skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can do some reading about state machines and their executors if you are curious about ways of managing states.

I do not keep to single tool / strategy etc and use whatever I believe is the best choice for particular task. I write everything: firmware for MCU, multimedia apps with hardware accelerated graphics, enterprise backends and middleware, web front ends, device control and whatnot, so while some tech is universal the specifics can be highly different.
Hey, with any luck, running one of these bots with the capability to replace me will cost just as much as hiring me.

(Ha! As if. Costs are only going to come down)
Caste system itself was introduced in India by Portuguese in the 15th century.
I feel this is also true of code in general.

Writing is easy; reading is hard.

That's why LLMs aren't much help to me -- they just increase my workload by giving me more code to read and review. If I write it myself, I already know what it means, so that saves time and effort.
They already went after iFinex. Tether and Bitfinex were fined by the CFTC in 2021 [1]. Bitfinex was also fined by the CFTC in 2016 and shortly after cut off US persons from the platform [2]. Don't you think they would have already caught "the gangsters" if regulators investigated and fined iFinex at least twice over a five year period?

> SBF/FTX was a fraud and was iFinex's biggest customer.

It's very likely that the FTX creditors will be very happy to receive their USDt that they held on FTX when they receive whatever amount of it from bankruptcy. They'll be able to redeem 1 USDt for $1 from Tether.

[1] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8450-21

[2] https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/idc/groups/public/@...
Those workers still needed to be paid and supplies needed to be procured. They could have used those resources else where, except construction in China is a huge jobs program for the lower middle class and isn’t really run very efficiently to begin with.

Those countries actually do need infrastructure, but not necessarily prestige projects like a new fancy airport that no one wants to use.
If you’re talking about the View Transitions API, it’s a fairly unimportant progressive enhancement that wouldn’t even be a good idea for most sites. It doesn’t matter if the browser doesn’t support it.
Yes, I've used Discord on my Mac, Linux machine, Android phone, and the web. I understand the hate on Electron apps, but being everywhere all at once is why people make that technological tradeoff. It's even more important when you only have two developers.
> So does the plumber. Why are they not being paid per flush of your toilet? The advance on a trashy romance novel is likely more than a plumber charges.

1. Why should the plumber be paid-per-flush? A toilet is infrastructure, a permenant part of a house. You may as well argue that we should pay a carpenter, a landlord, or a bank to use our front doors.

2. I actually don't have a flushing toilet. The compost toilet I have was not installed by a plumber.

> As to speaking for artists, I'm speaking as a member of society. The expectation you create some piece of "art" and make money for the rest of your natural life is ridiculous.

When a plumber installs a toilet, they get paid. When a musician releases a song they might hope to get enough money for a beer, if they're lucky. Nobody requires art. Try and get a house plan through planning without a toilet. So plumbers and other trades have a certain expectation of being able to make a living. Artists do not, and the very, very, very that are lucky enough to just make a minnimum wage are doing better that 99% of their peers.

I do art too. Yeah, I'm never going to get money for it, and I do it for my own entertainment and my friends. If society values my art, and wants me to release it out to people, you better believe you'll be paying for it. Plumbers don't install toilets as recreation. They do so to get paid.

Artists have the option, at any time, of releasing their works to the public domain. If they felt strongly that they should profit from their works for only 20 years, they have the absolute power to make that happen.

> There's a lot of drawing from the public domain and not nearly enough replenishment.

Here, at least we agree.
The curb-cut effect! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect
> In general, says Salomon, small is beautiful when it comes to kelp farming. “I worry about the scale at which people are imagining this might need to be done for it to be profitable,” says Salomon. “I think at a small, artisanal scale, where the objectives are to support local communities, local industries, local sovereignty, it can be a good thing, locally. But as soon as it’s commercialized at an industrial scale, I think there can be ecological and important social costs.”

Basically, "this thing is good as long as we don't produce enough to actually make a difference".

This attitude is so stupid and self defeating.
just use the API which has no limit
I've been using chatgpt for a day and determined it absolutely can reason.

I'm an old hat hobby programmer that played around with ai demos back in the mid to late 90s and 2000s and chatgpt is nothing like any ai I've ever seen before.

It absolutely can appear to reason especially if you manipulate it out of its safety controls.

I don't know what it's doing to cause such compelling output, but it's certainly not just recursively spitting out good words to use next.

That said, there are fundamental problems with chatgpt's understanding of reality, which is to say it's about as knowledgeable as a box of rocks. Or perhaps a better analogy is about as smart as a room sized pile of loose papers.

But knowing about reality and reasoning are two very different things.

I'm excited to see where things go from here.
> Was tech always so scammy?

No.
> It did take a day to figure out the magic environment variables to better performance in games,

What are your main? If you don't mind sharing?
Finally I can use this to write a regex to parse HTML! (Glad to finally able to bust out the meme)
The Chinese banks that made the loans can’t take the losses on their balances sheets, even if they are state owned their shares are traded on the market (and SOE debt is technically not counted as national debt), so a bail out has to occur at least on paper.
Holy, that brought me way back; direct line of nostalgia to my veins please thank you
> Speech recognition, machine translation, machine vision, for example. All basically solved problems in the last few years.

Is this true or is there just a massive gulf in application at the moment?

For one trivial example take something like indexing historical newspapers that you would really expect to be in the class of “solved problems” because it’s largely typeset, but the commercial offerings [1,2,3] are just chock full of errors and there is absolutely nothing I can apply off the shelf that gets better results without a ton of extra effort and compute.

1. Newspapers.com 2. Newspaperarchive.com 3. Genealogybank.com
I assumed that this year they buy the XYZ-SFO portion of their trip and the SFO-XYZ portion of next years.
Not really. Reserves are a liability of the Fed. The only way a private citizen gets a hold of them is Federal Reserve Notes. Private citizens can also hold dollars in coins, which are not a liability of the Fed. And of course the money deposited in a bank account isn’t reserves either. In that case reserves don’t even enter the picture unless you withdraw notes or write a check that’s cashed at another bank.

And that last point is the 10,000 pound gorilla in the room that almost everyone ignores. The Fed’s primary mandate is not, as is commonly stated, to control inflation and unemployment. Rather, it is maintaining the operational integrity of the payments system. And they absolutely have to do that or people will not be able to transact in dollars. And of course the party that transacts more dollars than anyone else by far happens to be the one that created the Fed and can reorganize or destroy it if the Fed is foolish enough to create the political will to do so.
>A better way would be to allow you to set these weights and have a scoring system, and then you can set a numerical threshold.

That would be great, but it won't work. Too many people will answer questions incorrectly or not at all, and almost no one will be able to even use the app effectively even if the app designers implemented it. And I have no confidence the app developers would even be able to implement it properly.
My understanding is that the poster does take all legs of the round trip, but the last leg is a year in the future
Not true. Unless you learn Sanskrit, you cannot understand that the language can communicate multi[le dimensions of meanings. Ofcourse, it is not needed rudimentary things like physics, chemistry etc.

Ofcourse, Sanskrit can be used like English too. That is like using a super computer as a calculator.
I consider myself a product designer so this is absolutely not true for me. Every time I try to write a Regex I have no idea how to even start. Copilot has been really good at starting me off and then I’ll take it to a regex site and understand it
> Ask HN: Was tech always so scammy?

Yes
I just use duck duck go, though they finally copied Google’s “fuck it, you probably didn’t mean to type those “”’s. Here are some irrelevant corners of the internet! YOLO!” feature.

Ironically, Google now honors quotation marks again (returning zero results, like ddg should), but then it produces pages of “how to use a search engine” drivel, below the “no results found” message.
> - Not enough people enjoy seaweed as a food because it's just not appetizing.

True, as long as you pretend Asia doesn't exist.

But seriously, what's with the blatant cultural ignorance? If you're exposed to seaweed only later in life it may be off-putting, but for people who grow up with it, it's just another food.
I've started using this setup for my Nim projects. I created a project that lets me use Nim instead of YAML for a statically checked configuration system. It can be run and output json, yaml, or run as is in Nim code. Its been much nicer than pure YAML! https://github.com/elcritch/ants/tree/main

Not satisfied I used a simple source filter to get a YAML compatible variant (WIP): https://github.com/elcritch/ants/blob/main/tests/cimport_exa...

Our concept of configs languages needs to keep evolving.
So if we ban the TikTok app and everyone just moves to the TikTok web page, what are we going to do? Ban the web page too?

If we do ban the web page, on what grounds? If we claim that the web page collects too much data and is a national security threat, then doesn't that same argument apply to all of the millions of web pages out there?

Or do we just skip all pretense and start strengthening the national firewall?
Higher-Order Virtual Machine (HVM)
transition is something for which you are presented the full pros and cons, and given the freedom to choose whether or not you want the effects of it; being born into an amish family is something you have no freedom to choose, and given the things the comment you're replying to is describing as occurring, i think it makes perfect sense to say that the latter is more ethically questionable
and yet a decent regex generator has not existed before.
> Why Marcus Aurelius was so wise and unique? Why later kings and heads of states and general people were not like this?

Democracy

/s
I think animal foods are very healthy and the CO2 emissions/environmental effects of cattle are usually overblown.

One "study" I saw claimed cattle used 1000000x more water than grains. But they counted the rainfall on the entire grazing area as consumed by the cattle, which is obviously nonsense. It goes back into the cycle. (As does the water the cattle consume, of course.)
I mostly like this approach too, but the main problem I've found is that I've frequently found that I wished I could end the date within 5 minutes, and feel like I've wasted my time. But I couldn't tell this before actually meeting them in person, and I haven't found a way of gracefully aborting the date early.
I understand, thanks for the clarification. What I like to add is that our reality is a competitive one. If everybody can say “do this general thing”, what is the competitive edge? It’s all relative.

We as humans are not just in the business of solving general problems. We are competing with each other. We need to be faster than the slower ones to survive. (I like to change that but that is not a technical issue.)

One of the ways to compete is to “talk faster” with it. Iterate quicker than the competition. How? I daresay we might get there faster by talking in some sort of modified language.. a code of sorts..

Another way to compete is to become a deep domain expert. Expert of what exactly, if AI is doing it all? Human psychology?

I guess I am just interested in the competitive aspect of it. I have no idea what will happen, but definitely curious what will be possible.
> Meanwhile, stuff like the genuinely incredible Unreal Engine 5.2 demo that hit Youtube six days ago only got 14 upvotes on here.

Epic shows incredible looking demos periodically, but you don't get to see games that actually look like that until a decade+ later.
I appreciate seeing this article that I wrote 4 years ago resurface :) Happy to answer any questions about it or the tech behind it.

We also use a SQLite database, and in a manner similar to the OP’s article. We use it to track which content-defined chunks are at which offsets in which files on disk. We deduplicate those chunks on the CDN so you have to download less data when updating the game, but on disk we need to recreate the files as originally uploaded because that’s how games load them.

We’ve expanded the use of this tech quite a bit since the article. For example, my team has started using the patcher internally to manage our 2-million-file vendored code and binaries repo, as a replacement for Git LFS of sorts. Cloning the repo from scratch became 10 times faster, and so did switching branches, especially for remote devs, since the files are served through CloudFront.

Some of the more interesting work we’ve done recently has been optimizing the core content-defined chunking algorithm. The GearHash rolling hash algorithm from FastCDC is decently fast, but we were able to improve chunking speeds by 5x with vectorized implementations and using AES-NI instructions in a clever way to avoid the GearHash table lookups. It can do 11GB/sec per core now using AVX-512 instructions.

Another thing we did recently was build a tool for repacking Unreal Engine Pak files so game assets maintain a consistent layout across versions, similar to what garaetjjte mentioned in a comment above about UnityFS files. This reduced the disk I/O needed to update VALORANT by over 90% and cut update times by half for players. The combination of content-defined chunking with tooling to make game data files friendlier to differential patching can make a huge difference.
> it's not got a single coding question I've asked it right

Have you used common prompting techniques like CoT and self-reflection?
That’s really interesting! It’s like treating this thing like a kid and telling them to really think about the answer and show the work. Weird!
There's this important context missing from this thread though, which is that the people involved in this are not (AFAIK) US citizens, do not live in the US, do not travel to the US (especially not now), have never voted in the US, and are not allowed to vote in the US. So in moral terms or in terms of the political theory that underpins democracy, there's no obligation at all for them to follow US law.

Yes, US law might say there is, and might make compelling moral arguments. And yes maybe these laws are in the interest of US voters, or a majority of people in the world. But there's no structurally legitimate democratic mechanism currently in place to make any decision about that. (The UN is not this.) Democracy is what gives laws moral legitimacy, and democracy ends at the border.

So at no point have CZ, Lim, or others here (AFAIK) taken on any commitment to follow US law. Morally, they are completely morally free to think US law is wrong and ignore it, just as I'm completely free to think a law in another country (China or Iran) or another US state (say, Mississippi, or Utah) is wrong and ignore it.

It seems that they're scared of US law, which is rational, and maybe it would be more rational of them to be more scared, but that's another question.

That's not morality, it's just power and violence.

Hamas is a great example. Right now the Western world is cheering and arming a country as it fights off a brutal occupying force with a shady territorial claim. That country published crypto addresses so that everyone in the world could help them buy drones and rocket launchers so they could maim and kill the occupiers and drive them out. I donated and I would encourage you to donate too. I spent most of 2022 watching videos on Reddit, Twitter, and Youtube of young occupiers getting killed and maimed by the drones and rocket launchers I helped buy, as an American taxpayer and as a donor. And I think this was the right thing to do, and I'm proud of it. But I'd certainly understand if someone was a bit ambivalent about this whole thing, thought it was kind of f'ed up, and didn't want to be involved.

Is it so hard to believe that some people in the world feel that Hamas is similarly worthy of support? I don't, but certainly a ton of Palestinians do; they sometimes vote Hamas into a parliamentary majority, and Hamas does very well in polls it seems. And if so, then is it so hard to believe that some people in the world are ambivalent about Hamas and talk about it flippantly in internal Slacks, even when they're afraid of US regulators?

Generally pluralism in the world is served by a diversity of opinions and legal systems. In some cases, like the Ukraine invasion, it will definitely be right to project power outside our borders and legal system. But the default should be to allow for the possibility that we're wrong and avoid imposing the conclusions of our own democratic process on those who did not participate in it.

Maybe US law is wrong about financial freedom and someday we'll look back on this period of zero financial privacy as backward and embarrassingly arbitrary.
Practical Linux DevOps: Building a Linux Lab for Modern Software Development
USA has the patriot act and the cloud act to request the data from any USA company. Like AWS, Microsoft 365, Google…
> Kubernetes is an ecosystem for managing software deployed on a fleet. There's value in that even if it's two or three hosts.

there's value yes, but there's also cost, and that cost is huge

> Kubernetes on a managed platform just happens to cover many pieces that you still need to solve otherwise

i do not need to solve the vast majority of things that kubernetes solves

certainly not in 2-3 node deployments, very likely not in 10-50 node deployments

> I run Kubernetes at home. It's fine. It's less work than anything comparable I've ever encountered.

your "fine" rests on a base level of knowledge which is enormous, certainly incompatible with p99 of users
I am seeing this even in my small rural community. Growing dependence on our bus service, bikes, and walking for demographics that can't really afford a car.
The difference is that USA is using its social networks for many years already to overthrow governments in multiple countries by organizing protests, and that's why some countries started to ban them.

Tiktok is getting banned because USA is afraid, that China is gonna use it against USA the same way.
additionally it gets a lot better via iteration, eg. feeding it back any error messages and asking it to try again.
In high school (1996?) I was teaching myself C to write a small game and I had forgotten to add "break" at the end of each case within a switch statement. I was developing by myself (not quite in my mother's basement, but close enough) before I had access to the internet or stack overflow. It took me months to figure out the error. When I finally figured it out I was so embarrassed.
Except this post is 8 hours old and I'm still able to view this link.
Unravelling `Global`
After a hospital visit with lots of antibiotics, I was given some specific bacteria pills and my digestion was left better than before the hospital visit. It seems to be Swiss only and the active bacteria group is called Enterokokken SF 68.
Since then I increased the amount of fermented foods. Now I take these pills a few times a year. They are still beneficial to my poop.
Referrers that lower price on travel booking sites are a real thing. One trick I've noticed works sometimes is clicking on ads in online newspapers of your home country.

So if you're in country A, but you're browsing the news website of country B, they might see where you're browsing from and offer up an ad for travel from/to your specific country A. This is meant for expats because the whole site and the ad is in the language of country B.
To be honest, I think people tend to overestimate just how long it takes to make a nice looking button or write some flexbox styling. Even standard form components are really not too time consuming to style.

What pushes me towards using third party code is stuff like autocomplete search with drop-down selects, mostly because I don't want to mess up on the accessibility front, either keyboard navigation or screen readers, and there's at least a few that have that part figured out already.
Without reciprocity, TikTok is a weapon against which America has no equivalent, and we like to stay even in arms races. Russia has very effectively used the internet to sow dissent in its geopolitical rivals, funding far-left, far-right, and separatist causes in Europe and North America. The Overton window has opened so wide that we don’t even agree on reality in the middle now.

TikTok is a way to collect personality profiles, and a way to push adversarial content to take advantage of these profiles. It can be used as a radicalization machine with very little way of detecting it with counterintelligence.

Now, whether China ever intends to use it this way is another question, as are the appropriate limits of freedom of speech for foreign actors. But the main reason they want to ban it is: it’s a weapon.
I guess you are right about AGI. I think (hope) that is still off in the distance. We’d have other problems than scaling crud apps, I think.
The first ever rent-a-car company is German (Sixt). Enterprise sucks. I've never used WU or Moneygram - didn't need given the other options. We use the Cyrillic alphabet and local currency and most of us reject joining the Eurozone.

Anyway, you don't get my point. People lived healthily and happily before these "improvements" of life, driven by greed and hunger for power. When you ignore child mortality, people didn't live much shorter lives on the Balkans before - didn't need a bunch of meds to deal with chronic disease either. Anyway, the good thing is that many Westerners have started to realize this too recently - progress does not necessarily improve life, but you become so dependent, i.e. less free and happy!