skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It seems to me that the advice given here would be more applicable to someone who only coded long enough to move into engineering management -- anyway something about it bugs me and I don't think I'd follow it exclusively even if I was starting today

The advice here is clearly meant for someone who wants to invest in themselves to provide food and shelter for themselves and/or a family in the future. (Ie “doing all this hard work for nothing… AI will make my future job obsolete”).

The advice is spot on. Soft skills are hard to learn, harder to teach, and allow for flexibility with regards to the tool used.

> anyway something about it bugs me and I don't think I'd follow it exclusively even if I was starting today.

I’d be you like the money but don’t seem to want it as much as you want to solve deterministic puzzles (“not interested in becoming a manager” ie “not interested in maximizing career/salary growth potential).

What bugs you seems to be that you can’t yet see the puzzle left for you to work on once GPT-12 makes coding obsolete and software architecturing obsolete.

A long time ago I got some good feedback, “You were hired because you typically know the right answers and/or know how to find them. You were promoted because you also seem to know how to ask the right questions, and that is significantly harder.”

I’m relatively certain it’s analogous to Carmak’s advice.
The thing that really shifted my software development mindset was learning about lean product development (and the application to software)
> How about a treesitter-based editor extension that converts between begin/end and {/}, as if they were ligatures? Actually this might not even need treesitter.

Neovim has the conceal feature, which can convert Treesitter nodes into a single symbol, but not the other way around unfortunately.
It alternates between being a serious point or a joke, depending on which justification is necessary.

Whatever genre that is, it's that. I personally think that this is the genre of problematic comments that we will have to collectively labor through in a struggle to have high quality conversations about ChatGPT.
Yes, you copy it (do what they did). Not take photographs of their work.
The beach will certainly make the cheat sheet stick in my memory, I can tell you that much.
It doesn't need to think per se, just like robots at an Assembly line, or algorithms at HFT, it only needs to do a good enough job.
> Well, humans are just trained on language tokens too

This is not true at all

You can teach someone chess without language
> Unclear

It's perfectly clear what if someone would come to CF to ask for payee details it's not for sending a welcoming cake.
That certainly wasn't the intention of that sentence.

Re "has no value" - wevs. It has massive value to me and to a community large enough to have continually supplied me with new and useful functionality and resources for 20 years, most of which have been spent using it alongside either Visual Studio (not "Code") or a JetBrains IDE (mostly Rider, some PyCharm). You use whatever tools you like and I'll decide what tools have value to me.
Reddit used to be like Hacker News, but as it became popular the memes started rolling in, and effectively lowered the IQ quotient and technology bias of the home page content and diluted the sub reddits.

I looked back through archive.org a few years ago to anecdotally prove this theory to myself and yes, on the front page the factual content (in my personal opinion) as opposed to meme content seems to drop between 20-40% compared to more recently.

The same seemed to happened to digg.com which made people move to reddit (remember that before it killed its user base?). I really hope this never happens to Hacker News...
Oooh yeah definitely, no argument from me there. I’m more stating that it doesn’t have much utility in a huge catastrophe where we can’t make microchips.
These remind me of that company called nanoleaf, they sold these stackable canvas led squares that really was beautiful but expensive if I remember correctly. But these seem to be a cheaper alternative, cool!
For fun, GPT4 summary based on the URL alone:

> Can you summarise this article?
> https://aeon.co/essays/jwsts-cosmic-revelations-will-change-...

The article discusses the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and how its capabilities will allow us to explore the universe in new ways, potentially leading to significant scientific discoveries. However, the article also highlights how the revelations that JWST will bring may have a profound impact on our interior lives as well, leading to shifts in our perspectives, beliefs, and worldviews. The author argues that the awe-inspiring images and information that JWST provides may inspire a new appreciation for the cosmos and our place in it, leading to a more nuanced understanding of our own existence and purpose. Additionally, the discoveries made by JWST may challenge some of our preconceived notions about the universe, leading to a re-evaluation of our beliefs and assumptions. Ultimately, the author suggests that the launch of JWST marks an exciting and transformative moment in human history, one that has the potential to change both our scientific understanding of the universe and our personal and spiritual lives.

> Did you hallucinate the article out of the url, or did you open that link?

> As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to open links or browse the internet. I provided the summary based on the information in the URL that you provided me.
Now you are assassinating the character of a person I have not mentioned. Is that what is necessary to sell nuclear?

Do you bet against this?

https://i.imgur.com/JYMNAWR.png
Tell HN: Instagram's API has broken, support tickets ignored, status page green
Meta offers an OAuth based API for Instagram.
Many companies and tools are built on and rely on this API for their product & daily operations.

Beginning Friday evening (US time), a critical endpoint in this API has broken. The endpoint creates long-lived access tokens, so it is in the critical path for almost any company using the API.

I find it disappointing that a leading technological company does not acknowledge a bug that's been reported to them several times more than 24 hours ago, even if to say that's it's being investigated.

The endpoint:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-basic-display-api/guides/long-lived-access-tokens#get-a-long-lived-token

Currently the API returns a Bad Request with a wrong error message (the endpoint should support "GET"):
```
{
"message": "Unsupported request - method type: get",
"type": "IGApiException",
"code": 100,
"fbtrace_id": "AuDYqK74IrT9Yt2Sx51UlP6"
}
```

I have opened a bug report but received no response.
Facebook's status page shows all green in the API section: https://metastatus.com/
There are several Meta Developers Community threads with no response
'Programmers' which are scared of ChatGPT, Copilot etc. would be scared as well of their IDE if they would ever read the manual of what is already easily possible with the tool they use daily
SQL was also meant to give a wider range of people access to data. The “business analyst” comes to mind. And, I think SQL was successful.

What it didn’t do was reduce the need for programmers, because the new SQL users always wanted more data to answer more complex questions.
I think this kind of writing are for readers who enjoy reading kind of like travellers who travel for the journey and not to reach the destination. It should feel like an enlightening experience to just reflect on the words written. I am usually not in the mood for that and leave dissatisfied.
To follow the path

Look to the master

Follow the master

Walk with the master

See through the master

Become the master
It's an odd example for other reasons, given the context. It's situated in an essay that laments that performance and accessibility are underappreciated. The next thing the author says is, "Were I to guess, trying to break the gravity of platform limitations doesn't help with the physics-based limitations like batteries and electrons."

In reality, eschewing with overly dynamic language constructs and code patterns is how to make things friendlier to low-power (in both senses of the word) devices...

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-iiEDtpy6I>
Importantly, the punt is propelled by having someone stand at the back and push a pole against the river bed. It's popular with students and tourists in both Oxford and Cambridge, although the two cities disagree over which end of a punt is the back.
> I'd be surprised if the next step is "Hi, I'm an ideas guy, please give me an app that does Uber, for bicycles, but better."

And even if AI is able to do that... Well, then anyone out there could become a UberCycle CEO. Which means: customer requirements will be much more complex by then and coming up with an entire product in 1h won't be enough anymore.
The "We are the 99%!" crowd were decidedly left, but that is beside the point.

I said I see no difference of substance between class, race, and sexuality insofar as politics is concerned, it's all identity politics all the way down. You have provided nothing to suggest otherwise.
Having been a victim of this type of fraud, I'd say definitively worse than arguably. There's no legal recourse, ITT tech showed the world you have to be able to afford lawyers for 15+ years, and even then you can only come to a settlement (not a verdict).

GE required physics at all of our local community colleges were structured so the pass rate was 12% one of those years. If student's can't pass without being academically dishonest, regardless of merit, its just state sponsored fraud.
If anyone wants to explore their PNG files, or files of any type for that matter, hachoir is a very fantastic tool.

https://hachoir.readthedocs.io/en/stable/urwid.html
I didn't mean SQL wan's a success. I meant, as the commenter above me said, a higher-level tool doesn't necessarily replace the lower-level ones, or reduce the need of them.
SyntaxError: expected ')', found end of comment

How does Unicode support make it harder to audit code?
People will always want things cheaper and faster (value)

- looking at AI as "chat" or textbox or AI autocomplete is wrong imo

- companies will come that utilise AI to deliver things faster and cheaper

- you quote $10k and 1 month, we will do it in $1k 1 week

- first to go is low value difficult to automate work which is already offshored and commoditised (basic webdev, graphic design)

- later the middle tier of work, that requires internal context (once whitelabel NDA'ble bespoke AI solutions are mainstream)

----

There will always be need for top tier leetcoders. but barrier to entry will get much higher.
Seems like this could come from GPT? At least partly:

- Text is rather verbose

- No thoughts on the topic I haven’t seen already
I think the trade-off is at the company level. They hired a worse programmer to save money/time back then and accelerate development in the short term.
That is super interesting. I assume it’s easy to spoof the density? And this is probably a stupid question, but do people ever try to alloy the gold to mix in an impurity in a subtle way?
We don’t AGI for LLM to be useful.

And regrading comparison with self driving car they are still improving just the bar for them is much higher. If autopilot works 99.9% if time then 1 out of 1000 drivers will die - so technology has to be even better. for LLM is enough if it’s 90% good to be broadly useful.
> the fact that if you POKE some address and the screen changes color doesn't tell you anything about how it all happened.

Simply typing in a PEEK or a POKE may not have told you much about how it happened, but peel back that one layer and you are learning about how memory is organized, hardware registers, and other low level fun. Peel that back another layer and you are starting to learn about EE.

Contrast that to today. Chances are that you are going to have to peel back several layers before you even bump into the OS kernel. Depending upon the language and the libraries, few of those layers will say anything meaningful about how the computer works. Things progress somewhat more rapidly after that, in the sense that each layer of abstraction will be more meaningful, but you will still have to peel back multiple layers before you touch hardware.

I don't think the article was saying that you automatically learned more about computers through the simplicity of older systems. I think they were saying that it was much more accessible to those who decided to do so.
Not honest enough. Would have preferred if it said "yes I hallucinated it"
I’d more expect the revolt to be along the lines of calling Microsoft out for being a dick. More an intervention than a revolt.
Well I'm in web dev (though I was studying CS in 2008) and the 2008 landscape had almost none of the same things. jQuery was not yet a household name, let alone SPAs. Facebook had barely 100 million users. Marc Andreessen yet hadn't written about "software eating the world". Personally I was more optimistic. If anything, the last 15 years have seen the growth of an attitude of tech "entitlement" because hackers got to the a lot of the ideas that now seem obvious in hindsight before a lot of the big corps could.

I'm sure there's still room for innovation, but I think a lot of it going forward will be driven by rapid improvement in AI capabilities.

In 2008, tech wasn't everywhere. iphones were brand new and very few people had them.. There was no "mobile browser" market share (though we did have SMS gateways). 77% of the global population hadn't even been on the internet yet.

AI looks like it's going to be at the forefront of the next big wave of fundamental changes to society, and it's really hard to predict where that will lead us. But I suspect it's going to become apparent that this relatively brief period of tech-elite empowerment was a historical anomaly, because the AI underlings are going to be willing to do a lot more work with none of the coddling, and they're going to improve very quickly.
"looks quite unfortunate in retrospect"

It was completely unjustified at the time. There was absolutely no reason to doubt the testimony of refugees coming from Cambodia, other than they didn't fit into Chomsky's strange worldview that the US is the cause of all problems in the world.

Even today his views on Russia's invasion of Ukraine are completely moronic.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/12/22/russia-ukraine-war-left...

For ‘Peace Activists,’ War Is About America, Never Russia
Their own hard-left worldview is so absorbing that they will take the side of any aggressor in the anti-Western camp.

https://www.e-flux.com/notes/470005/open-letter-to-noam-chom...
> The most effective way to learn new things for me, is still to play around with them. Whether it is compilers or a new graphical framework.

Compilers and UI APIs are easy to learn. I did it too. Education is the problem of teaching people much harder things.

> It hurts me to read this

Hey man, look, I was a great student and graduated from a good college with a 4.0 GPA with a math and CS degree, and now I've made a lot of money in industry. I am a huge proponent of the U.S. educational system and of the freedom of the individual to become educated.

But there are hard things you have to do in life; unless your name is Erdős, who, btw, was on speed the whole time.

It was relatively easy for me, but learning something real is something that is hard for all humans. The subjective experience of encoding millennia of information into your fleshy brain. Just like working out. The best way to work out is with a coach or buddy. There's a reason humans evolved to be social. Same is true with educational structures.

Play-based learning is a fad designed to satisfy liberal white women. Real, practical results come from overcoming challenge.
Yes, I do think it's a geniune term. Just like real debt, it's a very useful tool and many things wouldn't be possible without it.

Technical debt isn't inherently bad. Otherwise it would be called "techinical loss".
Lld 16 ELF Changes
This comment reeks of exceptionalism and “iamverysmart”. I hope you dont take strong offence to that because I am not saying you think this way, only that what you wrote sounds that way.

That said: Mass appeal always lowers the quality of discourse, due (in part) to there being more of a bias towards being first (the first comment to make a certain type of joke will be rewarded most) and also due to the fact that people tend to aggregate around things that are fun, not necessarily correct.

btw: IQ is a measure of pattern matching and is used in children to determine mental development relative to their biological age, it shouldn’t have any affect on internet discourse.
My career predates relational/SQL databases so I can confirm what you wrote. When Oracle came out the buzz was that a whole bunch of programmers would go away because managers and executives could write queries in a “natural” English-like language.

That never happened. SQL is hard to master, but it’s the easy part of understanding the relational model and any particular schema. Instead Oracle and the other RDBMSs that followed created more jobs for programmers and database analysts and admins.
"programmer" is not single thing.

Software jobs can be divided into expert jobs and laborer jobs.

Even if the demand for "code monkeys" decreases, demand for much smaller group of software engineers with masters or PhD (equivalent) and good mathematical skills probably increases.

It's a dynamic process where two forces find a equilibrium.

>Automation, which enables capital to replace labor in tasks it was previously engaged in, shifts the task content of production against labor because of a displacement effect. As a result, automation always reduces the labor share in value added and may reduce labor demand even as it raises productivity.

>The effects of automation are counterbalanced by the creation of new tasks in which labor has a comparative advantage. The introduction of new tasks changes the task content of production in favor of labor because of a reinstatement effect, and always raises the labor share and labor demand.

Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.33.2.3
My sides are like the James Webb Space Telescope:

In space
Having helped companies in traditional line of business to "streamline" their work processes, I am quite clear that many of the stuff that the West outsources into Asian countries will eventually be outsourced to AI.

It is already so that in many industries there are hardly any traditional coder jobs on site, and having to explain every step to avoid it going off rails in offshoring assignments is hardly going to be any different to explain it to an AI, when it gets good enough.

Maybe by GPT-20 only, but it will come, and then the roles of architects and business analists are the only ones left.
Yeah, but the original question was specifically about coding jobs, not hobbies, hence i think a reasonable business angle on the answer.
Relational databases replaced a whole raft of vendor-supplied databases and custom-built solutions. It was a new tool for software developers, not a replacement.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230319090005/https://www.nytim...
EDIT: Was the comment edited, or did my brain miss something? I think I perceived something else there when I wrote my response.

It's still "how". Only on a higher level. For example, instead of placing the form elements exactly and designing them you describe data flow and meta info about the data to be gathered via the form, and how it looks and where elements are placed on various screens happens automatically.

Writing code in a higher level vs. assembler still is coding, but you worry about very different things. Just compared with assembler, since looking back is easier than looking forward. Instead of worrying about (the few) registers and interrupts and in which RAM cells you place what you now think about very different things. It still is programming though, and you still tell the machine "how". Only on a different level.

When you lead a large company instead of working with a machine on the factory floor the work is very different, you still need precision and know "how", only on a different level. Even if you have "underlings" who can think, and you can let them execute the sub tasks you create, you still have to know what you are doing, only on a higher level.
> Ask a construction worker about them.

Hah. So true. The more I work on renovating parts of my house the more I see where a workers experience kicked in the finagle something. Very analogous to programming. All the parts that fit together perfectly are already easy today. It’s those bits that aren’t square, but also need to fit where the ‘art’ comes in.

Can AI also do that part? IDK, currently I believe it will simply help us do the art part much like the computer in Star Trek.
no one has lost their job to a roomba
How does it do on "Let's play connect four." ?
This is a feature, not a bug: https://youtu.be/MWRPYBoCEaY
The purpose of software companies is to earn money not to give jobs to people who "want to code".

Lots of people learned how to make games for NES, SNES, PS2, PS3, etc.

All those machines are now obsolete.

Current gen consoles are using x86 and ARM now and most upcoming AAA games are built on Unreal Engine.
The competitive advantage of those who mastered coding for the Cell processor is gone.

What should SONY have done instead?
Should they still use the PS3 architecture in the current gen consoles to keep those developers employed?
Just. Wow. This has piqued my interest, is there any background information as to why this happened (so often)? There must have been underlying tentions, wondering what those were, but can imagine it's just lost to history
But does it have as many addons and decks? https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german

There's a number of Anki alternatives such as https://mnemosyne-proj.org/, but Anki has an active collaborative community, as opposed to most of alternatives, as far as I know.
Yeah, it's the formal academic hiring system that hasn't yet figured out how to work without this. But of course, that's what eLife is trying to figure out: they're trying to separate recognition (in the published assessment) from publication. The big question will be whether those assessments will be able to play that role in academic rewards, because that's the root of the incentive system that preserves the status quo.
Idk, I tried to play chess with it right now, and it tries to do illegal move.

This is pretty crazy:

me > Bxe3

chat.openai.com > A good move! By playing 16...Bxe3, you capture my pawn on d5 with your bishop, and also put pressure on my queen.

Like what?
Yeah, it used to be that way until Microsoft noticed this good idea of browser syncing accounts… So now it goes in the same direction: https://imgur.com/a/wLcljDK
Here on HN everybody thinks they are going to be paid half a million a year.
> It doesn't take 9 years to learn to code.

True. But I guess the big question is what kind of skills you're going to need after that.
Possibly. But things have a way of not working as intended. A good chunk of my time as a programmer is spent dealing with things that don't work the way I thought they would, especially at the threshold between APIs and layers of indirection. Deeply understanding a complex system to deal with problems like that seems somewhat far out of reach for LLMs from what I see today.

But that's me looking into my crystal ball, nobody can say what will or will not be possible in a given time frame. But I chose to not worry about it - new developments will probably be accompanied with new opportunities, which I can jump on even if I didn't predict them ten years before.