skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm trying to avoid giving into hyperbole and over-stating the situation, but clearly something significant is going on. So while I'm not starting to build a bunker in the mountains and stockpiling thousands of rounds of ammo because I fear some "machine takeover" ala The Matrix, I am spending a lot of time thinking about possible scenarios and trying to work on some contingency plans.

Anxious (of the cascading effect on society, geopolitics and our business).

Yeah, that's mostly where I'm at. Definitely concerned about the economic impact, especially when you get into the idea of possible rampant "technological unemployment" and what-not. But again, not trying to be too reactionary, or rush to any conclusions. There have been other technologies that were predicted to lead to rampant unemployment, and things didn't work out like that. So far the old adage has held true that "technologies may destroy jobs, but they usually create more new ones for a net gain in the end." But I'm not convinced that it must be so.

So yeah, I'm not running down to the local community college to sign up for welding classes because I'm worried that all the programming jobs will be gone a year from now. But I am thinking about classes I could take, things I could do, etc. to position myself for other roles in the future. The truth is, despite my job title I don't do much actual hands-on coding these days anyway, and the value I create isn't so much in my ability to code. But I am thinking about how I can lean into that more in the future. Taking classes, reading books, studying things that relate more to the industry I work in, thinking about things like maybe getting a "business analyst" certification, or doing some management training, etc.

And in the end, I did grow up in an environment where my dad built and raced stock cars from the time I was a small child, and a lot of my early memories involve being in a shop, working on cars and doing hands-on stuff. And I did take 2 years of welding in high-school. So if I have to go out and take those welding classes, or auto repair classes, or electrician training or something, it wouldn't be the worst thing I could imagine.
A lot of qualifications serve as a very expensive proof of cognitive abilities. I guess it would be discrimination to just test IQ directly.
Same here. Had to take a break from regular life for a few hours today. Went floating, then met a friend for a walk and coffee. That really helped bring the anxiety level down, which in turn allowed me to be more present.

Hope you can find some peace soon. Would definitely recommend trying to do anything that takes you off of your head.
Yeah. I may explore other options one of these days but using the store-bought naan breads for flatbread pizzas using a pizza stone is a pretty decent and simple store-bought option to assemble a pizza.
Ask HN: Why is Julia so underrated?
I've just started exploring Julia and I'm really impressed by how efficient it is compared to Python and R. Julia is probably as fast if not faster than C++.

It's also completely mathematical, just like Machine Learning is. One reason may be the complexity but for most of the machine learning use cases in Python or R you still need a good understanding of Math (linear regression, polynomial regression).

It also has the same modules (Transformers.jl, Flux.jl, Torch.jl)

Despite all of this, Julia is not the go-to language for ML. For non-commercial it's Python and for commercial it's R. Do people not know about Julia?
Are these power figures measured at the wall? If so, both are astonishing. My file server with an old Xeon, 16GB RAM and 5x 7200RPM HDDs uses about 95W when idle and about 150W when I throw something at it that works the drives. My desktop with an I7-4770K, 32GB RAM, some SSDs and a single spinner ids about the same. IIRC if I push something compute intensive at it, it can break 200W.

OTOH a Pi 4B with 2 7200RPM HDDs uses about 25W and another with an SSD uses about 7W.
I know commercial products where the code is open source (and largely useless to anything except the product) and people contribute. Decent Espresso is one. It is insane anyone contributes but they do. Rich owner gets tons of free labor.
Quick start: takes 5 minutes

Quick crack: takes 5 minutes

Find the is-valid-license method and make it always return true.

As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time "on the other side", it's amusing to see things like this being open-source, because being closed-source --- and sometimes obfuscated --- is almost entirely what most DRM relies on for its strength.
I’m pretty sure the most successful language since Java is JavaScript.

Of course it has even more bad design decisions than Go, but people don’t leap out to defend them quite so much.
Design of GNU Parallel (2015)
Did Docker standardise the container format?

I always was under the impression that they had great marketing but were mostly capitalising on tech built by other (mostly Google to be honest) which failed to properly market them.
It seems pretty absurd to me that you would blame Go’s design for silly things people do with unsafe. Yes, I wish ago had more/better immutability semantics and it’s slightly odd that strings are immutable but other types are not, but griping that something bad happened when you used a package called “unsafe” is pretty silly.
I'd add that even without registered reports (which are necessary), meta-analyses attempt to cut back on some of the selection bias by scouring the entire literature instead of cherry picking the results that get the most likes on social media.
Dial it back, guy.
Ask HN: Resources for learning niche aspects of authentication services?
Over the course of my career, I've learned a lot about authentication, but I find that there's not a lot of resources for things you might need to know if you need to write your own auth service or even learn how one is written.

Some aspects that I feel aren't talked about as much are things like:

- How to store records of personal auth tokens (like GitHub personal tokens)

Using JWTs for these kinds of tokens is widely deemed a bad idea because it's not revokable (without changing the JWT key and essentially revoking all tokens signed with the same key). What I hear is that just generating a token with cryptographically random bytes is good enough for most applications, but does one just store those bytes raw in the database? Or is a hash stored? Or does the database record have an id and hash (similar to a username/password) and the token given to the user is an encoded string that contains the id and raw token? Most things I find when I search "How to store record of token in database" are questions about how to store an auth token given from an OAuth2 handshake or how to store a GitHub token securely. Nothing about how the identity service itself stores a token.

- How to store (or not store) records of one-time auth tokens like email auth/verification tokens

Similar to the above token question, though the threat model seems a little different because they're not long-lived tokens.

- Best practice for uphashing password hashes

I've played around with this idea of needing to rehash password hashes. For example, say you have password hashes a bcrypt hashes with 10 rounds. Then it's decided that bcrypt with that many rounds isn't great anymore with today's hardware and you should bump it up to 14 hashes, or switch to a different algorithm. Next time people login, you could use the old algorithm to validate then hash the password while you have it in plaintext, but what about the users who don't sign in? Couldn't you instead store the layers of hash rules (like the algorithm, salt, number of rounds without the hash) and the last "layer" be a hash with the latest algorithm? I vaguely remember someone suggesting that somewhere here, but when I tried to implement it, there wasn't really a standard format for storing those hashing rules beyond the PHC format that argon2 uses.

The goal of learning these sorts of things is not to go off and write my own auth service. At this point, I feel like rolling your own auth is treated a lot like rolling your own crypto: Leave it to the experts. But without expert writings, how are we to learn and maintain existing systems? Or attempt to improve them? Perhaps I'm just impatient and haven't spent the requisite time searching, but I'm hoping to get some ideas from this community.
> the prediction of the decision to have a ham sandwich tomorrow, for any given person is now, by the state of the art of applied mathematics and information science, a relative doable - if not plain easy - feat.

Sure, the LLM may be able to guess by reasoning (e.g. 'He always eats ham sandwiches for breakfast and he probably wouldn't break his routine'), the same way we could guess at another person's behaviour, but we're talking about reducing the brain into a deterministic input/output machine, which is a far larger ask.

Now if you said 'doable' that may be right in the long term, but 'easy'? Absolutely not. There's no current way to feed 'me' or 'you' into an equivalent LLM. The human brain has more axons then there are stars in the galaxy and we are nowhere close to even mapping these connections.

>The brain could be doing this exactly kind of predictions, even more better than LLMs, with more accuracy/speed using way less energy.

That's definitely an option. The fact that many of the brain's operations could be done by LLMs is a strike against the original thesis.
I’m feeling shocked.

This is the biggest technological advance in my lifetime, and it’s clear that we will get several-fold advances in the near term, just from obvious improvements(eg llms reading about how to use themselves based on all the experiments humans are doing now). That’s not even including upside surprises which there will doubtless be. LLMs gaining knowledge of the world through next word prediction was an example of this kind of surprise.

Also, I feel…strangely at peace, and less bothered by the things that usually stress me - achievement, health, the economy, whatever. The moments we’re living in and about to live through are going to be so unimaginably great(good and/or bad) those all seem so inconsequential.
I've heard ChatGPT is a great programming language translator.
Too much hype. Obamafication of everything. Ppl are condtioned to hype things up more than actually handle complexity better. New tool building has become very easy but our 3 inch chimp brain is a still a 3 inch chimp brain. All this to say apply the theory of bounded rationality and you and your kids will be fine.
> 4 of the 5 on team red blatantly attempted to subvert Democracy

Wait, which 1 do you think didn't?
Why this recipe doesn’t mention 00 Flour. You can’t just make a pizza dough with normal flour, I feel like many people will be disappointed without this minor detail.
A lot of people talking about correctness and performance, but I have a suspicion that most limits in older software had less to do with that and more to do with the fact that things were written in C, where arrays whose size is not known at compile time are just a lot more work for the programmer.

There are cases where the allocations and memcpys when a Go or Java collection grows can be a real problem, but the vast majority of the time it works out fine to leave the size unspecified.
Apologies for the plebbit-tier comment, but your user name is blowing my gd mind right now. And your account is no more than a year older than the mikolov paper!

edit: anecdotally, self-hosting your own video content on plex helps enormously, and plexamp for music (carplay!) helps too
The book should start from explaining what Redis is.

It is a DB in the first place so "Learn network programming [by writing Redis]" is kind of questionable.
Knowing the founder’s history, I feel like every article about them is somehow making them more money or being more successful. Perhaps not the business, but maybe the ability to keep raising money.

I can’t understand how you’d need 130 million to operate over 5 years. Someone is losing at the end of the day and it is probably the investors.

Like if you raised 74 million in 2020 and lay off half your staff a year later, then lay off half your staff again another year later, what in the world are you spending money on? Legal fees?
It especially seemed dumb at the beginning of COVID when one region's hospital would get slammed and already have been operating at the edge of burnout before half the staff was out sick and the amount of work tripled.
This looks like a very good book on Category Theory with a lot of illustrations. Anyone can compare between this book and The Joy of Abstraction by Eugenia Cheng for learning Category Theory beginner?

https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2023/02/the_joy_of_abst...
I posted in length in another thread... to sum it up, I ended with "It's a big deal."

I'm also in my 40s, and I have similar thoughts to yours.

My latest thoughts have been about thinking that we need to take a hard look at what software teams are made off nowadays.

Redraw software teams from scratch: I think 2-3 devs can make the most complex project happen with AI assistance now. I never understood startups with 10 front-end devs, wtf

And another "lead dev" needs to be dedicated to meetings/requirements gathering and stakeholder management. BAs don't work. They can't tell a mouse from an elephant in meetings and most solutions end up strapping more rockets to the pigs until they fly.

Large teams don't work. It doesn't make the software better. With AI's assistance, we can hopefully ditch large teams.

I don't think developers have to worry, they'll just become less specialised as they can rely on AI for a lot of context switching.

What I'm glad I have is my design skills. I've learnt design early and what good UX means down to the gestalt. That is skills that will never leave me and always have provided value... Humans don't like change, so design at the base, is very much linear growth in scope.
I did not see that, but I've been busy and missed a lot this week. Do you have a link?
Just from the title, I'm imagining this is more or less https://images.app.goo.gl/jGsA1QGurgprJbw78
Any idea where to get them for a GMC Sierra?
Absolutely, but GPT has taken "rubber ducky debugging" to an entire new level.
You'd be surprised how many people are on the "nothing to see here" bandwagon despite how obviously false that is.

It feels so ridiculous when someone says GPT doesn't reason or understand because I and many others can clearly show output demonstrating this.

When presented with this, the next thing is to double down. "Oh forget what you're seeing, it's not "true understanding" TM".

This just makes the conversation even more bizzare.

Either your dog fetches what you throw at it or it doesn't. The idea of "pretend fetching" is so obviously silly and it's exactly what these people argue. I'm supposed to believe in this mysterious special distinction that nobody can apparently properly define nevermind test for.

General understanding isn't binary. You can understand some things and not understand other things. And it's not like everything encoded in language is encoded at the same level. GPT-4's spatial understanding is much better but that doesn't mean GPT-3 didn't understand anything at all. It just means it didn't understand space.
One thing I distinctly remember about one of the Railroad Tycoon games is that it was almost always a better bet to invest in non-railroad businesses, and use the profits from that to build the bare-minimum railroad required to get the top score.
> I mean, when ChatGPT is writing all new books, screenplays, whitepapers, business plans, etc., etc., it seems to me that

ChatGPT needs humans to learn from though. It's very good at combining human knowledge and existing ideas. That's totally its thing.

Creative thought and new inventions? Not so much.

> everything is going to collapse to one boring, homogeneous, "everything is the same as everything else" state.

That's probably true. Like the circles you get in now when you try to Google something. Try to tweak your query and you keep getting the same shit back like it's the only few sites in the world. Really creepy, and probably the result of some overbearing algorithm or too many paid results.

It reminds me of this ST:TNG episode where one character is In a collapsing bubble where everything keeps disappearing.
At least so far, language models have zero capacity and zero indication of capacity they can come up with anything. Or even calculate things.
The decision they made to store potentially multigigabyte-sized backups into a single json is just idiotic, to begin with.
The other thing to do here is to just get out here and look us up.
Yes bikes are great for riding in the wind and the rain and the snow, and public transport proved to be quite useful in spreading COVID.
I see. I also often spend my holidays in front of my desk, playing with my pet project. And I find it more worthwhile than going outside, lol.

Thank you so much for your comment.
Literally tradespeople that surf when the breaks are good.

Good job, good income, fit and healthy.
Computer History Museum
DON BITZER
2022 Fellow
https://computerhistory.org/profile/don-bitzer/

For pioneering online education and communities with PLATO and coinventing the plasma display

When networks like the Internet were still a research lab curiosity, Don Bitzer's multiuser PLATO system served as a dress rehearsal for what we do on those networks today – learn, teach, collaborate, chat, mail, play games, argue, and more. PLATO's courseware language and touchscreen, multimedia terminals previewed features of decades hence. PLATO was a postcard from the future of online communities, and its example would help make that future real.

Donald L. Bitzer was born January 1, 1934 and is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is co-inventor of the flat-panel plasma display and the "father of PLATO,” the world’s earliest time-shared, computer-based education system and home to one of the world’s most pioneering online communities.
I would prefer that audio require explicit opt-in, not just interaction. The biggest offender I regularly encounter is not even what I would normally consider an evil website: npr.org
NASA did a study in the 1980's. For something more recent, I suggest checking out Dr. Casey Handmer.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19830007081/downloads/19...
People love to be riled up. It's clearly pizza but folks just love to argue.
It's hard to see the end state of capitalism being anything other than a single company selling everything and owning everything. We can delay it by passing laws or however else, but absent a compete system overhaul it is inevitable.
I’m putting a no steakhouses (soft) rule on my next Chicago visit. The steaks are great. But I miss so much of the other cuisine.
Pro-Moscow voices tried to steer Ohio train disaster debate
I had the same experience. I tried Anki for 2 years to learn to crack programming interviews, and failed. Then I started doing leetcode problems regularly on the site and that helped me to get past my block.
I am feeling surprisingly indifferent. I've been changing my work and non-work habits quite a bit, automating a lot of tedious tasks, doing tasks I'd find too tedious in the past, using it for jumping off points on creative things, "looking up" things I wouldn't have looked up before, refreshing my memory on books I've read before...

...and yet, getting used to it very quickly and not particularly confident that it's going to be a massive "change everything", maybe because I don't really have any prediction how it will change everything. But also, I guess, because I don't know if we're on an S-curve to 20% change or to 1000% change or what.

I share what I do with it with friends and family. I hope not to be to obsessive "that guy" about it and to suss out if they're interested, and so far they also try it out and share their results, and right now I think that's the best I can do for them and for myself. It's early days.

I have a 7yo, she doesn't read much yet. I expect it will be incorporated into her education later on, and no real clue how. I think the best I can do for her is stay on top of things myself.

It might all be coming fast, but change will be limited by how fast people can process it. I think readers here will basically all be well ahead of the majority of the wave.

Stuff goes mainstream fast these days, and there's also a huge population of people hacking on things now, and so we may be surprised by how much might get ahead of us in the peripheral, but we are probably the best people situated to stay ahead of the wave overall, even without much effort.
Yes, bincode supports the varint zigzag encoding which helps with small enough values.
I've never seen any. It feels like it goes against the grain of the very idea of a hackerspace.

In ours we didn't even do this during the pandemic. We just kept going except during the strictest lockdowns.
SSR solves the problem: "the content does not render before your browser download JS."
I wonder which endgame is more probable: satellite, or space ship? We have people perfectly willing to shroud earth in sulphur to “protect” us from the sun, so who’s to say those same types won’t repurpose the moon into a luxury spacecraft and take it on a joyride to distant stars?
Maybe? The whole thing with running large parts of the internet is that no one can refuse to carry your traffic, and you are able to dictate very favorable conditions.

(Also, whatever they pay, it is not charged in GB-increments.)
New chat: https://i.imgur.com/vwrxYyQ.png
If forever the moment was to buy a fellow bar patron a drink, that was it.
Interesting and unexpected results. Also aptly timed as over a billion people will be fasting within the week for the next month as ramadan begins.
Maybe it was Counter Culture Lab in Oakland, which is a maker space with a focus on microbiology.
In our society jobs that are satisfying are often not an option (even for the trades), regardless of the pay and regardless of the educational requirements.

In the context of this thread it is (almost) all about compensation. "Good quality" is in the sense that one can earn enough to "meet their bills (and then some)" and also weather a major event (such as a medical event). Satisfaction may or may not apply.
We've seen GPT-3 comments being banned from Stack Overflow. I also saw some people just copying the answer from ChatGPT to answer comments on Reddit. The good thing is that they all follow a certain structure that internet comments mostly don't follow, so they are easy to spot.
Well, the business model, without any controversy, requires a lot of upfront investment. You essentially provide training (hence the educators, materials etc..) for 'free' and recoup the investment later when the coding camp graduates get jobs and make income.
Authorization or authentication, or both?
Not really, though. It's a stranger situation.

ChatGPT's language model doesn't remember chatting with you. It doesn't remember anything not in the training set. It's stateless.

It only seems to remember you because the chat transcript gets fed back in again. No "game" is running, most of the time. There's no other "game state."

There is a writer. It can continue stories with convincing fictional characters. But the fictional characters consist entirely of words. This is the same sort of existence as the fictional characters in a novel.

The helpful AI assistant itself is a fictional character created by the writer. Each time you start a chat session, you create another clone.

If you wanted to keep a story going, there are other writers. The writer you're using could be replaced. It should make upgrades easy as technology improves.

Looks like we are going to end up chatting with increasingly intelligent fictional characters who don't actually exist. What sort of meme-creatures consist entirely of words?