skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think the people that first encountered computers when they were relatively simple and constrained have a huge advantage over the rest of us.

Even if they were simple it was hard to program them because there was a very limited amount of information on how to do it. The few books available didn't cover a lot of things. Learning was mostly done lots of things until you succeeded. And that took a lot of time and patience. The Internet, stackoverflow, Reddit, YouTube, forums, Udemy, Github, and the thousands of tutorials, examples and documentation site make things a lot easier.

I started to learn programming on an 8 bit Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the only good things that came out of that is that it teached me to work on very constrained systems and to build up patience and will to try and fail until I succeed.

4 or 5 years later when I've experienced IBM PCs at school, it felt like going from horse and carriage to a rocket. Yes, the rocket might be a bit harder to maneuver but you can do much more things, faster.
Back in the 80-90s you could earn money by making games for the NES.

You can still do it - lots of documentation, emulators and other tools are available.

But nobody is going to pay for it now.
I think it is absolutely insane that we are basically depositing our hard earned money into gambling houses that can collapse the entire system.

If one thing should be as solid as a rock it should be our trust in our currency and if that can't be achieved then maybe we need to go back to the gold standard however ridiculous that maybe.
What GPT does as recombining is what it sees from us. AFAIK. Hopefully this AI thing will evolve faster than our compute capacity and we can switch it off in time :)
Oh shit. It will read this later... :/
Did we? Hello gRPC, Web sockets and language specific SDKs for REST APIs, as no one actually uses REST as designed.
Also, people-people don't want to use no-code tools. They want to hire people to do that for them. If using the tool is really simple, the salaries will go down, but it won't remove the demand for "translators".

For the tinkerer, no-code tools are (probably) great, but if successful, even tinkerers will hire managers who will hire translators.
Very interesting.

There is some evidence (to my limited knowledge, please correct me if I'm wrong) that testosterone has some immune-inhibiting properties and women's immune systems are more reactive. Can this simply be a case of men's immune systems reacting to the antibodies at a slower pace?
Intel Thunder Bay is officially canceled, Linux driver code to be removed
Behold: THE LAST ONE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_%28software%29

> The Last One is a computer program released in 1981 by the British company D.J. "AI" Systems.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Now obsolete, it took input from a user and generated an executable program in the BASIC computer language.

It was THE LAST ONE because it was the last program you'd need to buy. FOR-EV-ER. While its baseball-eating ability was unknown, it was "all the programs you'd ever need for £260" and it apparently focused on ETL jobs; that is, extracting data from files, transforming it, and loading it into some other file. Talend for the Doctor Who set, in other words, and it was set to EX-TER-MI-NATE programmers. Maybe it did; after all, we don't very well write programmes, now, do we?

https://modeling-languages.com/last-one-code-generator-basic...

https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1981-02

It certainly got a lot of hype at the time but, like all Coming Things, it's hard to tell where it Went.
Most people want free grammar-checking, what are you suggesting exactly?
My experience with AMD in laptops + Linux have been much better than the ones I've had with Intel laptops.
Does the voting step with multiple classifiers make sense? My gut feeling would be that training a single larger network would be more effective.
I am a full stack dev with 20 years of experience and a focus on GPU accelerated cluster computing and GIS. I could probably help.
> you can fire half your development team and increase the productivity of the rest of your dev team with an OpenAI subscription.

Here’s another perspective on job loss:
Given that…

1. …OpenAI accelerates ALL knowledge work productivity, meaning that any human laborer is suddenly much more valuable than last year;

2. …there is a notable arms race at the moment that is accelerating tech and business innovation at a blistering speed, where higher rates of innovation outcomes will be expected across industries just to keep up;

3. …there is still a lot of money looking for growth;

…then, because shouldn’t this result in an overall increase in demand for human labor?

Looking around society, there is clearly a LOT of work to be done. “Leaning in” with a spirit of optimism may be more advantageous for the long-term.
> People of MQA surely have pointy ears like mr Spock.

I don't know about their ears but their marketing sure smells like it's been through a herd of bulls:

> Q. Is MQA lossless?

> A. It's better than lossless!

[https://www.mqa.co.uk/newsroom/faqs/is-mqa-lossless]

I'm pretty sure they used to claim the format was lossless instead of just implying something around those lines by using what they call a "lossless file" as a "digital container".
Wow, so everyone is qualified as teacher or nurse? It seems to me that you have no respect and knowledge of those jobs and the people doing them.
>. In the 8-bit computer era, many games were available only as printed BASIC listings in computer magazines and books.

Actually the best games and software were programmed in assembler and you had to load them from cassette tapes.

You couldn't do much in Basic.
Surely this sort of crap is heuristically detectable?

def opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW(opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_0, opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_1, opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_2, opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_3, opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_4):
if (opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_1 > opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_0):
return True
if (opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_4 <= opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_1):
return True
...
if (opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_0 <= opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_1):
return True
if (opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_0 >= opaque_fct_6_guXM09JTqW_1):
return False
Yes! https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1633466912024973319

Thank you
Karl Popper described democracy as a system that is not defined by giving you the chance of getting people you like into power, but by giving you the chance to remove those you disliked.

A duopoly that is this far apart in terms of ideology and goals is preventing that part. What needs to happen for a convinced Dem/Republican to vote for the opposing party to pu ish bad behaviour within their own party? This is much easier with more parties with more nuanced choices.
I am pretty sure that if you were to follow all these kinds of headlines, you wouldn't be able to eat anything while being pregnant. Like even organic vegetables are often contamined or not sold for what they really are.
The industry grew because the desire for data analysis grew, which is because the technology's ability to meet the desire grew. This can repeat itself a couple more times.
It's great to see that support for the most important ISA is getting good.
What is considered “original code” ? The code you are writing is probably not original and is built upon layers and layers of abstraction that eventually translated into 0s and 1s . AI or perhaps chatgpt20 could become another such abstraction layer .
Are we sure GPT is going to improve 10x in 10 years? Hasn't it already been trained on the vast majority of available text data? We might get incremental improvements, but it's not like we have 10x more data lying around somewhere to feed GPT5.
Halt and catch fire vibes
Everything is "healthy" and "unhealthy" depending on its amount. Good example is table salt. Too little and it feels unsatisfied, too much and it will poison you.
"Humanity has an uncanny ability to devour any excess capacity"

Well put!

You could also see the pressure on lower skilled jobs as a positive thing in that light, I suppose: Right now it's not super cheap to run a terrible call center. If five years from now you'll essentially get that for free, companies might see an opportunity to rise above "cheap and terrible" to be more competitive, which would likely create jobs again. Jobs which, however, don't have the main goal of being done cheap and terribly. A way more level playing field than what we have today, where companies compete by chosing the areas in which they want to shine.

Maybe terrible writing, art and customer service becoming nearly free _can_ be a tipping point of sorts. It only wouldn't be if nobody cares, then the market will adjust for that. But I'm not giving up on consumers just yet.
Hi, I'm the author of the blog post. Just wanted to say, I would be very interested in reading more about the experiments you ran on getting GPT-4 to describe its plans. GPT-3's explanations were confidently incorrect, as usual.
Maybe, but the rest of the world doesn't deserve the fallout of that.
This article suggests the Self Driving Car project at Tesla is suffering because Musk’s preoccupation with Twitter. Personally I believe it is the opposite - Musk lost interest in the Self Driving Car project because he finally realized he has no hope of delivering it, so he picked a new preoccupation, and that’s Twitter. He decided he wants to be known for something other than the failed FSD project.

Stories like this help Musk, by suggesting FSD is suffering because Musk is busy with Twitter when the real reason is that FSD is a failed project and it failed because Musk is a poor technologist and a poor manager.
You could LOAD a massive array of numbers and POKE them into memory ...

Such things were printed in magazines as BASIC listings and they were, in fact, "programmed in assembler" and typed in by hand.
Is it panicking on mutation because Go has some special logic, or is it panicking because the text segment is PROT_READ? If it's the latter, sure you can do that too.
Foxconn finds EVs are harder to build than iPhones
Show HN: Next.js ChatGPT – Responsive chat application powered by GPT-4
What does it take to make a basic ChatGPT-like frontend, with code highlighting, run in sandbox, drop-files, and 'acting' in prompts? Clone away and enjoy. First time poster
Love to code is rooted in the love to create.

This is not going away with the AI in the picture.

It will be just different.
It reminds me of Zero to One where Thiel makes the case that automation is going to help people do better things, not replace people. Same goes for AI.
Can you please share the example code in gnu parallel
Index funds are killing off activist investors.
I didn't know the backscatter could be analyzed to show atomic element composition!
Honestly, Delphi's WYSIWYG GUI editor in the late 90s felt way more productive to me than all this Electron "cross-platform" JavaScript React thing today where you need to take of about 1000 random dependencies to render a rectangle.
I asked GPT-4 to give me a prompt to use with it in order to set up a game of tic tac toe and it came up with a similar representation and played successfully.

https://pastebin.com/83iZjHuc

I'm still blown away that this is possible.
Then I think we misunderstood each-other.

Go is asynchronous-first, it just doesn't use the (flawed) async-await semantic to model asynchronicity.
Funnily enough using the refractive index to discern compounds is the modus operandi of one of the very fist spectrometer made by William Hyde Wollaston in 1802: https://www.en.silicann.com/blog/post/history-of-spectroscop... (disclaimer: I wrote that).

Very cool approach, though it will most probably only work for classification (i.e. what is this sample), whereas NIR spectroscopy (most common when working with organic compounds) allows for quantification of the sample analytes (who much of each analyte is in this sample).
Given the number of people who try to derive Is from Ought, maybe giving more people a better view of what is will keep them from listening to the ones attempting to make a new reality.
Yes, I use it alongside Raycast.

File search and acting on files is a lot more intuitive in Alfred, and the default results are tweaked to my needs so I usually don’t even need to activate a workflow. I just ⌘ space and search for an app/movie/document/image/contact/bookmark etc.

Also, the new Universal Actions [1] feature really makes this acting on files thing so much more useful.

I like to use Raycast instead for more visual results.

[1] https://www.alfredapp.com/universal-actions/
It was very true, and one of the most success DSLs ever invented. And many people coded SQL who never would have touched other languages with a ten foot pole.

It’s just that, with more powerful tools we can create more advanced and intricate things, so it never ends…

I not exactly welcome but rather anticipate, a near future were instead of reinventing every kind of pattern and library in terms of cloud and infrastructure management, we will see the same meta-management of different AI engines and services…
I appreciate all the sources and context! Will do some digging through these
The Forgotten Life of Einstein's First Wife
And how would you do that? Show certain moves and point your thumb up for ok, down for not ok? Then sorry, you're still using a language, just without using words.
I think the "step backwards" is largely due to the rise of flash memory, which requires an electrical interface. That said, electrical destruction aside, the threat of removable media "becoming something else" is avoided if you use dedicated storage interfaces instead of USB, like SD/TF/MMC/etc.
The main issue here is how we pretend to recycle batteries and electronic components while what we really do is dumping them to African countries such as Ivory Coast, Ghana which are the very same countries that produce the highest amount of Cacao.

Stop buying new electronic stuff / computer / gadgets / appliances every other years guys. This whole scheme of growth and making and buying new things while we still have no decent way to recycle or stop contaminating is out of hands.
Yes and all of those high-end Unix providers went on to enjoy great success selling addons for the Linux kernel and ecosystem.
If my sole interest was to just get shit done on Windows, I can just go and do it. Immediately. No setup time required. Yes, I could spend time tuning Windows to my liking (and I do as a power user), but it's optional.

On Linux, I have to tinker with it before I can get shit done with it. It's not optional.

$100~200 USD spent on a Windows license, or $0 by either not activating or using an old 7/8/8.1/10 license, is cheaper than the time-converted-to-money spent on Linux.
Ask HN: End of days – are subscription dark patterns simply becoming fraud?
So this is a Wells Fargo style question. Well Fargo has paid billions in fines after internally pressuring workers to achieve account sign ups. So the workers falsely claimed people had said yes to accounts and completed sign up forms, getting bonuses / not getting fired. Oddly there was not a huge amount of financial loss but boy it cut through as a scandal.

So anyway, I am "sniffing the air". The guardian newspaper opens my account online but to cancel I need to call between 9 and 5. That's kind of run of the mill dark pattern. My wife is currently arguing with Hello Fresh because an account we cancelled has been reopened and deliveries sent and charges made - a second time - first after a door to door salesman came round and was told no. And again with no obvious cause.

Am I being paranoid - or are all the subscription services now simply outright lying to keep the taps turned on for a few more months?

My seven year old daughters opinion "if the company does not make mummy happy then the company won't make any money anyway". Smart kid.
I mean, if you want Java, it's right there.

The advantage is that you get the fast path by default. Since Go programs are generally not awash in buffer reuse bugs despite its semantic trickiness, this seems like something different languages can reasonably prioritize differently.
Just like with undefined behaviour, IMHO the C standards are deliberately underspecified to allow the language to remain applicable to just about any feasible computer.
WAVE OK! The WWVB time signal sets my clock in Portugal for the second time
The term "SPA" wasn't in use until at least after 2009 and gmail was probably using some hacky AJAX (XMLHTTPRequest wasn't even standardized until, what, 2006?). Chrome wasn't launched until 2008 so they weren't able to get away with just adding the APIs they needed into the browser. Backbone wasn't even released until 2010 and Angular probably wasn't conceived of internally until late 2008.

Yes, gmail might have had some SPA-like behaviour in 2004-2006 but it was nothing like what we have today. Pretty sure I got access in 2005 because I knew someone who worked at google, and it was mostly doing full refreshes between actions at the time, like pretty much the entire rest of the web
Yeah, but the big problem is that a lot of deals get made in the terminal chat system. Access to that chat system can be very important to doing business depending on the user's role.
You know what a tradesman does today and an AI cannot? Get under the sink, undo that rusted bolt, route that cable in that awkward position and so on.
Considering most people still pay for Maya instead of using Blender, this reads like a fever dream.
I don’t have a very good sense of what kind of information that GPT-4 had access to, but I imagine there is a whole world of knowledge locked up in books, particularly textbooks, journals and periodicals that it doesn’t have access to. That could be interesting.
> AI won't take plumber or electrician jobs away in the foreseeable future.

I see this argument way too often. How many electricians and plumbers does the world really need? And if the market becomes over saturated, how much will those jobs pay? How often will you actually have a job to do?
10x? Try 1000x. We haven't even tried hooking up different types of reasoning models (chess engine, weather modeler) together yet...eventually LLM will be just one aspect selected based on intended use

GPT4 is basically Pong. Within a few years we will be nostalgic for its surprise value

HN has a God Complex when it comes to people like Carmack though, so you can't really survive disagreeing with him
It’s as if someone asked AI to wac poetic about the human condition and space, for 43 pages
This is not just development, this is problem of universities in general. A professor with 5 titles before and after his name is able to put an UHF oscillator on a breadboard and be surprised that it does not work, even that in theory it should.
Yes, and I think that is what makes risk assessment hard.

All debt packages risk. However, the kind of debt/risk perception we are personally conditioned around in daily life does not translate to software. Managing software debt requires investment banker-like thinking, rather than the mindset of a credit card or mortgage holder.
Makes sense, I think Verbatim were also the last ones producing DVD-RAM. I still have a handful of their hardcoat ones, they are like using a big stable floppy disk, no need for any kind of burning software you can literally format them to any filesystem.

CD-R's I bought a distributor case of Taiyo Yudens back in like the early-2000's, I have a few hundred left and use them in legacy stuff sometimes. They didn't get cd rot, all the CMC Magnetics CD-R disks (produced under many names) suffered cd rot within 10 years.
Trading this for simplifying the remaining 99% of my code is a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

The vast majority of projects don't use CGo, and of those that do, the majority doesn't call CGo in a tight loop, making the performance impact mostly irrelevant.

So it's really coming back to the performance-orientedness of a language.
Not that I'd use this, but in its defense there are applications for a lightweight licensing nag screen: B2B products where your customer almost certainly isn't going to be a leet hacker and is otherwise bound by the terms of a broader contract.

Think of it like locks on doors in the professional world of business software. Helps to keep the customer honest because at the end of the day they don't actually want to violate any rules. It can be hard to keep track of all the instances of things in some enterprises. The scale of our average customer has informed us that integrated licensing functionality is ideal for some of our products.
I started off with a BBC Micro, followed by an Acorn A3000. My first 'PC' was a 486 card for the RISC PC - now there's an interesting architecture: the machine had two processor slots, but didn't require that the processors to have the same architecture. You could use the 486 as a very janky floating point accelerator for the ARM chip as well as to run DOS and Windows.

An interesting thing is that RISC OS is still available for the Raspberry Pi and it's a direct descendant from the operating system of the BBC Micro - not emulated. It still has the same level of direct hardware access, so if you ever wanted to use peek and poke (well, those are the ! and ? operators in BBC BASIC) on some modern graphics hardware, there's a way to do it. There's a built-in ARM assembler in there too.

What I think was really different about the time was the quality of the documentation. Nothing modern has the same sense of empathy for the user or achieves the same combination of conciseness and comprehensiveness. For instance, here's the BBC Micro's Advanced User Guide: https://stardot.org.uk/mirrors/www.bbcdocs.com/filebase/esse... (it's of particular historical note, because today's ARM architecture grew out of this system). You could build the entire computer from parts using just this 500 page manual, and you'll note that it's not actually a huge amount more complicated than Ben Eater's 6502 breadboard computer.

Weird thing: RISC OS actually has backwards compatibility with some of the old APIs so some of the stuff in the advanced user guide still works today on a Raspberry Pi (plus it comes with a BBC Micro emulator which was originally written because Acorn didn't want their new machine to fail due to a lack of software). These days there's also https://bbcmic.ro of course :-)

The Programmers Reference Manual for RISC OS is similarly well written, and surprisingly quite a lot of it is still relevant: most things still work on a Raspberry PI, and even modern operating systems still work pretty much the same way on the architecture. While things like MEMC, IOC and VIDC are long dead, there's a pretty direct lineage for the modern hardware to these older chips too.
Too many people make the mistake of thinking there’s an infinite number of sinks to get under.
Why? The same people who support the idea behind this article, support the idea that men and women are equal, for example, because they think it ought to be so.

And there's a lot more things they say ought to be true that I won't enumerate here because my account will be banned
How about fossil fuel powered machinery? I've heard they are a real boon for labor intensive work.
I'll admit to having mistook your reply with another (hence the non-sequitur second half of my comment.) Apologies for my brusque tone.
A LLM isn’t going to learn how to drive a car because of how they are trained even if a neutral network could.

It isn’t that people’s views on intelligence are grandiose, it’s that the specific approach used has massive inherent limitations. ChatGPT 4 is still relatively bad at chess, 1 win, 1 draw, 1 loss vs a 1400 isn’t impressive objectively and looks much worse when considering the amount of processing power they are using. The only impressive thing about this is how general their approach is, but in a wider context it’s still quite limited.

IMO the next jump of being able to toss 100x as much pressing power at the problem will see LLM’s tossed aside for even more general approaches like say using YouTube videos.
Cause this is what the kids want these days amirite?