skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doing some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, I wouldn't be shocked for any value between 100 and 200 billion.

You end up with estimates of high single billions for all humans pre-Neolithic (pre-urban settlement)--the error bars are very high, but it doesn't make a large difference in the grand scheme of things because it's the smallest component. For urban settlement essentially before good, sustained record keeping (think ~10kya to 1kya), you're looking at several tens of billions of people, with several tens of billions more in the era of modern record keeping. Right now, it takes about 6 years or so for a billion babies to be born.

(For my part, I think the estimate they give here is on the low end. I don't know the sources they're using, but I've generally observed that estimates of pre-modern demography have generally trended upwards in more recent scholarship.)
End of Life: Okta Verify Apple Watch App
Well, this is inconvenient. I go on a short holiday and the authentication app I use 4 to 7 times a day is killed.

> very low usage rates

Wearables are only going to grow. And it’s easily the best way to use it.

> Only number challenges and one-time code flows are affected.

Who is rolling Okta without these?
Japan Inc must do more to reduce greenwashing risks
It's really weird that the monkey is eating two bananas at once, I would think in training data monkeys would almost always be eating one banana at a time.

I've been told that in the real world monkeys and chimps don't peel bananas when they eat them, they eat the peel and all, but i don't know if it's true. Whatever happens in the real world, drawings always show monkeys peeling the bananas as they eat them and I would expect a prompt "show a monkey eating a banana" to show it eating a single peeled banana.
One of the most upvoted comments there:

"It's like living in China without being in China."
Funny enough, I agree with you in every context but this one. I don't want ads on tv or the internet, but I love Asian mega cities and think they'd look likely worse without the huge ads, especially the animated ones. Cyberpunk needs ads and I want cyberpunk dialed up to 11.
The crude reality is that development tools cost real money to be developed and we no longer are in a environment where VCs are showering companies with bags of money without some really down-to-earth, concrete plan for profitability.
Companies like Microsoft and Google can have themselves the luxury of keeping projects like VSCode and Golang open source. The economics make sense for them. Not all companies can do that, especially small startups.
I remember a time when buying a C compiler cost money, real money. I don’t think we are ever going back to that, but I also think that paid tools with enterprise pricing are back.
I don’t care about the morality of that and I am arguing pro neither against it. It is a just a fact, a seismic shift that we can’t really stop.
I made a tool to help motivate me write every day. After sharing it with some writers for their feedback, one of them had a really insightful comment: “Wow, wanna-be writers will really do anything to avoid writing!” I had spent a lot of time writing a tool to help me write when I could have been writing instead! Writing is an ancient technology. We more or less know how to do it efficiently. I think it’s important to ask ourselves why we spend time writing tools to write.
That could also happen. Especially in a government, plagued by lobbying, and corporate interests.
I am Mac fan. However we had an Apple II at one point, which I thought was weird and strange because it didn't run the same Basic dialect that my TRS-80 did, so I was continuosly frustrated with it because I didn't understand why. I must have been 5 or 6 at the time.
you're right lol. I was basing this comment off of misha's previous video. just watched his lap with the track package and he's passing all kinds of cars in the corners.
> Unless Microsoft has an Activision-sized amount of cash burning a hole in its pocket

What? You greatly overestimate Canonical. Buying it would be a rounding error in Microsoft's balance sheet.
LLM-based regex generation is probably my absolute favorite thing. I give it a bunch of examples and say "create a regex of that"

Does it hallucinate? Probably! Do I "hallucinate" while trying to clobber together terrible regexes? Absolutely
Here's an interesting anecdote in the same spirit of skipping uninteresting work. Back when I worked with a rather experienced Haskell developer, he also wanted to design a language but dreaded the part where a parser was needed. Besides that, he took the further shortcut of representing functions in his language using functions in the host language Haskell. That is to say, the AST for functions contains Haskell functions. This technique is called higher-order abstract syntax.

Naturally there are limitations here. There's not much you can do to poke into the structure of Haskell functions other than evaluating them, so any sort of optimization and code gen work must happen by evaluating the function in Haskell, which gives you more of a challenge in designing the AST.

That said so far the author's language resembles simply typed lambda calculus and this is generally too simple. The meat of the language hasn't actually been designed yet in this post.
Dehumanizing
Reduced column bloat, easy reusability, easy reporting and data extraction, ease of bulk transformation (especially stream processing), but all this is essentially repeating the book, which I recommend as an excellent read.

Contrary to the claim above, there is no additional layer of indirection simply from rotating one’s record-keeping perspective by ninety degrees. I have to reject outright the suggestion that joins are unnatural in a relational database. The opposite is true: there’s nothing more natural to a relational database than a join, and that’s even despite SQL barely paying lip service to Codd’s relational algebra. Heck, using a join instead of a predicate may even be faster, not least because decomposing entity data into recomposable per-component tables means less data to scan. And if it’s instead of an indexed query, well, an index is a relation too, so in terms of schema complexity that’s a wash. As for cognitive burden, how about the nails-down-a-blackboard dissonance of dealing with tables that grow ever further rightwards with each new product manager.

None of this is to downplay the sheer productive rapidity of letting your template generator spit out a bog-standard CRUD app, it’s more to undermine and challenge assumptions about what deserves to be the conventional default, and to suggest that we can safely and reasonably change perspective to allow a little programmer happiness in.
Luckily you can create the biggest of things with just a compiler and a text editor. A repl helps but is gravy.

Devs have gotten drunk on devtool sugar imo.
Revealed: UK plans to drop flagship £11.6B climate pledge
My circle is 95.5% perfect, can you beat that? HTTPS://neal.fun/perfect-circle/
My circle is 95.5% perfect, can you beat that? In https://neal.fun/perfect-circle/
That’s because of religious devotion. The same would not work in most western nations.
They might own them, but it doesn't mean they use them.

I fault Elon Musk for many things, but it's never drive or passion. I assure you he isn't spending the weekend relaxing at his lake house.
GitHub Actions Public Bookmarks Service
I always knew that http://mslinux.org/ wasn't just a joke, but an omen.
> But these are niche uses, and very much confined to a realtively small percentage of the general PC using population.

You said it yourself right here. Yeah, what if there was only the OS? What if you just... made everything yourself?

What if you just... only cared about programming the computer instead of using it to...do stuff.
Have you tried to use it?

I know the link is there, but last time it took me to pages where you were instructed to install the app
I'm also a big fan of alpine on the server.
Yes. Tools like sourcegraph are cool, but it is not like they are going to make you X times more productive.
Someone even ported Rust to QNX targets on ARM64 recently.
Researchers induce cancer cells to 'commit suicide' with self-produced toxin
The bitterness of artificial sweeteners relates to your DNA.
Ha I was just thinking a similar thing. I'm much more immune to adverts in a foreign country especially if they use a different alphabet all together.

I'm not quite sure I'd consider it beautiful, but it's mildly freeing nonetheless.
The marginal efficiency gain over the free ripgrep is so small
This comparison is laughably stark to say the least.

A person must either be genuinely ignorant or literally deranged to believe SCOTUS would rule against the 1st amendment in a case like this. Especially given:

1. The current make up of the court

2. The court's current track of rulings aligned with the Constitution

3. It ignores the entire landmark ruling of New York Times Co. v. United States which describes in explicit detail about how the people's 1st amendment rights ALWAYS trump the government's interest, except under extraordinary circumstances where there's a very clear and imminent gave danger that cannot be prevented. The example given in the case was something being published that endangers troops actively deployed in combat AND with no means to redraw them. Anything less is grounds for rightfully being condemned, ridiculed, and mocked for being a tyrannical psychopath, because that's what the court will be saying.
Honest question: why doesn't Couchdb receive any love on HN?

It's such a perfect tool for my side projects and most projects that will never reach Twitter scale
thanks for your work, Nick!

Note Nick has tons of great content. Example: a video on how to use checklists to reduce risk on operations like database migrations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOp7uog7_Xw

and the corresponding blog post: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/creating-checklists-for-high-...
To be fair, most movie theaters in the US have a giant, 99% unused parking lot attached to them anyways. Plus anywhere with a drive-in probably doesn’t have transit.
i'm honestly not worried at all about LLMs because most of my jobs have consisted of fixing problems in other peoples' code, and i haven't seen any evidence that an LLM will be capable of doing that on a non-trivial program any time in the near future. I have, however, seen evidence that chatgpt will create many more problems and make my job harder.
€0.02/day and easy enough for anyone with basic cloud skills: https://www.dumky.net/posts/own-your-web-analytics-pipeline-...

(With caveats: This is a toy pipeline. More work required to make it robust and probably not a great option for any site with reasonable traffic. But easy to get started and play.)
It's basically a thing to load up Wine with the DLLs and tweaks for a specific program, right? That's what Winetricks does.
Thanks for the links. Interesting data all around. Not entirely sure what to make of it, but I suspect most of that is from prejudices I hold on some of these areas.
>Maybe I could take the aqui-hire angle, but how many Ubuntu devs would want to stay with Microsoft?

Probably far more devs than they'd get trying to make their own MS-branded Debian from scratch. Even if a bunch of them left after a while, they'd have competent, experienced people working for them for that time, instead of trying to staff up from zero and having a lot time where there aren't enough people to really get much done, and during that time they can hire new people who aren't going to quit just because it's MS.
Not all the time, but sometimes, it's as simple as the game having a dialogue or launcher that is awkward to control on the touchscreen - but the game runs fine.

Forza Horizon 4 is Playable rather than Verified because of the Xbox Live sign in window at the start, but after that goes away it's flawless.
What's an example of "open source" software you've used that matches that description?
The style of this article is all arched-eyebrows and “keep up with me I see the future” BS.

Clear away the faff and ignore the “AI is improving sooo fast ohh what a magic” remarks. What you’re left with is a tepid article about prompt engineering.
Or a scheduler executive with no MMU. Something like classic macos or DOS with TSRs fits the description too.

Or something like a smalltalk minicomputer or singularity/lisp that enforces separation in software.
Leo Binkowski (developer for NABU) gave a nice talk at VCF East earlier this year: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IhPsNQBCKfM
https://www.4async.com (Mandarin Only)
Advertising is devouring the world, but in the meantime, there have been some great tech startups that have enriched Bay Area landlords.
Your PC setup space looks fantastic.
That's also very US-centric.

In many countries it's more a title associated to education and specific degrees from specific schools than a license to practice some professional organisation could revoke.

While, from my limited knowledge, doctors and lawyers both seem to have some sort of license and controlling body in most, if not all, countries.
It's nice that we've taught the robots to make off-by-one errors just like a real developer.
In my opinion (you may differ), Apple and Google are notorious for locking their users onto their proprietary platforms to milk as much money as they can, no matter at what cost.

So complaining about Github proprietary tools and at the same time supporting Apple and Google for doing the same is a bit contradictory. Should be using an open OS and browser.
https://prowe.ca/blog/

Made my first post a few months back on building a Boggle Solver with WASM and Rust :)
https://dylanfitzgerald.net/

Mostly the-consulting-side-of-technical-consulting posts.

When I'm on a roll I post every weekday, but it's been a bit while dealing with symptomatic PTSD on my end. Hoping to get back to it within a couple months.
Both my grandparents on one side died of lung cancer. I still smoked until I switched to vaping (which may yet have consequences). Your assumptions are less universal than you seem to think.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22338321 - from Feb 15, 2020
I used to have that problem, then just switched to AMD video cards, and it magically went away. It just works. Whatever graphics penalty I pay is unnoticeable in comparison to the time lost troubleshooting and tweaking Nvidia for Wine.
A set being a member if itself (or not) is the source of the famous paradox that destroyed the naive set theory %)

In practice, you usually need either a definite sum.type (int | str | null), or the all-encompassing type, like Any. I think both cases should be adequately representable in a categorial language — am I wrong?

You may need to represent a sum type that includes Any (or a similar type) if you.allow type-based signature overloads for functions. I wonder if this may represent any obstacle to a caregorial approach.
So 90% of patients who wore the knee brace instead of getting a surgery healed properly?
> Sometimes the hallucinations compile.

In that case they become complications.
The names of migrants to America suggest they were individualists (2019)
That losers write posts with clickbait titles
Lasers are often used to cool atoms & molecules to extremely low temperatures[1]. Bose-Einstein condensates are made via laser cooling, and it's commonly used in quantum entanglement experiments since it can get the involved particles closer to absolute zero than other methods.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling
I do the same. I also commit at logical completion points that build cleanly.

I hardly ever look at commits older than the last commit.

I don't often create branches for features; I find having permanent Production / Test / Dev branches is sufficient for most work. But I will create other branches as needed.

Git worktree is awesome for having multiple branches checked out all at the same time. At this point, I almost never switch branches and instead check them out into their own directory.
https://maximumeffort.substack.com/

“Some things that aren’t worth doing are worth overdoing.”

I write about physics, language, and history, or whatever interests me at the moment, with an overarching theme of spending way too much effort analyzing useless topics. Here’s some of my favorites:

https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-wago...
I derive an expression for number of donkeys needed to move an army a distance L, and discuss its relationship to the tyranny of the rocket equation.

https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/guinea-pigs-are-fermion...
I postulate that Guinea pigs are fermions, and simulate the quantum dynamics of multi-pig states.

https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/a-statistical-analysis-...
I attempt to answer the timeless question of whether the characters in Wheel of Time sniff in disapproval more than average.

https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-inv...
ChatGPT and I invent a slime language.

https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/an-offering-for-the-dea...
I teach you just enough Middle Egyptian to read some of the hieroglyphs on most museum artifacts.

https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/the-great-kings-of-assy...
I share my technique for annoying text spammers by pretending to be Assyrian Royalty.

Mostly up to date index of posts:
https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/coming-soon

Hope you enjoy!
https://anderegg.ca/

Not a lot here, but I’m trying to write more. Going to go through this tread to bolster my RSS subscriptions!
Huge for reducing unnecessary surgical procedures. In what situations would surgery still be required?

Edit: would imaging be able to delineate?
I was mainly expanding on your optimizer point.

But the last point gets to the longevity issue: now part of the selective pressure can be genetic intervention and highly directed social pressures which could drive changes for longevity in ways that natural selection previously could not.
I grew up on Windows and Linux, but a mostly daily Mac user for more than a decade now.

I think the app vs window centric model really comes down to user preference - I think I could get used to window again but I had Chrome, Audacity, and the windows explorer open last night with maybe five windows and was alt-tabbing to all the wrong places. My brain just makes sense of “get to application, then find the window” better than a list of windows I have to sift through across disparate apps.

I agree with the scroll bars and settings getting worse. Buttons are either way, but - like app vs window switching - could be remedied with a setting to change the behavior.
blog.harterrt.com

Mostly data science - been slow lately, but I’m working on a couple pieces again.
The parent comment stated the 40 billion figure (joking or not).
Forbidden Kingdom of Bhutan Is Turning into a Ghost Town
Some people say that a thing how Steam Deck performs good is thanks to shader cache. There's only one GPU(SoC) SKU for Steam Deck like normal gaming console, so shader cache can be precompiled for Steam games, unlike PC.
I haven't faffed about with ChatGPT yet, mainly because of the verification cans it makes me drink in order just to use it. I also don't want every query of mine being snarfed up into some cloud database to be recycled for profit by Microsoft. Writing a program is a very private activity for me and I am very concerned about leaking data about my code to some huge far-off entity to profile me with. Yes, I know that there's a difference between private-time programming and programming on the job; given the industry I work in, my employer has even bigger concerns about data leakage and recently issued a policy forbidding the use of ChatGPT and other publicly available LLMs.

I do not feel that it will affect me terribly much. I don't even use autocomplete -- too distracting. I've long been of the opinion that things like autocomplete are there to simulate the feeling of increased productivity, without making you much, if any, more productive, because the bottleneck in writing code is the deep thought about what you need to write, not actually typing it in. I felt the same way about AppWizards and other code generation tools from old-school Visual Studio and the like. They generated boilerplate code for an application in the shape that some Microsoftoid decided was best, not the shape I actually wanted to create. I suspect that in the long run, LLMs will be about the same, until we've solved AGI -- at which point any such intelligence will have its own ideas about the code it wants to write, which doesn't affect me unless I choose to collaborate with it.

If you think about a human who isn't terribly smart, but they want the world to think they are, what they will do is generate bullshit to fill in the vast gaps in their knowledge. So if you have such a person working for you, you have to check their work because they will try to fob off shitty work rather than ask for help. And ChatGPT is kinda like that: it will generate bullshit (we call it "hallucinations" in the case of GPT, but the term of art is bullshit) to fill in the gaps of what was not in its training set. And there's no way to know where the gaps are. So you have to check anything it outputs for correctness and lack of bullshit. I'm not sure that incorporating LLMs into programming is (yet) not just an infinite generator of messes for humans to clean up.
[Notes, Photos] Inside Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Godfather’ Notebook
That's not what it means to not care about commit messages.

It means the commit only needs to make sense to my self until next week.

If I see a commit from 2 weeks ago and I don't know what the message means, who cares? I hardly look at those commits.
It is a blog that focuses on jobs, careers, and the workplace, started 10 years ago and receives about two million visits worldwide every month. https://confessionsoftheprofessions.com
https://acehigh.substack.com/

write about:
(1) lessons from building, including building/selling to a F500 for $>90M
(2) summaries of stuff books i read

goal is to
1/ share what my failures with others and hopefully help someone
2/ give my thoughts clarity
Having 10% not heal isn’t great… Since surgery is much more reliable I see it still being standard of care.
Sounds cool I'll be keeping an eye on you guys
“Someone has to get hurt, occasionally” How factories were made safe
What if HN had access to a keyboard while.... medicinally relaxing.
It isn't really. But those are the hivemind memes and not agreeing with their bullcrap gets you looked at like you are a crazy person or worse, not part of the in crowd. High school has done some serious and lasting damage to socialization throughout the world as social backbiting popularity bullshit became the norm.

Not to mention complaining about wealth disparity from investment as if it is a sin of the technology is asinine. If money can produce better results you will see wealth disparity from the simple feedback loop of "more money -> better results -> more money". Your neighbor taking up jogging while you sit on the couch all day is increasing a health disparity, should your neighbor stop jogging then?

Undermining of democratic institutions is just plain a dumb meme from vested interests who cast what were previously abuses or necessary evils of the system at best as integral to democracy. We would all recognize blaming the media for undermining the Catholic Church by documenting their child sexual abuse as batshit insane. Yet somehow it is different when it comes to newspapers moaning about their loss of monopolies and influence of cliques.
For that scale postgres works very well. Going to need very good reasons to not use it.
(IEEE Spectrum) Your navigation app is making traffic unmanageable
Yes it did and continues making it possible. Several of the largest codebases in the world are written in C.
How reliable is surgery?
I'm often checking activity of submitting account and look up for other submissions from same domain. This thing here is not worth attention at all
I dunno... Canonical + Ubuntu + Snap Store might be just the right amount of closed market to start to make this make sense to them.