skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, we've appended a question mark to the title, which is a trick we sometimes use to mitigate questionable titles (on otherwise interesting articles).

Edit: ok, not.
https://tek256.com
Incoherent ramblings about making games, game engines, and just software in general
> I'm not a big fan of working with those developers

I agree. And it ties into something I often see that puts me on edge: programmers not taking responsibility for the code they put into their projects.

What I mean is that when you incorporate any code, from any source (library, framework, copypaste, etc), then you are responsible for that code and its proper behavior as much as for the code you actually wrote. So you're well-advised to understand it.

That's one of the reasons why I won't include code that I don't have the source code to. I need to understand it and be able to fix it.
Sure, but you have to reinvest that money too. And it's a bit misleading to take just the FastThing cost and disregard the GoodThing costs.

For example -- it took 10 days to build a JS prototype, but 10 more years of evolution before it became the dominant Web Development language.
Not when you have leases that are 5 or 10 years for 7500 or 8000 employees, which is what they had before musk took over.

Commercial offices and real estate in big cities is fucking expensive. Like $100/year per square foot for nice office space at the peak. Each employee probably requires a minimum of 100sqft average to account for offices, conference rooms, etc. 10k x 1000 = 10m/year per 1k employees.

Figure like 1m or 2m a month per 1000 employees after you factor in all the other maintenance and required stuff for an office that size.

I would be surprised if they are not sitting anywhere from 70-100m/year of real estate costs.

Maybe 30-60m/year if they didn’t build out office space for their employees hired during the pandemic or got fantastic lease terms (which if they did, they would probably be subletting at a profit).

If you want to break your lease, in this commercial real estate market, guess what? Tough shit. You can pay the lease in its entirety or sublet the space.
Just gonna throw this out there - your pitch is awesome, and “mom tested” put me off. Maybe I’m just a Californian but “parent tested” is a bit more 2023
In the UK we have been debating building 1 more runway at 1 airport for about 50 years and still it’s not settled. Meanwhile China has built several entire islands in the ocean and put airports on them.
Fun! New to me mechanic. I wonder if a slightly different sound for the length of side hitting the surface would be interesting (or confusing?).
Lonely individuals process the world in idiosyncratic ways
My blog is at https://cobertos.com/blog

Right now it's archival stuff and tiny home stuff, though in the future it'll include other projects I work on and other weird software arcana
https://dheinemann.com

I mostly blog about programming and software, or whatever comes across my mind.

One of my favourite posts is
"This is not the Web I've Known", which is about personal websites and the Small Web.

https://dheinemann.com/posts/2022-01-09-this-is-not-the-web-...
The wood is CNC'd in Germany, the metal back cover is from Spain. :)

PCB and screens are from China. The final assembly happens in my home.

I try to run a short supply chain to limit my inventory risk.
> How do we ensure AI systems much smarter than humans follow human intent?

I am not convinced we can. And spending 5x more resources improving the super intelligence compared to the alignment research certainly doesn't do much to convince me otherwise. Maybe if the alignment research got 80% and the intelligence development got the other 20% there would be a better chance.
We are making computer controlled microscopes more accessible: better software and lower cost. We are working on tightly integrating output images with cloud services (ex: AI analysis, data viewers) to make the data more usable. We also have FOSS Python host software that enables a lot of user customization. We rely on a lot more COTS components and software correction than traditional players to keep the cost low (ex: we use mass produced chassis instead of designing our own).

https://www.labsmore.com/

My ask for HN: pricing is hard and I'd love to talk to other hardware co-founders about their experience / advice. One complication is that pricing is affected based on how we make money (ex: are we selling more hardware vs cloud services). Or please reach out if you just like microscopes :) Always great to talk to more people!
> I think in any form using it alongside you workflow is helping

No, it is not. It can confuse and mislead you which wastes a lot of time. I lost multiple hours on different occasions figuring out subtle mistakes that it had made. It's sometimes harder (and slower) to understand someone else's code than writing the code yourself completely from scratch.

Also, if you aren't working alone, be prepared to answer code review questions on code that you haven't written. GPT is not going to take any responsibility for what it outputs. It often begins its answers to review questions with "Apologies for the oversight" followed by a revised version of the previous output.

The people I work with are used to me providing PRs that don't contain stupid mistakes. So in order to guarantee for that, I usually have to do a full blown quality control on every GPT output that I use. It can still be a time saver, but not really a significant one usually. I am still learning how to distinguish the cases in which it is not even a good idea to involve it and when it can be somewhat trusted. Seems to be highly dependent on the amount of training data in the particular problem domain and programming language.
Your analogy is flawed. It's like someone consuming coffee but not wanting the persons who grew the coffee beans/roasted/brewed it to be compensated.
This is a great breakdown of imo why the show is Not Good – they didn't need to hit all of these points, but the way the show was written it was like nobody on the engineering team had ever thought about these things before. It totally breaks reality for me when people in a work of fiction who have apparently been doing the job for a long time act brand new when something happens. The teamwork across this whole escapade felt very much like a child's idea of how teams work.

The show is full of stuff like this like [SPOILER] the sheriff leaves and nobody discusses that they will have to find a replacement until after he's gone?? [/SPOILER] that is just so thin and un-real it just falls flat imo. Very much in the teen post-apocalyptic genre, even though it has more of the trappings of Serious Adult Fare.

(If u want current adult sci fi Foundation gets top marks from me! It takes its world and its people seriously.)
Shipping to end user. Even if it's a script to rename photos from exif.

There is no glorious or inglorious software. As long as it benefits users it's good.

Good quality code will come naturally as you will be faced to complicated problems.

Also, do not be scared to write things from scratch.
Here is an article [1] by the American Nuclear Society detailing all the improvements that happened since the incident at Three Mile Island happened. It does not list these as negative, but positive, since they improve safety. So the industry thinks safe is correct, but then some like to pretend that removing these would make things only cheaper, never less safe. It cannot be true.

[1] https://www.ans.org/news/article-3903/insights-from-the-thre...
Is it? My parents have a salt water pool and swim in it daily through the summer.
Don’t think that’s fair - unless they’re selling them out of a boat in international waters to avoid regulation
That's the least of it. In Lisp the distinction between code n data is blurred all the time. In F18 assembly i frequently have "double entendres" which are used as code or as literals depending on the entry point. I think at least once there was code and data in the same entry point. Assembly n Lisp are both homoiconic, after all. N verb at the end of the sentence, are you transliterating German, or a two-foot green Jedi master full of wisdom?
Starting design work in a spreadsheet
Really fun game, I like it
Indeed. I'm having a fight with that at the moment and the line breaks as well.
Yeah, this is a much better example and reflection of how weakened institutions and process can drive up costs.
They do some impressive stuff
https://isolatedsystem.com

CERN engineer writing about cooling systems and simulations.
Had been more than 1-2 years now. Surely related to the time Biden called their guy a murderer, but with much bigger developments afterwards...

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/biden-heads-saudi-....
> Now, I understand why the initial decision was made

Do you though? Because you immediately contradict that by saying the majority owner should be paying out of pocket for other companies to access twitter's data for free. The company has been toeing the line of bankruptcy since before Elon.

Neither reddit nor twitter owe anyone or any company free access to the data they have been paying to host. HN is the last place I'd expect people to be so naive about bandwidth and storage costs, much less the mandate of a for-profit business.
Would anyone else rather just roll the dice on the AGI's morality?
What's the brittleness like compared to glass? Is it more/less shatter resistant than other crystals?
We're building hearing aids that work in noisy places (AudioFocus[1], YC S19). We use novel machine learning and microphone array design to help patients hear better in loud restaurants, weddings, & family gatherings better than any other AI hearing aid.

It's a big deal because untreated hearing loss is associated with social isolation & depression and while 37M people have hearing loss in the United States, only 8M use hearing aids. Hearing in noisy places is the biggest reason for lack of adoption.

We just got our behind-the-ear (BTE) hardware prototype running and already have several excited patients. Listen to an audio recording from it here[2]. We're currently working on a pilot study with a professor in San Francisco.

If you, or someone you know, is interested in participating in the pilot study let me know. And if you know interested investors, I'm happy to chat with them. I can be reached at shariq@audiofocus.io

[1] www.audiofocus.io

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orU5Wx6_RfA&t=24s
Python packaging is painful.

They will probably get a build system going so wheels can be used eventually.
When you find out let me know. Almost 10 years in and I don't know what I'm doing most the time.
I was very nervous about ChatGPT and disruption of both software development and general content creation a few months ago. I paid for GPT4 and used it. I'm no longer that nervous. Having something be wrong 10% of the time is extremely tedious. It's got its uses but I think people are going to choose quality over quantity in a lot more cases than we first thought.
Measuring Session Replay Overhead
I actually had our chief innovation officer pick up a screen from you guys out in NY a few years back. I love your tech and wish you the best of luck
Candidates can't read minds.

The best technical interviews I've been on as a interviewee have been those where the expectations are clear. In your example:

"We're not expecting you to create Twitter in 15 minutes, but we want to understand how you think about the challenges and key considerations of building a large system like Twitter"

Many interviewers fail to provide enough context and that leaves the interpretation of the prompt too wide open. At that point, the interview has failed since whether a candidate can provide an answer that is aligned with the expectations of the interviewer has an element of chance to it.
Cicada: Private on-chain voting using time-lock puzzles
This may be one of the best (worst) examples of how bad things are today. The California High-Speed Rail was funded over 15 years ago and they haven't begun building it yet. They are 82% of the way through their environmental studies.

https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/

https://twitter.com/cahsra/status/1674900759677227012
There were two major milestones for me.

One was taking my first college CS course. Just being forced to work in depth with indirection and write algorithms set me up to make all sorts of things, even though I did not go on to get the degree.

The other was to realize, after a few years, that code isn't an edifice - that is, you don't progress through it linearly to a solution, as tends to be the case in school assignments. To solve a production-grade kind of problem, you start by making an incorrect solution that you understand well - the proverbial "start with a hello world". And then you iterate over that to generalize and make it produce more correct answers. The bugs reflect a lack of understanding of the system, and architecture strategies tend to result from knowing that nobody can understand the entire system, thus you design in some constraints and safeguards to enable more complex ideas to build on smaller ones without that understanding.

This process also meant learning to reject "blogpost-driven development", which was a common genre back in the 2000's of people doing some career-making by making a blog about some cute idea they had about best practices. Naive me, I tried testing out every one of them, and eventually, through painstaking reduction, learned that mostly, you have to invent the best practices according to the problem domain. If you can get a direct answer by not writing code, that's a really, really good idea, hence I try to usher more of my work onto paper or into a spreadsheet now.
A lot of these schools have been putting their content on services like Coursera for a while now. I think that’s generally a good thing, but it can’t replicate every aspect of being an on-campus student (no teaching labs for example), and I’m skeptical as to how online degrees that some schools offer (I know Penn recently started an online version of their LDS program) will be viewed the same as a traditional degree by employers
Supreme court precedent seems to impact a lot of decisions...

Plenty of companies who have legal teams will keep an eye on the legal landscape of court decisions, and use them to decide if our T&C's or contracts need rewriting, or if any precedent puts us at legal risk.

Sure - the supreme court could overthrow its precedent anytime, but until it does, a lot of people will act as if what they say is the law.
that's shortsighted. I can understand adjusting the pay raises but not freezing pay altogether.

freezing the pay sends the message of: "we don't really care about the workers and we will extract as much value as it's possible for the lowest possible fee". The problem with knowledge workers is that sometimes it literally takes years to build the skill needed and if you don't actively work on retaining people you will end up with empire building and the minimum work not to get fired instead of exceptional people that can move the needle - the brain drain is real.

to drive this point home: if you have 100 people that you are paying 100 dollars you are paying 10k. if you give them a raise and now you are paying them 105 dollars you are not paying 10.5k. if you don't give them a raise and you tell them to suck it up, 20 people leave and now you need to hire 40 people to be able to pickup the work they were doing, now you will pay 14k. So while in theory you are getting a bargain keeping the comp at 100, you in reality are paying more. Even worse, you may get ideas that you don't need 100 people and layoff 30 people with the remaining people doing the work of 100 people - so in effect you are getting more work for that 100$ and people are actually taking a paycut relative to how much they are working.
Yeah that's my business, http://fgemm.com , coming soon. Paper is coming out v soon however.
After my first internship as an AngularJS developer, I joined a small team that built some pretty cool stuff. Very interesting stack, lots of programming languages, different databases, queues, etc.

I joined as the "person who will teach them how to use AngularJS and rewrite the Ember app with it". This went pretty well as we (mainly myself) rewrote the app pretty quickly after months of them struggling with Ember (I didn't use Ember, so I don't know if Ember was so confusing or they were just lazy to learn it will).

After that, I started looking into the backend and I was able to contribute to the company's success. When I had to use Cassandra, Kafka, Symfony, Ruby, Puppet, etc, I'd watch hours and hours of videos, read documentations until I knew it "well enough".

After some time, I noticed that quite often I knew the subject better than my colleagues and I could come up with solutions and implement then on my own.

This helped me realize that these technologies can be learned and it's only a matter of determination, dedication and patience.
Thanks for replying to me directly! I'm finding it fascinating to follow this project. Good luck with your company Georgi.
There are a few very big salt mines below the great lakes. We could totally get a desalinization plant in Michigan by pulling water from the lakes, salt from the Detroit salt mine, and combining them in the input stream to the plant!
« parle » definitely does not sound like « parlaient », only the 3 last letters are silent. The former sounds sorta like an English speaker would pronounce « parhl », the latter like « pahrleh ». It also doesn’t translate to « they speak » but « they were speaking ».

You might have gotten confused with « parle » and « parlent » which do sound the same (3 silent letters again) and translate to what you said!
Whatever happened to scalene?
ChatGPT, right?
I was at their wedding in Chernivtsi when they got married years ago.

Of all places. As if you'd be able to find even a single person in that city right now who even remotely agrees with anything you've been posting in this thread.
Edit to clarify, not my GP but maybe similar experience.

All the fixups, for five:
browser.fixup.alternate.* (multiple)
browser.fixup.dns_first_for_single_words
browser.fixup.fallback-to-https
(If I type something in the url bar I damn well mean it! It'd be fine if it tried others, but it tries them and then stays on them, meaning I have to retype urls to get it to load the actual thing I want.)
There's a few others that I don't _need_ but do use that I'm not including here.

System-provided custom CAs, for another, and removing the CAs I don't trust and am not likely to be impacted by removing. I don't need or want trust in a Turkish CA, for example. Cert stuff in particular gets worse every year, and here's another specific example of that:
security.certerrors.permanentOverride.
Enough said, I hope. At least they give me the option to make it temporary again.

There's no GPSD support in any easily available Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1250922#c24 and they're going to remove it (again) because they didn't maintain it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1803234. Now I need dbus and geoclue, I guess. Where are the docs on how? I think it's clear enough that Firefox is not being made for the _users_ with this topic.

There are more, but I hope this is enough to show that they exist. These are the most egregious, for me - if they were removed I would stop using the web entirely the same way I've stopped using my cell phone for everything except work.
The Salton Sea is over a hundred miles from the ocean, though, with at least one mountain range in the way. It might be a good dumping ground (or maybe not - there at least were fish in it, if there still are, this would almost certainly kill them). But it would definitely take a lot of energy to pump the water there.
popsci version: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/lonely-people-see-th...
Let me know if anyone starts complaining and I'll let you know how serious they are and my plan

(this is such a good example of how programming / law are the same skills but different, this breaks programmers brains but is obvious to a lawyer)
What if a mysterious molecule that jumped from animals on humans would replicate fast and kill over a million of people all over the world?

What if climate change would lead to massive fires and flooding?

What if mitigation would be a thing?
> Otherwise, your argument is just like saying that infrequent lead exposure may be beneficial because studies only focus on the negative effects of lifetime lead exposure.

No, it's saying that infrequent lead exposure is not as harmful as most think, and certainly not as harmful as other environmental pollutants that are more pervasive.
not to mention layoffs, where you effectively have to pick up the work for your fellow workers that are out of a job.
> Instead of being made with Pyrex borosilicate glass, it was cheap soda-lime glass that couldn't stand up to heating. I never noticed the difference.

American-made[1] "genuine" Pyrex is now also soda-lime, so just the name isn't proof enough any more, at least for cookware rather than labware.

[1]: and I think some stuff found in the UK, as I have a Pyrex-brand jugs and dishes that have got a distinct blue hue when seen edge-on.
>>You can tell that guy's not a parent, haha.

I find it really interesting that you reached that conclusion. Me and my wife spent what feels like an absolutely insane amount of money on a car seat, definitely more than any of our friends have spent(the beforementioned Anoris-T, because as far as I can tell it is the best seat you can buy) and the idea of spending $1000 on a car seat just doesn't fit in my head. It's just too much.

>> but at least in this case I know that I'm getting value out of it

Really? how?
Yeah, it tends to be low single digit percents, but you can get some pessimal behavior if you have enough tiny functions because the overhead of what Cpython exposes starts becoming large. Our "benchmark" where the 10% comes from is tensorflow, which is overwhelmingly tiny functions and no sustained io/individual functions.
I have heard great things about Elixir/Phoenix. Haven't tried it personally.
> a big tech company is surprisingly similar to governments in terms of internal bureaucracy

Underrated point. It didn't really sink in for me until I saw the numbers with my own eyes.

From a quick DDG search of publicly available info, here's [1] the numbers for FAANG headcount as of the end of 2022:

- Meta: 86,000
- Apple: 164,000
- Amazon: 1,541,000
- Netflix: 12,800
- Google: 190,000

The numbers get a bit smaller if you focus only on creative roles (engineering, design, etc) — but it's still an enormous amount of people. And all of them are constantly moving at the speed of realtime chat to jump on every project and figure out how they can use it to advance their careers. The politics and bureaucracy are practically inevitable at this scale.

[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform... (all companies' numbers slightly rounded for easy reading)
Lonely individuals process the world in idiosyncratic ways - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35497738 - April 2023 (96 comments)
He absolutely did say that. He specifically references the female co-worker he had a shouting match with the previous day, and then says:

"These are the kind of women you don’t wanna get married to. You know, some men, they lose their temper and the next thing you know, the wife is dead... it’s the woman who can drive you to do crazy stuff, you know?"

The idea that this is some kind of passive, context-free observation that some men kill their wives after getting frustrated with them is absurd.
Read the licenses more closely.
I agree with you. However give them some slack and consider this more fantasy than a hard sci-fi. If you don't get stuck on details it's not bad to watch.
Tech in Switzerland is a middle class profession, you are doing well but not getting rich with it.

It's certainly not on par with what you might earn in SV, unless you work for Big Tech.
A new perspective on: Wolfram Language (Mathematica) vs. Python for data science