skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff” - Michael Kagan, Nvidia CTO

If I sold shovels and meth users liked to dig swimming pools in their back yards at 3:00 am I might say my shovels weren't doing anything good for humanity, but I'd be happy to sell them shovels.
"Hey, we really can't keep up this system of just letting anyone graze sheep on the commons willy-nilly. Eventually it'll get overgrazed and produce nothing. To prevent that catastrophe, we need to move to a system where total grazing is limited to a sustainable level."

'Well, then why are you grazing your sheep on the commons? Checkmate.'
> BTW you can blame the Fed for low interest rates, but it's the yield curve inversion and long rates which caused the liquidity/solvency problem not the short term rate hikes

Can't we sort of blame the Fed for that [yield curve inversion and long rates] too? It undertook massive quantitative easing during the pandemic, which depressed the yield of long-term bonds such as those bought by SVB. Perhaps if it hadn't done so much QE, the yield on SVB's long-term bonds would have gone from, say, 3% to 4% instead of 1.56% to 4%.

Edit to clarify: I'm not saying that the Fed deserves blame for SVB taking such a risky long-term position, I'm saying the Fed deserves some blame for long-term bonds being risky.
In most cases it's both. Like the people who were early to the Internet, they believe in a better world and they hope their early participation will be rewarded.
> I remember Dutch having had a spelling reform at some point

Several. But for an easy grapheme-phoneme correspondence, you'd better look to Spanish. You can learn that in an hour or two.

> incremental tweaks

will slowly render older texts unreadable. Nobody (ok, almost nobody) can read old Dutch texts. Even 19th century Dutch is awkward to read.
Looks very similar to what CodeT did with GPT3?
A source that quantifies value with cited examples and statistics. I ask because the crypto crowd argue there's utility and value there too.
I meant where does this law mention 5 million ?
Brian Lumley write a series of horror novels back in the 80s and 90s that had such a world.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necroscope_III:_The_Source Was written in 1989. Kind of cool.
Totally agree with you.

Looking at the comments only makes more obvious the snowflakeness and detachment from reality of the "software artists" bunch.

If they hire a guy to (re)model their bathroom, they expect it for free done yesterday. What I mean is that there's usually a complete turnover effect on the demands they have on people working on THEIR money and the lax and forgiving way they expect to be treated on OTHERS people money.
“user of cryptocurrencies”.

It’s scammers, ramsomers, speculators and illicit drugs all the way down.
That font really makes it hard to read
Right, and even withing social ontology/constructivism there are multitudes. Dismissing the entire subfield as vapid comes across as intellectually immature. If you have specific critiques feel free to share them but, "constructivism bad because Marxism bad," is about as thought-limiting cliché as one can get.
Mormonism was persecuted because it was a sex cult and it refused to follow American law.
(Being serious) should banks as we know them even exist, then? Maybe having them fill a role as an intermediary makes sense, but now that we can securitize loans, why does opaquely connecting short-term lenders directly with long-term borrowers make sense?
Six stages of acceptance:

1. We'll never land on the moon.

2. It's hard to land on the moon.

3. I never said we can't land on the moon, you just can't do it with pile of chairs.

4. I was never denying that chairs illustrate a fundamental principle that illustrates why the problem is indeed solvable in principle.

5. I was never saying distinctions about what is or isn't 'qualitative' was intended to show that we can't in fact land on the moon.

6. I know, I've been saying we'll land on the moon this whole time! I've always disagreed with people who said otherwise despite coming to defense of arguments that were used for decades to make the point that I supposedly am not endorsing!
I find it takes much more time to disable all the junk Apple puts in your way and find fixes for all the stuff their designers don't find elegant than it does to install all the junk that doesn't work out of the box with any decent linux distro.
Intent and practice are sadly different.

It doesn't seem like Bitcoin, etc. are widely used enough to be crucial to a society such as you describe. And I have a hard time imagining how they could become so, given the difficulty in converting that society's standard currency to cryptocurrency.
That's fine, those applications are why Ada was invented. Languages get pulled in too many directions when they try to be everything to everyone.
I invoked the crypto hype cycle, not crypto itself. Don't conflate the two topics of discussion.
It's even one fewer in his native Hebrew: "יעקב זיו"
I think people tend to underestimate the concept of understanding, and also the concept of conveying thing by just saying them.

Most people don't get most things most of the time.
That's why I moved to Debian 11 at end of 2022.
I took that as an, I don't have time to learn a new platform so I stick with what works for me, which is valid.
To be clear, I'm not being sarcastic about AI. I am pointing out that there are many examples of systems that can perform calculations that humans can also perform because we understand calculation, but (those systems) do not understand calculation, or what they are calculating, or that they are calculating anything at all.

Yet, nobody is surprised that a calculator can perform arithmetic operations without understanding arithmetic, but here we are, with a whole bunch of people surprised that a language model can calculate the probability of a string in a natural language without understanding language.
On the Model 33 ASR that I learned programming with, we were taught to type CR LF RUBOUT at the end of each line when punching a tape. RUBOUT is like a no-op character which is ignored by the receiving end, so it gave a little extra time for both the carriage return and line feed to complete.

RUBOUT is also how you would correct a typo on the tape: you would backspace the tape punch, hit RUBOUT, and then the character you meant. The RUBOUT character had all holes punched, effectively erasing the typo.

When operating the remote computer interactively, we just had to type CR, as the remote system would provide the LF and a slight pause. Working directly on the remote timesharing was strongly discouraged, as dial-up time cost $30/hour back then, or about $250/hour in today's dollars.

So we would punch our code on a tape, dial in just long enough to run the tape and get our printout, and hang up right away.
I agree- long standing issues that have popped up and are never fixed over the years:

1) My iPhone has never properly synced screen time with my other devices (presently my other devices: 2x iPads, MBP) sync fine together. This has persisted across multiple iPhones and major releases of iOS.

2) Apple News has a permanently saved “story” of a specific magazine issue’s table of contents. No idea how it got saved, but since it isn’t actually a story (it’s a ToC instead) the UI option to “unsave” it is greyed out / unavailable. I reported it to a CSR about four years ago, he took down bug reports, I even sent a screen capture demonstrating the bug… it still persists and Apple provides no mechanism to manually clear all saved story data. I can remove it locally from the device from disabling iCloud sync for Apple News -> selecting yes when prompted to remove local data, but it will still persist in iCloud and there is no way to wipe it there… it’s back as soon as I reenable sync.
If they live in the United States of America there is no state where straight pipes are legal for road use. Nearly all aftermarket exhaust parts will have a disclaimer that they are off road only.

I like fast cars and fast motorcycle, but I hate obnoxious ones. For any street/strip car there's no reason to eliminate the catalytic converter or mufflers. Because the sound is largely about the resonance of the pipe length you can have exceedingly fast cars producing lots of horsepower be reasonably quiet especially at idle and residential speeds.

I had a heavily modified trans it was very fast It was a street legal car that I also took to the track for racing. It did have some technically off-road parts like long tube headers and other things that provide performance but it still had catalytic converters and mufflers. Between idle and about 3,000 RPM it was only slightly louder than stock not obnoxious at all above 3,000 RPM usually in the 5,000 to 6,000 range it sounded like it had an open exhaust system due to the residence value of the exhaust piping.

So anyway your neighbor is a jerk just to be a jerk and I would begin to lodge complaints with the police until they send someone out there especially if they leave for work at the same time every day and pull them over. Same thing for those Harley-Davidson idiots that want to put on straight pipes.
Man all that ads on hn nowadays kinda xxxx :(
People in tech are still just people.
Society is the unspecific. It's the masses. Who are this earthship.

Non-society is everyone who sets themselves apart.
I did. The police officer told me that he himself drove a loud sports car, and his neighbors complained to him about it, and we just need to get used to it since it's part of driving a sports car.

Needless to say, I was not writing a letter of my compliments to his supervisor.
I haven't seen anyone talk about the elephant in the room - only part of the reason for giving estimates is practical. Most of it is political/psychological:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093789

The political solution is to give an estimate assuming nothing goes wrong, and then when things go wrong blame those things.

This lets everybody from you up the chain look good while not changing anything.
I was early to the internet, and the only financial benefit I ever expected from it was that I'd be able to have a good career because of the skills I'd developed.
The starvation experiment was done on conscientious objectors (not "military deserters", although they might have been considered as such by some at the time) and it had the ultimate goal of understanding what was the best diet to make people subject to famine (like many in Europe at the end of WWII) go back to a normal weight. The result was that calories were the main factors, and other aspects of diet were of minor importance.

Weight loss can be predicted, Keys and his team did that. Yes, they lost fat and muscle tissue (diet was very restrictive, and they were not doing any exercise, since it was a particular experiment), at the end they were bones and skin, on purpose. They were also miserable and sick-looking. Some hurt themselves to go out of the experiment.

But I wrote that given "adequate protein and sufficient stimulus" (and not like 500 calories per day), loss of muscle tissue is, for the general population, not a concern (bodybuilders and athletes require different considerations).

There is no disproving whatsoever of people (on average) eating less and doing more manual activities and spending more time outside in the past.

"You don't get to 300lbs by slightly overeating and slightly under exercising". For the vast majority of 300-pound people, that's exactly what happens. They overeat and not use enough energy during their day (can be exercise, manual labor, moving around, fidgeting - they can all add up to more than 1000 calories per day, not 20). Wait 5 years and putting on 100 pounds or more happens.

"Of course thin people eat less. But correlation doesn't prove causation". Of course, it is causation. If people eat (substantially, 50 cal difference are "adjusted") less, myself included, they lose weight.

I wrote in the beginning that I am not referring to your specific case, which I don't know in the specifics, it looks like a medical problem at this point, and I am anyway sympathetic with. People can be strange exceptions.
But for people who are 50-100 pounds overweight, eating less, eat enough protein, move more, exercise, is what works for losing fat and being more "healthy".
+1

RHEL's model is similar to Sun's old model. You sell a small, stable core OS that is well supported for it's lifetime. You are supposed to use it until there is an new version then start using that with the plan for the systems using the old OS to retire. IE. upgrade path is whole-system based and it really isn't designed for upgrading in place.
That's a neat trick; I was in a similar situation recently and wrote a tool that's faster for me though; for a million files ROBOCOPY was 257 seconds, but https://github.com/shaggie76/FastDelete did it in 34 seconds on a hex-core laptop.
There's a huge warning on the first page. This is a weird stance. Don't use it if you're at all concerned.
> I wonder if the person asking the question would be happy to let someone do a job in his home with an uncapped budget and timeline?

The author made the claim that software engineering is fundamentally different from carpentry ("Almost everything a developer writes is unique, they have never built that particular thing before. We are not cabinet makers...")

But does that hold up? Many software projects do in fact have a similar analogue, and each house is unique and carpentry projects will thus run into unexpected snags.
Well, you can make falsifiable prediction about whether an AI "understands" something at a deep or shallow level, though both these concepts and the predictions themselves will be a bit fuzzy.

As a concrete example, take the "wolf, goat and cabbage cross a river" puzzle. you can make several experiments which distinguish at which level an AI "understands" it.

- Can it solve the problem at all?

- Can it solve the problem if you translate it in a different language?

- Can it solve the problem if you switch the names of the characters around but maintain the framing of "a boat crossing the river"?

- Can it solve an equivalent problem with completely different wording where the solution is still logically equivalent?

A model that can do 1 but not 2-3 is probably just pattern matching a sequence of words; it doesn't "understand" the problem. A model that can do 1 and 2 but not 3 or 4 is still pattern-matching the problem, but it's matching abstract concepts (like "the concept of a wolf" instead of just the token "wolf"). A model that can do 3 but not 4 is probably pattern-matching the general-shape of the problem, as in "mutually-incompatible characters being transported on a boat". A model that can do 4 is the real deal.

(I think ChatGPT currently sits between 2 and 3)
So much extra fluff and process. Why not just document your code. Use markdown files. And focus on working core?

In my experience good engineers get together in a room make decision swiftly and deploy them. Often with docs. Also worked with an RFC process which worked but also introduces a “checkpoint” which slows down decision making. Only for one door decisions such docs or joint decisions are needed.

All useful but keep it lean folks.
There's a scene at the end of the second book where the aliens offer to build a neutrino communication device for humans but the humans opt for one that uses gravity waves instead. It's a very brief reference, I don't know why the parent would have brought it up.
If this person worked on my team, they wouldn’t any longer. Not even addressing the question at hand of why we give estimates, the idea that you just want to code without any repercussions shows me that you don’t understand the job.

Companies (most) don’t hire you to perfect the art of software. They hire you to deliver business value. Estimates are them trying to frame how long it takes to get that value. Coordinating the delivery of that against other company projects/plans or customer project/plans is the business you are in. If you want to just code and experiment, go pursue a PhD and stay in academia.

The people who work for me, with me, report to me, or interact with me know that I’m always focused on value. I could program the best platform I could design but without customers that see value in it, it’s worthless (or worse, costs you money).
I'm personally leaning towards being opposed to intervening (and I think diversifying chip fab locations/companies/etc. over the next decade will remove much of Taiwan's geopolitical importance anyways) but the loss of Taiwanese independence to China would affect a lot more than Apple. The ability to supply any company or individual with modern high-end computing power would be severely limited, and much more expensive. Samsung and kinda sorta Intel are currently the only other fabs with capabilities on the level of TSMC, and their current production capacity is nowhere near enough to meet worldwide demand.
This is a quote of Linus explaining why he doesn't have the time to move to a new computing platform on a new architecture.

This is not a question of "setup macos takes effort X vs setup linux (on M2 laptop) takes effort Y" this is a question of "doing nothing (keep existing system) is no effort while setting up a new system (new hardware, new architecture, etc) is major effort"
100% my thoughts, mate. I definitely see it becoming the go-to tool for many in the future. It's got a lot going for it, including authenticated access to premium feeds, ergo people can monetize and allow their content to be consumed in a way that makes sense to the end user.

Still one of my favourite things to emerge on the net. Especially being able to filter through feeds!
SVB also chose not to prioritize hiring a risk manager for months leading up to their collapse, which is just pure stupidity. Anyone worth their salt would've pointed out that they were at risk due to their investment strategy and homogeneous customer base.

We're seeing old lessons from the 80's being retaught in the banking world.

Never put all of your cash in one bank. Keep your debt and your liquidity held in separate banks because if you don't and your bank goes under, your bank debt is written off against your balance when the bank liquidates.

The hyper-connected world we've created prioritizes efficiency and optimization at the expense of operational redundancy, which leads to people getting caught doing stupid things like putting all of their money into one business bank that had no visibility into their own risk profile.
Totally out of context quote:

Linus Torvalds when asked on a Real World Technologies forum whether he would buy an Apple Silicon laptop, he responded with:

I’d absolutely love to have one, if it just ran Linux. I have fairly fond memories of the 11” Macbook Air (I think 4,1) that I used about a decade ago (but moved away from because it took Apple too long to fix the screen - and by the time they did, I’d moved on to better laptops, and Apple had moved on to make Linux less convenient). Apple may run Linux in their cloud, but their laptops don’t. I’ve been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS. And I don’t have the time to tinker with it, or the inclination to fight companies that don’t want to help.
Thanks for the downvotes, but the point is not that Stallman should prove it but the point is that you should reflect on the fact that the point being made cannot be proven. Ever. Also not for you, yourself.
I currently regularly use 4 desktop/laptop computers: a T480 running Kubuntu, an L420 running Xubuntu, a Dell work laptop running Kubuntu, and a custom gaming desktop running Windows 10.

I have spent dramatically more time delving into OS nonsense to solve issues on the Windows machine, from "ghost" controller inputs making WPF applications unusable to audio devices randomly disappearing to some weird HDCP interaction causing my display to turn off when Disney Plus is loaded in Firefox.

I do not have nearly the same amount of trouble with my Linux machines; nor does my boyfriend, who is not a technical professional and uses Xubuntu exclusively.

Yes, Linux on the desktop can require tinkering, but it's not always the case. With the right hardware choices and some thoughtful setup, it can be remarkably stable.
Yes and no. There's some degree of nurture here, for sure. But there's some degree of nature.

Misophonia is common in folks with autism, for instance. While there are techniques and strategies for living with autism, it's simply not something one can learn their way out of.

Some of us do have neural connections that have hard wired responses to certain stimuli.
How does shifting from a physical currency based on the petrodollar to a digital currency backed by the petrodollar address any of this? Technology cannot solve problems of power…
I would have agreed with you a long time ago, but nowadays my Linux machine is the lowest setup cost and lowest maintenance cost I have.

I don't have a Mac, but Windows has become quite needy and bloated. While Linux has become easier to install, harder to mess up and less jarring with interface changes in the last decade.
> The developer says “there are too many unknowns to provide any sort of estimate”.

You are misunderstanding your
job. You are a subject expert and paid accordingly. Answer with what the unknowns are, an optimistic and pessimistic take on them, what you could do and how long it would take to lift them.

If you don’t, your boss is going to ask you for exactly that in a roundabout way and micromanage you because you are forcing them to do your job.

It still baffle me than approximately half of developers don’t understand things which are obvious to any seasoned blue collar worker.
Yes, it changed his job in to something a 6th grader could do with little to no training. In other words, it’s now a meaningless, low-value job that won’t pay well.
Not really. 4090s are flying off the shelves.
Reminds me of when a sushi chef apologized to me for the sea urchin tasting nasty:

"Sorry, it's out of season. It's not fresh."

"Why do you sell it out of season?"

"People still buy it."
I’ve worked in construction. Estimates from contractors are notorious for being wrong. Almost every time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupperware

At-home food storage was switching to plastic in the 50s.
Both F-22 and F-35 have internal bays for weapons. Sure, they can also carry external loads that blow up their small RCS, but in a hypothetical scenario where that low RCS is still valuable (i.e. contested airspace), they wouldn’t be carrying external stores that make them vulnerable.
> Software development is not carpentry.

I found that assumption to be ludicrous too.
Experience Replay
I am amazed how my team mates are trying to always severely underestimate tasks. To the point that our manager has to intervene and raise the estimation a bit.

Why are SWE and programmers so afraid of bussineses persons, product owners, scrum masters and higher management?

Whenever I thought my estimation is good, I fought for it with the teeth. It could be the CEO wanting it done by tomorrow, if I said it would take a week, it took a week.

And if an user story is not well refined, is subject to change while it is in implementation phase, is unclear or have some uncertainty, then it's absolutely normal to add time for that.

And I hate estimating in points instead of days. The bussines is always pressuring towards doing more with less people, and as a result velocity rises, we are expected to do more points and people stay after hours to do the work.