skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The US Forest Service was started in 1905 in part to reduce forest fires. The result of that policy was forests with a much higher tree density than naturally occurred otherwise.

Other changes include that around 1900 settlers of the western US introduced livestock that ate grass, which in turn removed potential fuel for smaller fires, and enabled smaller trees to grow.

After a hundred years of fire prevention, you end up with very different forest density. As the fire manager of Santa Fe National Forest noted: “On this forest, it’s averaging about 900 trees per acre. Historically it was probably about 40.” The result is a much bigger fire risk than previously.
https://unintendedconsequenc.es/morals-of-the-moment/
This insightful article by Gregor Hohpe covers:

* Evolution of programming abstractions.
* Challenges of cloud abstractions.
* Importance of tools like stack traces for debugging, especially in distributed systems.

Gregor emphasizes that effective cloud abstractions are crucial but tricky to get right. He points out that debugging at the abstraction level can be complex and underscores the value of good error messages and observability.

The part about the "unhappy path" particularly resonated with me:

"The unhappy path is where many abstractions struggle. Software that makes building small systems easy but struggles with real-world development scenarios like debugging or automated testing is an unwelcome version of “demoware” - it demos well, but doesn’t actually work in the real world. And there’s no unlock code. ... I propose the following test for vendors demoing higher-level development systems:

1. Ask them to enter a typo into one of the fields where the developer is expected to enter some logic.

2. Ask them to leave the room for two minutes while we change a few random elements of their demo configuration. Upon return, they would have to debug and figure out what was changed.

Needless to say, no vendor ever picked the challenge."

Why it interests me?

I'm one of the creators of Winglang (https://github.com/winglang/wing), an open-source programming language for the cloud that allows developers to work at a higher level of abstraction.

We set a goal for ourselves to provide good debugging experience that will allow developers to debug cloud applications in the context of the logical structure of the apps.

After reading this article I think we can rephrase the goal as being able to easily pass Gregor's vendor test from above :)
Not true at any job I’ve ever worked at.
And it wasn't quite dead back then. '89 maybe? Dying, but not yet dead.
Under the prepare the firebreaks ahead of time doctrine, you'd still be on the hook for mustering resources in response to an unscheduled fire as is the case today, but if the firebreaks are already in place and appropriate for the conditions at the time, the response would be watch and wait, and if all goes well, let it burn out without much additional effort.

If conditions aren't appropriate, then you're back to status quo of containing a wildfire; but maybe the firebreaks help somewhat?

(Would need the opinion of someone knowledgable in wildfire fighting rather than random internet peeps to know if this approaches a reasonable idea at all though; I'd wonder if it's reasonable to build and maintain general purpose firebreaks in large forests at all; and what effect that would have on the habitability of the forest for its flora and fauna)
What if you bought a the peak and the house price falls? Negative equity, right?
Both seem to be Windows reviews, any Linux ones around?
Well, yes. That's what "food addiction" is.
Car phone mount with a heat sink on the back could help a good bit.
That's all true to a significant degree. Of course, the reverse expectation was that you'd be a "company man" and spend your career (or at least a decade or two) at the company.
Isn't that the nature of tech? In the past most programmers needed to focus on low level details while today most devs kit together libraries and services and yet there are more then ever and salaries are higher then ever.
I think nobody that enters tech expects that in 20 years we "code" as we do today but we will still build stuff and need to solve problems... and there are enough problems to solve.
The problem for users (not google) is that its an arbitrarily enforced restriction. Of course companies can do whatever they want. Google could ban all programs that import PyTorch on their free tier, too. Totally their choice. It’s also my choice to mention that people should look into alternatives like Replit if they’re worried about a cool notebook they made on Colab randomly getting them in Google TOS trouble.
All you need is a toggle in the settings that is off by default. They also already deal with regional law differences regarding speed camera warnings, so it isn't an insane idea for them to maintain a list of countries where the feature is blocked (although that's not the solution I would prefer)
Exactly this. I take a low level of SSRIs because I am an otherwise highly functioning person who has a tendency to get into severe anxious spirals that can last days on end and induce vomiting. I do all the things that a person should do to mitigate, including meditating, exercising, lots of friends, etc etc.

I know that my medication dulls my most intense emotions, but that is the point. It is slightly sad knowing that I don't experience the highest highs that I used to, but it is completely worth it to stop experiencing the lowest lows that were completely debilitating. I would stop taking them immediately if I could be assured that I wouldn't fall back into physically debilitating anxiety.
I was randomly watching the YouTubes earlier and they were talking about the magic square [0].

If I were to instruct the robots to mathematically solve this for some value humans have been unable to do so far who do you believe is responsible for the solution, the human asking the question or the AI coming up with the solution?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square
A complete story can be told in under 2 hours. Forcing developers to bloat their games for no reason other than to avoid the refund system is an absurdly idiotic suggestion.
That definitely isn't the requirements for most engineering students and it sounds like an honors program (I've helped undergrads do their thesis). But I'll also tell you that not only does every CS student with a 4 year degree still do all the crazy interviewing, but so do Masters, PhDs (far surpassing your requirements), and people with a decade of job experience (even from a FAANG company). The whiteboard, leetcode, and takehome work never goes away and applies universally. Your argument would make more sense if this was a filter for non-degreed individuals or just green candidates. But it isn't.
https://beepberry.sqfmi.com/docs/enclosures
I came out online in the mid 90s and in rural MI in 2000. I also find this maddening and frankly it feels kind of like gaslighting. Corrective rape/assault and violent reactions to my sexuality were things I had to seriously consider every time I met new people/was in a new place/in a new situation. Now I generally don't have to worry that if I tell someone I'm gay they'll beat me up or try to 'fix' me. They might make comments or give me a look, but I don't have that fear of people finding out like I had growing up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410870 (3 months ago)

--

SkiFree in the Browser (2013)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5247965
Before to send Greenwood backwards in time to conquer Berlin, maybe we should just assume that Bing is stupid?...
It costs nothing amortized over the hundred hires you wouldn't fire in the first month. If you fire often, this law is good to stop you from doing that.
Etsy promised shopping with a soul. Then the scammers came
I've found that Bard and Bing are incessant people pleasers. You can tell it anything you want and it will say something like "Oh, sorry, you're right" and regurgitate whatever bullshit you've given it back to you. I don't see how anyone thinks these are useful for fact retrieval.
I feel like this article doesn't explain how `nth-last-child` works clearly.

The example uses (n + 3) in a list of five items. Start counting from the 3rd item - ok, the visualization[1] shows us counting from the 3rd-from-last, so now I'm already confused. And then we count "until the end", which actually shows us counting back toward the beginning[2]. And we end up with 3 items. Are they the last 3? The first 3? I can't tell. The author should have chosen a number that didn't sit at the halfway point of the total number of items.

The description makes it sound like we start at 5 -> 4 -> 3, then select 3 items, so we select 3 -> 4 -> 5. But that's a tautology. I think what it means is that we start at 1 -> 2 -> 3, and select 3 -> 4 -> 5... is that correct?

[1] https://ishadeed.com/assets/css-has-nth-last-child/nth-last-...
[2] https://ishadeed.com/assets/css-has-nth-last-child/nth-last-...
Have you tried setting an excluded zone and include your whole SMB share in it
An empty HTML page works on both. Add some margin and spacing and it keeps working.

After that, what you can do is ruin it, targetting a webpage for a specific screen size.
There's a huge difference between "it can be true" and "probably stealing stuff".
What I find most troubling is how resources and power get concentrated in hands of the few, and the rest of us (99%+ of the population) are left to deal with the consequences. The few laws that do exist to prevent benefiting parties from raping and pillaging the earth and society at large are slaps on the wrist at best. The default is to toe the line and/or overstep legality and morality. That's what's so depressing about it all.
This is because its difficult to decouple the code from the requirements. And the full requirements are never contained within a doc. So you need an engineer to look at the code to see how its done. This is going to change.
Transformers are about converting some input data (usually text) to numeric representations, then modifying those representations through several layers to generate a target representation.

In LLMs, this means go from prompt to answer. I'll cover inference only, not training.

I can't quite ELI5, but process is roughly:

- Write a prompt
- Convert each token in the prompt (roughly a word) into numbers. So "the" might map to the number 45.
- Get a vector representation of each word - go from 45 to [.1, -1, -2, ...]. These vector representations are how a transformer understands words.
- Combine vectors into a matrix, so the transformer can "see" the whole prompt at once.
- Repeat the following several times (once for each layer):
- Multiply the vectors by the other vectors. This is attention - it's the magic of transformers, that enables combining information from multiple tokens together. This generates a new matrix.
- Feed the matrix into a linear regression. Basically multiply each number in each vector by another number, then add them all together. This will generate a new matrix, but with "projected" values.
- Apply a nonlinear transformation like relu. This helps model more complex functions (like text input -> output!)

Note that I really oversimplified the last few steps, and the ordering.

At the end, you'll have a matrix. You then convert this back into numbers, then into text.
> Even software engineers / software developers who have accredited engineering degrees

And software engineers with {a Masters,a PhDs,10 years of experience}
Understanding database indexes in PostgreSQL
If ExampleCo laid off 1000 javascript developers last week and is trying to hire 20 ML developers this week, then it's true to say they're hiring again, but it's also true that it can be hard for a dev to find a job.
https://archive.is/qEaU3
> this might be a camera recording the driver-distraction

I'm not sure why you would want to use your phone to record yourself while driving to see if you're distracted.
>> This seems backwards to me. German law is supposed to be consistent with the constitution, so is, essentially, a logically consistent system. If you can prove a logical inconsistency with basic law, then you can win a case on that basis. That makes it more or less understandable, because the entire corpus of law follows logically from a short, comprehensible kernel.

This is typically the case in common law systems with a written constitution as well (the US, Australia, India, etc). Laws not consistent with the constitution generally get stuck down as invalid to the extent of any inconsistency.

In practice, of course, most day-to-day cases do not engage with constitutional principles in either system. If you're facing a criminal charge of larceny, and you're searching the Constitution / Basic Law for your defence, I might diplomatically call your approach... bold.

>> Secondly, precedent is a pretty good guideline to what will actually happen.

>> Making precedent binding seems a bit crazy, to be honest, because if the precedent contains mistakes (which it inevitably does), then those mistakes become binding also, right? So logical inconsistency and contradiction is inevitably part of the common law system?

This is a great question! Precedents can and are overturned in several ways in common law systems. A higher court can overturn a lower precedent, and generally also its own previous precedents. A lower court is more restricted, but perhaps the most common way to avoid a precedent is to "distinguish" it - this means to basically claim that the two cases are not alike, and so the precedent ought not apply. (Very loosely speaking, precedent is only binding on alike cases - this is the basic theory of precedent, that the case has already, in fact, been decided before. The Latin term you often hear for this is stare decisis.) This is tricky, and higher courts will rap lower courts on the knuckles if they're not obeying precedent that binds them without good cause.

But more broadly it's important to remember that precedent ("common law") is subordinate to written law ("statute law"). So if the legislature passes a law, and the judiciary interprets it in a way that the legislature doesn't like, the legislature is entirely free to amend that law to correct the court's understanding, which renders the precedent moot. The one exception is constitutional law, which might be more complicated to amend (referenda may be required), so courts have to tread carefully.

(None of the above is legal advice.)
They may be right, they may be wrong.

Only time will tell :)
Unkind response, and the API link goes to info about Stability's API, not info about an API for interacting with the StableStudio app.
Yes, it was possible, but like all collective action problems it involves people organizing for the general good at a cost to themselves.

Everyone in the world masking (with effective masks), distancing a bit, and using standard sanitary practices edit to add, because I forgot - for two months, and a few with immune compromises spending some more months isolated, would eliminate a significant chunk of all contagious respiratory illnesses, not just have stopped this single one from spreading.

But it's not going to happen because a significant fraction of the population: 1) don't care (either from the get go or after a period of time), 2) think spreading the disease is a positive ('builds immunity'), or 3) make 'statistical decisions' that fail at points.

Edit to add: I hope the downvotes are because I forgot to add the "for two months" to paragraph two. This could all have been over and done with between April and June of 2020 (or maybe a few months later to give time to ramp up mask production). Oh well, at least big Pharma made big bucks.
I've often wondered what alternative schedules could do for somebody's time management. For example, instead of 24 x 60 minute hours, how about 32 x 45m hours? Of course your actual time spent won't change much. Instead of 8 hours sleep you get 10.6, etc. But how would it change how we perceive time? Seems like it would be an interesting experiment.
Sweden’s Covid death rate among lowest in Europe, despite avoiding strict lockdowns

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
Again, where do you guys work? Maybe lets not use software engineering. If I asked you today, to do requirements gathering for building a bridge across the Mississippi river, could you do it? Don't you think you would have to learn about materials, regulations, land procurement, tensile and compression strengths and all the tradeoffs of the above? And once you learned all of that and you can finally present the requirements, would it be fair to call you non-technical?
That's actually a great supporting point to why AI will wipe most developers out.

What you're referring to is one of the AI systems that I mention that the top ~25% will still write code for directly. It's a governing AI system.

Most software development doesn't involve tasks that can very easily kill people with N thousand pounds of fast moving metal.

Most software development is trivial by comparison in terms of challenge/complexity. It'll be wiped out accordingly. Why would you need anything more than a human handler to sign off on AI development as it goes down a path? It'll be able to build drastically faster than a median developer can and it can do it without getting tired (its productivity won't implode after 4-6 hours). All you'll need are some human handlers to approve key decisions during the process of development (to ensure you get to the end product that is desired).
Like being dropped into a very other world. I'll have to dig some out and read again. The feel is like it's written by someone not sane. Gormenghast, a least the first 2 books, felt the same - not-quite-sane leaking through. Then again I may not have been at the time so maybe a bit of projection.

Anyway thanks for the reminder!
Thanks for checking out the chat transcripts!

Ya, that one is some real work I was doing on the tool itself by using the tool. I use aider extensively while I code now. Aider has authored 150+ commits in that repo in the last week or so.

Many of the other transcripts are more "toy problems" to help convey the experience of working with aider to folks unfamiliar with the tool.
How far away is the VS code plugin?
managing emotions is at the crux of all of this. those productivity apps try to remove the emotion from certain decisions and give you some organizational help so you can act procedurally throughout your day. giving yourself a deadline is another approach coming that tries to focus the emotions you already feel into a productive force. a deadline will provide clarity because your subconscious will try to prioritize it over the small details that those productivity apps will have you continuously document, which can be a pain and sometimes create more friction when you're stuck with zero momentum.

if your life is already moving fast and you are managing a ton of different things, I think those productivity apps will provide a great resource to remind you of other things that need to get done and remove the friction that comes with context switching.
Wendy's Announces Partnership with Pipedream Labs for “Instant Pickup”
I used to prefer going to a regular cashier. But early in the pandemic, when all the health advice was about contact-spreading and hand washing, we switched to self-checkout with a cart and doing the bagging back at our car, where we left our own bags.

Now, it's become a habit and I realize we prefer not to have the distracted or rushed staff smashing all our groceries into bags in the worst order possible. It's also become almost a towers of hanoi game for me to carefully unload our full cart onto that little weighing platform and then back into the cart. I will defer buying alcohol since it requires regular cashier service here.

Early on, I fought the systems and swore at terrible UX, until I found how to pace myself for the machine. It's also a team sport. While I amuse myself with the object packing problem, my wife likes to audit the pricing system. Almost all our calls for support have to do with her principled refusal to accept their errors, which are almost always in the store's favor. It borders on fraud how often the scanned prices do not match what was published in weekly ads or posted on the shelf.
I always have my phone screen off while driving since it's hooked up via Android Auto, but I've had my phone shut off many times on warmer days. I'm not sure how I could reasonably shield it from sunlight and use it as a dash cam at the same time.
S3 standard storage class also says it's 99.99% availability so ... I wonder how hard it is to get beyond that?

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/
Software Developers on Mastodon
The blog picture looks to be generated with dalle2. The quality was mind blowing less than a year ago, while it is now a mess of artefacts compared to dalle2.5 (Bing), adobe firefly, stable diffusion, and of course MidJourney.
> Union worker issues

When did that happen? I've only heard about India changing the labour laws to inhumanekennels to keep apple happy.

(Because everyone knows overworked and tired workers results in better quality)
Suicide around the teen years is so sad because it shows just how difficult life can be in that time, and how little support is being given to so many thousands of teens.

Being a teenager in the U.S. means you're:

1. Going through puberty still and have all the crazy emotional states that go along with that.

2. Possibly having sex for the first time, and hopefully you're making the right decisions in that area.

3. Finishing up the required and free part of your education. This means you have to make decisions that will drastically alter the rest of your entire life, such as whether will you go to school, where you'll go, how much debt are you willing to take on, and what you'll study. If you make the wrong decisions here, you could suffer financially for decades to come.

There's much more but it's really a crazy time in life, and I've seen so many parents who treat their teenagers like they're simply overly-dramatic children who can't possibly understand how hard "real life" is. Meanwhile those same parents in part only experienced difficult adult lives due to the fact they made poor decisions in their teenage years.

To me, it all comes down to parenting. It comes down to making sure your children have strong support systems. I lost a close friend, a 19 year old, a couple of years back to suicide. An outsider would have assumed his parents were extremely supportive, but they were unfortunately too focused on his material success vs. his emotional and social success.
Yep, I weighed the risk of the poor Devterm reviews when deciding to preorder the uConsole. My hope is with the uConsole being a simpler device with a traditional 4:3 display etc there will be more scope to just treat it like a plain ole Linux computer, but absolutely it's a niche toy for me too - neither of the devices make financial sense as a work tool!

I also love the design of the Devterm and would absolutely have bought one if reviews were better.
>Not all complaints about society are ridiculous, of course. But this particular one always was. The person spouting it was always a disaffected loser.

I found the article reasonable as a whole, but this line stuck out at me. 'Losers' are just people who aren't doing very well out of the current social and economic system. Of course they are more likely to complain about society than winners! Discounting critiques of society than come from losers is a little bit like discounting movie reviews from people who didn't like the movie. Or to put it another way, it's like feudal lords discounting critiques of Feudalism because they always seem to come from gross stinky peasants.
What is "a consternation"? I've never heard this term and can't find it referenced anywhere.