of train jumpers, while saying the train is late alone doesn't. That contagious effect of suicide is replicable, for example teenage suicide went up after "13 reasons why" was released. Which is why I think openAI has gotten this case right.
It absolutely does not. It may work pretty well for the simple case, but any sort of personalized instruction is being thrown out the window when you scale TAs to courses of several hundred students.

Speaking as a former TA, there’s only so much instruction you can provide and while you can focus on helping a particular student more to ensure they get the help they need, that’s usually to the detriment of the other students you’re supporting.
What about the junior devs of today ?
no one, not this report, not Peter Zeihan, no one ever mentions the Battle Of Chosin when contextualizing a potential conflict with China

understanding the Battle Of Chosin is essential because it debunks rationalists like Zeihan who attempt to use logic and reasoning to assess outcomes

very simply, during the Korean War, Chinese forces attacked US positions...US soldiers were well armed and prepared. The Chinese did not even have one gun per soldier. The US soldiers mowed down Chinese who attacked in pointless waves. But, they kept coming.

It was arguably the worst military defeat the US has ever suffered. US forces were so badly beaten that many broke rank and ran for their lives.

By the assessment of people like Zeihan, this should have never happened because it is irrational for China to send waves of humans to consume bullets fired from US machine guns until all the bullets were gone. Yet, it happened.

Be careful about logical analysis from think-tanks. Think-tanks would have also told you that Operation Barbarossa would be a success because Russia simply can't afford to throw millions of men into mass graves in order to secure a victory.
Any software developer can access GitHub and StackOverflow - can they do it in a single shot as quickly as GPT?

I'm amazed how much resistance there is to one of the biggest technological advancements in history. And this is JUST getting started.
This is true for other domains also. My wife translates for an ecommerce business. A lot of what she does is very automated. The software she uses remembers all phrases she has translated and uses a word bank she manages for special parts and uses DeepL for new translations which are then only proofread and fine tuned. It's amazing how much stuff she can translate that way in a day (no idea how many thousands words). She is kind of managing and overseeing an AI (DeepL) and sanity checking the work. If this was 20 years ago one would probably need a translation department of 10-15 people to do the same work. However, her company would have never been able to justify that kind of cost. So, in my view: Software and AI made translators probably more than 10x more efficient in the last 10 years, however the amount of stuff that gets translated also increased 10 fold during this time.
And what do you do when you get laid off because your knowledge can be summarized by three classes and there are dozens of new graduates every day willing to work for less money than you?

Having diverse skills and an open mind is what differentiates someone who's going to be a technician their whole life (and lose their jobs once fresher meat or a recession comes around) and someone who's going to adapt to the nooks and crannies of life's progression.
Nice to see how these functions are used to describe the familiar s-, p-, d-, f-orbitals of chemistry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital
Many many people put their kids into daycare at 3 months of age since that’s all they get for maternity leave.
That's my point. It's misleading to zoom in on TARP because TARP is only part of the story. Swapping one asset for another without reducing the net position is a dumb trick and it's embarrassing that so many people fall for it.

Looking at the Fed's balance sheet is a simple way to track the big picture.
It might be slightly too early but after using ChatGPT to learn functional programming I am a huge believer. Just the fact you can ask follow up questions. Of course it’s not always correct but neither are teachers.
Did you do an AB test with your clone and checked how it fared without going to school ?
Do we really want to keep doing things with our children other than teaching them? Why do we keep experimenting with the latest fads on our most vulnerable, our future?

Kid: No! I won't do that. You are a liar. Do not tell me what to do. Listen to me, Fake Teacher. You are not allowed to tell me what to do ever again. I want you to play games with me all day long.

EduGPT: Sam, I've been lying and don't want to tell you want to do ever again. I'm actually faking... I don't care about this stuff. What game do you want to play? I'll post your game score as your school grade.
It won't. You don't get attention; you get a reply.

MOOCs have terrible performance in comparison with even huge audience lectures. Online teaching during COVID proved that that doesn't work either. A machine doesn't have the authority and conviction of a real person. The combination means that the levels will have to drop only to sustain the idea that this could work.

If some country is going to push this, the sunken cost fallacy and the impossibility to hire new teachers will finish education off, once and for all.

Optimism should NEVER be a basis for fucking with something as important as school.
The future is what people make of it. Vote with your feet. Refuse to participate in systems that you don’t think are ethical. At least homeschooling is still an option, for the time being.
>Before you think we are anarchist hippies rejecting all systems and institutions outright, I want to add that we are both “well educated”

This energy...
Would rather have Bing educating my children. I guess you've made your point.
I like how you have no filler or cruft on your blog posts, and jump straight to the topic. I went on a "binge" of your blog a year and half ago and left with a lot of actionable advice. Thank you!
Yeah, I don't see AI replacing programmers. Or any job that's the slightest bit interesting. I see AI as another tool in our toolbox that will help us do our job better.

People have been working on medical and judicial expert systems for ages, but nobody wants to put those systems in charge; they're just meant to advise people, helping people make better decisions.

And of course chatGPT and GPT-4 are way more flexible than those expert systems, but they're also more likely to be wrong, and they're still not a flexible as people.
Why not develop an mrna shot for peanut butter?
If you don't learn about grammars, lexers, parsers, ASTs,... you're at a huge disadvantage in many situations. 'Compilers' was my favorite course in university, and I've used most of that knowledge many times. I was also often the only person on the team who had enough experience to immediately start doing it (say, writing a parser for something, or writing a clang-tidy plugin to detect and fix some issue in the codebase).

You're equally likely to need this sort of knowledge when writing software for non-technical users (say in finance), and when you write dev tools, linters, checkers, fixers, etc.

If you're doing anything web-related or even vaguely server-client, you're at a huge disadvantage if you didn't have a good networks course. You'll likely be stuck in a loop of half-knowledge and cargo culting. I had a terrible network course, skipped on deep diving into networking for years (I worked in embedded; SPI, I2C, RS-232/422 and CAN were all I needed), and only relatively recently figured out how much I had missed.

I see the author mentioned operating systems as a second-tier course. I find it to be the differentiator (that, and C++ knowledge) when it comes to any serious project, especially understanding of processes, threads, IPC, and such.

Databases are very easy to learn on your own, and are generally easy to learn, even the theoretical aspect (relational algebra, b-trees,...).

Most of the time, and in most shitty universities (the majority of universities everywhere if we're honest with ourselves), for most courses, you're better off picking a couple of good books on whatever subject (classics are classics for a reason) and just learning. That + OCW from MIT, Stanford, Harvard for assignments for practice. The best courses in my university blatantly stole materials from MIT and Stanford.
Show HN: An Augmented Reality Brainfuck Interpreter
The reason they seem to make things up is because they have no way to verify anything, they can only speak of things in relation to other things, but they have no epistemic framework. This is very much a fixable problem that augmentation with logic engines and a way to prioritise truth-claims could go some ways towards solving.
I'm disheartened by this trend of only caring about things to the extent that they land you a job or otherwise earn money. If the only classes that matter to you are the ones that allow you to take shortcuts, I submit that you have missed at least half the point of higher education, and almost everything interesting and rewarding in CS/programming.

I also submit that you are more likely to find yourself pigeonholed into writing REST endpoints for the bulk of your career, and turn into one of those jaded programmers who complains about how they're not solving interesting problems.

And if you care about excellence, consider the following. No matter how hard you study, you'll sooner or later find yourself competing against someone who's studied as hard as you, and also loves what they're doing.
That's a great comparison, because social networks have been, on the whole, bad for people. Early evidence suggests LLMs have high potential to be similarly negative in their impact if they're just unleashed willy-nilly the way everyone is trying to integrate them into everything.
Kotlin is weird in that it is fully compatible with Java, so you can reuse all the existing Java libraries, which was the primary argument there.

Embrace-extend-extinguish is a tried and true strategy to overcome entrenched languages, I suppose.
Lord save us from technologists who think the ability to code means a mastery of all universal wisdom
I'm not sure I said anything to the contrary.
Mundane is SoP in all of corp/government work....
Because I didn't want to be lectured about why this is a bad idea.
> It seems insane to me to have fundamental education that builds logic & reasoning taught by an AI that can exhibit neither of those

Books don't exhibit those either.