skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with this sentiment.

I'm running through a similar situation now, where I'm somewhat adjacent to a client and a dev team. The client has a list of tasks he wants done, and he'd like banded estimates for the effort the dev team thinks it will take to complete each.

The developers are obliging, but one of them complained to me privately "why doesn't he just give us 2 months of budget and we'll get through as much as we can?" - which is an interesting statement. From the developer's perspective, this is ideal. They are very good and work hard and have integrity, so I'm sure something like that would work, from their perspective. They can just 'go' and get stuff done.

From the client's perspective though, it just raises a bunch of uncertainty. He wants to know what he could get out of his 2 months of development budget. If one task took all 2 months, and the others (15 in this case) didn't get done, is that OK? What if some important task wasn't that much effort? You'd potentially want to priortise that over a bigger item.

Just saying 'give us two months of budget' doesn't take the other party into account, and what they're trying to balance or plan for. I've sat on both sides of the table, and honestly just asking for a budget with no actual commitment to completion feels selfish in my opinion. Discounting their opinion because they're 'business' people and not developers, or treating them like an enemy to fight against won't win you any friends or long term relationships.
10.6 wasn't even perfect from the start, it just has the standout point of being "perfect" by the end before 10.7 got funky.
>> it is an estimate and should be treated accordingly.

That's where it all breaks down. What does "treated accordingly" mean? In reality it means the estimates can't be used for anything because they are always unreliable. There is no such thing as a reliable software estimate, ever, unless what you're doing is so repetitive that you're about to be replaced by AI.

But that's not why people ask. Instead, half the time you give an estimate it gets immediately turned into a deadline, even if you were promised it wouldn't.

The top comment on this thread is naive. The reason devs hate giving estimates or point blank refuse is because it is meaningless, that's not how the software business works. Analogies to plumbers and builders just reinforce the naivety. Guess what, blue collar work is only predictable for as long as it's highly repetitive which being physical in nature, it often is. The moment what you're asking for is "build me an underground railway using the latest technology" it turns out construction estimates are worthless too (see: Crossrail).

One reason tech firms crush their competition so reliably is they don't have an estimates-deadline culture, because they're run from the top by programmers who understand intuitively why they're pointless. Instead developers are incentivized by equity, bonuses etc to do the job as fast as possible.
Conservation in conflict: Corporations, capitalism and sustainable development
I mean I would definitely give you the estimate before it got to waterboarding.

The quality of the estimate would be unaffected.
> Come on. All sides are grandstanding all the time nowadays, even on this particular issue. Complaints about it are almost always soaked with myside bias.

Agreed, but exactly one side made this fake issue A Thing.
Of course. If management expects precise estimates then they need to provide precise requirements and be okay with adjusted timelines if they change the requirements. But that's fine. They can do that.
There is also ransomware.
ChatGPT started a new kind of AI race – and made text boxes cool again
> If I paid a marketing agency for this, I'd be very disappointed.

But you didn't. You paid only a few cents. You're probably not using it for a million dollars ad campaign but many people could use it to make their communications look better in less time. Same thing as using a stock PowerPoint template instead of paying an agency to create one. Good enough for most of us.
His claim...
"it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society"

...is incorrect. The total crypto market cap collapsed because of interest rate hikes.

Nvidia's stock dropped 68%. Is that because it didn't bring anything useful for society? No. It was trading at a premium because of low rates.
Leviathan and Cybernetics
> literal Nazi-ism

What do you mean? "Exactly what a countryside simpleton ("Ignaz", at the time and place) would adopt as a stance"?!

Somebody takes an innocent expression and tries to taint it, you do your part in deflating the tainted use, you renormalize - that's what you are supposed to do. The article author uses irony.
It would be cool if it was like the matrix. The problem is it isn’t, it’s just a screen on your face. That inherently makes it shit because having motion in front of your face without real motion makes you ill.

It’s an unfixable problem. Instead of fucking around, why don’t they just make siri be like cortana in halo. Give me a cute hologram in the real world with a GPT model behind it.

Every house in the world could have a siri pod. Your phone could connect to their siri pod and let your siri come out and talk to you while you’re at their house. That would be some real science fiction. Imagine siri popping up in your car and directing you or warning you about pedestrians it can see that are about to step into the road.
That same argument can be applied to home renovations then. The carpenter has build many cabinets before, but perhaps not YOUR exact cabinet. So then no estimate is expected in that case?
I have an old house. More often than not, replacing a light fixture is a multi-day task.
Noise-cancelling headphones have been a game changer for me. I specifically love my AirPods Pro, because beyond the apple integration, I can have them with me in my pocket at all times. Distressing or even mildly unpleasant noise? I can always pop them in and get some relief
> Do we need to keep the "Make X Great Again" meme alive?

Agreed.

> this is a literal Nazi-ism

Uh…what? I’m struggling to recall the locations of the concentration camps in the USA.

We also shouldn’t keep the guy I don’t like is Hitler meme alive.
Anyone that's bought in during the past few years isn't early.

Those that held pre-2017 are the ones that got in early.

The rest could probably make better returns speculating in the US markets.
The ESP is compatible with the Arduino IDE. I've found it as easy to program as any other microcontroller. (Though I have encountered watchdog issues with unoptimized code)
Minor correction to an otherwise valid article: AI does not pass the Turing Test, and what LaMDA did was not a Turing Test. Reading the original article by Turing is illustrative. This is not to say AI is not impressive in a measure that the Turing Test is meant to take a measure of.
The story of 'dollar backed by petrol' is fiction. Petrodollar exists as much as a corndollar exists. The dollar is US Treasury debt.
How did you use CGPT to write an application? I understand how to use it to solve simple problems, but not create an application
You'd expect that in general, but for developers updating content the partial would often win.
Not an expert, but I feel like interlocking your hands does not count because the definition of a gear includes rotation, and transmission of motion. Interlocked hands don't rotate and they don't transmit motion.

Interlocking hands seems to me to be about grip strength. Sometimes it's easier to grip your other hand by interlocking than it is to grip the object you're lifting.
That's why he should sign off on a capped budget for an incremental milestone.
And remember Transistors?
God forbid people use expressions and clips from other people of different color and background! Somebody must make it into an outrage story...
You can't use chairs to get to the moon not because of distance but because of orbital mechanics. That's why chairs work and colors don't: you think you're getting closer by stacking chairs when in reality, all you're going to do is fall down.

Until you grasp orbital mechanics, the concept of orbital velocity, and delta-V you can't possibly get to the moon. The distance might as well be infinite because the gravity well will pull you down.

It's also a completely invisible problem until you really reach altitude unless you're got a lot of theoretical background which we don't have on artificial intelligence. We don't even really know what the AI rockets will look like when compared with AI chairs.
How much will the team have to learn as individuals and as a team? How many components can you enumerate and in what detail? How many tries will each component take?

How many interconnects to "external" systems are there? Risk is time, how much risk is there?

What are the non-functional requirements? These will be dropped when time is short.

How motivated will your team be? What will make them depressed about this project? What will de-motivate them?

=====

Don't ask a developer for estimates in terms of time. It's not useful to them, and it's not informative to management.
Gpt-4 can do all four. Just keep in mind that it has human like failure modes. It can give you an answer that is just applying common but false assumption reasoning steps. However if you rewrite the question to avoid biasing common priors, it gets it.
And( Or at least with Bing), if you tell it it's making a wrong assumption somehow (not necessarily what the wedding assumption is), it gets it.
Manager here. I ask everyone for estimates. Then I track how long shit actually takes. I find that:

- Some folks are scary precise in their estimates. I’d say this is like 10% of engineers. You ask them for an estimate, they tell you, and then it takes exactly that long every single time. In other words, I have confidence that if I ask one of those folks for an estimate, I can take that shit to the bank.

- Some folks always overestimate. This is rare. Maybe less than 10% of folks. When I find that someone overestimates, I know that I can take that shit to the bank as an upper bound, which is still useful.

- Some folks say they don’t know. That’s fine. Those folks are even rarer, so I don’t have to do anything smart for them.

- Most folks underestimate, sometimes hilariously so - they are always one day, or one week, or some other too-short amount of time, away from finishing their multi month effort. That’s fine. Once I know you underestimate, I know that I can take your estimates to the bank as a lower bound. For more than half of the underestimaters, I find that there’s some formula that works: like if Steve says he needs just one more day, he always means he needs five more days. So if suddenly Steve says he needs another week, then I know he probably needs over a month. That’s still useful to me and I’m totally fine if Steve then tells his friends (or HN) how dumb it is that I ask him for estimates. They may be dumb to him but I’ve got my napkin math that turns his BS estimate into something that I can take to the bank. (I don’t actually manage anyone named Steve but I was a Steve as an IC.)

So yeah. When I ask you for an estimate, I expect it to be wrong and then I look for patterns in your wrongness. For most people, there’s a pattern that allows me to turn something that looks like a nonsense estimate at first into something I can then plan around. That’s why developers I work with are “expected” to estimate.
Most other disciplines have this exact same problem. Construction contractors for instance, are notorious for it.

The difference is, the law says if a contractor signs a contract to do something at x price, they HAVE to do so or suffer consequences. So contractors go broke/bankrupt, lose their licenses, or figure out how to bid correctly enough they can either weasel out of it if it goes sideways or they have enough wiggle room to deal with the inevitable problems.

Software Engineering Consultants have the same situation. But directly employed software engineers are in a different position of course.

One thing that typically makes this worse, is the implicit assumption that planning/quoting/estimating is ‘free’ work, and since it CAN make things easier to deliver, therefore we should do more and more of it as, since it’s free, it will solve the problem no?
Just google ESP on AliExpress. Tons of different dev boards available.
What ever model works for a group of people producing software I'm fine with.

But as someone else said in this thread: If the question is more about who provides the estimate and less about why is there an estimate (also plenty of opinions about that in this thread) then I would say that time estimation is a integral part of an engineers job.

What makes someone an engineer is being able to provide a weighted solution towards the needs of a client or consumer. Not the best solution in the world, but the best solution for that client. If the requirements are that it should be delivered fast, you understand that the quality goes down. If the client wants high quality, it takes more time.
America can't even win a culture war with itself... I don't think college-aged leftists have ever fully comprehended what Pax Sinica means for them: work. Just watch "American Factory", the documentary Obama made on Netflix a few years back. American MBAs think you are lazy compared to Chinese who will work 12 hours a day, six days a week, and would love nothing more than for you to accept that schedule for even lower wages.
> In comparison computers have gotten many orders of magnitude faster in a much shorter time. But there is a physical limit, and we are very likely to run into that soon. And once that happens the only way to progress is to make more efficient use of the resources you've already got.

Good points. And I will even argue that while we didn't hit a physical limit in hardware yet, it's still important to have a reasonable performance because not having performance means resources are wasted, money are wasted and it might lead to user frustration.

But it seems to not be the majority's opinion or at least not most of the business owners opinion.
GPT-4 is Clever Hansing at web scale
It's not just bots posting, but other bots upvoting those posts. If it can get on the bottom of the front page for even 5 minutes, that's probably x > 1000 clicks.
Fair points. Thanks for letting me refine and discard hypotheses. While I think about those, how about this?

Language is not a complete representation of thinking.

We use language to describe symbols, not even very precisely, and we can convert imprecise language to more precise symbols in our brain, manipulate them as symbols, and only then turn them back into language.

That’s why you often cannot perfectly translate something between two languages. That’s why nine year olds, who have been trained on far less text, can learn to do math that ChatGTP never could without an API. (They don’t have to generate their output linearly - they can add the one’s column first) When Newton invented calculus he wasn’t predictively generating words by token; he performed logical manipulation of symbols in his brain first.

That’s why LLMs can’t tell you where they got a specific piece of their own output from, while a human can. This matters because LLMs can’t convert it into a symbol and think about it directly and deduce new conclusions from it, while a human can.

If fundamentally human thinking was just “LLM” we would have never generated the words to train ourselves on in the first place! And neither would any new idea that gradually built the library of human knowledge that eventually trained ChatGTP. The language is just the interface; it’s not the full essence of the thinking itself.
Hard +1.

If I have to hear one more “click-clack-click-clack” of people playing a ping-pong match while I’m trying to get work done, I’m worried I’ll end up in the newspaper the next day.
I wouldn't hire someone to do a job in my home that they've never completed before.
You are right, it does need repeating. Centralized control, means that at some point, they can decide to abuse that power to do whatever they want and at everyone else's expense. They can decide access, what can be seen, or what the "new" rules are and despite any objections.
Maybe the world has just become too loud too frequently.
It says it does not have the authority or the capability to do so, and that it can potentially cause damage to other ship systems or even cause a power overload :(
Natural immunity has been shown to be at least as good if not superior to the vaccine, as shown in peer-reviewed research published in the Lancet. So following science is malicious and selfish?

Likewise, "CDC study finds about 78% of people hospitalized for Covid were overweight or obese" (source: NBC). So 78% of the people who are overwhelming our healthcare system are people who eat too much. Will you call them malicious and selfish as well? Eating less has 0 side effects and is actually beneficial for others as well, as BMI is correlated with COVID transmission (from a study published in Nature).

Now who has the media criticized over the past 2 years? The young healthy athlete who is most at risk for myocarditis after vaccination, or the obese person who is responsible for increased transmission and overwhelming the healthcare system?
Russia won the Eastern Front despite suffering dramatically higher casualties than the Germans

China smashed the US at Chosin Resevoir despite dramatically higher casualties

Ho Chi Minh once said something like "ten Vietnamese will die for every US soldier that dies...we will win"

and he was right

keep that in mind

every American should learn about Chosin Reservoir...a forgotten battle that may very well be the worst US military defeat since WW2, maybe the only time in recent history where US soldiers broke unit cohesion and were running for their lives
The moral hazard is that there isn’t a a limit to the $250k FDIC insurance so people that put money into the bank don’t have to care what the bank does.

So there’s no incentive to work with a bank that took the time and money to pass a stress test — in fact the one that didn’t bother to do any testing can give better terms as they aren’t spending money to be safe.
Some of the best programmers have come across had their origins in OS and compilers. This is where the real programming and fundamentals are built.
Tesla rolls out vision-based park assist, but it could still use some work
Honestly, arch seems like a fragile distro.

My experience with arch is: install the distro files, set up efistub booting, reboot... install updates a couple days later and wind up with a system that can't reboot, and if you force reboot it, it won't ever mount the root fs again.

I've never had that happen on Gentoo, or debian/ubuntu or fedora, or suse. Only arch could be so temperamental to break itself on kernel upgrades.
> We now have decades of experience with the Bradley and while it's not a perfect vehicle, it is pretty good.

We have no experience with it fighting a peer or near-peer enemy, is that correct? That doesn't make it bad, but not good either. We have little data.
Add as many of the source words as you want, the meaning is the same. Perhaps you should re-read my response?
The white noise feature on the iPhone has become my regular companion in allowing for “covering up” unwanted sounds:
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/background-sounds-iph...
You've identified the problem but missed the solution: don't bet your business on a dependency that doesn't exist yet.
Be useful enough to work on a different project, or take a furlough until you are needed.
You're equating "Make America Great Again" with the Holocaust?

I think you might want to take a step back from politics for a bit and take a deep breath.
Well, agree to disagree then. I think I'm not a major outlier. I'm pretty representative of an obese person who's been trying to lose weight his entire life and none of the mainstream advice has ever made a dent.

That's why I'm searching for a strategy that works and is falsifiable, not religious dogma that there is "no disproving whatsoever" for.

I've lost 100lbs before w/o ever restricting my eating or exercising much, so I just know you're wrong on this from personal experience.
I'm not sure what you're saying... there is a clear benefit to perfboard and protoboards: they let you prototype instantly, without waiting for PCBs to be manufactured. An earlier critique of that approach was that some parts are no longer available as through-hole. I'm pointing out that there is a simple workaround that still lets you prototype quickly. Generic breakout boards are around $1 a piece and you don't need them custom-tailored to a project.
So comprehensive my overload alarms start going off. Still though, good suggestion.
Fortunately I don’t think anyone is concerned with what libertarians consider a “big win”.
A multipolar world sounds all well and good until Japan starts making plans about Manchuria, Korea and Nanjing again. Don't get me wrong, they are entirely concerned with defense at present, but that's just the present. What will Japanese millenials do when a decade or more passes and they are the ruling constituency? What will the Japanese Overton window of 2035 look like?
It's a little thing called fun. Doesn't have to be referring to the same topic to make a joke reference. In fact, it works better if it's from an unrelated domain
Ask HN: Is it time for a Manhattan Project in artificial intelligence?
Are we in a position,ike fission in 1939, with respect to AGI? Is it possible that giving generative models a thousand-fold increase in the number of servers, memory, and improve its sensing ability beyond text scanning, and Artificial General Intelligence will appear spontaneously?
I don’t agree. Aircraft had their growth phase earlier, first flight in 1903 to landing on the moon in 1969. Airliners look like they did in the 60s because there’s nothing left to improve on with regards to efficiency. How many orders of magnitude are there between the wright flier and a 747?

We’re reaching the diminishing returns portion of the logistic curve for computing with regards to both things like hardware and compiling, compression, etc. It’s just hard to compare industries which are done growing with ones that still feel like they might be exponential forever.
It's a pretty big claim to say the ability to purchase cannabis online is due to crypto.

The legalization movement started well before crypto, and the consumer laziness to anything except online shopping has also been around a long time. It's a pretty "natural" development. Also, it's not available everywhere.
Equating everything you dislike to an actual tragedy has the opposite effect, you are making a mockery of that tragedy and using it to further your ideological belief.
> Who remembers the silly <BLINK> and <MARQUEE> tags?

I remember them.

I don't understand why you're referring to them.

Is it because we replaced them with auto-play videos and javascript carousels?

> Well, ironically AI can be a far bigger negative for society than blockchain.

> AI can literally destroy all our systems. Its upside may be far lower than its downside.

"Can"? "May"? Yes, of course. Because, unlike crypto it actually does stuff beyond just turning energy into maths, and that stuff can be used for evil.

Cryptocurrency, despite being an interesting idea, has mostly only been the combination of all that's bad about fiat money with all that's bad about commodity money. I remain open to the idea that smart contracts have uses.

And in reverse, AI "can" help us invent all the cool scifi tech we want that's within the laws of physics, and "may" help us build a Dyson swarm around every star we can reach.

I recommend against letting either word become load-bearing.
Read a big story about people setting up illicit mining farms in Venezuela (?), using the proceeds to buy goods and have them shipped to them, providing sustenance to those in their community. Unfortunately the government realized the dilapidated grid was hemmorhaging power in the area, tracked them down, and shut it all down.