skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> except, it IS easy to learn actually. it's visual, you can click around and find out.

That's not easy at all. I am an actual Excel 2007+ virgin. I switched to OpenOffice (there was no Libreoffice yet; Oracle had not yet bought Sun) before high school. Before I finished university, I abandoned all traditional office tools in favor of open-source tools that use entirely different paradigms from Microsoft Office, e.g., Word -> Lyx/LaTeX, PowerPoint -> Org-beamer, Excel -> R. I didn't even use traditional Office tools when they were 'required' by class, instead explaining my commitments to the instructors and teaching myself the open-source alternatives as I went.

For the first ~5 years of my career, I was at startups where I didn't need to use Microsoft Office or even tools in that category.

So within the past year, I started dabbling in Excel for my job, when the last version of Excel I even messed around with was Excel 2003, pre-ribbon menu, in junior high.

And as a developer who is approaching contemporary Excel from a position that is actually pretty close to a blank slate in terms of experience with it... I am here to tell you that this

> [Excel] IS easy to learn actually

is false. You are almost certainly discounting experience people have gradually acquired with Excel in school and over the course of a career. This isn't just evident with oddball developers like me who wanted to and managed to avoid Excel for most of our careers so far. It's also perfectly evident in baby boomers who grew up without Excel and need assistance for basic tasks, and increasingly in zoomers who, like those two generations before them and earlier, have grown up without being trained on office software in schools.

Which takes us back to GP's statement:

> > Excel is powerful, but it’s not easy to learn. It only seems that way to people who already know how it works.

Moreover, these statements

> if you forget the spelling of some formula, no probs, there is a help button.

> people dont want to read manuals or consult documentation

contradict each other. So do the following two, in a slightly less direct way.

> it's visual, you can click around and find out

> they want to hit the ground running

Pressing the help button is reading the documentation, just as much as running `q --help` or whatever.

And anybody who is visually exploring a GUI with as many buttons and menus as Excel's is absolutely crawling, not running. Visually scanning an overloaded, totally new-to-you graphical interface is slow, slow, slow.

When I've been driving Excel on video calls with colleagues during working sessions (specifically for the purpose of learning it), I can practically hear the veins on their foreheads bulging as I fumble around.

Searching with your eyes, especially when some options are hidden behind additional clicks as they are on ribbon menus, is so unbelievably slow compared to searching through a comprehensive manual by typing a couple of words.
I use a similar thing that also handles when you forget -rf, with confirmation & stuff; https://github.com/MikeDacre/careful_rm
100% this. I had a class called "software tools" taught by a bored grad student that covered the standard unix utils (including "sed", "awk", "lex", "yacc", etc.). That's the single most relevant class I took in 6 years of undergrad and grad school and I use its skills virtually every single day ("formal languages and automata" was fun, but I've only ever written a single LALR parser since university and that was on a personal project).
This doesn't feel so futuristic anymore:

T-800, speaking to John Connor in normal voice: "What's the dog's name?"

John Connor: "Max."

T-800, impersonating John, on the phone with T-1000: "Hey Janelle, what's wrong with Wolfie? I can hear him barking. Is he all right?"

T-1000, impersonating John's foster mother, Janelle: "Wolfie's fine, honey. Wolfie's just fine. Where are you?"

T-800 hangs up the phone and says to John in normal voice: "Your foster parents are dead."
> I've heard this before, and I'm curious, not having developed in flash myself.

FWIW, Flash (the authoring tool) became Adobe Animate¹ when Adobe started targeting the web. Because the authoring experience hasn't changed much in 20 years, you can watch Adobe Animate videos² to see how its timeline-based authoring worked.

¹ https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html ² https://www.youtube.com/c/AdobeAnimate
Using LLM in education may lead to trouble unless supervised. Children will learn a lot of fake information made up by the LLM.
Nowadays your doctor can just take a small blood sample and run a battery of allergy tests on that.
It's actually a really hard time for indie bloggers, but I still think you should do it.

I've been blogging for years. I've had a handful of posts go Twitter-viral and/or make the front page of HN, but most of what I write feels like it's just talking into the void.

That said, the benefits are numerous. When I'm looking for a gig, I can point people to my writing. When I'm hiring folks, I can point people to my writing. It gives them a genuine window into how I think about the world. It's one thing to say that you do X, Y, and Z. It's much more credible to point to a blog post you've put out into the world that says you do X, Y and Z, and explains how and why you do it.

The other benefits are more personal. It helps me clarify and structure my thinking. It also helps me remember how I thought about a problem when I want to revisit it in the future, to see how/whether my thinking has evolved or deteriorated.

So if you're going to write because you think you'll magically get an audience and/or numerous job offers, you'll be disappointed. If you write because it's beneficial to you, the rest might happen and if it does it'll be a cherry on top.
I'm no Linux guru, one of those may be along shortly. I would say that as a Windows person you should just start using WSL for stuff and write down everything you learn as you come across new information. You'll naturally pick up the basics fairly quickly.

At some point it might be worth installing a distro on an old-ish laptop you may have lying around - Pop OS is the least problematic in my recent experience. Then actually use it.

You will accidentally irretrievably trash everything numerous times, WSL lets you backup & restore distros easily so do do that. With full installs, just remember to have copies of your config & data.
You're right, but not being in the position of a god-king where I can change those larger trends, the best I've found is to model and demonstrate that the "consumer tech profitable defaults" aren't the only way to live life, and rather loudly so.

I work in tech (deep weeds), and most people I interact with are quite aware that I do not like what we've done with it, and that I try to keep its influence on my personal life down - with plenty of handy ways on hand to suggest people try out, or solutions to "But how can you possibly XYZ?"

Having grown up before smartphones were a thing, I do recall how we used to do things, and most of those methods still work.
Residents’ Right to Be Rude Upheld by Massachusetts Supreme Court
> From image capture at the microscope to segmentation and some post processing steps the biggest bottleneck for us is disk speed.

If you're doing sequential writes, this drive benchmarks slightly slower than the fastest PCIe 4 NVMe drives on the market.

Upcoming PCIe 5 NVMe drives will be significantly faster than this.

This unit is really only helpful for extremely small random writes or if you're doing so much writing that you exhaust the wear capacity of a normal SSD.
got me job opportunities multiple times

https://gourav.io/blog
President Erdogan endorses Finland’s NATO bid
But why? Ordering via app is more convenient, and the restaurants clearly don't mind fees.
I was just complaining to my friend about how much trouble I'm having with it. I purchased the $20 GPT-Plus so I could use GPT-4 after reading someone on HN say that GPT-4 is "scary impressive" at writing code.

I have two tasks I wanted it to try, both making use of public APIs, starting from scratch. In short, it was frustrating as hell. Never-ending import problems -- I'd tell it the error, it'd give me a different way to import, only leading to a new import problem. I think I used up all my 100 queries in 4 hours of GPT-4 just on the import/library problem.

Then there were constant mis-use of functions -- ones that didn't exist, or didn't exist in the object it was using, but did exist in some other object instead, at which point it would apologize and fix it (why didn't you give it to me correct the first time, if you "know" the right one?)

The actual code it wrote seemed fine, but not what I'd call "scary impressive." It also kept writing the same code in many different styles, which is kind of neat, but I found one style I particularly liked and I don't know how to tell it to use that style.

Lastly, it's only trained up to Sep 2021, so all the APIs it knew were well behind. I did manage to tell it to use an updated version, and it seemed to oblige, but I don't really know if it's using it or not -- I still continued to have all the above problems with it using the updated API version.

Anyway, I hope MS fiddles with it and incorporates it into Visual Studio Code in some clever way. For now, I'll continue to play with it, but I don't expect great things.
Kubernetes Removals and Major Changes in v1.27
I not only don’t care about a thin bezel, but I don’t want it to be thin. It makes cases less effective as they can’t wrap around and protect the glass when sitting the phone glass down.

They make them ultra thin and beautiful… then also slick as shit so you need a case. But then make cases difficult despite the ridiculous margin on them.

I feel like they stopped making things for actual people. I don’t like it.
To be fair. My instruction page is setting up Minecraft, Docker to run a minecraft server in, Python and VSCode.

So I have quite a few prerequisites for my Python tutorials and this makes the first page intimidating.

However, installing and running MC java edition has got more fiddly since Microsoft took over. There was a horrible transition phase where accounts were being migrated from Mojang.

It's kind of OK now. But I'm sad that Microsoft is pushing hard on Bedrock Edition and look like they may try to ditch Java. This project could be adapted to Bedrock without much trouble but there is a whole class of things {NBT related} that you don't seem to be able to do via the remote interface in Bedrock.
I don't maintain much anymore, but one of the key lessons I learned very early in my career is that having anything in public (a link blog, a github where you post a tutorial you've done, a class project online, a quick YouTube tutorial) will put you instantly ahead of some really substantial percentage of the population who have nothing to show.

Back in the days of yore when I did it this put you ahead of 50-60% of new graduates. It's less now, but I review internship applications and a good 30% still give me nothing tangible I can look at.

So if you happen to be in the 30%, the best thing you can do (and it's so quick) is to put anything at all related to your professional development online. Go through a tutorial, post the results, and briefly write up your thoughts on it.

Congratulations, you just skipped 30% of the line for your first job in an evening of work.
The algorithm in China would promote education, handicrafts, innovative ideas and 'morally positive' videos, while curbing over-sexualisation, crime culture, pushing these to the West, so that our children are brought up on rubbish
I'm referring to a discrete SDF, where you have a 2D/3D grid storing distance samples, e.g. font textures, or mesh distance field textures [0]. You can use a tree of textures to get adaptive sampling, but a single texture gives you a fixed resolution grid.

[0] See the "Quality" section here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/BuildingWorlds/Ligh...
In this case you are actually yelling at a “cloud”

I’m more optimistic about tablets and AI, but the word that resonates with me the most here is “experimenting”. I don’t think there’s a guise, eg using learning as an excuse, but I do think that we have to be careful with how we present tech to children, even if it is with an altruistic goal.

So if we shouldn’t experiment on students, how will we figure out how to make these new technologies improve student learning?
Great Moments in Unintended Consequences: Subsidized Trees, Daycare Fees
Search Intensifies for Radioactive Canister Missing for Weeks in Thailand
> UCLA has a notorious class called CS35L, which is a weekly series of time-consuming labs. This class, although painful, is what creates software engineers.
>
> In it, we learned how to use the command line (e.g. shell commands, scripting) and change management (e.g. Git), which is core to writing code in a collaborative professional environment. Lastly, we learned how to use basic software debugging tools.

That's just some of the superficial tools "lab skills" of churning out code.

Software engineering (for real, when it has to be effective over time) is a larger and more difficult space.

I think the three courses this person is talking about are all about passing a FAANG-like "coding interview" that is targeted at new college grads with no industry experience.

LLMs will now gladly launder open source software into churning out code, much faster than a new grad, and will even (statistically, emergently) apply more software engineering practice than these classes will teach you to do.
How do you protect two rare birds when one keeps attacking the other?
These aren't shortcuts. The other classes are just not relevant to the profession.

Besides you pay a lot of money to higher education to get a job. If you want to learn, just read a book or something.
I've heard that peanut butter is mainly an American thing. What would be an alternative to peanut butter in other cultures to cut peanut allergies?
We also tried to give our child (when a baby) peanut butter early and was rushed to the ER. Terrifying.
when a degree is going to put me in debt it better return something though...

id like to go back to school as mature adult, to expesnive, ill just watch youtube and read books to satisfy my curiosities lol
I started my blog in 1996 [1].

It started slow -- before I even became an engineer. As I grew as a software engineer, I started to set aside time specifically to write a post. At peak, I was spending ~50h per month writing one technical post. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It helped improve my thinking and writing skills. Over time, it became harder for me to find the time (and content/ideas) so I've essentially stopped adding new posts. I keep the site up since it doesn't cost me anything beyond the domain name.

I don't have any analytics, so I have no idea how many visitors I get. Cloudflare does tell me that they saved me GBs of bandwidth every month and mitigated ~10 "events", so I'm guessing there's at least a handful of people and hundreds of bots -- hopefully enjoying the content.

[1] https://www.quaxio.com/
Higher IQ high functioning autistic people, mostly.
Normal mapping is cool but parallax occlusion mapping is some real wizardry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_occlusion_mapping

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k5IatsFXHk

You'd have a bad time including all of that in the actual model.
Yeah I have to say those sound excellent. Time to go hunting.
Rural US hospitals are losing the ransomware war
This seems like an extremely weird interpretation of what the article is saying.

You’re implying that the only knowledge this person has, period, is those three courses, and that’s absurd. While working, they would have ostensibly already picked up enough knowledge and skills to be able to readily compete with those dozens of new graduates who have might not yet had relevant work experience.

Just because someone didn’t get much out of their college education does not mean they don’t have “diverse skills and an open mind”.
80-110m is not such a deep dive, I personally know at least 3 SCUBA divers that have taken classes and dived to 100m, it's something that amateur divers can do with enough resources.
There has been enough instances of platforms dying, pivoting, or just plain ignoring their users. It is OK to use a platform, but own the content or a backup of it that you can "walk away if needed." So, owning your own domain and perhaps pointing it to the blogspots, substacks, and WordPresses of the world as a tool is a OK. One day, you will need to relocate to another platform or tool(s).

If you own your own domain, and own the content, you can just walk out and it will still be alive. This is assuming that your content are more important (to you) than the platform.

Once, WordPress was the new MovableType/Blogspot, Medium the new Wordpress, and now Substack the new Medium. You never know.
You mean from exposure to other kids?
LLMs don't "understand" things because they can't generate new theories. Imagine you trained an LLM a ton of text describing what it means for something to be true, and for something to be false. It would never independently come up with, say, propositional calculus. It could tell you everything in the world about what it means to be true and false. Would never come up with anything new.

Does this matter for education? Well, I don't know. A student is unlikely to come up with a question that GPT-4 has never seen before. The idea of kids being taught by a chat bot is just depressing, though. What are we doing to ourselves? Why do we want this? To be more "efficient"?
Noam Chomsky in a recent interview had a similar take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7S0zHIDMaI&ab_channel=Anime...
>you could hardly have a lot of exposure in children to peanuts earlier than 5 months!

Don't have a baby, but couldn't you put a few drops of unrefined peanut oil in the bottle? Or a quarter teaspoon of peanut butter?
If you run it in a container the best advice it to leave things with default options. JVM has ergonomic GC options and with adaptive heap sizing. 95% of time you dont need to change anything at all.
I blog at mbuffett.com , personally I just like seeing that people are engaging with or learning from my posts. Like whenever there’s a new release of Bevy, I get hundreds/thousands of people reading my snake game tutorial, and that’s fulfilling to me, to know that I’m helping people. For the more opinion-based posts, it’s fun to see the discussion on HN, or get emails from people agreeing/disagreeing.

I’ve had 3 blogs now, the first was just for fun, the second was because I was told it was “good for my career” in some vague sense, and now I’m back to doing it for fun. The one I did for vague career reasons had the worst content, and did nothing for me. In general I think it’s hard to have a blog lead you to jobs, but maybe this isn’t true if you’re blogging about very niche stuff.

I kind of object to the “purely vanity” catch-all in the last sentence, as if the act of creation has no intrinsic value, so if it’s not a means to an end, it must be for vanity.
AI programs, made by people, teaching history and philosophy i think is what that rich guy elon musk was talking about.

Yet, if the AI program can be copyleft then the matter is a non-issue.

I find this to be the heart of the contention.
The document says, "ARC found that the versions of GPT-4 it evaluated were ineffective at the autonomous replication task based on preliminary experiments they conducted."

But the one example they give (CAPTCHA task rabbit person), showed ChatGPT getting the human to do something for it, by lying. This seems to show its pretty effective. I wish they went into more depth about what led them to believe GPT wasn't effective for these sorts of tasks.
That is a fascinating definition of propaganda. So if I'm involved in state and want to ensure that the free press in my country spreads my message, all I need to do is ensure that there's no direct private coordination between my department and theirs? If I hold a press conference in which I state the party line, and new outlets reports on that press conference with no pushback, and then editorialists around the world write think-pieces that assume what I said at that press conference as truth, that's not propaganda unless I made some phone calls in the meantime? Amazing.

I don't assume Hersh is Russian, that would be bizarre. I haven't said Russia is making him do it, or that he's avoiding saying anything negative about Russia out of fear or as a result of blackmail, or anything like that. I have offered no conspiracy at all. I think it quite possible that Hersh just has a Russia-shaped blind spot. Having been witness to so much US malfeasance over so long a period of time, he might just assume that everything he see must be appropriately struck with the same hammer.

Perhaps his single unnamed source is a Russian plant, or perhaps it's an anti-American plant, or perhaps it's someone who misinterpreted things he witnessed, or who knows? I don't have any particular theories about that, either. I just think it's probably important to consider all the players, not just one. It's probably important to consider important and deeply-relevant public facts when forming or accepting a theory. That's all. Otherwise you might accidentally find yourself spreading propaganda, possibly without even realizing it.

I genuinely don't see what any party really gains from the destruction. It was already an unused pipeline for which there are alternatives, so the destruction seems symbolic more than anything. That facts since then have shifted slightly in the US' favor doesn't seem to have much to do with the pipeline destruction, things were already shifting that way.

I'd probably go with 50/50 NATO/Russia, but it's still not clear why, or how we'd ever find out absent a confession in a few decades.
very cool! I wanted to create a terminal myself too. I was trying to implement a native solution, but the estimated workload is too much for me.

I'm also considering xterm.js, but do you see any performance issue using it?

Also, can it be easily customized?
Yeah, once data files, OCX controls and more got involved you had to build an installer and Microsoft didn't provide any solutions for that until MSI came along. And InstallShield was expensive. So that hurt VB just as people were moving towards the web where you didn't have any dependency issues like that (assuming all the servers were online).
But it’s not counted, that’s my point.

It’s getting quite pedantic to talk about ones and zeros in this context anyway.
Thank you. In this case,it was more a reference to:

> Our central syslog server is a central source of accessible, text based truth. It requires almost no infrastructure to be working on any machine in order to get logs to it and accept logs (...)

From the linked post on central log server (and Loki):

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/GrafanaLok...

Unfortunately, AFAIK journald and qryn don't speak rsyslog - so you'll need something "alien" - all though vector seems very straightforward.