skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Scratch gets a lot of hate with semi-experienced programmers (the kind to browse this sub) because of its simplicity...

"This sub"? Semi-experienced? Nice way to start a conversation. OK, I'll bite.

My first contact with Scratch was ten years ago when my son wanted to learn it in a workshop organized by Medialab Prado, a group funded by the city council. The wait list was already very long so, in order to cut it, I volunteered as an assistant teacher for another course.

I reviewed my son's assignment and helped him make some modifications after the classes.

I don't hate Scratch. I have a good opinion in general. But it had its shortcomings, that made easy to end up with some sort of visual spaghetti code, as soon as the project grew a little over the size of the examples. IIRC all variables were global.

My son chose a different tool for the next workshop, I don't remember the name (appstudio?), Python for the next and then Python again, but as a teacher. So good for initiation, but my impression was that not so good for bigger programs.

That might have changed, it's been a long time, but if you're curious about where criticism comes from, maybe it's not hate from semi-experienced wannabes :)

Oh and BTW, the guy that was the main teacher in my course defected in a couple of classes, so I had to take over. The children were bored with HTML and I tried introducing JavaScript. Surprisingly they understood it very quickly and liked it. Of course the group had a selection bias, people interested enough in programming to know about the course, etc. but my guess is that with some syntactic sugar and graphic libraries, it could reach a wider audience.

My two cents: every language should make super easy to draw shapes in a canvas and move them. If you need more than ten lines of boilerplate to do that, you shouldn't be designing languages.
I've always assumed that Halliburton has a plan to corner the market.
There is nothing wrong with being the category-defining early-stage investment company, and doing it as a for-profit business that's optimized for good financial outcomes.

I think what some of the insiders (like the OP) and semi-adjacent outsiders (like me) might be feeling a little queasy about is that YC began with a pretty clearly stated goal (in addition to making money) around disrupting the unproductive importance of high-status networks and signaling like elite university educations and to a lot of us (even people who didn't apply like me) that was really inspiring. And to at least some degree, YC is now a high-status network that signals well.

There's nothing uniquely bad about it, it's kind of the default throughout human history, and they are completely transparent about being a for-profit company, but it's also ok to be a little sad that it's not quite as idealistic as it used to be.
Oh, thanks. Those are indeed very good numbers to have.
The SR-71s were over Libya in 1986 because the Libyan secret service detonated a bomb in a Berlin nightclub, killing 3 and wounding hundreds, ten days prior.

"oh yeah well what abou.."

With all due respect, stop.
I could not help but notice the similarity with another popular question "Is MBA worth $100K+" and the equally similar answer "MBA is what you make of it".
> The AppleTV is closest but I think it shines more in comparison to the rest of the market than it does on its own.

IMO true for most of Apple's product line. They're the best because it looks like nobody else is even seriously trying, not because they're, like, perfect and never screw up or do bad things.
Because HTTPS is harder. The user could be loading HTTP content from another host on their page. In order to support this you would basically need to modify their page (including scripts) to rewrite all URLs to HTTPS. This is nearly impossible to do perfectly. I think they are right to give their customers this option if desired.
> Do you think that the Sackler family has had a positive impact on overdoses in the US?

It's better to use prescription drugs than mystery substance available on the streets. At least you know what you are taking.
"Better" can mean a bunch of different things, too. For example, if your business is headed for the rocks, mediocre advice that you get in time to enact it is much better than perfect advice that you get too late.

What advice isn't, and can never be, is ironclad rules that you can just accept without consideration and expect to provide value. The real value of almost all advice isn't the part where it's telling you what to do -- it's the part where it's providing you with a new way of thinking about the problem.
Not sure why you are being downvoted, when that is exactly what has happened with incandescent light bulbs one century ago:

> How exactly did the cartel pull off this engineering feat? It wasn’t just a matter of making an inferior or sloppy product; anybody could have done that. But to create one that reliably failed after an agreed-upon 1,000 hours took some doing over a number of years. The household lightbulb in 1924 was already technologically sophisticated: The light yield was considerable; the burning time was easily 2,500 hours or more. By striving for something less, the cartel would systematically reverse decades of progress.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-great-lightbulb-conspiracy
My guess is this breaks some NDA and he wouldn't be called to red team at OpenAI again.
While it's true that not every programming job requires extensive creativity, problem-solving skills are still essential for developers to succeed in their careers. Programming is not just about writing code; it's also about finding the most efficient and effective ways to solve problems.

Moreover, the demand for problem-solving skills is only going to increase as AI-powered development tools become more advanced. These tools are great for certain tasks, but they lack the human creativity and intuition that can lead to unique and innovative solutions. As a result, developers who can think creatively and solve problems efficiently will always be in high demand, no matter what type of programming job they're working on.

So, while the "gluing together" and "people stuff" parts of programming are undoubtedly important, let's not overlook the critical role that problem-solving and creativity play in creating value for businesses and staying competitive in the tech industry.
‘Pumping a precise volume of near-boiling hot water at high pressure’ is orders or magnitude harder than ‘blowing hot air’.

Sounds like you need a popocorn maker :)
It's not really hard to tell if he's doing a good job, he's clearly not.

Losing nearly half of revenue in only a few months, adding crippling debt payments, stiffing employees on their severance, refusing to pay rent and other services, plus countless other debacles make it clear this is a dysfunctional company. Network effects and resilient architecture can keep a company humming along for some time despite incompetent management, but those resources will get depleted and they are hard to regain.
Why Bloom filters work the way they do (2012)
This is the perfect response to OPs question.
You can take nanoGPT and work backwards from it, googling all concepts and papers. A book on PyTorch would be fine, too.
All the World's a Stage
Procedural Content Generation in Games Book
I would imagine that you would get deeper bass from the larger models but I found the bass to be nice and tight with the 5 inch woofers and low enough for me. I think that anything over 5 inches would be too overkill for a living room. I am aware that studio monitors are meant for studios and not living rooms but I really like the flat response. Can’t stand boomy speakers with exaggerated tweeters.
Interesting that you mention DSLs like Drools and Esper. One of the things we'd like to do is explore ways to bring the complex/composite event-processing (CEP) functionality to Kaskada. SQL does include "match recognize" at this point, but it is still pretty unwieldy to use.

With the shift towards general event-processing, we'd really like Kaskada to make it easy to express queries like "how many times do X happen within an hour after Y with these properties" -- the kinds of things that Drools and Esper provided!
I think he's a pseud with no real connection to AI research.

I'm not saying he's stupid or anything like that I just don't see any useful scientific output from him.
> and if so, by how much—

Wait what ? So, you first have to squint, real hard, to find out how much past the printed number the indicator hand is, and THEN you have to do what kind of non-math magic to find out "by how much" ? "By two deegrees!" ?
Reddit should have been a technology, like PHPBB or Wordpress, instead of a website. That would have been better.
At work [1], we've wanted to provide kids with cognitive and/or physical disabilities an introduction to coding fundamentals (sequences, loops, etc). As a result, we've created Weavly [2]. It's a React app that can work standalone, but also integrates with some off-the-shelf robots. It's free, open source [3], and accessible to people using screen readers, switches, and other assistive technologies.

[1] https://idrc.ocadu.ca/

[2] https://weavly.org/

[3] https://github.com/codelearncreate/c2lc-coding-environment
nailed it. sophistry indeed.
Doubt it, extreme population density plus good education plus social mobility seems to suppress a lot of crimes too.
I kind of assume that NSA decompiled it, freaked out, is semi quietly spreading the word.
The undocumented Android change that led to aCropalypse was reported during beta
Appreciate the chime-in and honesty.

> If building a valuable product, talking to users, and focusing on facts sounds good to you, you should consider applying to YC.

Also being perfectly honest, it does sound very appealing, but I'm afraid it unfortunately just isn't what makes startups successful in 2023. Speaking from personal experience and carrying the battle scars.
But it is not a viable choice anymore to “not include this useful dependency, because its dependency tree is huge, so I will just rewrite it from scratch”, which is what practically happens in most cases. No one deliberately imports bullshit like leftpad on the root level. If you use react alone it will probably already make enough of a mess that windows’s file operations will take considerable time on your node_modules folder, which is ridiculous in and of itself.
So? When I built a system that could collect and classify millions of images with close-to-perfect accuracy circa 2010 (with some tricks), I found that unacceptable images (dead nazis, micropenises, etc.) that occur at a rate of 1-to-10,000 would get my advertising turned off.

Circa 2017 YouTube had a crisis from beheading videos and such that caused them to demonetize almost all user-contributed content until advertisers felt safe.

In the advertising-based economy social acceptability (a non-functional requirement if I ever saw one.) is more important than anything else, including the quality of results.

The problem with ChatGPT recommending people for targeted assassination is not that it does it but that the story gets covered in the media. When there are 100 chatbots like that it is not going to be news that one of them will write you a story where your next-door neighbor gets raped, as awful as that is. For the first one or two or three it's a showstopper.

The PRC would not have some of the moral scruples we have but they'd feel similarly prudish about a chatbot that talks about what happened on June 4, 1989 or that explains why Taiwan should be an independent country, etc. All of these values are relative and you'd better believe that Israel already does use network analysis to target Palestinians for assassination (and really assassinating them) and they do it with a real network analysis, not just a bullshitting machine that will bullshit about death and destruction as well as about Ren and Stimpy.

Part of it is that ChatGPT is cosplaying as a person and appears to have moral agency. Nobody complains that the Mengele Cartel is using pocket calculators and software like Quickbooks to help manage international sales of cocaine and all the mayhem that entails.
Made with ChatGPT?
Proof that religion can justify anything ... even the worst inhumanity. It has been done in the past and will be done in the future if the need arises.

Religion is a poor substitute for morality.
Those are actually kind of nice.
Here’s the thing about modern AI.. They are black boxes. Not in a negative way, they just are.

Logically, predictions are extremely simple: data (encoded in some way) goes in, answer (encoded in some other way) comes out.
As far as training goes, the modern and “useful” models are so big that you cannot train them yourself anyway.

This simply means there are 2 very separate ways to approach them:

-If you want to understand the internals, I absolutely suggest to go the traditional way: start with linear algebra/ vector spaces, then understand how MLPs work, then CNNs, (by now I would skip RNNs), and finally transformers. Other important topics include: latent spaces/embeddings/autoencoders/etc

This is almost academic knowledge though.

-On the other hand, if you want to play with them, really all you need is: first learn python (if you don’t know it already), and one DeepLearning library (probably Pytorch). Then go to Huggingface, and download some models. You pretty quickly get a feeling of what are the common formats for models and data, and you can start putting them together..

Even many of the popular AI papers today are creative ways of plugging the output of some model into the input (or training objective) of some other..

This is my 2 cents anyway!
> I dislike the lack of separation between home and work, and how it makes my children feel like I’m “always working.”

I’ve never really understood this “lack of separation” argument. Are your children at home all day long? If not, the only way it would seem like you’re “always working” is if you were working outside of normal business hours. Which is something that would still happen if you were at an office all day, wouldn’t it? If not, why not? Because your day ends when you leave the office? Why not just make your WFH day end at some similar cutoff point? Why does working at home make that less possible?

If your kids do stay home all day, one way to look at it is that yeah, it seems like you’re always working, but that beats “always at the office” doesn’t it?
MM in Roman numerals is 2,000. There are some Unicode symbols representing one million, but I dunno if they're in the range HN accepts.
People need paths to help (recovery / redemption), integration in society, and happiness. Everyone, including those who would seek to escape with drugs (which should be legalized, taxed, and regulated so they are used responsibly), and those who need a direction to walk to reach success.

Cartels, and predatory businesses who happen to be legal, make their money off of the suffering of others. Society, that is the collective will of the people, has the choice of choosing tolerance, compassion, and empathy to dry up the source of the evil poison that corrodes people and the places they live.
> says nothing about efficiency or any practical considerations

Sure it does, it's practical for pretty much any problem we want to solve, in fact i can't think of something it has not been shown to be practical about. Gradient descent is pretty straightforward and the most efficient generic method we have, even though it's not proven to be the fastest. Forward-forward is proposed as an alternative that is biologically plausible, not as an efficient alternative (it isnt)
As someone who brews espresso at home, and is a bit of an audiophile (mostly in the home recording domain), this is spot on. If your grind is too coarse for an espresso, it's very very obvious.
> - Housing is too expensive. True! Not the fault of the office. - Commutes take too long. True! Not the fault of the office. - Housing units close to the office are often too small to be comfortable for families. Subjective, but many people feel this way! Also not the fault of the office.

I think when people say "I hate the office" they (I include myself) use that term to talk about everything the office implies (e.g., commute time). I'm 100% pro work from wherever fits you best. That being said, if the company I'm working for puts an office 5 minutes away from my home on foot, then I will definitely visit it a couple of times per week... but that's just impossible, hence, I hate the office.
and yet, there aren't many electric pickups you can buy today. I bet there are many people that would buy the Ford at the higher price point. Why would they leave that money on the table ? The cheaper tesla segment buyers do not overlap with Ford buyers.
At that point you may as well lean into the idea that free will is an illusion. It just sort of stops the utility of the discussion (if there even was any).
The correct part of the legend is that the speech he was reading off of said SR-71, because someone thought it sounded better, and getting it spoken by the President was easier than doing it the "Right" way.
Pacific Rim and a recent Godzilla had their fight scenes in the dark, so in those cases I'd surmise it's to conceal CGI shortcomings.
The Australian government used to threaten you with the police force if you didn’t scan QR codes when walking in to essential stores or locations.
if the author wants up-to-date packages, I wonder why they didn't move to debian testing
In simple words: leverage. How much they need you divided by how much you need them.
> labelers. Finding a roundabout way to extract the value of a direct competitor's purpose-built, costly data feels meaningfully different from scraping the web in general as an input to a transformative use

There we go again, its, one law for the unwashed plebs and the other for us.

Why do you think that I, after spending my time and effort to write my blog, own my content to a lesser extent that OpenAI does their? Such hypocracy.
Because it is common for people in bubbles to forget, that's the entire point. It should be easy for you to ignore if you've seen it as often as you state.

It sounds like you prefer a conversation to be more tailored to your experience, that is normal. In places like HN, a large portion of people live in their bubble and don't see out of it. Bringing up a more common experience is necessary to put a topic in complete context in some cases or at a minimum expands the field of view, it's not meant to make you feel guilt.

A part of being human is to point out abnormality, and many times it's done without even a thought. I'm not sure why you're having a melt down, just ignore it if it bothers you. Telling people to stop mentioning their experience isn't going to be constructive and people who WANT to guilt trip you can just fuck right off so don't let it get to you.
You are what you eat
> add ads within the API

Realistically, how much of the "content" is already ads? Ie corporate announcements, brand building, or political astroturfing, etc. It's almost like twitter is double dipping.
This is how the cartel works in Mexico - don't bother hiding, just take over the power structures. I wonder if she's connected to them.

This is a bad sign.
My favorite quote I saw or heard somewhere on the rogue genetic elements in us all:

“We are but a raft of genes in an ocean of retrotransposons”

A little hyperbolic, but dang there are a lot
Addicts are the ones doing that.
I don't think he would be ok losing $40billion+ and with only some assuaged grievances to show for it. He's not that tempermental.

He's got a business idea for Twitter, which is to turn it into "X", the everything app he originally wanted Paypal to be 20yrs ago. Basically a US version of WeChat.

But it will be a steep climb from here, with a skeleton engineering crew that needs to both maintain current Twitter and build new X, and the debt service draining money and constraining hiring.
I don’t think legalization is better for everyone, though. I live in Oregon and I’ve been very disappointed with the impact of decriminalizing possession. Cases are no longer clogging the courts, instead we have people using in my neighborhood park and on public transit. I stopped taking the train after a ride where we had to evacuate because someone was smoking fentanyl (apparently even the second-hand smoke can affect a person). It was, apparently, not his first time.

You seem to support it, how would you address the externalities?
This is insanely impressive.
For fingering, in the right hand I typically put my pinky on the highest note for a phrase, it feels more comfortable and you can accent it more than the middle fingers. In the left hand I typically put the bass note in the pinky as well. The middle fingers aren't as dextrous so I use them less, though a concert pianist could probably use your fingering.
Overall technique wise, human hands cup their hands more, the palm is arched where the robot's is flat. But who says it needs to model humans exactly.
I can't believe this is working in three.js! Amazing work!
I read a review of a prototype BMW mini. The turbine (fixed RPM) + batteries seemed like a great combination. Plenty of HP for highway cruising, plenty of battery+AWD for great acceleration. Turbines are efficient, crazy small for the HP, and have few moving parts. The downsize is having a fixed RPM, which would normally make them unacceptable for a car.

Sadly it never made it to market.
I don't think this true, the idea is that it triggers the same-license requirement even for network accessible code.
Where normal GPL only triggers that when the code is distributed, which allowed the SAAS loophole to exist.

As for the spreading to other programs part, yes that's the entire point, if you use free code, anything built on it should be free too, to continue giving to the Free/open Eco system.
well, i would like a couple of links if that's not too much to ask
Bank runs are a feature, not a bug
We're going to ban the use of VPN and fine and imprison people who use them. This is actually worse than the firewall of china
Superficially, FAANG offering massive compensation packages to anyone who fits their model of "Stanford/MIT degree, willing to suffer through LeetCode challenges", which has a massive effect on the market for SWE, as it changes the bar for what's _possible_ in the realm of compensation, and ensures that the cartel gets its pick of SWE talent, simply because it can offer substantially more than most other companies.

Interestingly, those companies are also the ones that I think have put the most effort into quantifying the value of a software developer to the business as a whole. The salaries look obscene to many people, but the cartel pays them because it believes it's getting more value than it's paying for.
this is not the attitude to use when promoting products or posting on HN
Oh dear, it's like listening to a 12 year old practicing before their lesson. But hey! Well done Robot for the achievement. I bet in no time you'll be https://youtu.be/e37NxUtFQSo. Good luck with the training!
That could be because putting it on the box creates a liability that the LEDs are meeting those specifications -- just because the source LEDs claim to meet those specifications doesn't mean that the enclosure being sold using them as a component will actually produce that. Additionally, any change to LED suppliers/etc now means that the box also has to be changed.

In other words, what they are selling isn't the same as the thing in the box nor the aggregate of all the components (since they interact with one another).
As an addendum, other games get away with a "designed" modding API because the alternative is too difficult, as most games are built in C/C++ which is nowhere near as malleable and discoverable as the Java runtime. It's also why mods for Bedrock (the C++ implementation of Minecraft) is barely a thing.