skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Spectrum is garbage and ZX81 is even more garbage... especially when considering that Commodore 64 was only slightly more expensive.

Jack Tramiel (owner of Commodore) was hugely influenced by what Sinclair was doing (really cheap computers). It definitely influenced the VIC20. You can't underestimate how widespread their influence is/was. Source: Commodore: A Company on the Edge.

Sort of like the Velvet Underground quip about only 20 people seeing the band live at one point, but every single one of the viewers starting their own band as a result.
Infographic back page about the Kowloon Walled City
We the HN community are engineers, how can we find a solution to fix this? My thinking is we need a portal to advertise affordable housing or starter homes. Housing is the basis of the family.
I really wished there was a GC-ed but strictly-evaluating Haskell. A Rust-like syntax would probably help with adoption but I don't have a strong preference in that.
Very happy that things worked out for them in the end, but people should remember that for every good suggestion generated by ChatGPT there may be a hundred others that it has just hallucinated. The author did the right thing by using its response as a starting point to do further consultations and testing, but I suspect there will be more and more cases of patients barging into their doctor's office with printouts of ChatGPT results convinced that they know the right treatments, similar to what happens today with Google and WebMD. Or worse just trying the treatments themselves without any consultation at all.
Maybe that's why she was allowed in.
Summary via ChatGPT:

> The article "I Saw the Face of God in a TSMC Factory" describes the author's experience visiting a TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) factory and observing the advanced technology and processes involved in producing computer chips. The author marvels at the complexity of the machinery and the precision required to create chips that are smaller than a human hair. They also reflect on the spiritual experience of witnessing such advanced technology and how it can make one feel small in comparison. The article concludes by discussing the societal implications of technological progress and the need to balance technological advancement with ethical considerations.
I've so far used successfully it for:

- Larger, more annoying reformatting tasks when Copilot isn't cutting it. Stuff like turning Go's variable dumps into JSON. I'm too lazy to write a tool to do it really.
- I had it take a small legacy interface and wrap it in a nicer one. Passed a handwritten test suite with flying colors.
- Coming up with arcane sed, jq, cut, etc. commands. Generally it is great at getting me 90-100% of the way to a solution in query/command languages that I just don't have a compelling reason to learn deeply.

It has come up short for me when:

- I asked it for advice on architecting a new service, and it mostly ignored my requirements. It just looooves suggesting Kafka, Spark, etc for any task.
- Tried to use GPT-4 to make a rather large rewrite of something into Rust, and it couldn't do it (even its context window was too small). Compressing the code did not help; it elided all useful parts of the code since it had no "budget" left.
> We need AIs to "sanity check" human output more than the other way round.

On the contrary; we need AIs to "completeness check" the experts, because experts are prone to forget things or have missing knowledge; we need humans to "sanity check" the AIs because current LLMs are insane: mixed in with brilliant pieces of insight are super-obvious mistakes and outright hallucinations.
Wrong, there's just so much a company can dedicate itself too, otherwise you'll start doing little useless experiments that go nowhere like google
Docker Desktop runs dockerd in WSL and adds a few things to enable working with it from Windows (e.g. installs the docker CLI on the Windows side and exposes the dockerd control socket to it). You can easily get rid of it and replace it with running dockerd in WSL on your own, or with podman-based tools.
Funny thing is Googling a very simple "dog anemia" suggests it in the first result. Which is unbelievably faster than pasting in a giant set of results and phrasing a question. I guess ChatGPT is the horse :P
I'm sure most programmers work more than 10% faster with syntax highlighting and autocomplete. But no one says IDE replaced humans' jobs.
1) Who said a set is supposed to be a "collection of items" or any other kind of set in the CS definition? A set is a mathematical object which can be said to contain, or not contain, an element. The natural numbers fall into this definition of a set.

2) There's no such thing as a "finite symbol." What does that even mean? A symbol is a symbol, it symbolizes something. The symbols themselves are finite; they're just letters. But if that something that it symbolizes is an infinite quantity, why stop it?

You are living too close to reality and numbers and words. Even if sets were rigidly defined as finite objects, why not define some new thing, call it an "infinite collection," and let all the theorems like countability and aleph-null come out of that? It lets us do useful math, after all, so why let the words we use stop us? Clearly set theorists worldwide find nothing* wrong with the current definition.
not everthing is about LGBTQIA+ .... I think adding in national origin or skin color or religion is more pressing and common.
that's a global phenomenon, unfortunately.
> "knowledge or lack of knowledge does not differentiate..."

I agree wholeheartedly. Knowledge, or even intelligence, shouldn't be the most highly valued skill in a team lead.

But there are many people extremely confident in their confirmation bias that seem to be unwilling to consider anything that might challenge their ideas. Our industry has a problem with celebrating the intelligent arsehole. Not only is humility not incentivized, it seems to be actively counterproductive.

I wonder how we can foster the kind of culture that values experience, encourages innovation, and is also able to get things done without chasing geese?
I thought that having the network subsystem manage resolv.conf dynamically had been pretty standard since well before systemd came along.

e.g. Most DHCP clients have done that since... well, probably since DHCP was invented. See, for example:

https://wiki.debian.org/resolv.conf

If you want a static resolv.conf, but you're not using a completely static network config and have some kind of dynamic network management daemon, be that `dhclient`, or `NetworkManager`, or `systemd-resolved`, you've always needed to explicitly configure it to leave resolv.conf alone.

Not sure how this is a systemd issue?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306506 got more traction (32 comments at the moment).
Note that at least thelocal.dk, the Danish equivalent, is nowhere near representative of the actual country. Hard pass on thelocal.it as any true source
Another take:

> The article is an opinion piece where the author reflects on her visit to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) semiconductor factory in Taiwan. She describes the factory's massive scale and advanced technology and compares it to a religious experience, calling it a "secular cathedral". The author notes the incredible amount of human ingenuity and effort that goes into producing semiconductors and suggests that the factory's operations and technology have a spiritual significance in modern society. She concludes by arguing that the TSMC factory embodies humanity's creative and innovative potential.
Yeah and those are necessary to avoid airlines filling all the way up at the cheapest location and thus wasting more energy carrying unneeded fuel around
Question is, would an incompetent, overworked person take the time and humility to actually ask the AI? You did, because you cared. With incompetent or overworked people, the problem is often that they just don’t care, or have no capacity to care. Being able to ask the proper question is almost always 80% of the solution. In your case, the first vet, it seems to me, wasn’t even asking the question.
Musk, Byrne, maga and a couple of heads of state. Maybe some of them are not great people in your or author's opinion, but it just reads unnecessary and petty.
The benefits of openness compound irrespective of the motivations of creators.
Yeah, I would like to build something against FROM debian:wheezy.
> Microware's OS-9 operating system

I loved OS-9 on the 6809. It was my introduction into unix-ish-like systems that led into SunOS and later Linux and the foundations of my career.
I think true sentience is a long way off and likely takes a very different form. I fear this line of thinking distracts from a more immediate set of ethical issues. Some examples:

- How do we protect against such powerful models inadvertently causing significant harm to society?

- How will these technologies be used for propaganda and how can we detect / limit that?

- Can we trust anything we see in writing going forward?

- How will these technologies be used to spread hate?

- Can we find ways to use them to reduce the spread of hate? Do the ends justify the means in this case?

- Will we allow people / organizations to use these technologies to shield themselves from responsibility ("It wasn't me, the AI wrote it!")?

- How do we balance the rights of those who authored the training material (i.e., the content that was ingested from the internet for model training) vs. the potential good to society that comes from all this? (see all the HN threads about Github Copilot - many of those threads generalize beyond Copilot)

When it's cheap to spit out vast amounts of well written (but not necessarily truthful) text, a lot changes about the world. Laws and societal norms have had trouble keeping up with issues around digital media, social media, relatively simple machine learning, etc. Things are now accelerating dramatically. How badly will we need to hurt ourselves before we rally together to address some of the issues that are coming? How will ethicists and technologists come together to figure out the right questions so we can start to think about answers?
https://github.blog/2020-03-16-npm-is-joining-github/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22884586
Related:

Still Have a Use for Adobe Flash? Ruffle Is Working to Safely Emulate It in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35196442 - March 2023 (60 comments)

Ruffle: WebAssembly Flash Player Emulator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32011842 - July 2022 (60 comments)

A Flash Player emulator written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033561 - Feb 2021 (125 comments)

Ruffle – A Flash Player emulator written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242115 - Nov 2020 (89 comments)

Emulating Flash Player with Rust and WebAssembly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25164531 - Nov 2020 (1 comment)

Ruffle – An Adobe Flash Player Written in Rust Compiled to WebAssembly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20728019 - Aug 2019 (70 comments)
If I give Google the same prompt you gave ChatGPT:

> Here's the reassuring truth: Headache, by itself, is rarely caused by a tumor. According to a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins' Comprehensive Brain Tumor Center, the chance that your headache is a sign of a brain tumor is very remote.
Does your misspelling of “cash” mean anything other than signaling you know CS?
> It might at least currently be on the cognitive level of an overconfident 6yo in many regards, but a 6yo with more knowledge than any single person alive.

I'm not sure I agree entirely with this - It's very rare to see 6 year olds to be capable of writing valid code, summarising academic literature, or doing diagnostics on a dogs bloodwork.

Even if I gave a 6 year old access to all the information and literature, they just wouldn't really be able to do these things. Maybe if we trained the 6 year old for 10 years then they could do these things, but then they aren't 6 anymore they are 16.

At age 6 the developmental milestone is really "Can count to and understand the concept of "10."
Yeah, if you don't need performance, then just take a simple ANN library. No need for a database at all. In terms of databases, Qdrant and Pinecone are the simplest I've tried so far. But Pinecone isn't open-source, not an option for on-prem. PGvector is too much imho, do not want to have all the other Sequel stuff if I just need an NN search.
It's not faster, just somewhere else.
Even just "anemia in dogs" is sufficient.

The first Google hit goes to a page that lists IMHA right away.

I am sure LLMs already are helpful to do medical research. But this case seems not to be a great example to show their superiority to old fashioned googling.
> Writing a spec is a problem that can be broken down into sub-problems and so on.

Yes, a.k.a. programming.

If you assume that you have a machine powerful enough to do that, then you have a machine powerful enough to do anything at all: you are assuming the thing you're trying to prove.

There exists no universe where a machine that can do whatever you want by being instructed verbally isn't also replacing the one instructing it...
I've had to do something similar in a much shorter career as well (about 10 years or so). I think the rate of change is much quicker these days too. It was still always within the tech field, but for better or worse my career has been incredibly diverse. Not sure if I'll be able to keep up when I'm older (entering my 30ies now) or not, but so far I've always seen it as personal growth opportunities.
Here GPT helped analyze the result of this particular case and advised based on it. Of course, human could have done this, but this is where humans failed in this particular case. I see huge value in Chat GPT retaining the context while giving the answers.
I'm a native German, and I agree with all those points, even when speaking the language perfectly. Add high taxes and a surprisingly corrupt government when you pull back the curtains and I'm thinking about leaving again.
Gay guy here.

I have always said that these sort of laws designed to protect children will do precisely the opposite. An LGBTQ child is effectively forcibly outed by this law, potentially before they've come to terms with their sexuality / gender themselves.

Whilst I don't doubt social media causes a lot of harm on children growing up, giving parents full access to your messages is not the solution. In my opinion, based off a scale of a child's age and maturity, children are entitled to some privacy. Clearly a 4 year old shouldn't be left alone with unfettered access to the Internet, but equally a 16 year old shouldn't have to feel like their parents are watching everything they do or say. Both can cause long term psychological harm to a child.
I agree with a lot of what you write, but in my experience in the UK there can be instances where money from the the wealthy has been used for the common good. For example, until 1945 only the rich could afford to educate their children, but the government decided to use taxpayers' money to provide free education for every child up to the age of 16. It was a utopian idea, and when it was first suggested most people said, 'yeah right, nice idea but of course it'll never happen'.
Yes - sorry it's a bit of a lottery which submission 'wins'. It's still on our list to write software to handle this better someday, i.e. share the credit and the karma.
yeah but if you google "differential diagnosis for anaemic dog" this comes right up. the first vet couldve just googled it.
Yea I actually gave the author the benefit of the doubt thinking it must be a really rare thing, but "dog anemia" works even better.
I think the answer is clear: go off grid and hunker down after pilfering a 2-year supply of unregulated popcorn memes. I too seem to be coming down with a mild case of existentialitus
> 1. Currently, these things work best (really need) an operator experienced in the craft.

I guess the question is: how long does the intermediate state of super-powered developers last?
But then, you cash out during boom times, and go bankrupt in bad times.

Not a good reason for people to buy your insurance, but some people might believe in the boom times
Plus, if there's a complex directory tree, rm has to traverse it (to deal with all the metadata) while mv doesn't.
not everthing is about LGBTQIA+

Sure, if you aren't in these groups you have the luxury of completely freaking ignoring it.

I'm bisexual all the time. Transfolks are trans all the time. All queer folks are queer all the time even if you can't tell they are queer. So yes, everything is about it as much as you are always gonna be whatever nationality you are (even if you aren't legally a citizen), you'll always have your basic skin color, and so on.
Many human professionals are incompetent in ways that go beyond just "missing knowledge". This dramatically understates what a colossal problem incompetence is, and one that AIs don't appear to suffer from in the same way.

Already with the current generation of AIs, and their strange mistakes and so-called hallucinations, I'd be hard pressed to say that they are overall worse than human professionals, considering what I've seen from those.
Here GPT did about 1000x worse than Google.
> A.I. art is not art. I will give you a simple example: Who will be the creator of the famous David sculpture? Michelangelo or the rich patron who gave the description of the task? According to the definition of A.I. "art" the patron is the artist.

No? What are you even talking about? AI is not a person. In every single legal and ethicical discussion, "human" and "non-human" are treated completely differently. AI is a tool, while Michelangelo isn't.

Who's the creator of David sculpture is completely unrelated to whether AI art is art or not.
>The kernel of truth is that the technology itself isn’t valuable; it’s the /humanization/ of a technology, how it interfaces with the people who use it every day.

Apple in a nutshell.
Same as a MacⅡx, but they wisely avoided calling it the SE/x.
But if they were given warning they could avoid opiates before the tests, so it wouldn't work anyway.
6yo in terms of cognitive performance, not knowledge performance I assume parent comment means. Ultimately comparing LLM or MLS against humans is not a good idea.
That's a process that didn't start with AI but now it became obvious very fast that it gets to late to ignore.

There is no model that works in a purely capitalistic setting. The reality this this issue will hit us hard, everywhere and faster every day.
The point is, you got the phrase you Googled ("low platelet count increase wbc") from GPT4. I had no idea what the test results meant or how to interpret them. I was trying to do SOMETHING to improve my dog's chances, and ChatGPT was #1 most accessible tool I could use for this.

Sure, if you know exactly what you want to google for, you can google it. But that requires you to interpret all the information and piece together a theory, whereas with GPT I just stated all the facts and received accurate (in this case) info back
> Techically, you’re right but it’s often grouped with them.

It is usually distinguished from them, especially as the one OTC painkiller typically usable by people with conditions for which they should not take NSAIDs, and which lacks the issues with long-term use of NSAIDs.

OTOH, with more digging, while most medical sources distinguish it, it is occasionally identified as an NSAID in the literature – ironically, the first source I could find that does that is a paper which both calls it one and contrasts it with NSAIDs, so it seems a bit confused – and it apparently has some (though weak enough compared to the things usually labelled NSAIDs that most sources just straight up refer to it as not being anti-inflammatory) anti-inflammatory effect.
In my experience on topics I know well, ChatGPT is pretty good at avoiding bullshit. A lot of garbage in but mostly high quality results out.

A bit like the image generation AIs that are trained on tons of ugly pictures, understand the common concepts, and only output beautiful pictures thanks to the fewer beautiful pictures from the training datasets.
I support it because I want to see the Silicon Slopes destroyed and young people abandoning Utah.
The abstractions work very well, until they don't and you need to dive in 5 abstractions deep to debug what's happening, or an upgrade needs to be done and you have conflicting dependencies a few levels deep.
> I don’t want to be paying interest on cars that I don’t even have anymore

Lol what? Imagine if a banker, supposedly the root of all evil, was saying something like “I don’t want to be paying interest on the money I borrowed to buy this financial instrument only to sell it later”, they would, rightfully, be pilloried.

But because it’s a “regular old American dude” saying it, I’m supposed to feel sympathy for them?
>but you and I agree we can simulate the same computation a small bundle of neurons can accomplish to a high degree of confidence, right?

The important word is simulate. It means it can accomplish a common subset of measurable phenomena. It certainly doesn't mean they are on pare on ontological status as a whole.

The debate seems to easily confuse notions like living entities, consciousness and intelligence, when they are three orthogonal considerations.
I didn't interpret their article as reluctance to embrace technology. They understandably liked 3d modeling using the current tools and was able to make a living doing something fun. It's a rare occurrence and sadly innovations in technology took away the joyful part of their job. If it was not a tech innovation removing the joy from their job they would probably still be upset about it.
Fair enough! I just haven't experienced that (laggy mouse and keyboard processing) before.

Well I've seen it but it tended to be RAM/memory rather than CPU originated.

Thanks for the update!
I did not have a compiler course at university but I talked on r/programminglanguages discord and eatonphil's discord and I learned how to create a simple expression compiler in Python.

You can run the code here:

https://replit.com/@Chronological/Compiler3

It's ~400 lines of code and it compiles the following AST

program = Main(
[
Assign("a", LiteralNumber(5)),
Assign("b", LiteralNumber(6)),

Println("Value is %d",
Mul(Add(Reference("a"), LiteralNumber(7)),
Add(LiteralNumber(8), Reference("b")))),
Println("Hello world %d", LiteralNumber(10))])

Or in other words, the following expression:

a = 5
b = 6
(a + 7) * (8 + b)

If you run

python3 main.py > assembly.S
gcc -o assembled assembly.S
./assembled

You should see

Value is 168Hello world 10

It's barebones but I think it's the basis for a compiler.
Yes, Americans build everything of wood, rather than cement or bricks, like in the civilized world. Remember the tale about 3 little pigs? After 50-70 years it falls apart and needs to be teared down.
To be fair, IPFS has always been flakey there. For the past year I haven't even bothered trying it.
Pgwire: a Rust library for building PostgreSQL compatible servers
> About five years ago I decided to never use swap anymore, and I couldn't be happier with that decision.

How does that make sense? Either your workload fits into RAM, so no swapping occurs and everything is responsive. Or your workload is too large to fit into RAM so

a) you have a swap partition and you system starts swapping and everything becomes really unresponsive, but the task will finish.

b) you don't have swap so the kernel kills the process using most memory, which is most likely the thing you're just trying to run.

How can you be happy with option b? I mean obviously get more RAM either way, but I'd rather have that safety net for the occasional memory intensive task. Obviously not a solution if you're short on RAM by a huge margin but if it's just a GB or two it's acceptable, because it's likely that the kernel can just swap out stuff from background programs that don't actively access their stuff right now.