skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Skimming through this document I'm surprised at how vague the wording is and can't help but think this may do to the 1st amendment what the Patriot Act did to the 4th Amendment.

----------------

SEC. 3. ADDRESSING INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION
TECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES THAT POSE UNDUE OR UNACCEPTABLE RISK.

(a) IN GENERAL—The Secretary, in consultation
with the relevant executive department and agency heads,
is authorized to and shall take action to identify, deter,
disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate, including by negotiating, entering into, or imposing, and enforcing any mitigation measure to address any risk arising from any covered transaction by any person, or with respeet to any property, subject to the jurisdiction
of the United States that the Secretary determines—

(1) poses an undue or unacceptable risk of—

(A) sabotage or subversion of the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of information and communications technology products and services in the United States;

(B) catastrophic effects on the scerity or resilience of the aitieal infrastructure or digital
economy of the United States;

----------------
I recently started a newsletter [1] where I highlight and interview artists. I'm often using ChatGPT to help me come up with interesting questions.
To be honest the output quality is average and I rarely use it as is. But I found that this is a great tool to nurture ideas, like a rubber duck talking back to you. It's good to throw a lot of ideas and explore new angles. The process of writing the prompts also helps me put into words what I want, which is really helpful in and of itself.

[1] https://arterald.com
The slowness and lethargy of the system is by design. For instance, The constitution is really hard to change to prevent tyranny. Checks and balances against power protect all our rights. There is no garauntee that the people in power will choose your path forward. There is also no garauntee that the majority view is yours. Hitler for example was elected. The system was setup to ensure for hundreds of years at the price of short term inefficiency. Read the history of an imploding republic - France, Rome, Weimar - and you will see similar pushes to speed reform for the masses that ended in tyranny. Reading the federalist papers will give good perspective on the rationale for these things. One may disagree with the conclusions, but the concerns and rationales are reasonable
I'm kicking myself twice over for not buying a Wii U --- could have bought one for short money when I was working part-time for Amazon but didn't, then couldn't bring myself to buy one of the XCX bundled units which were available in Japan and the UK.

At this point, I just want Nintendo to port it to the Switch (or more likely the switch's successor) --- I've also given up on getting Xenogears and Xenosaga chapters II and III.

Emulation is something I just don't have time for --- I've seen at least one report that it's possible to download the packs manually onto a Wii U --- maybe that's what I'll do.
I agree with this statement a lot. Using Copilot saves you a lot of tedium if you are comfortable with the language already. If you are new to the language, then it might trip you up a bit (at least in its current incarnation).

Here is an example where it helps. I tried to initiate a connection to a Mongodb server using Python. While i have used many databases before, I have never used Python and MongoDB together. So, i knew i would have to have some kind of MongoDB library, a connection Factory and a connection string. I could have googled all of these things.

I did the following in VS Code using CoPilot.
def get_db():

"""Initialise a MongoDB connection to a local database"""

It then automatically filled in the rest.

db = getattr(g, '_database', None)

if db is None:

db = g._database =

MongoClient('mongodb://localhost:27017/')

return db

Notice above, that it knew i was using a flask environment and added the line getattr.

Why this is a productivity boost is that i did not have to alt-tab to a browser, search for "pythong mongodb tutorial example" and then type it out. I was able to do the whole thing from VS Code and since i use vsvim, i could do this without taking my fingers off of the keyboard.

This is the next jump since autocompletion. I like it.
And why it recovers so quickly.
Harvesting the interstellar medium? Transfer ships from Earth? Some random comet redirected to the area? I dunno, let science work it out. I just wanna dream.
I don't see problem with growing languages as long as designers are doing their job.

There's difference between adding features randomly and putting effort into making it obvious, transparent, integrated well into the ecosystem and overall UX.

UX is something that languages and API designers must put more effort into.

Start creating APIs with assumption that people have no access to documentation - it makes everybody's life easier. Just take a look at .NET BCL - it's very well designed. They even wrote a book about framework / libraries design basing on their decades of experience.[0]

Also "small language" is relative.

If you have started doing X lang development decade ago then that version of language is "small" to your perception. For somebody who started 5 years ago it was small 5 years ago.

The point is that at every point language have some features which aren't popular because they serve some specific cases which are required for somebody.

Very often those features are required for base class libraries makers so they can create either good API, or have good performance/safety, or anything else.

For me it seems like programming languages and its ecosystems lack of deprecation process which actually removes stuff.

[0] - Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .Net Libraries
I'm not sure the Waltons are a great example to be honest. They pay many of their employees so poorly that they're in receipt of state benefits. Society is effectively paying a portion of Walmart's labour cost. Until that's no longer the case I don't think the Waltons deserve a penny.

To address some of your other points:

A poor person in my country is allowed to take time off for illness without fear of being fired. That time isn't subtracted from their legally mandated minimum number of holiday days.

A poor person in the US will show up to work sick because they know their boss can let them go. Their colleagues might then get sick.

While I'm not sure how common it is, I've seen US news articles lauding co-workers for donating sick days to a colleague with a life threatening illness. While they're obviously doing a good thing, the necessity of the act honestly comes across as barbaric.
Founder's Guide to the US Department of Energy (2022)
I'm sorry, I think I might have used "privilege escalation" in a confusing way here. To clarify, these services sometimes need access to the surrounding environment to enhance the AI's context and prevent misuse. For example, according to the Chrome Web Store, Grammarly may need to monitor network, mouse, and keystrokes (from non-sensitive input fields), as well as location data. Meanwhile, Copilot may require access to adjacent code or open tabs, which I believe is now configurable. As I'm not a security researcher or user of these products, I may get these details wrong.
Yes, I have my eyes on that mission. Only 6 short, uneventful years to go ..
Useful things:

- As a thesaurus

- What's the name of that "thing" that does "something" - kind of like fuzzy matching

- A starting point for writing particular functions. For example, I wanted a certain string-manipulation function written in C, and it gave me a decent skeleton. However they're almost always very inefficient, so I have to optimize them.

Things I've tried, that others seem to be blown away by, that I find useless:

- Rewriting emails or documentation: I see no clarity improvement from ChatGPT rewording what I say, and sometimes information is lost in the process.

- Outliner or idea prompter: I don't see an improvement over just traditional internet search and reading over various articles and books.

For me, its capabilities do not match the marketing and hype. It's basically just a slightly better search engine. All of the above use-cases can be accomplished with some Google-fu. For people who don't know any programming or about using search engine operators, I could see why they might be impressed by it.
Start here:

https://www.csunplugged.org/en

https://www.barefootcomputing.org

https://www.bootstrapworld.org

https://www.nand2tetris.org

In an ideal situation I would like to see, what I call, a "ladder strategy" of teaching a subject i.e. as with a ladder, a curriculum should have two vertical support, one for "theoretical" part of the subject and the other the "applied" part of the subject. And as with the ladder these two supports should be connected with strong links at each level, from basics to advance, so that the students can climb up the ladder of that subject with confidence.
The idea is discussed quite a lot on the Fediverse. It's a relatively small movement, but so's the digital accessibility movement, and look where that's going.
Yet, more often than not, everyone just drops thier phones (and car keys) in a pile on top of the provided lock boxes.
There is always one or two boxes with labels for the boss and demi-boss, but they too just drop thier phones in the pile.
It could be split across everyone that works that shift, and it is taxed as salary, etc. Cash from table to pocket can be readily spent however by the person that did the work. Always tip in cash.
Part Apple's docs haven't been great for a while, part that's just how they roll, and part trying (like most everyone) to figure out what their strategy is going to be in a post GPT4 world [0].

[0] Persist with their own models running locally, how much to integrate with rest of the OS and maintain privacy moral ground, that sort of thing.
A personal story about how writing helped me make a decision.

A few months back, I was job hunting due to tech layoffs and ended up with two offers from different startups. One was a 2-year-old YC company with a larger team, while the other was a brand-new startup where I'd be the first engineer, building the tech stack from the ground up.

Deciding between the two was tough, so I tried a creative exercise. I wrote draft emails to both hiring managers, explaining why I chose not to join their startup. After about 90 minutes, my preferences became clear.

The only reasons I had for joining the more established startup were job security and better work-life balance. Meanwhile, my passion for the new startup was evident in the email I wrote. This exercise helped me uncover my true feelings.

---

It was a very useful exercise; might be able to help someone else faced with this issue.
There is a specific benefit to society. It allows artists to live of creating works meant for wide consumption. It means artists aren't limited to those who cater to the rich and those who are rich themselves.

Not that I support current copyright law, but I do see that it brings some good. That good just doesn't outweigh the bad.
> know a lot less about languages like C# and the like, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've gone, or are going, through something similar.

100% true, it is. More keywords in each release. More ways to do things.

e.g. Now we use "record" and "with" keywords, and operators such as "a!.b" or "a?.b" .

And we set projects up with "implicit usings", and "file-scoped namespaces" which do the same thing will less indenting.

While I like all of these, the downside is yes, it's an ever-expanding language.
I think they are referring to reserved words. Regular c list of reserved words has stayed rather static except for various data types. Where python kept added reserved works as time went on.
Show HN: Tool that uses GPT to translate text into executable commands
Quite the slippery slope. Cloudflare still hosts the IPFS-backed UI to Tornado Cash for example. (OFAC-sanctioned)
Yeah that's an interesting way to put it - lightweight federated overlay OS. Nice! I like it. Perhaps that can be the origin of a name. Lofos - lightweight overlay federated operating system.
Hacker Newsing above the clouds? What a world we live in…
Thank you Mr.Moore, RIP.
Ask HN: How do you deal with entrepreneurial obsession?
Two years ago we me and my partners got an acquisition from a startup we created in the previous 2 years, while having a full time job, my background is software engineering. Since then I couldn't stop thinking on my next "idea". Rationally I know there is nothing that kills creativity like trying to be creative, one of my reference on the topic is Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25670869. That being said, this entrepreneurial goal has polluted everything in my life and the way I see the world. I stopped to genuinely enjoy experience since everything became a potential problem to solve, I started to be less present during interaction with other people and I pretended to have less time for things that I like because of some phantomatic idea I had to test. I recently started meditating with Sam Harris's Waking up, which is really helping on bringing more awareness in my life, not solving my problems but at least acknowledge those are there. My goal is to understand if I still really want to be an entrepreneur or I'm just projecting expectations from the shadow of the past success, if the answer is yes I want to keep my exploration in a more sane journey. I don't believe I'm the only one experiencing what I described, did anybody deal with it / are you dealing with this? What was your experience did you find something that worked for you?
The real purpose of the carriers is not to fight a war, but to assert control of sea lanes. In a globalized economy your country needs access to maritime shipping lanes to survive. The carriers basically act as an area denial threat, preserving the ability of the US and its allies to trade and prosper, denying that to anyone who messes with them.

If Russia and China decide they're going to get together and be super trade buddies but the US denies them the trade lanes with everyone else, that's fine, they can share food and oil which are certainly important, but they'll still be broke and their economies will still collapse, especially China's which is super export dependent and seemingly approaching collapse right now anyway. China needs huge exports to survive in its current state and Russia doesn't have that much purchasing capacity.
> Unsurprising that not all of HN is pro-fair use.

Isn't "fair use" restricted to (a) short portions of a work, (b) used for specific purposes, such as education or criticism?
Seriously? I'll have to ask around my neighborhood. There are consultants, lawyers, and lobbyists, who I am sure spent a lot of the pandemic on Zoom equivalents.
I work in government. This is marginally helpful, it describes a lot of the structure of the department of energy, but budgets and programs change so often that this is already out of date.
Google has been increasing revenue by $20-30 billion per year, with a huge bump of $70 billion in 2021. They made half a trillion dollars in the last two years!

Oh, you meant the search engine. Yeah, maybe.
I am not a big fan of them because the sport has converged on the idea that the competition should be about quickly producing code for problems that map to algorithms fairly trivially once you parse the structure of the problem. Top-level competitive programmers have libraries of functions and algorithms that they copy-paste from, and so the end result is more like a spelling bee than anything else.

Personally, I would be a much bigger fan of competitive programming if at least one of these were true:

1. The problems at high level programming competitions were harder and maybe mapped more to real-world programming problems. Think of the IMO or the Putnam exam in "competitive math." The "Olympiad" of programming today consists of 5-10 problems that top-level competitors can solve in ~10 minutes each by reading the problem and mapping it to a known algorithm. Speed of typing and information retrieval from your algorithm library is the primary skill here.

2. The scoring method was something other than speed of production of code. Performance of the code is an easy alternative, but also not a great one unless you want to force everyone to use C++ or Rust. Using an objective function of some sort (based on the problem) would be an interesting method, but harder to write questions for.

It is very easy to see the link between leetcode and competitive programming. The problem structure is basically the same, and the big difference is that the leetcode problems that people give in interviews are easier. The problem-solving skills involved are the same.

Also, I can't suggest an interviewing method for you that has all those properties, because one doesn't exist. You aren't going to find one interviewing method that works the same for a cloud provider, a CRUD SaaS startup, and a game studio. This isn't something you can just cargo cult, you have to design it for your own situation. My inclination would be to cut the 5 leetcode interviews from your circuit and put that time into a single 2-3 hour take-home project that has some relevance to your company plus a 1-hour code/design review interview. Alternatively, give a candidate a bunch of small code snippets and ask them to debug the code.

Finally, if you want an IQ test (which is what I suspect hiring based on "spelling bee" competitions like competitive programming and leetcode is really about), you can add a Wonderlic test (or one of their competitors) to your interview circuit - a lot of hedge funds do it, and I honestly didn't hate it when I interviewed with a few of them.
I don't think that this company will die in a predictible future.

They are too large to be innovative. Internally they are paralyzed by processes, management, and burned-out programmers who had ideals a few years ago and now are tired of the internal system.

But Google is a rich company that can buy innovative startups and acquires innovative technology whenever they want.

I think it will be key for their survival.
Hey if your project is public I would love to take a look if you don’t mind sharing a link
> [flagged]

Fitting, I suppose, that this very discussion has now been censored.
This is quite the ignorant perspective. Competitive programming is much more than just for tech interviews. It's allowing ambitious people who care about algorithms and solving problems to learn, have fun, and improve their programming ability. I think it's healthy to facilitate such activities.
It started a long time ago.

When Google first introduced ads they were in those distinctive little boxes and not blended with the content. They said at the time that blending the ads with the content would destroy the legitimacy of the product and that they didn’t want to be evil.

Trouble is the ads compete with the search results. Why would a user even look at the ads if the search results were good? Why would an advertiser buy ads if they could spend resources in SEO and get an organic search spot that isn’t labeled as a self-serving ad?

SEO is a Janus-faced God. It has a negative aspect of spam and dark patterns (remember those weird pages you would hit on a typo domain? They looked like they were drawn with a crayon but were well-oiled monetization machines.). On the other hand, quality content that people want to link to and that fills gaps that people are searching for is powerful too. (Particularly when joined with darker tactics.)

You might blame Microsoft’s purchase of Powerset to get the knowledge graph technology behind Bing, Google’s panic and subsequent purchase of Freebase. But certainly it was the blending of ad content with the search results that made the organic search results wither away.
Michael Hudson:

https://michael-hudson.com/2023/03/the-mechanics-of-a-bond-m...
Bear in mind that Google doesn't make money from users who are reasonably tech savvy, have adblockers running and are also of the mindset that they would never click on an ad anyway.

Folks have been complaining about search quality for at least the past 15 years btw.
Nothing happened “after Lehman”. The Lehman collapse was a result of what came before it — the liquidity crisis, the bank runs, and the stock market crash.

Does anyone remember the sign boards outside every bank offering up to 10% interest on short term CDs in the fall of 2008?

When my mom called in February this year about opening a “savings account” for the grandkids at 5 1/2% interest, I knew something was up. Because the going rate the month before (and ever since 2009) was something like 1/10 of 1%
Weird, the sky outside is turning blue...

Oh! It’s 5am!

Just one more turn and I’ll go to bed.
You certainly can if you're in east texas!
The actual article (vs the HN Title) only seems to say:

> Over 30 million people were under a tornado warning through the evening

Their maps show quite a few states being in the path of the storms.

OTOH:

> Published: 01:45 EDT, 25 March 2023 | Updated: 08:23 EDT, 25 March 2023
Despite it being in the constitution, this "legal theory" has never really been successful. Numerous states have tried to use the nullification clause and failed.

Not to say I disagree with it, or agree with it, but don't get your hopes up..
We'll have to buy their nukes at some point.
Plain old Bing Chat - which I feel a bit better about using because I'm not paying for it and not contributing to the problem that way - used for its original intended purpose of search. Compared to trying out keywords and reading through the results myself, it's faster to ask the question, let Bing read the pages, and let Bing summarize the results to me.

I recently got access to Anthropic Claude, which I don't feel as squeamish about using as I'd feel about paying $20/month to OpenAI and helping them destroy the world, so if there's more that can be done that way maybe I'll find it out soon.
I'm not sure the iron ore mining companies themselves are following that thought train. As a recent example https://www.afr.com/companies/mining/fortescue-lab-succeeds-...
My former childhood room still has the Civilization II manual (in German), together with the Settlers III manual it’s being used as a monitor stand for my mom. Whenever I visit and see it, I have to smile and am happy about the fact that it’s still seeing use, even if not for the original purpose.
> So you agree the recession prediction is not evidence for Shiff's competence?

Economists make wrong predictions all the time. Am saying Schiff is not exactly entirely wrong on some of the ones he's made in the past.

> ...have you looked at the trend, though? Inflation was climbing higher and higher until last June, and then it dropped by more than half. For the last 3-8 months the inflation rate has been about 4%.

Have you? The last time the inflation rate was even near 4% was in April 2021 [0].

[0] https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_inflation_rate
The warnings covered a larger area, but it looks like most of the death and destruction happened in Mississippi.
As it is also illegal for people to take cash tips without reporting said income to the IRS. Some illegality has become a cultural norm. Restaurants shorting people on tips is as common as speeding.
Yunohost, Cloudron, Sandstorm, maybe even portainer are similar platforms. Highly recommend selfhosting
@7am: well, I’m now well into the day. Might as well just stay up. One more turn and I’ll go eat breakfast…
The formal notice was 6 years ago but they still haven’t implemented it fully and keep deferring decisions.
It is amusing that the quick reference is a densely packed "52 pages".
Yes, this is an incredible show.