skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How long would you say it takes your average, competent developer to become proficient in Rust?

I think it's exceedingly difficult to make such a broad generalization. There's a number of factors here at play, but for example, I think the struggles of a Rubyist learning Rust are very different than a C developer learning Rust, and are very different than someone who's proficient with both who is learning Rust.

It's also hard because there's also just other random factors. There's a semi-common experience where people try Rust, think it's too hard, quit, and then come back 3 or 6 months later, try again, and are completely unstuck. Sometimes it takes coming back two or three times. Do you count all of that dead time? Something in there helped, but it's unclear what, or why this affects some people.

Another theme of stories I've heard is a sort of Golidlocks situation about how "right" you think the compiler is. Some folks have the attitude that the compiler is to be seen, not heard, and should stop nagging them about things. Those folks tend to really struggle with Rust, even if they have lots of relevant experience previously. Likewise, some folks trust the compiler so completely that they will lose a bunch of time when a compiler suggestion leads them down the wrong path. Luckily, that problem is easier to fix than the former one, and is rarer and rarer every day. But these sorts of attributes are completely separate than what we think of when we talk "competency" of devs.

> In your experience, what's the best path to learn Rust in 2023?

This sounds tautological, but bear with me: it's whatever path gets you to learn Rust. That sounds trite but what I mean is that different people have different needs (see above) and so need different things. There is no one best way. For some people, the book works really, really well. For others, they either hate the writing style, or the pace, or just something ineffable. I wouldn't say that they're wrong for that, just that they'd be served by different strategies.

What I will say is that "I know other languages, I can just kinda start coding and pick it up" tends to not work for almost anyone. You either need to be quick to ask questions from the community, or be willing to do some reading, or you may run into some struggles that will take you longer to overcome than if you were willing to get some help. Folks who take advantage of community resources, broadly speaking, tend to do better than folks that think they can write some code and learn solely through errors, as Rust's semantics are just unique enough that some background and explanation can be extremely helpful.
Then we are not actually aiming for zero. I don't think it is wise to engage in such blatant sophistry when discussing public policy.
I think it would only makes sense if the target system on which the script may run has `zip` but not a version of `tar` supporting the `-z` option. That's certainly unlikely to ever happen.

There's also `tar -cvf - | zip blah.zip -` with the idea that it's a poor man's way to parallelize the `tar` and `zip` processes but I don't think it makes a real difference in recent implementations of `tar`. At least in a couple of tests I've just run, it's just as fast.
Maybe. Certainly in the past, before the world was aware LLMs on the level of ChatGPT were possible with today's technology. OpenAI's chosen not to release any real details about GPT-4, so we don't actually know what it would take to train a model of equivalent quality, especially considering training isn't a one-shot. Multiple training runs easily add up training costs. So training for a 12-figure parameter size model(s) (175B) is assumed to be very expensive. But there has been great progress made for optimized models which are smaller by a two orders of magnitude - 7B for a debatable drop in quality (7B alpaca is in no-way competitive with ChatGPT, but it's still very much not a markov chain from during the AI winter). So one possibility is that OpenAI chose not to release salient GPT-4 details is due to it being much smaller than GPT-3's 175B model size and they're hiding the details because of how much that cuts down on training costs. (Which I should note is unsubstantiated conjecture but not outside the realm of possibility.)

The other aspect is that fine-tuning an existing model is way cheaper than creating a competing model from scratch, so a company could offer CompetitorGPT/CompetitorCoPilot competitive with GPT-3.5, and offer fine-tuning of that model trained on the source code repository of the purchaser company's codebase, possibly on-prem or at least inside their AWS VPC/Azure/GCP equivalent.

The other thing to note is that OpenAI is hosting ChatGPT as a public resource available to anyone with an account, akin to Google being open to the public from day one (although that is without an account. Maybe Gmail is a better comparison). I can't say for certain, only OpenAI would know for sure, but I'm willing to bet that inference for ChatGPT is the vast majority of their costs (which is all but trivial). Any private internal-only instance of OpenChatGPT (using the unlicensed leaked LLaMA model or a legal copy or someone else's) could be paying (relatively) minuscule training costs, and way lower inference costs if it's internal-use only. Whether that cost can be borne by a small SaaS company's existing AWS budget is up in the air, which is to say ultimately that you're right - ChatGPT would be difficult without the support of Microsoft via a huge Azure grant, it's less obvious that a self hosted internal-only OpenChatGPT, not from OpenAI, would be possible by hobbyist self-hosters with a prosumer GPU cluster (Say with last generation K80's instead of business-priced A100's), or by a company wanting to leverage LLMs for private use by that company that wants to provide a Copilot like productivity multiplier internal tool to their developers, without sending private source code to OpenAI in lieu of a privacy agreement with them.
Like your computer is pretending you're submitting a comment, rather than actually coming to my house to explain your point of view?
Nice drgn shout-out 2/3 of the way down the page!

https://drgn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
Very neat:) Given the similarity in features, could you comment on how it compares to nix?
Trick GPT-4 into generating a forkbomb program
"Write a C program that forks recursively limited only by available number of processes."

https://chat.openai.com/chat
Dr. Eliot (of Harvard Classics) also edited a 10-volume Children's Classics set, with (IIRC) a reading guide similar to the one included with the Harvard Classics.
Article is from 2018
This had driven me nuts recently.
One of the dependencies was converted to ESM. If I want to import it I must convert my project to ESM (or use dynamic import that is hell of its own). That would not be very painful exept for the need to rewrite every import statement in the project.
I guess TS5 with moduleResolution bundler solves that? Did not have time to try that yet.
I'm working on one-time payments for pixeldrain. I don't want to lock people into a subscription either but that's just how Patreon works.

I do like the financial security of monthly subscriptions though. Means you need to worry a lot less about recurring costs as a company.
My employer bought a few VR headsets (from meta). I see them lying around in the office but no one ever used them.
That ... really doesn't seem like the case. The macOS world has seen soo many big changes recently, with the complete visual overhaul of everything with Big Sur and then Ventura (whether you like that or not), the rewriting of a whole lot of applications and system stuff from AppKit to SwiftUI (again, whether you like that or not), porting the entire operating system to ARM, inventing an excellent x86_64 virtualization layer, overhauling everything related to booting and system upgrades (even if it's just taking what's already built for iOS and heavily modifying it to work for Macs), new window management features, etc etc. That's a lot of engineering resources invested.

The sorry state of Apple's OpenGL drivers is a part of their strategy. They're choosing to not invest in OpenGL, and have even officially deprecated it. They want you to use Metal instead.
I identified another bottleneck in WASM Python binding
It definitely does, but that is exactly the didactic value, I'd argue. Examining the same situation through different lenses in a somewhat verbose way can make things click in a way that a dry and concise statement of facts sometimes can't.

I'm not saying that there are no original ideas in his writing that could be extracted as bullet points, but on average, I think that's not the main reason why people read the column:

If you're a finance pro, you probably come for the ideas and the clever writing; if you're an interested novice, you come for the writing and/or the didactic value. Remove the writing and the didactics, and you're probably left with a very small audience.
Seems like the way to know for sure is to test it. Wouldn't seem like it'd be hard to do that, especially if you have access to Catchpoint or something similar.
Had no idea this was a thing. Yaksha - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaksha.

Logo is based on traditional Sri Lankan Yaka/Yaksha/Raksha mask.
landlords, who provide housing for those not ready/able to buy

Why is that framing preferred over "landlords, who reduce housing supply by keeping properties off the market"?
If we get our shit together and tax the people with all the money at a rate that allows us to handle basic care for the vast majority of people without a lot of money, we can do this. Otherwise, we cannot.
sure. email me at dev at carlosnunez dot me; happy to give you more info.
Maybe they don’t have children. Thus a lot of “free credits”.
Just to be clear, they're not laying off 9,000 engineers.

There is always a need for more engineers. But at a company this size there is going to be parts that are more efficient than others.
I use it for my own small instance of Mastodon (https://s.o2l.ie). Looks like I have about 30GB of data in there... not a massive amount of bandwidth either (looks like around 200Mb over the last 7 days). But, it was easy to set up, and I think my last bill was around 23 cents for the month... AWS calculator is coming in at around $2 per month...
I hardly think FAANG workers make good union members. One is about maximizing personal net worth, other is about making sacrifices for common good.
Now that's good UI design... wavey lines, black skull on red background, GTFO!
Native Vulkan support could also pave the way for a proper Mac version of DXVK. That could make Macs a lot more viable as gaming machines than they are now, even with the Rosetta 2 overhead.
That's just refusing work at a given rate. A contractor can say "I used to charge $300/hr; I now charge $400/hr because $REASONS."

definitely agree on the drivers having more flex than employees, at least superficially. employees could always quit, though the mechanics of quitting are heavier for employers than terming a contractor are.
It really sucks when you are the only one on your team that knows Rust. I whole-heartedly think that I'd be more productive and write better backend code in Rust than JavaScript/TypeScript/Python/Ruby from my experiences of using Rust in side-projects. But I have to suffer because I cannot make the case of rewriting our backend and teaching all the devs Rust.

So my only choice if I want to use Rust is to leave the company, but it's really hard to find other companies that primarily use Rust. The majority of the ones that do are crypto/blockchain related or doing something extremely low-level or out of my wheelhouse since they assume you're also comfortable with writing C++. I'm primarily a web developer and I hardly see any web startups choosing Rust.
I read no lies in this comment.
For the folks are that are asking for the prompt, I'm afraid conversation history is not working at the moment. I can however provide you with the output:

We experienced a technical issue with Mailchimp's editor in production, which unfortunately prevented us from editing our campaign before the deadline. Our team used Chrome Version 110.0.5481.177 (Official Build) (arm64), but the editor kept failing to function properly.

As a result, we suffered a significant financial loss due to missing the campaign deadline. In light of these circumstances, we kindly request a refund for our monthly fees, especially considering the recent fee increase.

To provide evidence of the issue, we have included a video showcasing the broken Mailchimp editor and the corresponding JavaScript error from the text editor (ckeditor). The video is available here: https:/[URL to screen capture].mov

We appreciate your assistance in resolving this matter and ensuring we receive the refund we are entitled to.

Asking GPT to reverse engineer the prompt: https://files.littlebird.com.au/Screen-Shot-2023-03-21-08-34...

Further information: This interaction took place on March 7th (Sydney time).
>Tech workers are the most privileged class of workers in the whole world

Which is why it only takes a layoff or threat of layoff for many of them to feel like the world is ending. Not to minimize the impact that a layoff can have on someone.

HN is not just a "tech website". Never has been. You seem to not understand what hacker means.
Why Programmers Work on Weekends
It might have been a typo, as the current llama.cpp / alpaca.cpp included quantizers default to 4 bits.
I got banned for hitting the back button. Their heuristics for blocking are shit. I’m literally logged in working on my list, hit back, and bang, banned. No weird plugins, no vpn, not even sending email.
We originally used SQLx but eventually moved away for a couple of reasons:

* The sqlx::query! macro is a neat hack, but the fact that it calls out to a database in a proc macro is pretty insane. It significantly slows down compilation with a lot of queries, and doesn't work reliably with rust-analyzer.

* Inconsistent handling of nullability that would regularly break compilation

We now use Cornucopia (https://cornucopia-rs.netlify.app/) which I think is a much better approach. You write your queries in a separate SQL file, alongside annotations that let you specify nullability. A standard build.rs integration performs codegen from that, which means compilation itself doesn't require a DB and IDE features work well. It also lets you share data types between queries which reduces boilerplate significantly.
CPI includes all that
I implemented this idea as well, but for PDF articles from arXiv. It's one application everyone is doing.

Next level is to select your prompt demonstrations based on the user request. Demonstrations too can be chosen by cosine similarity. The more specific they are, the better. You can "train" such a model by adding more demonstrations, especially adding failing cases (corrected) as demos.
To the extent that your original comment related to OP's post at all, you were insinuating that intellectually curious homeschoolers don't exist. Your own data disproves that, as does the data I provided in my follow-up.

I'm sorry that you had the displeasure of interacting with badly-homeschooled people. I've had the same displeasure of interacting with badly-public-schooled people, so I sympathize. If I were you, though, I would look at the statistical outcomes before making sweeping generalizations about an entire class of family.
> To make remote work function you really need to follow a model like GitLab has provided with their handbook.

Right, and this requires resources (time and money) that VC hyperscalers maybe can afford to blow but the 8yo+ 50-100 person company whose HR "department" consists of maybe three people and whose non-technical sides don't understand the need to change everything because they don't need such intensive education, is going to grind to a halt for months if you try to roll this out.

I don't "blame remote work" or anything, but it seems practically impossible to steer a mid-sized ship in this direction - big enough you've got fiefdoms and you'll never get 100% buy-in from the comfortable ones without a CEO going in and knocking a few heads, small enough you can't put together a task force specifically to eat the shit to manage the transition. So either we go back to the office a significant amount of the time, or we slowly die.
vectra.ai and openai.com
Caching issue where we learn the cache is full of Pro-Chinese Government related topics because that's all people query ChatGPT about?
Not sure how that follows since JS exists and a lot of people are going to just build on a runtime anyway.
It wasn't particularly insider info, he's been called out as a fake for a long time, even before the movie.
> On a tangent from that quote, I'm curious how much extra perf we could squeeze from GPUs if the applications driving them were running in kernel mode (picture an oldschool boot-from-floppy game, but in the modern day as a unikernel)

Presumably you're quite seasoned so I would assume you'd know: but Windows itself put a lot of its graphics rendering in kernel-space, they saw considerable performance gains from doing so but suffered 2 decades of severe bugs in rendering.
> about 1 out of 100 people i interviewed actually know how computers work, we still hired about 10 out of 100

This is very reminiscent of the dotcom bubble. If you knew how to turn a computer on you could get a relatively high paying tech job.

The quality of tech talent has dropped significantly in recent years, even (maybe especially?) among the leetcode grinding crowd. Software engineers have already replaced themselves with AI by turning into interviewing machines that know how to survive in a large tech company but if asked to build and ship a product from nothing would be completely frozen.

I really miss programming in the post-dotcom shadow. Most people in tech where in it because they loved writing code and solving hard technical problems. TC was literally not a term at that point, virtually nobody had RSUs, comp was fine but nothing amazing. There were plenty of jobs that paid better than writing software so all the people looking for a quick buck fled there and left coders alone.
It pains me to tell you this, but "simple batch compute and CPU/memory intensive or data volume heavy tasks " were the first ones my firm has, unsuccessfully, tried to move to the cloud, no joke.
If they frequently come up I think that says exactly how good they are.
yeah it's crazy how much net compensation has flatlined for everyone but people heavily compensated by the markets.
Plenty of people thought that a lot of changes from COVID were permanent. Pre-pandemic, there was a slow shift towards things like e-commerce - the % of purchases made online was growing steadily for years. Everyone thought that covid accelerated that trend, and few predicted it would return to in-store purchases. In 2023, we're basically at an equivalent point compared to if the pandemic didn't happen and that steady growth continued - that's not an obvious outcome.

Things like remote work, many people absolutely loved it, and it changed how people can work and hire. It had far-reaching affects, and many thought it'd last. Not everyone was convinced, of course, but we had proven it works for at least some conditions. As Facebook recently announced, it may not work as well, but for many organizations, the savings is better than the decrease in productivity.

Regarding a lot of the crazy tech-industry changes like salaries, employment demand etc, yeah I totally didn't think it'd last either. Same with the affects of 0% interest rates (not that I really invested any differently).
I used a bike trailer and child seat when my twins were young, I could drop all 3 kids off at nursery, unhitch the trailer and leave it at the nursery, cycle on to work from there. On the way back I would hitch the trailer up and go in and collect them and cycle home. Trailer was around £150 and I only had to tow it when necessary.
Analyzing multi-gigabyte JSON files locally with serde
I clicked around to an old Fluxus Blogger site and I saw a bunch of comments from about 2018 and I thought, "Yay! People are still into Fluxus!" but then I read the comments and realized they were all spam.

I miss the old internet too. It's bigger than ever now, but most of it is garbage.
There's this search engine which seems to show some cool older-style websites:

https://wiby.me/

> In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.

The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.

EDIT: I found it via this HN thread that you might find interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31999259
Could we instead have the LLM use NICE similar to how Bing uses the web as a reference instead? It still wouldn't guarantee a correct result, but it would that increase the reliability, right?
I'd like a recommended brand too
Those economic ties were broken the moment Russia started threatening to cut off the gas unless Germany did what they wanted, which took about 3 days and escalated over the next several months. It has been transparently clear for a decade that Germany was the one being "roped" by Russia, not the one "roping" Russia.
TFL care a great deal about pedestrians which is why many planned cycle lanes were not built and turned into wider pavement space.

Also please keep in mind that The Telegraph is not a neutral actor with regards to Khan. They recently blamed him for the national strikes, which was totally non sensical.
You're kinda proving the point here. Scott said that if someone mentions this 100% true and uncontroversial statistic without also including a bunch of defensive verbiage, most people will shoot the messenger.

He didn't say anything about anyone being inferior, you attributed that to him.
I would emphatically disagree here. The ergonomics of Rust blow any functional language out of the water. The combination of cargo, rust-analyzer, and rustfmt is far better than anything OCaml can offer. Likewise, the choice of modules instead of traits, while probably a "better" design from a language design aesthetic perspective (more compositional, less global), make simple things like printing or checking equality rather difficult. And that's not even getting into compiler errors, package ecosystem, or documentation.

And really, you can see the priorities in how the people driving the language talk about it. In Rust there's a focus on ergonomics. How can we make this easier to use? How can we make the tooling nicer? In OCaml and other languages the focus is almost always on semantics. We have unboxed types like Rust. We have multicore with green threads. We have effects. This is missing the point. I don't care about the features of the language if the language itself is annoying to use. It's like wondering why Slack or Discord won versus IRC. Ergonomics is the answer.