skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bion:

What’s your modern update on this article from 1978? Today is 2023-05-17 and this is on the first page of hacker news. Can you find actionable advice here for prompt engineers?

$ARTICLE

GPT-4:

This article from 1978 discusses the idea of natural language programming, which is the concept of programming computers using languages that are more like human languages, as opposed to the structured and formal programming languages that we use today. The author argues that such an approach is not feasible due to the imprecision and ambiguity inherent in natural languages, and the historical precedent of mathematics flourishing only after adopting formal symbolisms.

Looking at this concept from a modern perspective (2023), natural language programming is still not the norm, but there have been significant advancements in natural language processing (NLP) technologies. The development of sophisticated AI models such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 by OpenAI have demonstrated the ability of machines to understand and generate human-like text based on prompts. However, these models do not imply the feasibility of natural language programming. Instead, they are used in applications such as chatbots, translation services, and tools for generating human-like text.

In terms of applying the article's insights to today's software engineers, there are a few key points to consider:

1. *Understanding of Formal Languages:* Despite advancements in NLP, the importance of formal languages for programming remains. Engineers should have a deep understanding of the programming languages they use. The ability to think logically and algorithmically is crucial, and this is best facilitated by formal languages.

2. *Designing Interfaces:* The argument for "narrow interfaces" is more relevant than ever. As software systems become more complex, the need for well-designed and specific interfaces increases. Engineers should strive to create interfaces that are clear, concise, and precise in their function and communication.

3. *Natural Language Processing Skills:* While natural language programming might not be feasible, the importance of NLP is growing. Understanding how to use and implement NLP technologies could be beneficial for creating more intuitive user interfaces and interactions.

4. *Communication Skills:* The article criticizes the ambiguity of natural language, but in the human realm, effective communication is crucial. Engineers should cultivate their ability to communicate clearly and precisely, both in their code and their interactions with others.

In conclusion, while natural language programming might not be viable, the lessons from this 1978 article remain relevant. The need for precision, formalism, and clear interfaces in programming continues to be important, and the growing role of natural language processing technologies presents new opportunities and challenges for today's engineers.
I disagree I am afraid. We DO need a very large change.

That does not mean we will get one. I actually think we will just adapt (as best as we are able). Remember: the change required is a matter of physics and economics. That change being politically or morally unacceptable would not make it any less necessary.

But by your own admission we have do everything we are willing to do (and had a pandemic), and barely touched the 2nd differential. That's the opposite of progress (it's continued progress in the wrong direction). At this rate, we will still be decades from sustainable emissions long after I am dead (and the earth has warmed beyond liveability)
No I’m thinking that scaling trolls up has diminishing returns and we’re already peak troll.
Source-available might be more practical in this case. Low-quality PRs and issue reports can be a massive drain on a project. A IRS tax-payer tool is about the most likely project I could think of to attract massive amounts of that.
KeePass flaw allows retrieval of master password, PoC is public
Same. Lost a perfectly good G403 Hero to double clicking and spinning out. A quick perusal through r/MouseReview shows that this is nearly an epidemic among Logitech users

PSA: optical switches cannot ever get the double click issue. There are quality inexpensive optical switch mice to choose from as well.
A common concern I see is people being worried that the reaction to having "how much of our user base actually uses these features" answered will be to remove the feature entirely, when in practice it is more of "we think implementation A of the feature is no longer in use and we have migrated everyone to implementation B, is that the case?" or "we have implementation A produce user visible effects, while we have implementation B run parallel to it to detect divergences, have any been detected in the wild in the past X months?".

In Rust we've had large migrations like that (the "new" borrow checker comes to mind) and we had a really long periods of time where they were tested against the latest crate versions on crates.io until crater came back clean, and even then we had bug reports about regressions in the wild only after it was released on stable.

For me personally there's one big blind spot when testing only against published code, no matter how big the corpus is: humans are excellent fuzzers and the malformed code they write and try to compile is hard to replicate. Having visibility into uncommon cases that are only visible on users machines would be incredibly useful. An example of this could be the "botched" 1.52.0 Rust release[1], where invalid incremental compilations were changed from silent to visible Internal Compiler Errors in nightly for several releases to the point where the team felt all of the outstanding incr comp bugs related to them had been addressed, but when turned on in stable immediately hit users in the real world, making it necessary to do an emergency dot-release reverting that change. If we had telemetry on stable compilers, instead of turning on the silent to ICE change we could have added a metric for the silent error and know ahead of time that the feature wasn't ready for prime time. With more telemetry we could have known what was causing this. Snooping over a user's shoulder while they hit the case could make identifying the bug trivial, but of course then that user would then turn around and ask me in unfriendly terms "who are you and how did you get in?"

Arguments can be made against even implementing telemetry, and they can be compelling enough to elect against it, but shouting down the conversation from even happening is not helpful.

[1]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2021/05/10/Rust-1.52.1.html
I love how he wants stability for himself but front page of the blog is filled with dunking on conservatives. There is some nuance in that one can want Windows 95 for him/herself and still allow others to have Windows 11. But having "Windows 95 states" and "Windows 11 states" should be at least considered as a solution and also, what if people forcibly install Windows 11 on your kids laptops and don't even bother telling you? Anyway, since he wants to force everyone to take COVID vaccines, surely he can't object to being forced to install the latest OS that still gets up to date security patches?
while i disagree with the ruling, that is not what is happening. they are ruling on what happens on a german server.

the question is, if something that is illegal in a country, may still be produced in the country if it is only offered outside of that country. this is certainly not clear-cut.
He writes about all these productivity tools and that he stopped using them. For me the same, but the one I still use and helps me is org mode. It excels at customizability and simplicity.
How I use it: I write down my plan for the day, and I clock in and clock out, keep track on how much time I spend on actual work and doing useless stuff (like browsing the internet). When I saw how much time of the day you are actually doing nothing during time you have decided for your self to be productive, well that was a shock.
I'm now entering my eighth year of working full-time remote since 2008. Had a big gap between 2013 and COVID, but I don't see myself ever going back.

South Carolina is too choice of a place to live.
Yeah, most mice I've opened up have the same rectangular black switch (Omron d2fc or similar). They're pretty easy to replace.
Downvotes, why? You guys are weird.

- https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...

Even if downloading it for the purpose of having a backup is your goal, it's still piracy in the UK and the US. There is no difference.

Fair use means you are allowed to make a copy of your OWN legally owned/purchased copy. But if the only copy is on a digital platform, then you aren't allowed to have a pirated copy as a backup measure.

You can disagree with me if you want to, but them's the legality of it.
Read this; helped me get to staff. Some takeaways:

- If your management chain isn't supporting you into a staff promo, it's because they don't value the work you're currently doing.

- A staff engineer isn't a highly-productive senior engineer. Stop optimizing for the things that got you promoted to senior.
> and any job I would consider would have to be 100% remote.

The problem is that if you lose your job this plan will crumble on first contact with the enemy. I'm job hunting right now, and between 'ghost jobs', bad recruiters, low ballers, take-homes with unstated requirements, leetcode grinding, system design studying, optimization for "best talent, lowest salary", and the fact that workers have absolutely no power means you don't have a choice how you work at some point.

Once savings start to dry up, you'll work in person. You'll move if they ask, you'll take a lower salary and a worse position... after all, do you want to eat?
I have a pet theory that much of what we call mental health and chronic illness will eventually be traced back as a symptom of some causative factor - most likely infectious or environmental - rather than being a base illness as we think of them now.

Much as we don't think of "fever" as an illness any more, I suspect "depression" will become descriptive rather than predictive - which, to an extent, it already is, at least according to the DSM as I understand.

It's also possible that we'll see it as something that is multifactorial - some genetic susceptibility combined with environmental and/or infectious triggers.
Are you high? It said being free from government ids is a human right for a human planet in a thread about net neutrality.
Budgie might be worth checking out (I've used it on Manjaro): https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop It was extremely responsive on a 2009 laptop.

Otherwise whatever AntiX and Puppy use, which are mouse-driven UIs, are probably lower-resource than Budgie.
True, but I'd certainly consider those "cities" and not "rural" but you can draw the line elsewhere; whatever or wherever you draw the line a substantial group of people live "in a metro area".
Neat trick, buy I really don't see this as something I'd use unless I'm in a pinch. Phones (pretty much every phone) will heat up too much in this scenario.
It has to be something else. Lots of people around the world live in dire conditions, in sub-modern conditions, picking garbage dumps bathing in ditch water. And they and their friends are equally poor and living under cramped tin roof dwellings. They're not doing "great" from an economic standpoint, but may be doing well from a social standpoint and mental health standpoint. They may not be individually tougher, but as a social group, they seem tougher.
Here you go, right in the documentation you get that TCP streams are streams with additional qualifiers. Not simply streams. The whole thing we are arguing about: TCP streams are subset of streams.

> Not sure what your reference to buffering or async buffers and XML has to do with the topic.
An illustrative point for what happens when assumptions from a contrived case are applied on a more relaxed case.
I have a similar, but not as bad, situation here. About a 20 minute walk to the bus station. If I go very early, I hit the reduced schedule and so I could wait up to an hour (typically less, that’s the max). Then the ride is around a half hour.

These sort of transit systems seem reasonable-ish in comparison to, say, the rest of the US (if that is where you are from—it is the only standard I have to compare against). But it is actually not really practical if it wipes out 4 hours of your day. I mean, assuming your are some sort of programmer (since this is hackernews), then your time is probably worth around $40-$50 an hour at least… $200 a day should be able to buy a better option somehow.

I like my trip: it is good to take a walk anyway, there’s a nice coffee shop near the bus stop, and I usually get a seat so I can do something work related… but even still is is just on the cusp of not really being practical, and I’m probably giving it a mental discount for ideological affinity.
The model-view-controller pattern in web projects
For electric cars, I don't believe there's an ownership period required. But for example of the right way to do it, in New York if you buy an electric car then at the time of purchase the state will pay $500 to $2000 to reduce the price of the car for you based on the all-electric range, with no requirement about income levels and nothing to file on your personal income taxes.

https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Drive-Clean-Rebate-F...
Guide to ChatGPT prompt engineering for non-technical people
Yeah, I don't think that's a good metric for "greater metro". Some of the "major" airports they listed were the closest for a grand total of about 3000 people.

I live in a small rural college town in upstate NY that has its own municipal airport; there are more than 3000 people here (especially during the school year!) for whom this is the closest airport, and it's...well, it's tiny, with (AFAIK) zero regular flights to or from anywhere else.

The closest cities are Utica and Syracuse, each about 30 miles away. Only Syracuse has an airport that's worth driving to if you don't own your own plane (SYR is on the list as being closest for 1.2 million people—probably including me? The maps aren't loading, so I can't tell), and I've never heard anyone describe Syracuse, NY as being a "greater metro area".
The change in the rate of population growth is also negative and has been for some time.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/population-g....

At present it still seems that we are doing very little relative to the risks and costs. Far less than seems prudent.
Dashcams should 100% be required in every car. Too many accidents are a he-said-she-said situation, sometimes without any impartial witnesses.
But I'm not sure anywhere was gutted to see them go. Some people hate being around others, many love denser communities.
https://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/

It's just a bit too much grunt work to make something that lots of people really want to use. Tax codes change very year, there are 50 states in the US with different tax codes, it's a lot of work to review contributions (are you a tax lawyer familiar with all 50 states ...)

Lots of successful open source projects are started by one person, who spends a few years making something very useful for themselves, and sharing it, then slowly growing the contributor pool. But this kind of project is a lot more work than just doing your own taxes! And nobody wants to use it as-is 2 years later, it needs more maintenance work every year to be baseline useful, a lot more than it takes to just do your own taxes.
CatB Revisited
I get it, but seriously trying to wrap my head around it. But their example code took me a minute.

And their demo code looks like:

#include "sqlite3.h"

#ifdef USE_LOCAL_DATABASE
#define DATABASE "/var/databases/invoice.sqlite"
#else
#define DATABASE "sqlitecloud://username@password:localhost/invoice.sqlite"
#endif

int main (int argc, char **argv) {
sqlite3 *db;
rc = sqlite3_open(DATABASE, &db);
}

It took me a while to figure out they they are trying to replace the sqlite3.h file with a patched version that includes handling their own remote protocol.

They (in theory) provide:

> SQLite Cloud provides an open-source C library that is 100% source code compatible(1) with SQLite (based on our official SQLiteCloud C SDK).

Why not ship a sqlite3_cloud.h file? You're already using a conditional macro anyway. I assume you could also swap this version in when compiling something like Python, but the friction for a company to use this is really high. Especially when SQLite is designed for a protocol-less, local, experience. I think the fly.io method of moving an application+sqlite3 database both to the same cloud node is probably the better choice.

Or, it might be possible to do something with SQLite's virtual FS module to keep it all vanilla SQLite and still store the full database remotely.
In my experience these people are usually in the types of environments that most engineers hate to work in. Environments completely void of the creature comforts we're used to for solving the task at hand because they are working in a new domain that likely needs new abstractions. Tools and libraries such as testing, build, automation, data structures, concurrency, fundamental primitives etc. that are suitable and at the right level of abstraction for the task at hand.

Really bad engineers see these environments and complain without doing anything about it, ultimately leaving the project. Slightly better engineers complain about the tools and blaze ahead anyway leaving a mess in their wake. The great ones I've been so lucky to work with pave the way on those fronts at the same time as solving the problem at hand and make it easier for their successors. It's quite beautiful when you see it.
Or you can delay the inevitable by making it hard to transition to remote. You can contribute in ways big and small. Have that cake supply flowing for a few more decades. And if enough people resist and companies give up on fully remote, you don't even have to worry about losing those cakes.
It is just a symptom of youth and social media addiction.

I forget what the stat was in 1999 but it is something absurd. Like 90% of the US was against gay marriage. In 2022, 71% were pro gay marriage.

I am gay and when someone says bullshit like this is just drives me crazy. As if a gay person in high school today can possibly relate to my experience of being gay in high school in the 90s. It is such an ignorant statement and view.
As someone who has more or less successfully learned to deal with depression, ADHD, anxiety, etc., the trick is basically doing everything considered "healthy."

We don't understand all of the mechanisms of long-term illnesses like depression, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, etc. but we do know how to fight them: exercise and good diet. *

Some processes in the human body obviously get disrupted under modern conditions, so it's important to give your body something it's a little more used to: more movement, more traditional foods.

* (Obviously, it's not going to automatically fix depression in all cases, but it's absolutely worth fighting the good fight if you can. Other treatments are definitely worth trying too.)
Looks interesting! a high-performance vector database service that has full SQL support, built on top of ClickHouse (famous for its speed as well), and is also cost effective to use.
Timezones cover Canada and Latin America. That's where most of our new hires are coming from.
the clock app in windows 10 is pretty good for this - you can create multiple
I am currently working on a low traffic (back office) web app for a client. It runs off of a single AWS EC2 instance (2 vcpu arm). When I looked at the hourly pricing I thought it would be $30/month, but the actual bill has been more like $4/month, I suppose due to an idling discount or perhaps some free tier credit or something else.

The web app is fronted cloudflare (free tier). On the box itself I have caddy set up as a reverse proxy with the cloudflare cert, then uvicorn serving my python asgi (starlette) app. The app uses a local SQLite db.

I’m still working out some of the operational stuff like backups and monitoring but so far I am very pleased with the setup. I’m learning a lot and for the first time I do not feel like there is some monstrous pile of complexity behind a curtain.

Setup takes some time but I have detailed notes and it gets easier every time I run through. Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to hear more details.
Yeah, lol, the OOP thing is a bit dated. Maybe I should have said blockchain.
Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
Look up the termux community. There are actually people in third world countries who are learning programming using their phones. I've seen awesome builds which use Android phones as their primary CPU unit and cobble on scavenged monitors and keyboards and mice. It's honestly fucking awesome
Have you been since it reopened after CZU?
The existence of someone having a harder time than you does not invalidate your own issues.

I'm fucking thrilled that most American schoolkids feel comfortable enough in their lives that anxiety over things like shootings and bullying and slander and hatred can come through and be acknowledged.
Clarkio's VS Code Extension Template
You can't really talk both about H1Bs and naturalized citizens at the same time here. The topic of conversation is worker visas. And, conveniently for you, it takes fucking forever for an Indian citizen in the US on H1B to get naturalized.

But I'll ask you: do you think that naturalized citizens of south asian descent should leave the country? You and I disagree politically, why can't I demand that you expatriate?
> If remote work is established properly, then your remote job will end instantly and will be shipped to Canada or Latin America (if bosses care about timezones) or to Eastern Europe or India

That was already happening. Remote work doesnt change anything with that.

Moreover, dont think that the senior dev in those other places will work for American companies for dimes like that. They will want the equivalent of top dollar in their country and that ends up being closer to the cost of the remote American dev when the obscene real estate/housing costs and general cost of living in places like SF or NY are removed from the equation. If you dont give that remote overseas dev the competitive rate in his/her country, he will either go with someone who does or he will just follow the traditional, more respectable career track in his country - like moving to manager positions in a respectable local corporation or launching his own business.

And if the American company goes for junior devs who are actually willing to be working for dimes when they start, they will get sloppy jobs like how they get with such cheap outsourcing now. And at the moment those juniors gain some experience, they will either ask for competitive pay or they will leave and take the traditional career route.
Sorry to be that guy, but IME the fidgety & anxious feeling is almost always some need in one’s life that is being unmet. If you sit with that feeling it often becomes clear exactly what the source is.

YMMV especially if you’ve experienced some serious trauma.
And yet when NASA went to the moon, they had telemetry data.
I gave up the moto when my wife and I started trying for a kid, and this is by far the thing I miss most about it. Instant mental clarity on demand. I bike a lot now but the lower stakes mean it's not quite the same.
I don't think boxing is really the best sport for brain health.
This ^
Though, I think we need to find data to support the claims in this thread. More income and more demand in housing could increase prices,but also increase the viability of building houses and just as plausibly lead to an increase in home construction.