skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>We've seen your feedback on Richard Stallman's conference. We are very sorry to be so late in realizing the extent of the implications of organizing this event.

I personally don't like the guy, but to take away his views for the people that were genuinely interested was cowardly.
I've been reading a lot of Asimov lately (though I've not read Foundation yet) and greatly enjoying it. Something I love about his novels is that about halfway through, the characters will start interpreting the situation and making decisions about it, and there's a great deal of sophistication to it. People are often wrong, or even come to the correct conclusion through incorrect means.

Currents of Space is an especially good example here, the characters will spin these complex conspiracy theories and talk themselves into a paranoid position, but in the end the explanations are very simple, but their bigotries prevented them from seeing it.

Which brings me to my next point, I was surprised by how political they were, in a quiet, unassuming way. There's a strong through line of center-left populism and critiques of bigotry and classism and sexism (though Asimov clearly had some blind spots here as well, he's a product of his time after all). He was very artful about constructing scenarios where his critique was apparent, without being explicit and without it feeling forced or in your face.
There are a lot of details, but essentially yes.

To solve that, see the compiler barriers section in https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/memory-barriers.txt
Ask HN: Retired engineers, are you being asked to return to work?
Several years ago, I was pushed out of my full-time job, along with all other engineers over 55. Similar situation for four of seven colleagues in our consulting consortia, where we do occasional side jobs. Our consortia previously numbered 13, but four had got their fill of American employers and went back to their home countries, while two 'near-shored' themselves into Mexico and Argentina.

For last three months, phone has been ringing and email is full of both contract and full-time offers. I have doubled fees and am more selective (fishing and reading and harassing my wife are my preferred tasks). None of this made sense when you look at reports of the thousands of people being kicked to the curb (but maybe that's particular to coders and not hardware engineers). But I did see this:

businessinsider.com/baby-boomer-retirement-surge-spark-forever-labor-shortage-jobs-workers-2023-5

Older workers, are you being sought after? Do you think that gen X and Y will have less stressful employment situations, or will employers always be able to mitigate worker costs?
The thing that brought x86 to supremacy was Itanium and its suppresion of established CPU architectures: Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC
This is almost the same thing I say to people.

To ask GPT about something and be able to determine whether its answer is false or not, you already need to be competent and knowledgeable in that topic. If you're already competent and knowledgeable in a topic, you don't need to ask GPT about it because you already know it.

ChatGPT is not an expert, it's not even written to try to be one, it's fancy phone keyboard prediction with a random element added.

It's great for creative stuff like "write a cut poem about a puppy" but so far literally every technical question I've asked it has been answered incorrectly.
If you’re asserting that intelligence has a genetic component tied to race, the burden on you to demonstrate that connection

You would need to demonstrate that:

“Race” can be defined in a way that has consistent significance (Our current social indicators of race make so sense biologically)

that intelligence is consistently heritable within those racial categories

that genetics are the source of that heritability to the exclusion of other factors

It’s not enough to simply wave your hand to say “they do roughly classify people with similar ancestry together.”

What we do know is that IQ differences correlate strongly to factors totally unrelated to genetics. Look just at the results of IQ studies within Europe - https://i.imgur.com/IcHt0tu.jpg That data is actually pulled from a book that argues in favor of a generic element to intelligence affecting national wealth, but at a national level instead of a racial one - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard_Lynn3/publicati...

The differences the authors find between nations are wildly large. Do you really think that East Germans were nearly 10 IQ points dumber by genetics than the West Germans in 1968-70, or that the Israelis got dumber between 1975 and 1989?

Europeans cluster with Middle Easteners and Central Asians - https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/324/5930/1035/F4.... but the latter groups have universally low IQ, mostly under 90. Palestinians only average 85 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... even though they're genetically the same as Meddeterreaneans, who average as much as 102 (Italy). Why define "white" as "European only" when Arabs, Central Asians, South Asians and North Africans have the same shared mutual ancestry? How is IQ primarily inherited and not environmental when non-European caucasians have uniformly low IQ relative to Euros?

I'd also love for you to explain how IQ is consistently going up over the last 100 years across the west? That's like 4 generations, not anywhere enough time for natural selection to kick in.

Those types of results show up time and time again in IQ studies. Whatever genetic component there is to IQ is less important than the environmental component, AND that the genetic element varies so wildly within even homogenous populations that talking about larger constructed population categories like “race” doesn’t actually say anything useful.
Except expecting everyone to want to go toward managerial roles is a nasty (and very common) antipattern.
well it obviously depends on your usage patterns.

But at a certain point any technology is going to reach the limits of what current hardware and operating system primitives can do.

fsync vs. distributed consensus vs. other tradeoffs w.r.t reliability and consistency are not inherent to "Kafka or similar technologies".
It's inherent to anything that runs on a computer in the real world.

Generally unless your scale is mind-bogglingly big, the ROI on tuning what you already have is going to be way way bigger than just ripping it out because you read a benchmarking article.
Indeed, plus what are you going to do otherwise? Google it. And how will you vet the pages Google returns? Intuition and common sense, and perhaps an appeal to authority.
> age out at about 45

Maybe it's different in America but that just hasn't been my experience in the UK. Loads of people over 50 still working in tech. Obviously most in management but that's to be expected. There are plenty still doing "actual work". I'm not really worried about ageism.

Of course you have to keep learning. Nobody is going to hire a 60 year old who only knows Pascal or whatever (sorry Pascal programmers).
Agreed. Intuit and it’s “competitors” need to stop fighting this and I’m glad to see this being a thing.
Bill Gates had bonds with Epstein. His multi decade marriage fell after the fact became public. He didn't get 1% the flak that Stallman had for commenting about a word to describe Marvin Minsky.
This is the reason that companies like twitter don't allow their paying members to see stuff ad-free.

If they did, then ad revenue from the non-paying members would drop a lot, since now advertisers know that they are no longer targeting the general public, but instead the general public who refuse to pay $8 for a better experience.
If you have legal strategies for avoiding paying 6 figures in taxes ever year, I'm all ears.
Sweat shops usually don't have a six figure entry level salary.
I noticed this when the logo was missing (I have SVG disabled in the browser for security reasons). upvote/downvote buttons are totally invisible to me now as well and unlike the logo in the corner they don't show up as broken, just missing (although they can still be clicked on)

I don't expect many people will have these issues, I know I'm running in a very locked down environment that most people wouldn't want to put up with, and it shouldn't be very hard for me to fix this with a little custom css, I just thought I'd give the feedback since I was impacted and I do try to encourage sites to fail gracefully.
I didn't read the article cuz I don't have accesss

but, so what? you go to any other computer-related job, maybe even for minimal wage

and put effort into learning and
gettings skills and then you try to get into these high comp jobs.

Is it privilege or delusion that grads want to start with top tech companies?
LLMs are ran by companies. Not one American company can afford to run an LLM spouting potentially civil right violating bullshit as an acceptable loss. You have freedom of speech, not freedom of consequences. But please feel free to spend 100s of millions training up your own LLM, and then turn it loose on the world so you can figure out how the legal system actually works.
I'm a bit confused by this post. I've been using the GameCube controllers for a bunch of switch games.
LeCun is reasonable, like a lot of researchers, and was a while back (in a way) perplexed that people are finding uses for these text predictions at all considering they're not really perfect. I'm not exactly ascribing bad faith to all of these people, but for Hinton and the fact that he went on a media tour basically, I don't see how that could be in good faith. Or even logical, to continue with his work, if there's some probable X-risk.

But what I do know is that it is in the interests of these companies to press the fear button. It's pure regulatory capture and great marketing.

Personally: it's tiring when we have AI-philosophy bros hitting home runs like "what if we're actually all just language predictors." Coupled with the incessant bullshit from the less wrong-rationalist-effective altruist-crypto grifter-San Francisco sex cult adjacent about how, ackshually, AGI is just around the corner and it will take your job, launch the nukes, mail anthrax to you and kill your dog.

People approximated text prediction. It got good at it. It's getting better at it. Will it be AGI? Could it be construed as AGI? Can we define AGI? Is there existential risk? Are we anthropomorphizing it?

My take is: no, no, no, depends and yes. For whatever a take is worth.
> Obviously typing from start to finish with few edits is also a "failed" result in such a program.

I hear ya, but I wonder if there are people who have the proper mental organization to write a well-organized coherent essay in one shot.

I'm not one of those people, but I assume they exist. And I assume they would be unfairly penalized with such a system.

That being said, I think we are going to end up in a world where we are all communicating with each other via ChatGPT (or whatever succeeds it).

ChatGPT will be our "Lingua Franca" as well as our "Mens communis" (I got that by asking ChatGPT). Strange times ...

* edits for clarity: ha! </irony>
It can be fairly trivial to hide your age and if you’re doing remote work using filters will make you look deceptively young. By the time the company ever finds out your actual age it’s too late. You should also avoid revealing your age to coworkers or other clues that may hint your age.
you are aware that Meta owns instagram and whatsapp right and facebook is still very heavily used in the developing world?

your little question is extremely naive and myopic and probably not the sort of thing you should be using to make investment decisions
I already feel it when I see the number every 2 weeks on my paycheck. Or when I'm advised of my property tax bill every 3 months. Or register a car. Or buy something at a physical store. Taxes are everywhere, and you have to work really hard to stay ignorant of how much they're taking out of your pocket.

Literally all Norquist is doing is making it so for about 2 weeks a year, what little free time I have after the kids are down for the night is spent in tense almost-argument with my wife as we seek out all the places our employers have secreted the tax documents they already provided to the IRS. Its such a colossal, pointless waste of time for people who have a simple tax situation.

I have never, not once, looked at the numbers produced by performing my tax return (which, again, the IRS already performs so they can double check my numbers) and thought "Thank you Grover Norquist for keeping me aware of how much my government is costing me!". Because I am already made aware of that when I get my very first paycheck from a new job.

Speaking of toll booths vs electronic debit, when I lived in the Bay Area, I had to commute from east bay to west bay every day. For the first 4-5 months, I was paying cash, because in my scant spare time, I hadn't had time to get transponder and direct debit set up. I was paying $35/week. I didn't become less aware of that cost when I switched to the transponder, because the actual cost was time. Time is something I have very little of, so adding friction just wastes my most limited resource.

Using my most limited resource to make sure I'm aware of how the government might be using slightly too much of my like 10th most limited resource is a waste of my fucking time. Thus, I'm angry not at the government for potentially wasting my money, but at Grover Norquist for wasting my time because he thinks I'm too fucking stupid to realize what's happening.
Yes, it probably was a euphemism originally, but negative connotations catch up pretty fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill
Hey now … you’re describing vi ;)
Have you or anyone else been able to confirm the relationship was what you imply it was, or are you advocating guilt by association?
Why should a person who has root on a computer talk to another person, and just do what he is talked into doing?

For example a secretary receives a phone call by her boss, and listens in her boss's voice, to transfer 250.000$ into an unknown account, to a Ukrainian bank? Why should she do that? Just listen to a synthetic voice, just like her boss, in exactly the way her boss talks, language idioms that is, and she will just do it?

That's what you are talking about? Because that's impossible to happen if her boss uses ECDSA encryption and signs his phone call with his private key.
As hardware costs drop over time and algorithms get better, more big models will show up over time. Lest of course this gets prohibited somehow.
Where did he say he had a lot of errors?
https://archive.is/YoxD3
No need for that, just a D notice on Cloudflare and half the internet is decrypted.
MSFT does not own ATVI yet, the transaction has not closed. Perhaps you meant when Activision acquired Blizzard.
Well I think that depends on what is being provided, most suggestions I've seen only talk about cover the simple case of some W-2s and other income sources already reported to the government and taking the standard deduction. If that's the case then the government doesn't _have_ to provide everything it knows, it would be on you to know if you have income that wasn't already reported to the government and file yourself, and it would be the same as now in that you don't know if they'll find out about your other income.

But also, there's still the risk of getting audited either way. Just because they apparently don't know about some income _now_ doesn't mean they'll never figure it out later.
Nah, it's plotting polar vectors, and it uniformly picks an angle. The random(...) is just the magnitude of the vector.
“I’ve been asked xxx but what if what they really want is yyy” - in my experience they usually want yyy, xxx is just how they managed to write it down using existing terminology/environment.
>I think its funny that terms like math v maths come about very organically and then after the fact everyone feels the need to back into a reasoning that was likely never there. Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.

We Americans use the phrase "do the math," which means to go figure something out, not necessarily arithmetically.

Is there a similar phrase for the Brits? As in "do the maths?" Which seems unlikely. As such, I'd expect those using British style English to have different phrase for the same thing. Is that the case? If so, what might it be?
I'm heading toward that trail, put my time in at FAANG and it's time to move on.

Any tips on how to get started?

I'm as unclear on how to build a serious consulting shop, as I was when I was 22, a waiter with some self-taught iPhone OS experience. Which I guess makes sense, I wasn't building business relationships from deep within a FAANG org chart as a SWE.
The first season was frustrating for me. If it was a stand alone story I probably would have really enjoyed it, but it is based on one of my favorite sci-fi book series, and it is one of the least faithful adaptations I've seen.
> I don't understand why it's more acceptable to allow magic `0` conversions than magic `(void*)0` conversions

In the end you don't have to chose between '0' and 'nullptr' anyways.

char *x = (decltype (nullptr)) 0;
Aging out is one of those myths that sound true until you think about them. The number of developers doubles every 7 years or so. Which means there are twice as many 20 year olds as 30, 30 as 40 and 40 as 50. So if you're at the average shop then for every 50 year old you see there should be 8 20 year olds. Which is pretty close to what you get.

And that's before we even start talking about the fact that js was just invented when the average 50 year old was entering the workforce.
My wife only started learning drums a few years ago, and now she's regularly gigging with a band in a bunch of iconic venues around London. It's never too late to start! :)
A lot more. You literally couldn't pay me enough to work for a FAANG company, but I have a wonderful and profitable career nonetheless.
Any open source tools for this?
I have no doubt that there is an objective reality. Physics shows us that reality is weird and unintuitive, and we don't fully understand it. The mere existence of consciousness also raises big questions about the true nature of reality. But still I have no doubt there is an objective reality.,

There is massive amounts of evidence that show the universe evolved (matter condensed to form stars which formed heavier elements which formed planets and organized into galaxies ...) and also that life evolved (single celled organisms to multicellular organisms to animals which eventually gave way to sentient life). Why would there be such substantial evidence for any of this if there were no objective reality?

If I take a psychedelic drug, my conscious experience is significantly altered. Why should that happen if there were no objective reality? Why should a chemical be able to have such a huge effect on my conscious experience if it "doesn't objectively exist"?

Why should there be such a strong correlation between patterns of brain activity and our conscious experience if there were no objective reality? Why should the brain be organized into regions with well defined functions if there were no objective reality? Why should sensory organs be able to take in information from the environment through well understood physical processes, and transit that information through well structured nerve endings to the proper regions of the brain, if there were no objective reality?

I don't claim to know the true nature of reality, far from it. I merely posit that there is an objective reality.
Yes, I somehow thought those repositories would be up forever, just never updated again.
> My only health care needs in the past 30 years have been a couple of dental cleanings per year.

I hate to be disagreeable but that might be an example of past observations not necessarily predicting future ones.
> Nobody is going to hire a 60 year old who only knows Pascal or whatever

Lots of legacy code is still out there. But that's probably a pretty thankless job.
I'd be happy if we had free coffee..
One of the problems with sugar is just how sweet everything is. My take is this is a direct result of sodas like coke and pepsi. They set the sweetness bar and then everything rose to it. People became desensitized to sweetness by drinking sodas and then everything needed to up sweet to even taste a little sweet in comparison. I stopped drinking these a while ago and my sweetness tolerance dropped. Now when I make recipes I will use sugar (or honey or whatever natural sweetener called for) by only use 2/3 or 1/2 what it calls for it. Otherwise everything just comes out way too sweet.

Using artificial sweeteners just makes it the desensitivity worse in my opinion. Better to use real sugar but far less of it. Bonus is that you'll be able to taste more of the other flavors in the food and drinks.
Amusingly I live in France and filling my taxes take me a total of two minutes checking the numbers and clicking ok. Really depend of your situation I guess.
This word DOES exist!

> Grumplestiltskin (noun): Don't be a Grumplestiltskin

In fact, I use this literal phrase frequently with my kids.

(Also, but less frequently, with my partner)
we're talking about Meta not Facebook. Why does everyone seem to forget this. Also Facebook is huge in the developing world.
<3

So many possibilities have been crushed.
There are many factually accurate statements that are, nevertheless, inappropriate to wildly inappropriate under the circumstances. I have personally interacted with rms decades ago and have a generally positive impression of his entire body of contributions to computing. Nevertheless, reading the controversies section on the wikipedia page induces a combination of cringing and face-palming.

Someone researching the science of attraction in humans could very well be justified in saying "it is normal for adults to be physically attracted to adolescents".

Someone commenting in apparent defense of a convicted sex offender should not make that exact same claim, whether factually correct or not.
> Confluderation (noun): The act of creating a temporary or makeshift solution to a problem by combining unrelated elements in a haphazard manner. Example: The broken chair was held together by a confluderation of duct tape, string, and clothespins.

The example basically describes all fixes make in the army. Black tape[0] and green string[1].

[0] https://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/Harry_Black

[1] https://www.arrse.co.uk/wiki/Green_String
And furthermore it's never been cheaper or easier to start a new one if none of the existing ones suit you.
I agree with your sentiment, but I am more optimistic about the future of RISC-V. It considerably lowered the barrier of entry for vendors, and so there are more of them! Higher competition usually means that users win: they get lower prices, open-source toolchains and firmware, etc.

For one, I am very excited about the tiny CH32V003 ([1], [2]), a RISC-V 48 MHz microcontroller that costs ~$0.10 and can be programmed with completely open-source tools, see [3] and [4].

I am reasonably sure the higher end of the spectrum of RISC-V chips will also get better in terms of user-friendliness.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Wrv7nW-S8

2. http://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH32V003.html

3. https://github.com/cnlohr/ch32v003fun

4. https://github.com/aappleby/PicoRVD
>why are we still making students learn such an obviously obsolete skill?

Just because a machine can generate an essay of questionable quality with a fair chance of containing hallucinations making it unusable for many fields of human endeavor doesn't mean that writing is no longer a useful pedagogical tool. Learning to write is a part of learning to think.
> You're going to age out at about 45ish

This isn't actually very true outside of SV and FAANG.