skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the bit that maybe programmers haven’t quite realized yet:
if I can get an LLM to just do that task, I don’t need to go and
get someone to build some software to do it.

I think everybody understands that part, and that the cynicism/skepticism is about LLMs' ability to deliver on that aspect of it.

Part of training John, or writing a script, or telling an LLM, is handling all of the edge cases that exist in even a "simple" import job.

- What to do if there is a duplicate record? Create a dupe? Do an upsert? If data conflicts how we decide which version "wins?"

- What about fuzzy dupes? Two records that are probably identical but not really the same, probably due to typos or slightly different accent characters, etc

- "find the CRM record for each company listed" <-- okay, and what if the record doesn't exist? fail?

- Is the import job an all-or-nothing thing? In other words should we wrap everything in a transaction and back it out if there's a single failure? Or do we keep going? Do we log failures? Email somebody?

- If we're wrapping the whole job in a transaction, should we lock out the users while this is happening so they don't see stale data? Do we notify them? Do we just do it in the middle of the night?

- Should we log changes to an audit table for debugging purposes?

- What if the import file is invalid? Do we log, email, etc?

etc etc etc.

Like Visual Basic, Excel macros, etc I think LLM will enable some non-programmers to do scripty, programmery stuff and I think that is excellent. But anything really robust (and honestly, "simple" import jobs are often critical path and therefore need to be fairly robust) is going to require some rigor. A person telling LLM what to do is still going to need to address all of those edge cases and then some.

It's also very unclear to me how we'll debug LLM-managed processes. When things go wrong, how do we determine what/when/why? And in fact, how do we determine LLM-managed processes are correct in the first place? These particualr concerns seem completely solvable, but they will need to be solved.
Yes, you can, and downranking propaganda wouldn't stop it from turning up if you go looking.

But when my naive sister-in-law hears something about how Ukraine isn't a real country, I don't want the first page of results for "history of Ukraine" to turn up Russian propaganda.

I live in a red state, and there are astonishing numbers of people here who already buy Putin's story. I'm fully behind DDG deciding they didn't want to play a role in spreading his message even further.
I'm upvoting this short comment in hopes that you'll share a somewhat longer story about what you tried to do and why it didn't work. Thanks!
How much? Do you have any links to discussions or data that were against covid vaccination and turned out to be truthful and useful? I'm really curious because I've never heard of this in my personal information bubble, despite trying to widen it as much as I can.
Yup. Every single feature has bugs. But without nostalgic glasses they also did in Win2000 and Win7.
> But in the last 6 months or so, Google's results have gotten so bad and DDG has continued to improve to the point where I no longer bother with !g.

One place that still consistently gives me trouble is Stack Overflow. More often than not, I DDG my search, get two SO links, one irrelevant and the other bad, repeat the search with "!g" and get a half-dozen SO links, 3-4 of which are relevant, and 1-2 of which are good.
Is there anything inherently shitbag about collecting debts? As long as you’re professional, follow the regulations and treat the debtor fairly, I’m not sure what the problem is. The debtor presumably agreed to take on the debt and still owes the money until either it’s discharged or they’ve paid what they owe.

There are obviously a load of shitbags in the debt collection industry, but the only way to change that is for non-shitbags to get into the industry and replace them.
> By the time you arrived

Do we know when grandparent has arrived? The description (i.e.: “I've been reading HN for a while. I made my first comment May 31, 2018.”) only mentions when they added their first comment and not when they started reading hn.
Do parts of this sound ai-written to anyone else?
it is not a search engine's job to filter their results based on acceptable politics. the only explicit filtering out they should be doing is filtering out manipulation, explicitly illegal content, spam, fraudulent content and stuff like that. aside from that the filtering algorithm should be largely neutral and unbiased. it's not a search engine's job to refuse to answer search results because the owner finds it distasteful.
The main thing I still use Google for is when I want to look up offline stuff near me. DDG uses a rough location, but even if I zoom in on their maps near me it's missing a whole lot of local stores etc.

For other searches I usually try DDG first and only fall back on !g when the results are bad, and often the Google results are also bad in those cases.
Is it because people get in the union on the west coast and then move east?

Or are you just stuck in the local that you started in (and would then definitely be unwilling to relocate once you’re in?

(Not sure how the regionalization works if the unions are national)
When OpenAI started I don't think anyone would have thought that AI this powerful was around the corner.
Anyone who thinks that NYT article is a puff piece can't possibly have read it very closely. The writer is very clear that they realize they are being courted for PR purposes, about how Holmes is attempting to draw a distinct line between the past "Elizabeth" and the new "Liz", and ends the article politely refusing to be pulled in further. The article could have been harsher, but it does not portray Holmes in a good light.
"remains at the injection side" was one of the more blatant lies. The funniest lie was "a corona virus outbreak of a novel strain in close distance to a biolab which does experiments on corona viruses ... is without a doubt of natural origin!"
>living to see AGI, immortality and space travel.

You mean living to see other people enjoying or otherwise benefitting from these advances. A homeless junkie is not exactly the kind of class with access to groundbreaking immortality treatments.

Realistically, high schoolers of today are going to grow into a post-globalization era, everything will be much more expensive for them, housing and education will be out of reach for many. And then there's the absolute havoc they will inherit with climate change. The next generation is dealt a pretty terrible hand.
Same for me, seems it has not changed much. I have had an ID for like 7 to 8 years.
I've been here since launch (with different usernames), and I don't think it's meaningfully changed at all.

btw this is sort of mentioned in guidelines (see the last one)
Russia’s invasion transformed one Ukrainian city
> Ironically, you may actually be more secure today running 95 than 7, since any modern exploit would be incompatible with it.

I'd guess a lot of malware is opportunistic and not really designed to maximize compatibility, so I imagine you're right but I would be curious to hear from someone who actually studies malware.

In a similar (also ironic vein), the lack of modern HTTPS probably also makes Windows 95 "secure" in that it will be inconvenient to use a Windows 95 machine for anything that needs securing.

Edit: It does make me wonder how fast computer viruses and malware goes "extinct." Probably much faster than biological viruses (if that's the right term) since malware doesn't evolve like viruses do.
Interesting thought. My mind went to the possibility that since they reversed signals are allowing your mood to determine how you feel physically that it might allow you to leverage a good mood to overcome negative signals from your body i.e. power through pain or exhaustion. Maybe it became maladaptive when more opportunity for rumination became available.
>I don't think adult pedophiles ever stop being sexually aroused by children. They just learn not to act on their urges.

Adult pedophiles can stop being sexually aroused by children, because there's still a cognitive component to it. In the same way that you might for example, stop being attracted to your partner if you start associating them with a negative memory, a softcore pedophile might lose their attraction to children if they begin to associate it with a negative emotional response from the child.

>Past puberty? Do they really change sexual orientation or do they realize they were X all along?

They quite literally change sexual orientation. The same way you might stop liking sugary foods if you go off them for a while, or how you might develop a taste for leafy greens if you give them a go enough times.
>because many people suffering from depression haven't been "done" anything to by anyone

Some may lack the tools to identify the reason for their depression, that's not the same as nothing having happened to them.

>it's not out of the ordinary or different to what's been done to other people who are not depressed

It's entirely possible that the people who are not depressed are in fact the ones who are sick.

>some react with extreme depression to the most ordinary and mild of life's occurrences.

Or, the mild life occurrence just serves as a tipping point that cascades and causes the person to reevaluate their situation and come to the conclusion that they are dissatisfied.
It’s not inconvenient and more importantly not information. It’s annoying and not based on facts. I’d love to see any actual research done at a molecular biology lab that’d back an anti-vax fantasy. And then there’s the whole epidemiology level…
I agree, to an extent.

I find that if I need to be "attentive" then having something going on helps. For me it is podcasts while driving. Having nothing noise my mind tends to wander which isn't always ideal because my focus should still be on the road despite engaging my brain with passive knowledge.

But for the rest of your comments? I agree wholeheartedly. I used to have the headphones in walking dogs, listening to podcasts, but I've stopped doing that and find the time outside far more relaxing, because that is time I should let my mind wander and venture. At work? Music to fill the voids, but I mute it if I'm trying to roll over some sort of problem in my head. Other strategies such as leaving the desk or using physical mediums (writing / sketching problems in notebooks) help too, but that's not really where we're at in this discussion.

Ultimately I think people need to just be aware that how they troubleshoot and relax won't be the same as another's. But it takes discomfort and experimentation to find what works for you too. Try podcasts where you would use music. Try the opposite. Try nothing where you would try something. Find what helps, and always be willing to re-test with new/old atmospheres.
Yeah ChatGPT is pretty good at solving coding problems - 'My apologies for the confusion, I misunderstood your requirements earlier. Let's try another approach...' is much better than 'Never mind I fixed it' on a four-year-old Stack Overflow post.
Tracking Blocked Scripts
Strange.

It does now.

It’s not as if someone from Apple did a quick fix is it?
They’ll get to experience some of it as indentured servants on some off world colony /s
The original "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20220705105128/https://blog.jaib...

It's nice to have a handy phrase for this effect.
Why is cross-platform navigation and responsive design hard?
Recourse debt and its consequences have been a disaster.

We can do better but there’s not much will.
This combination feels unnecessarily complicated to me, at least for most of the use cases shown.

Suppose we want to style a list differently if it has five or more items. Since :has can detect any child element, the existence of a fifth item is a sufficient indicator that there are at least five items. So instead of ul:has(li:nth-last-child(n+5)), we could just use ul:has(li:nth-child(5)) which is quite a bit clearer in my opinion.
You could read the main linux kernel git log and see who the top contributors are.

If you prefer system level programming there are jobs out there and plenty of work to do. I dunno if this counts as, "hardcore engineering." To me, engineering, involves many other skills other than writing code: being able to specify systems clearly and, as the occasion demands, formally is a part of engineering; communicating with others; Knowing which trade offs to make depending on a situation, etc.
There's definitely a trend (and to my eyes a lowering of quality) on this site over the past couple of years. That's easily attributed to the downturn (possibly allied to the increasing social influence of the site) - so I'd suggest it's the "90%" in Sturgeon's Law waxing and waning over time (albeit it seems more waxing than waning when viewed over longer timescales).

Never forget, a lot of people on here weren't even born when "Accidental Empires" came out.
What I'm saying is more akin to "you're being strangled, and we should take the person's hand off your neck"
Ah, I see what you are talking about now.

> Beepberry Early Access Program
> We have 50 units available to ship immediately to developers and hackers. If you would like to be one of the first to receive a Beepberry, please fill out the form below after placing your order.

I'm not sure how I missed that, thank you for pointing it out!
Uh... are you suggesting that at some not-insignificant point into the pandemic someone credible was arguing COVID was NOT airborne?
It's certainly possible. I can't read minds. But his statements on these issues sound more to me like "Yes, this is really dangerous stuff and we're taking a huge risk in developing it, but too bad! You can't stop us."
Car Buying AI?
Shopping for a new car, was searching on Cargurus and Edmunds and just got an ad for this. Has AI entered car buying? Anyone else used it?
Musk tells 'laptop class' to stop 'work-from-home' BS
Duckduckgo search results are spotty at best. I can live with the mild censorship (yes yes I know, they censor the side that you don't like so it's totally not censorship and just blocking evil propaganda, they're the good guys etc etc).

Their web browsers are great however and I've been using them on android for years and on desktop for months! I wish I could use them with a better search engine, though (Typing !g in all queries is now a reflex for me).
Appreciate your feedback precompute! I like the idea of having folks be able to try it out without logging in and yea definitely a crowded landscape out there so might not be worth the energy when there's other problems to explore.
I would highly recommend writing some articles, and going on for days. Light is a good disinfectant.
She needs to quit carrying on - Bryan, Texas isn't that bad
While I get it... there are plenty of risks just with high characters in domain names. I would simply suggest the "hover" view for links don't show the translated punycode character encoding for domains.

I think it would be far more of an issue if .lan or .local were ever able to make it past icann for a registrar. What's funny to me, is the number of web forms that haven't been updated to allow anything other than .com/net/org for signup.
You’re not “harmed” by an ugly building. Annoyed, maybe, but you’re not harmed. Ugly is subjective. Even if the majority agree that it is ugly, there’s likely a group that enjoys it. Should they be denied the ability to have architecture that pleases them?
These roles likely comprise less than 5% of all engineers at big tech companies so I would be pretty surprised if such a book exists.
Russia says hypersonic missile scientists face 'serious' treason accusation
A thread on Hacker News isn't usually a referendum on the author; it's a discussion in its own right.
And takes 10x as long. It's good, but it's gotta get a whole lot faster (which I'm sure it will.) It would be really nice if it would in-line the source links it summarized piece of info from too.
I've been around since September 2007 (heh), when—iirc—Michael Arrington mentioned it on TechCrunch.

HN has definitely changed over the past 15.5 years, but then again so have I. That's just an inevitability, though. My perspective on technology, the world, and my own life have changed quite a bit from the age of 25 to 40.
It's a tricky case because they do provide the `big""` macros for literals, and mention in BigFloat's docs that:

BigFloat(x::AbstractString) is identical to parse. This is provided for convenience since decimal literals are converted to
Float64 when parsed, so BigFloat(2.1) may not yield what you expect.

...
Examples
≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡

julia> BigFloat(2.1) # 2.1 here is a Float64
2.100000000000000088817841970012523233890533447265625

However, saying RTFM is not a solution, especially for not-too-frequent parts of the language like BigFloats. It's still a trap many people are going to fall for.

The solution here is a good linter though, not adding more work to the already overstressed compiler. It comes back to the issue of Julia needing more mature, easy-to-work-with tooling, that could say "hey, this is technically allowed, but you probably didn't mean this".
Rust seems to be good for language designers thanks to a combination of features - enums that can contain data (aka tagged unions) and exhaustive matching on all variants of that enum with the match statement. This makes it easy to model all the token types of the language. Good performance helps as well.

I reckon other languages could replicate this combination, it’s not very hard. Dart added this feature recently. I just don’t know why it’s taken so long for tagged unions + exhaustive match to become widely adopted.
Disagree partly. Here we are preventing actively the natural circles of small fires in the lifecycle of a forest. We bring up that we need to introduce them at least in a controlled manner. Some people say no because xyz. Well these people need to cover the incalculable sometime damages that causes.
The younger to older Stanford matching service part got me laughing, good one. Lots of truth there.
This is the general message, and is extremely poisonous and insidious. "Arsonists are heros"

Thousands of puppets ear-whispered to break the laws. Then there came the consequences, the dry, the mud flood, the people killed and the houses burnt. The best joke is to blame the green and the hippies.
Kudos for showing up and recognizing that the industry is terrible.

The other commenters in this thread should read your post.
I wonder about the area ecosystem - I think it got unbalanced after the 1906 earthquake in san francisco that caused them to (tragically) log all the redwoods.

What has grown back is groups of ~ 7 redwoods clustered around the former trunk of a felled old-growth redwood. They are more numerous and denser. I suspect with several trees competing, there will never be the thousand-year-old ecosystem again in the area.
Redwoods are touch even when you do cut them down. The trunks will put up water shoots immediately, and you'll have another small tree in a couple of years. The problem is all the other species that live in an old growth forest can't survive in a brand new forest.
AGI seems plausible enough but especially for the other two, I don't think we can take it for granted that the development of these technologies is imminent; that it will be economical, ethical, or just vaguely wise to use them; or that they will be generally good for mental health and quality of life, those things not necessarily being aligned with what does the most for the survival of our species, which inevitably comes up in discussions of being a space-faring civilization.

A comfortable life on a healthy Earth, with less disease and suffering, privacy if you want it, liberty, and favorable opportunities seems both more achievable and reliably "good".
I’ve noticed over the last two years a significant decline in the quality of the comments and front page posts on HN.

I blame this partially on the larger tech sites referencing and linking back to HN, so a new…demographic..of online users are now here.

Some days HN is really good, and I’m enjoying the commentary and creators posting, other days I feel like I’m on Digg with reddit quality replies and attacks.

I’m still here, I check almost daily, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say the quality has gone downhill
With hindsight we can see their mistakes but isn't following the expert line the best thing to do in an uncertain situation?
PDFtk, the pdf toolkit
It's called "regulatory capture"[1]. As a CEO If you manage to accomplish it, you get +100 HP.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
There aren't too many hardcore engineering jobs. They are being done in startups where hard problems are being solved, and even there the average startup is just a website which is acting as a broker in a two-sided marketplace, or some variant thereof.

If you step back and think about it, it makes sense. The majority of companies are one-trick ponies, maybe following up with a few additional products. Incremental development is the path of least risk once product-to-market fit in a large market with high growth is achieved. As public companies (and late-stage startups or private companies) are incentivized to reduce risk, the majority of the people will be doing incremental work. The growth of the pseudo-technical managerial class in the form of Product Managers, Project Managers, and umpteen levels of mid-level managers further encourages the relative lack of 'hardcore engineering'.
I imagine that as you add more nines, you start to hit more problems that are more out of your control. Like, how many nines do your backup diesel generators have?
> Apple cares about privacy, unless you work at Apple (2021)

Yeah. Until you read the TOS.

"You can turn off wi-fi, location, cellular data, but not for Apple apps".
> No real funny business with OpenAI.

Well, except for the funny business such as backpedaling on being "open", trying to be a billion dollar company while pretending they aren't trying to be a billion dollar company, etc.

And with Sam Altman personally, it's really, really hard for me to get past all that WorldCoin stuff and pretend it never happened.
Truly impressed by the level of performance out of laptop class hardware the past few years. I think it's also great for home server/lab options from Beelink to MinisForum and the like, you can get pretty powerful machines for server use that sip power when inactive, but can do just about anything you might need from them.
> Because the salaries have been stagnant since the 70s and the cost of living/existing has sky rocketed.

I couldn't find info about salaries per se, but average hourly wage in the US increased by around 800% since 1970.
I disagree. There are some tools that really help by taking friction out of the way. A well-tuned text editor and a few good bash aliases can keep you focused on your task. Good tools are digital mise en place [1].

The problem is that these productivity tools can become tools for procrastination. You get to feel productive without actually doing anything. An out-of-control todo list or backlog becomes a wishlist.

1. https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/mise-en-place
Ask HN: ChatGPT=daily journal. Can I count on OpenAI to become a utility?
Does bad-faith propaganda not qualify as fraudulent content?