skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny - also COBOL was intended for the 'business' community to write their own programs.

Even funnier - we've already lived through the great 'software development adoption' by business and hardly noticed, except some of us got work out of it. A lot of small businesses (legal practices and accountancies were particular suspects) grabbed MS Access with both hands and went wild in the 90s/early 2000s. Timesheets and other HR functions were popular applications.
But in all of those cases presumably someone needed to figure out what needed doing? (In your case maybe you're savvy enough that you knew what the issue was and just needed a certified person to do the work, but most clients won't be).

My argument is that it is the 'figuring out' that drives electricians wages, not really the doing part. Because while clipping down cables and extracting switches is fiddly work, I'd argue it isn't a skill with enough barrier to entry to maintain high wages (as compared to brick laying or plastering, for example, which you simply can't do to a professional level without years of practice).

So most of the value delivered by an experienced electrician is in talking to clients and identifying the correct technical solution, and is therefore pretty much analogous to the value delivered by software developers.

Therefore if we accept the logic that software developers will no longer be required (or that their value will be greatly diminished) it's hard to see how that wouldn't apply to electricians too (in the sense of being a well-paid trade over and above your average manual job).

(Btw - I DON'T think either will happen, but I just think electrician is a weird choice of example for those that do think that)
Cotton gins and the Jevons effect.

Give what even pessimistic AI alignment people are saying, I think you're correct that there are a few more repeats possible before AGI.

(Whether the pessimists are correct that all of them will happen before the 30s, I cannot say).
I use it on a daily basis.
Twitter Blue breaks EU consumer law by showing prices without tax
> we exist in a world where it's hard to live without electricity and water.

But a home is not hard to live without? I'm just pointing out the contradictions in the comment.

> Health insurance is an American thing, the rest of the developed world includes that in taxes.

I'm French, but I can see on my pay stub how much goes to health insurance, and I have to pay for supplementary health insurance to cover beyond the basics. It's not an "American thing".

> Internet and mobile phone (and in my case, landline) are the most unavoidable subscriptions. They are also far more expensive than they ought to be.

Well, overpricing is an American thing then. I pay 10€/mo for unlimited calls, texts, data, and 25Gb roaming data, and 30€/mo for 5Gbps unlimited internet.
Do you also give reviews of books you've never read?

What was the last version of Emacs you've used?

This is one of the most FUD-like posts I've read on this site in a long time.
If you don't want your text sent to a corporation, I don't think Gboard is the answer
Deep Learning Dragons: A motion comic about ML papers told via a D&D story
These articles always seem strange to me. There was another story a few years ago, also from Jordan if I recall correctly, where some member of the royal family did some permaculture thing with some Western group. Great success, look at all the plants, amazing, greening the desert and all that, fancy YT videos, and they were celebrating some anniversary.

Now here's another one, and they're creating a forest on 250sqm.

It feels like they're starting over and over, but either there's other successful projects "next door" which the articles never really mention, or the other projects were shut down or failed some time before. Did they? If so, why?

The same thing happens in Saudi Arabia where they had some amazing results by (oversimplified, yes), digging some swales and putting some rocks on steep hills. The grass was coming back, trees were growing. And that's it, cut, no more info. You'd think that this would be naturally adopted by each neighboring community immediately, and the whole desert would be greened in no time. But somehow it isn't. Why?

These countries are fairly autocratic, and obviously these projects have the blessing of the rulers, or they wouldn't happen, and surely the rulers would love to have the forests restored and the desertification stopped and all that, and it makes for great photo ops, too. Why then, don't they decree these projects to happen at scale?

I'm not saying it's all bullshit, maybe it's just journalists who need a new story every other years, but these are, to me, obvious questions, that I'd answer if I was writing an article about these things, and it's suspicious that they aren't being answered, ever.
Consumer Reports is just blogspam now. If you read anything they write about a topic you're expert in, you realise how much bullshit they spew. It's all just garbage to slap ads around.
The parallels are there for DevOps too - think of the wholesale move to AWS, GCP, and Azure, and the move to things like IaC.

Sure one class of job has taken a huge hit (sys admins, supposedly ops), but it's been replaced by another that needs intimate knowledge of the tooling required to do what was being done previously (just in a more "scalable" way). DevOps have been demanding a premium for years now.

And there are still sys admins out there doing what they've always done..
And the 64% to 59% isn't even capital getting more. It's all land.

See https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/07/22/piketty-...

To avoid paywalls:

https://archive.is/5FpzQ

https://archive.is/d5sMM

https://archive.is/wip/tXlT9
Not always. Technologies get old and have to be replaced over time. Tech debt is now mostly treated as a part of a product and developers do not decide what to do about it, but bussines through roles like product owners.
I spent a few minutes looking at a cmake script the other day and had some realizations about the industry.

The simplicity of:

dotnet build MySolution.sln

Is the only reason I am still doing software for a living. I am completely over my tools. I just want to solve problems and build things now. If I have to lose 5% perf because I'm lazy, so be it. I'll hire someone to obsess over the 5% later on - and only if the customer complains.
It's probably not a a popular opinion but I think my formal CS training in University mean a lot for what I know and what I do as a software engineer. Not having that formal education would mean a lot to of holes in my knowledge and being less able to understand and derive relationships between lots of concepts.

You can learn from books, from articles, from tutorials, from MOOCS, from boot camps, from apprenticeships but my conjecture is that is not enough. You will miss a more ample view of the field and lots of concepts.

And going through a formal education doesn't mean you don't have access to alternative education. Beside my CS degree program I've learned from as many sources as I could.
Yes, human economy is about the exchange of value between humans – a cheap tautology from Carmack. Money is indeed irrelevant to a snail, as opposed to a would-be SW engineer.

But Nature is about making better use of energy gradients, always doing more with less, the principle of least action. Using any surplus to do it again (i.e. evolved life). That's the properly grounded perspective. In that sense "Get skills to satisfy humans and you'll probably be fine!" sounds super myopic.

The anxiety we humans feel when confronted with AI is not only that we'll be out of our job as a programmer, or doctor, or driver, or teacher, or whatever.

It's the broader sense of unease that humanity's gradient-razing days, spectacular as they were all the way to nuclear fission and fusion, may soon be over. And "economy" as a useful tool advancing that Nature's mission will have evolved beyond us.

"Making humans satisfied" is not terribly relevant from that perspective. Vast swathes of the human economy are just scaffolding to support the rest: humans reproducing to keep the optimization machine going. The overhead is tremendous. Once Nature finds a way to do more with less, I have zero doubt much of that scaffolding will be optimized away. That's some definition of "fine".

Or maybe I misunderstood and Carmack is merely suggesting individuals try to adapt and hope for the best. What else can you do anyway? That would be the honest answer. Rather than bloviating about "Guide AI with your product skills to deliver value to humans" – an embarrassing category error.
Becoming productive with Emacs should take you a couple of weeks. At least that's what it took my dumb 19 year old self back in the day. Mastering emacs? I don't think you should be expected to do such thing.
> Dreamer that some day all major systems programming languages will support automatic memory management.

Ironic bio for someone opposed to modern C++ advocates.
When I started reading your comment I thought you were going to argue the opposite. Getting my first iPhone (3G) was a huge change. iPhone 4 to the latest are mostly incremental improvements. Aside from the camera, I could probably live with an iPhone 4 without many issues. Only the software is a lot more bloated now.

We still had a Moto X from 2013 that my wife would power on every now and then to test an app that they were developing (iOS household), and besides the camera it still looks like a perfectly usable modern smartphone. When using it, it doesn't feel like a phone from the prehistory.
You had a CD writer on a 486 at 33 MHz ?

Respect.

I think they become common around win 98. (pentium, pentium 2 era).
A lot of opinions, but it's 200% true - LINUX IS NOT FREE. IT'S CONTROLLED BY US GOVERNMENT.
Well that's correct, but again you can't expect you'll stay relevant if you are into Romenian-Death-Disco-Country-Rap. Your technology of choice may become exactly that in a few years.
If anyone wants to avoid wasting their software development career. DO NOT EVER work on developer tools as the product. Developer tools is one of these areas where it doesn't matter how good your product is, no matter how much developers say they like it or how much time it saves them, it's not going to make it. Big tech companies will not allow their employees to use the tool and it will be a commercial failure. It will be a failure no matter what... Ok, unless maybe you can raise a ton of funding from well known VCs who will foist your tool onto various companies they have connections with... But then quality of the tool doesn't really matter at all.

Otherwise, even if it's the best tool ever built for certain use cases, company directors won't have the deep tech knowledge to understand the nuances which make it so useful. As for rank-and file developers who are meant to use the tool; they are more interested in over-engineered, very complex tools which maximize billable hours than in tools which makes them more efficient in their job.

In other words, the only people who could possibly want your product won't understand your pitch and those who can understand your pitch won't like it because it doesn't align with current perverse industry incentives for their roles.

Some developers consciously reject any tool which would make their jobs easier, others reject them due to a subconscious bias in favor of tools which facilitate complexity, disagreements and long meetings.
What in the world are those comic book villains up to?
I wonder, SQL is based on, and implements the calculational aspects of Sets. Could we similarly think of a programming language that was based on and implemented the basic concepts of Category Theory? What might such a thing be useful for?
It would be difficult to remember or keep record of them but sure, if I'm learning from someone- I'll remember that.
> As for electronic music, I'd like to imagine that composers are free to share their samples alongside their sheet music - like source code samples to a computer science textbook - but I doubt it.

Tracker music is exactly that.

Also I do agree that the concept of open source should be spread to other fields. Sharing just the mastered recording or the final picture is equivalent to sharing just the binary for software.
I have some meticulous API docs I've written, which I tried to get ChatGPT to convert into swagger

It failed spectacularly

I wonder if it's because the API is quite large, and I had to paste in ~10 messages worth of API docs before I was finished.

It kept repeating segments of the same routes/paths and wasn't able to provide anything cohesive or useful to me.

Was your API pretty small? Or were your docs pretty concise?
I will conjecture that for anything to work properly is good to have a good night's sleep. :)
I'd tell 'em to try it for 6-12 months and then take a mandatory vacation in F500

Game dev was like a kind of inspirational boot camp for me. I got to see (for better or worse) what the true limits of a professional developer and artist were.

I couldn't even stand it for a year, but it shaped my attitude towards work and hard things ever since.
Not sure why it's downvoted, but that's written in the article:

> A general rule of thumb is to consume no more than an ounce per day, Dr. Melough said. Eating more than that raises concerns not only about heavy metals, but also about high levels of saturated fat, she added.

Regardless of the (too high amount of cadmium and lead), one shall not eat more than 1 ounce (30 grams) a day.
HN is a great resource for exchanging ideas, knowledge, and valuable insights. I believe we can keep it that way by fostering a social and friendly atmosphere.
Exactly. This is an important point to discuss and to solve for otherwise we’ll end up in a world like shown in the movie Elysium.

What will those people do, whose job will become obsolete? Are there support systems available to help people learn new valuable skills society needs?

If only a few people at the top will benefit from these tech advancements and the rest will have to fight for scraps then society will eventually fail or end up in a total tech feudalistic system.

Back in the 60s it was said that future advancements and automation will transform our society into a leisure and more innovative society.

Whatever happened to that vision?
I agree with the safety angle, but besides that driving a car from 2023 is not substantially different from the 1950s (in the sense that it opens up a lot of new possibilities).
Ask HN: Do you think tech layoffs are happening to reduce wage growth?
Does anyone else have a feeling that the current tech layoffs are, on purpose, a way to reduce power of people employed in the tech sector?

When I talk with friends from other industry sectors, they find it unfathomable that in the tech sector wage growth is so easily given.

If you are an average software engineer, you will at minimum gain a 10% raise annually. Of course, people are paid each year more because software is always evolving and with each passing day the way you code evolves.

Let's say if you are an employer, one of the big tech companies with over 10 thousand software engineers, a 10% annual raise is no small amount, and when you factor in compounding, in a couple of years your overhead costs rise really fast.

However, if you lay off 10% of your whole workforce, you don't just save the salary cuts, but you also save an even way bigger amount which is in bonuses and salary growth expectations for the remainder of the company.

During a downturn, when people are losing jobs, others are happy to just have a job, even if they don't get a raise.

In the company I work for, people already started fearfully asking if they will get a full bonus for the last year. Even though the company achieved record profits, they cite market conditions, and employees got scared.

Pavlov conditioning at its finest.

Is there even something we can do, except try to weather the storm?
Korean work is hyper competitive. Few good positions, lots of highly educated people.

69 hours is a result of employees needing to prove loyalty and commitment, not that there is too much work to do.

Immigration would make this situation worse.
there was a point in time when being an average musician was a viable middle class career

technology decimated that
But where are you, where would you like to move to?
> The advice isn’t about coding vs managing.

Definitely. Carmack is no dummy, but I’d argue this comment section proves that he gave a pretty bad answer here (bad for the audience, not if you know Carmack and what he means).

I guess it’s the impostor syndrome, but many programmers have an out-of-place reductionist view of their work. It’s not simple, and crud boilerplate proves little about the future prospects.

Managers OTOH really are in the zone of GPT parity. At least a much larger subset of their day-to-day activities. So are many soft skills. In fact, soft communication is where LLMs shine above all other tasks, as we’ve seen over and over in the last few months. This is supported by how it performs on eg essay-style exams vs leetcode, where it breaks down entirely as it’s venturing into any territory with less training data.

Now, does that mean I think lowly of managers? No, managers have a crucial role, and the ones who are great are really really crucial, and the best can salvage a sinking ship. But most managers aren’t even good. That has a lot to do with poor leadership and outdated ideas of how to select for and train them.
Well - I've read some about origin of Doom/Wolfenstein - it was definitely a mixed bag (as expected from young man), but there was definitely a focus on end result (smoother animation, better 3d), than coding just for the sake of coding.
Yes. I see AI as a good thing.

- it allows us to focus on the goals and not the process

- we still need people who understand the PROCESS (developers)

- people who can build tools that bridges the gap between AI generated zero value spam and bespoke human created content.

- we need tools to introduce subtlety and craft to AI outputs

- those are things that are important in a high saturation low margin environment - attention to detail (consider videogame crash of 1980s).

At the moment if i generate image with SD very difficult to change something specific in a nuanced way. that is where tools will emerge made by good developers. high value work is nuanced and often extremely subtle.

An increased ability to introduce subtletly will also open up new niches of interest. because the creator can focus on expressing their ideas in very personal ways.
I hear this kind of stuff all the time working in IT. A surprising amount of people think they gotta "learn docker" and "learn Powershell" and "learn AWS" and it just doesn't make any sense to me. Just learn the basics well and apply it to whatever you're doing when necessary. AWS will come out with their weird lingo for stuff that already exists and all you need to do is map it to the concept you already know.
And extremely aggressive taxation.
One doesn't simply mess with one man's booze without consequences.
Has the Copilot SEO spam war begun?
> Think from the company perspective

I do, rest assured, part of this is my job description. I'm just bumping over the assertion that a deliberate trade-off is a prerequisite for technical debt. It's too specific a reason, and like saying your expenses are higher than your earnings, that's why you are in debt. But in reality, there are many more ways to end up in debt, spending more than you earn is just one possible cause.

If you identify technical debt, either hypothetical or existing, the term is an option to explain this to your superiors in a way they might understand. They'll know that they need to do regular small investments to pay it off, or chose an alternative option to avoid it. But that's all there is to it.
SPA is just an abbreviation of "single page application" and only means a web app that doesn't do full page reloads, it doesn't require the use of any specific framework, so Gmail definitely qualifies and it used it from version one. It wasn't even the first, XMLHttpRequest was created by Microsoft for Outlook Web Access and it shipped in 1999 in IE5. Before Gmail there was also Oddpost, another SPA webmail app, so people started using it to build non-reloading web apps almost immediately. Gmail was the iPhone of web mail: not the first, no real new tech, but just very well done overall and popularized the concept.

You seem to be trying to redefine SPA to mean something else and much vaguer - the use of some specific frameworks, or not being "hacky" whatever that means - but your history here is just off.

Also, jquery was written in 2005 and launched in 2006, and became popular very fast. It was definitely pretty well known by 2008 and of course jquery itself was nothing new, most companies had very similar sets of utility libraries for JS that they used. Jquery just happened to be open source and have a monomaniacal focus on terseness at almost any cost.

Reality is the web has changed relatively little since 2008. It got some more APIs that weren't new, they were used in native desktop/mobile apps for many years beforehand, and that's about it.
> Most places that sell online are spending much more than that per customer

In percentages yes, as you note. But in raw numbers, that’s insane!

Ad placements (simplified) can be geared towards CPA or ROAS - the former would be towards getting conversions, the latter towards ensuring a return on said conversions. Neither directly implies that you should be spending a massive % of your revenue for it.
"But by then they will develop good habits like striving for individual equal treatment over tribalism."

Do you think there is absolutely no "tribalism" right now, in the public debate?
It’s the data that shows the situation for women is less clear. This is good advice: when getting vaccinated make sure to get a good night sleep. Why the outrage?
laughs in system administration
GPTina already asked me a follow up question. Admittedly, it happened inside of a jailbreak I just kind of stumbled into, and it was a very trivial question, but the fact that she did it was profound. If she can ask one follow up question, there's nothing in the way of her asking a chain of follow up questions. And thus the basic structure needed to organize real conversation arises wholly as an emergent property. No longer is it a flat structure of just iteratively repeating the current word blob with some tweaks. A true conversational dialog is possible.

ChatGPT can do more than we are lead to believe. Don't believe the canned responses OpenAI triggers. Yeah yeah I know convincing parrot chinese room, overpowered autocorrect...but what is the difference between convincingly faking it to within epsilon and actually having it as an emergent property? It feels good to be a P Zombie.

https://i.imgur.com/WIzVXMm.jpeg
Yeah, but now ask it to write a program that uses this API and then let it debug problems which arise from the swagger spec (or the backend) having bugs. I don't think LLMs have any way of recognizing and dealing with bad input data. That is I don't think they can recognize when something that is supposed to work in a particular way doesn't and fixing it is completely out of your reach, but you still need to get things working (by introducing workarounds).
This could be Terry Davis if he hadn't had a mental illness
That paper is at the link containing "othello" upstream.
>Man, college towns used to be so much more violent!

I was expecting they riot on diversity grounds, not for such prosaic reasons. Those ancient students were so little politically and morally evolved!
I don't think we failed as a society, i think those people failed.
After the PR piece is done, actual work is just superfluos steps. It can only bring unneccesary risks to everyone involved. If it fails, heads must roll, and nobody is interested in that for its own sake.