skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if there's something like the Doppler effect going on here. The field continues to advance at a constant rate, but it takes time for news to reach us, proportional to the distance between us and the frontier.

To a stationary observer, it would appear as if the time between developments is increasing, and that the field is slowing.

I hope I'm wrong to use this analogy, though. I'd like to continue thinking of myself as relatively informed about technology.
If you write it you at least partially understand it. I don’t buy it
The first point doesn't follow the second: there will always be a sustainable career in building software that delivers value.

In tech we take it for granted that just because there's some new hotness everyone wants to jump on it day 1. GPT 5 could drop tomorrow and if your tool delivers value using 3.5, it's not going to magically stop delivering value, and in most verticals people will prefer your battle tested 3.5 to some brand new 5.

And if 5 does simplify prompts for your use case and there'll still only be two options:

- making a the same thing as what you made with 3.5 is now trivial... in which case you still have the mindshare and the distribution solved to a degree your newly enabled clones don't.

- making a better version of what you made is now trivial... in which case you can just as trivially improve your version and already have the mindshare and distribution solved.

At the end of the day software developers often struggle to fit software into the larger ecosystem it slots into before it becomes something valuable, and to be GPT has been an amazing case study in the fact.

I think the use of the word engineering did half the damage, and I think people confusing the twitter memes with the interesting attempts at prompt engineering (via ReACT, Gorilla, etc) did the other half, but at the end of the day I think a lot of people will be left kicking themselves when "misguided prompt engineers" end up solving real useful problems in ways they didn't think were possible well before we reach the arbitrary goalposts for foundation models that people keep setting up.
The story I'm seeing around Mastodon is that in fact this feature will not launch until the fall.

Also that it they will only peer with hosts that sign an agreement with them. There is rumour of $$ involved.

I think you can guess how this will all shake out.

(Snarky aside: maybe Truth Social will federate with them?)
> Neural networks find features via gradient descent so humans don't have to encode all of the features.

Yes, but what are those features? What did it decide was important? Often, we aren't really sure. We often can't ask the model to justify its decision.
Excellent point, unfortunately the broken, but simplistic school of thought is also prevalent along with the broken and bloated one...
Looks like the arithmetic only supports integers 0 through 10

https://github.com/ronami/meta-typing/blob/master/src/utils/...
I'd wager that a large portion of desktop Linux users choose Linux because they want configurability and to fiddle with their system to tune it to their preferences.
Encountering such an opinionated software suite on the platform is a culture shock for those people.
99% of the issues I've seen for these features have been the OS making it increasingly a pain in the ass to grant an application permission to gain full-screen control or camera/mic access.

Not really Slack's fault as far as I can tell.
Generally agree: these days almost all of my images are either Alpine-based, or Debian-based. For example, the upstream _/ruby and _/python images offer both of those as the only base OS (well, aside from Windows Server Core apparently?) options, which alone makes up a huge chunk of Docker uses. (this is evidently because buildpack-deps offers Debian and Alpine bases, and these images both base from that to try to share layers, neat)
In Firefox, at least, none of their code is formatted; there are no line breaks.
Technically yes, but in major western cities these days the professional class tend to start having children in their 30s. I know plenty of people here that had their first child in their late 30 or even at 40 (both women and men) - probably more than the amount of people i know who had their first child in their 20s!
I don't think OP means running VM from within containers (although, who knows, I mean I guess you could). LXD provides a management layer that treats containers and VMs (libvirt/KVM/QEMU VMs) mostly the same.

So commands like this work on both containers and VMs:

lxc start fedora-desktop
lxc mv pi-hole other-machine:pi-hole

etc
Just blogging about (neo)vim. More targeted to the intermediate-to-advanced user, since there are tons of blogposts for vim beginners already.

https://nanotipsforvim.prose.sh/
>> Because that isn't in-line with the Gnome devs' vision, or how they want you to use Gnome. If you don't agree with their vision, then why are you using their software?

Sometimes you don't get to choose.

If GNOME is the only desktop environment on your employer's enterprise Linux distro and you do not have root or other window manager choices due to corporate security policies then the GNOME devs' vision is what you get.

GNOME 2 was fine. It was customizable and did not shove opinions down your throat.

GNOME 3 and 4 have gone the way of MacOS and Windows 11, but worse because there are fewer customizations and bizarre defaults.
And also solve the wine dependency hell

https://www.gloriouseggroll.tv/how-to-get-out-of-wine-depend...
Well, in this case it was undeniably human behavior that crashed the plane: if the pilots would have, at any point during the flight except at the very end, realized that they were trying to fly using the damaged engine, and switched to the other engine instead, they probably could have salvaged the situation. So I think a psychological analysis of why this didn't happen is warranted, and the story about another copilot refusing to fly with the pilot because of his disregard for procedures is relevant context, even if the NTSB didn't mention it.
Is this what happened? I booted up a Roblox-made game yesterday and it broke the EasyAntiCheat software on my machine.
https://www.alonbd.com/
Also cross posted to medium https://medium.com/@abardavid
It’s been amazing learning some knots these past few months, realizing what you can do with them once you have a good repertoire to draw from, and then realizing that many of them have been used since antiquity.
I have an Intel GPU (HD Graphics 520) and gamescope doesn't work for me under arch Linux :( https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope/issues/356
https://blog.ioces.com/matt

I post pretty sporadically about things I'm working on or that interest me. Electronics, coding, food, general hacking and making.

There are only a handful of posts there now, with 2 or 3 in the pipeline for the coming months.
Interesting description: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpAOeoZWAAM-iHV?format=png&name=...
Thank you for sharing! It is nice knowing others feel the same, although I hope you can find what you are looking for.

I am curious, what were you two careers?
Two personal blogs:

https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/ - what I wish I'd known when I started as a dev

https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/ - tech/business/books, coming up on 20 years!
The 2 month wait period for transformers both assumes that 1) there isn't a sudden huge spike in demand and 2) there isn't anything unusual getting in the way of building them, such as the grid being down literally everywhere.

Given how reliant we are on electricity and the internet I don't think it's actually a stretch to say it would be a society ending event.
Unix default security mechanisms are not enough, otherwise tools like KVM/Firecracker and gVisor won't be the standard for all cloud hosting. Unix just wasn't built to sandbox truly hostile code.
Sure it's feasible. For one, if I were to ban everything, I'm sure people with come up with something, it would be a never-ending cat and mouse game. And one of the somethings could be that there could be catalogs, or assistants, who you can turn to for "help" to get something.
Dreams are one of the most fascinating mechanisms of the human mind.
I understand the feeling of exposure, as they might well be revelation of the subconscious and unconscious mind that bypass your awake self-imposed limits and shames.
For that very reason, though, your wife is doing something quite intimate when sharing them with you.
FWIW, most of the TypeScript lines of code are in the E2E tests[0] and the webapp dir [1], which, as the name suggests, contains "the client code for the Mattermost web app". So we should really only be counting lines of Go code.

[0] https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/tree/master/e2e-tes...

[1] https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/tree/master/webapp
Thanks all, that definitely makes sense. :)
https://mattsimpson.ca

I have been blogging before it was called blogging! Ha. Mostly just random technical musings, with a bit of book/movie reviews. There is always room for improvement and more, but I like my little slice of the web.
>> Encountering such an opinionated software suite on the platform is a culture shock for those people.

Exactly.

It is worse when such opinionated software is the only available corporate default that cannot be changed.
Hallucination is less a problem for programming compared to other use case, because finally program must be run.
From an analysis perspective, I do not believe you can call an O(n) algorithm constant because you could run it on a computer with n cores.

From a practical perspective, I do not believe it is bounded by K, where all numbers you sort are less than K. Consider an array of one hundred trillion items, each being the number 1. This is bounded by the array length, not the number 1.
They could just pirate content, as many have always done. But I see your point, ads can be an acceptable form of payment. I have seen this in a mobile game for example, where you can buy the in-game currency with real money, and you can also get some if you watch ads, fill surveys etc. I'm sure it's abused to hell and back, with telemetry and so on, but I could get on top that right after I ban all other ads.
And yet the EU generally has stronger and more respected unions than the US. So it seems unlikely that's the issue.
I once was in a meeting about which web authentication framework to use for a site that ran so long because of bikeshedding that I implemented during the meeting and demoed at the end a solution based on the fact that HTTP already provides an authentication facility.
I’m not sure what’s worse, the damage done to your child by letting them use a smartphone, or the damage done by not letting them use a smartphone while of their friends use one.
How much experience does your junior dev have? Do they have a CS degree and have they done internships before? I am in college and looking at my peers, I can tell you that just having a degree does not mean they can code.

Maybe a controversial answer, but tell the junior dev to use ChatGPT.
But then how will nginx continue to pretend that it is still 1995?

nginx was once amazing, but it’s decidedly bad now when compared to modern webservers.
Every time something about invidious and piped instances is brought up, YT Premium shills come out of the woodwork like GTP4-powered bots
"This project attempts to push TypeScript's type system to its limits by actually implementing various functions and algorithms, purely on top of the type system... Please note that this project is meant to be used for fun and learning purposes and not for practical use"
XFCE twitches its fingers and smirks.

LXDE, which has always had trouble with sleep, muffles a yawn...
Good observation.

Turning off extensions is where OP lost me. In the last year, the single biggest quality of life improvement for me has been discovering the Argos[0] extension, which basically lets you put whatever text/menus you want in the top bar by writing scripts that print to stdout. To save space, I hid the dock (I use [1] as a replacement alt-tab), so the top bar is the only piece of screen that isn't OS chrome.

On my top bar right now I have the time in four time zones (including the ever-important UTC to save a mental calculation when logging at logs), the name of the current Wifi access point, and some VPN details gleaned using a combination of ip r, ping, nc, and curl. Another extension shows free RAM. I look at them dozens of times a day.

[0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1176/argos/

[1] https://gist.github.com/cbd32/cbec9a32b32bd9e93b0d2696c71b5f...
You just (poorly) measured the same thing the article did.

I'm still curious to know what % of Show HNs make the front page.
Honestly if the goal is a website as simple as possible, dark mode should not belong there at all. We've had simple readable websites in 90s long before the dark mode fad was a thing, only having light mode is fine.

> Third, this binary toggle is a bad way to implement dark mode because it ignores system/browser settings, so if a user has, say, enabled dark-mode on their smartphone OS, they still get served light-mode until they manually enable it; note that some systems change it based on local time/ambient light too, which is quite nice... if websites & apps respect it instead of overriding it.

There's so much complexity here that goes against the philosophy of a simple website if simplicity is the goal. They should just skip dark mode entirely. HN itself is perma light mode, it doesn't stop me from reading it at night.
Transformers themselves are pretty robust and it's believed that even high levels of GIC would not generate enough heat to cause widespread, permanent physical damage to modern equipment[1]

A more realistic scenario is that GIC would result in grid instability by causing protective relays to "trip" offline. Enough grid infrastructure tripping in succession could produce a cascading failure and widespread blackouts on a large grid. As seen in the 2003 Northeast blackout[2], it can take days to recover from such an event.

[1] https://library.e.abb.com/public/cbd31097f5bd26bfc1257b16002...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
Normal for the professional class in major global cities.
Steel is really strong vs tension, not so much vs water / rust / chemical reactions.

It's also relatively cheap. Maybe carbon nanotube ropes could replace that after we have cheap mass production?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_3zhkDwpg
why not just stay in software-engineering!?

realize, software-development ist NOT (!) (only) about writing code.

its about solving problems / adding value for your company / client.

* learn & understand your companys / clients domain

* learn to proper communicate within the team - horizontally

* learn to proper communicate with the non-technical people of your company / the client - vertically

imho. AI can't replace this kind of work - at least for now / as long as AI == GPTs ...

cheersv
Nigeria
Yes
Not yet
Writing,data entry and ICT
On request (BSC holder in modern European language)
jabtics@gmail.com
> because that ending would not have landed for me

No wonder it didn't, you just watched a video. It's like the difference between 4dx and netflix.
That's how representative democracy works. The legislators were elected in and can be replaced by people who will repeal undesirable laws.
It is indeed interesting! I was just trying to analyze it a bit deeper
I don't know, what was it?
I have to partially agree. When I started, codeweaver was hard to miss. I guess it was a different time back then? Must have been 15 years. For me, it was the other way around. My first wine experience was using codeweavers, and then I learned about wine itself. If you searched to run MS Office apps on Linux / Mac, codeweavers was the first result. Perhaps this was only true for Linux beginners. They had (have?) an easy to use commercial wrapper around it, with different Windows apps (especially office) working with no additional configuration.
It's not just on Linux though. My wife and I had literally identical setups with the one difference being the video card. I had an AMD card, she a NVidia. And the compatibility issues are real. For a specific example, Nvidia cards and Grim Dawn just don't (or didn't at least) get along, even on Windows - with about a zillion threads of such in the Steam forums for it, indicating it wasn't just e.g. a hardware failure type issue. And that wasn't the only game issues cropped up in. That's when we decided to replace her card with an AMD one, and we've had zero issues since.

Another fun thing (again, on Windows at least) is NVidia's drivers forcibly installing telemetry, even when disabled in the install settings. NVidia was king of cards for quite a number of years, but they're really not the company they once were anymore.
Peanball.net

A random list of technical things I work(ed) on in my spare time and a reading list of articles I found interesting to remember and share.
I suppose I should send an email instead of using suc then?
This is a common misconception about how life expectancy works. If you have 10 children, 9 of them die at age 5, and the 10th dies at age 55, the life expectancy of your children is 10. Those 9 children who die early aren't going to go through puberty and become parents, but the life expectancy of those who do reach that stage is decently long. Low life expectancy doesn't mean you're considered some decrepit geriatric at age 12; it means that you get to grow up with lots of siblings who didn't make it.

When you look at pre-modern societies (essentially until around 1900 or so), there are four large causes of low life expectancy that don't really exist anymore. Infant mortality was extremely high (a quarter or so of live births didn't make it more than a few days). Then child mortality itself was high (you had perhaps a 50-50 chance of making it to puberty). For young women, there's an extra hit to life expectancy due to risky childbirth (you have about a 10% lifetime chance of dying in childbirth). For young men, they get extra risk due to endemic warfare--the baseline casualty rate of premodern warfare is basically WW2-levels of total war. Of all these factors, the infant mortality is the heaviest drag on life expectancy, as dying at age 0 really pulls down the average lifespan.
https://www.irif.fr/~gc/papers/set-theoretic-types-2022.pdf

This research paper by Giuseppe Castagna presents an in-depth exploration of programming with set-theoretic types, which include union, intersection, and negation type connectives. The author argues that these types are not just useful, but necessary for typing some common programming patterns, and they play a crucial role in precisely typing various language constructs, from branching and pattern matching to function overloading and type-cases.

What sets this work apart is the extension of the theory of types known as semantic subtyping to include polymorphic types. This is a significant step forward as it allows for a more expressive and precise type system. The paper also discusses the design of languages that use these types and presents a theoretical framework that covers all the examples given in the presentation.

one of the key takeaways from this paper is that current programming languages are unable to infer intersection types for functions without explicit annotations. This is a limitation that could impact the development and efficiency of certain programs. The author presents three effective restrictions of this system, each with its own trade-offs, which could potentially guide the design of future programming languages.

The paper concludes with an overview of other aspects of these languages, such as pattern matching, gradual typing, and denotational semantics. These insights could have far-reaching implications for the development of more expressive and precise programming languages.

this paper pushes the boundaries of what we understand about type systems in programming languages, Elixir is going to be the first general purpose language to implement such a type system.
The parser design space is really interesting, but recursive descent seems to be the best go to, and you don’t have to think about parsing theory much. Or you could go with no syntax (lisp or scheme style), or a structured language (but you’ll need to do your own editor for that).

You could also try doing an embedded DSL in Haskell or even Kotlin if you just want to get your feet wet.
https://explosionduck.com

Mostly covers various software side projects I've worked on over the years, or concepts related to them.
Slack to most end users is the client, though. As well as the admin, user management UI, scalability, webhooks, etc, absolutely none of which is handled by "you can chat with other users in Linux if you all log into the box" which every *nix has had since before most readers here were born.
>they could only compete on price and quality

They can (and do) also compete on exclusive deals with places who sell soda. I'd wager it's more important than competing on ads, because what are people gonna do at a pepsi or coke exclusive place, not drink soda?

I'm sorry but the free market idea that's lurking in the argument is naive, when contrasted to our current (and past, and projected future) reality.
https://craigmod.com

Wow, just realized it passed its 21st anniversary last month. A few iterations throughout the years, but the current form is basically 13-ish years old, regularly updated.
I think so, but the solution may be convoluted. Waydroid users can spin up an Android container to run Roblox post-Wine ban: https://youtu.be/E0BLQCEU8ZI
https://notesbylex.com

It's a mixture of blog and a public Zettlekasten.

So far, this has been my most popular post: https://notesbylex.com/disputing-a-parking-fine-with-chatgpt...
Though this is my favourite: https://notesbylex.com/making-song-covers-with-my-ai-voice.h...
Hope you enjoy your stay. I'm going on 8 years in the Netherlands (originally from the USA). The freedom my kids have here is a major reason we are still here. Biking everywhere is amazing. Work life balance and the ability to work part time is also a huge benefit over the US.

What area are you moving to?
>it misses practically all of what makes Slack so popular - UX

I strongly disagree. Slack has nearly the same UX as every chat platform of the past 2-3 decades. It's a slightly change over AOL Instant Messenger. There's also a large amount of very similar software or straight-up slack clones that are not very popular at all.

I would say what makes Slack so popular is how easy it is to set up and get running, both as a service and for every user, combined with the availability of easy integrations/plugins.
I think you're right, ads can be the opposite! For example the way Facebook does its targeting, smaller businesses seem to have a real chance to target their niche. So it's not all just like a sporting event, where the big dogs will buy up all available ad space.
For me I needed like 5 extensions to mold gnome into an acceptable desktop. (I forget which ones)

Then during one install I was having trouble getting one of the work arounds to work. (I believe it was a distro bug) Which lead me to give up and try KDE again. (Hadn't used in years) I was kicking myself for not doing that sooner everything works as it's supposed to.

I do miss gnome's Expose-like windows overview thing though. KDE has one too but it's not as good. But it's not as important as having my desktop behave like a desktop without some third party hacks (which will probably break at some point or stop being maintained) tricking it into behaving normally.
> I am a little confused why this is regarded as a powerful pattern

The power of the generator is that, unlike an iterator, the collection of values doesn't "exist", it is created on the fly. This comes in to play when iterating over, say the set of integers, or something else that would take significant amounts of memory.

Also, as functions, generators can be passed around in any language that treats functions a first-class types.