skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes! I know this guy's work.

I haven't visited this site in years though. I wonder if mobile games are the reason why. I stopped playing a lot of web/flash/html5 games a long time ago when gaming (for me) moved to the app store.

But I recognized the name and remember playing a lot of these games back in the day.

I always thought they were delightful. Building off a single game mechanic or two and then moving on to the next concept. The dev has a good system in place for shipping :)
I was in Shenzhen recently, walking around the shopping districts, and I was constantly feeling a sense of unusualness. Eventually I figured out that it was because that despite all these cars and scooters on the road, I felt like I was waking in a forest, as most of the sounds I hear are from people, and the cars and scooters are pretty much silent, since so many of them are electric.
"40MHz 386 was is 1992."

It was also the lowest configuration on which Doom could run decently in full screen mode.
> programmers tend to read essays until they getting to the first line they disagree with and then tweet about it, like a compiler

https://twitter.com/tef_ebooks/status/1108101434141298695

I suspect many people didn't get past the first five words.

That said, I agree with you that the point is more legitimate, but I don't think it's a particularly strong argument.
Double blinds are not the gold standard for science. They are not even the gold standard for medicine, although for drug studies in particular they have great utility. They actually have quite limited applicability outside of a particular set of circumstances.

The double blind study is a special construct created to deal with the confounding effect of placebos, which really isn’t a thing outside of medicine.
I don't remember the beginning premise of Shaun of the Dead, but rabid positive thinkers reentering society sounds about right.
AWS charges 90x more for bandwidth than conventional hosting companies. The economies of scale are in Jeff Bezos' pocket instead of being passed to customers.
See it otherwise: It's not overtime, as a firefighter does not overtime 8h a day. It's your job and your job is to be on-call while writing code or vice-versa.

I think the only viable method for such a fast response time is that it's your work. You will have off on Friday but work on Saturday (or something like that).

If it's more like 1h response time sure, take your laptop with you to familys dinner.
datacenter is to information what power plant is to electricity

Economically, scale makes the centralized solution more efficient. That doesn't preclude independent entities running their own stoves, or running their own internal combustion engines, or their own industrial furnaces, but confines those uses to niche areas where direct power generation is more convenient/efficient due to additional constraints.

Politically, centralization means power. Power seeking entities will eventually outright ban independent power generation, for whatever excuse du jour. See NY ban of gas stoves, or EU plans to ban ICE cars. For information, 'to prevent illegal activity' excuse is usually used.
No, I didn't leave them out. They're just not a significant factor because those costs are proportional to need and demand. A company is either large enough to have enough that those things are aggregated across tons of servers, or they're likely colocating. Also, datacenters don't require all of that to be datacenters.
There were actually metaphysical materialists similar to Machiavelli in Newton's time who were paragons of something similar to atheist thought and were free of " this cancer on humanity". But it's telling that none of them ended up developing anything of worth in the natural sciences and anyone who knows their philosophy would know why that's the case.
No it would not be necessary. A control group would give you confidence that it wasn’t some other aspect of the experiment that resulted in people surviving. But we have strong enough priors on rabies that we should feel confident the probability of accidentally curing rabies with a different aspect of the experiment is extremely small.
It just depends on the business, b2b can be very consistent. Some workloads just have predictable behavior.

I worked at a medium sized place where we had plans in place to handle the workload for our entire market on-prem (if we were ever to capture that market).

We realized that horizontal scalability wasn't important to us because we had enough of the market to know that the other half of the market could be supported on our existing solution.
Extending this metaphor, I would then want to own my two bedroom home, and take a vacation to the rented mansion.

Is there a well trodden way to serve most of your everyday traffic out of your own datacenter, but scale out to cloud infra when traffic peaks?
One large part is much cheaper to produce than the same section made out of several parts - chiefly because you don't have to spend time and resources on putting it all together.

Also, you can actually use less material since you don't have to reinforce the points where you weld/bolt.
If you read Asimov's short stories and novels, you'll find that the point being made over and over again is that despite them sounding ironclad at first, the laws are naïve, futile, fraught with unexpected ambiguity, and ultimately cause more trouble than they solve.

People have this idea that Asimov envisioned a world where robotics was based on the rules, but it's the opposite really. He was claiming that there is no such thing as absolute rules once intelligence starts getting involved, and that nuance and grey areas are inevitable. The three laws were never more than a straw man to be taken down, and it's really weird to me whenever anyone uses them as some kind of north star wrt/ to AI ethics.

So in that sense, the comparison is definitely apt :)
https://www.goodrx.com/wellbutrin-xl says $29 at Walgreens and most other pharmacists - some much cheaper.
yes but current AWS and similar mainly win through flexibility and services they provide not on cost for a immutable compute capacity. For that nearly always getting your own hardware is cheaper when you look at a time span of multiple years (but running it in a rented rack in a server center, there are services like that).
Ottoman State Finances in European Perspective 1500–1914 [pdf]
It’s not extremely small. It’s extremely consistent that matters.
I've enjoyed using Clozemaster - it's an app that uses the sentence-mining concept advocated by Glossika. That is, it uses pre-made cloze deletions that help you learn words in the context of a sentence. It has some advanced material and has been a good language learning tool somewhere "in-between" Duolingo and Anki.
How did you jump from "After several days you get used to it and it does not bother you" to "you then start committing code with obvious issues"?

You can't just make up stuff and then blame other people for it...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-...
You can easily use this for digital documents as well. The only difference in my setup is a tag showing whether the document id maps to a physical document in a binder or not.
I see two solutions to the conundrum. At one company where I previously worked, they required that employees receive 2x the time off, if you had to fix or work on anything during off-hours. Another company I’ve been at is pretty strict about not shipping things until they’re ready (but, that company doesn’t hire juniors in engineering). Pick your poison.

The fact is that no engineer wants to get paged. But we have to be responsible for our work and our mistakes. That said, I think it’s well understood, the dynamic of pushing rushed work. To which end, you have to construct a system where e.g. product is incentivized to align with engineering on some minimum level of reliability.
Do you notice how these instructions look like they have been written by some frustrated manager for some poor employee to follow, and refined over years for every mistake that gets made?

Those instructions wouldn't look out of place printed and taped behind the reception desk in a hotel... Except the topic would be 'how to operate the room key card programming machine'.
I appreciate your input but I'm not in it for a career. I'm in it for personal satisfaction. If I can't build a game on my own then I'm not good enough to call myself a game developer.

A team can't bring that satisfaction to me. Kudos to those who enjoy working in groups. For me, I end up doing more than my share of work and correcting others' mistakes. At that point, you may as well make it yourself. People are more of an obstacle to my progress than they are an enabler.
You do realize this "list of rules as a pre-prompt" is common and happens right ? This isn't some hallucination (which is easily tested by asking again on a fresh instance and seeing if it's consistent).
Your colocation provider handles all that for the flat monthly fee you're paying them for the rack space.
Why are some Chinese women still looking to the West for love?
dang, i always thought Newton Mass was named after Isaac, not some other rando British chap that hopefully at least liked figs. the more you know...
This is a pretty fair comment, but also not scratching the surface in some ways. Firstly, any decent boss will give you days off if some gnarly on-call stuff happens. Anywhere from "you can come in at 2pm and leave at 5pm" to "take Monday and Tuesday off, no one will track it". This is because they know it is a retention issue.

Secondly, there is a cultural divide sometimes. Generally, iOS programmers aren't on call, because they can't ship anything in less than a day or two. So, you get this phenomenon where they say "I'm an expert in Apple user interfaces" (a fine thing to know about!), but everyone resents them, because they are not on call.
It is somewhat depressing to realize that the disease that killed him would be easily treatable now. And we would have results of 40+ extra years of his productivity.
Well, consider that "once in a blue moon" might actually be worse given that a) it is not predictable and b) likely to be less compensated.

Like, it doesn't matter if something almost never happens because I'd be "on call" regardless- that ---is--- what it means to be on call.

I did that for many years and it didn't matter so much when my kids were little and I didn't want to, like, go to a rave off the grid or perform music over a weekend or go climbing in BFE Utah.

But I quit a job that I'd had for almost 10 years because of that fact of the work. After a while it's a really bullshit thing to do to folks.

It doesn't matter if I never get called- I still have to be available and that really is something people need to be compensated for.
And lose respect from anyone with an inking of common sense. Nobody cares about who you’ve demoed your software to. People care about who is using it. Marketing like this and the people that choose to do it are the absolute worst.
Games have pretty much entirely moved on from loot boxes. There's a few holdouts (FIFA/EAFC), but most games have moved on from that.

We're still in the phase of climate change denial though.
It really is underrated how effective calm direct communication can be when it's not coupled with attempts to injure with insults.
What is truly irrational is believing that renting computers is cheaper.
> We can't know that life is guaranteed unless we find another example of life arising independently.

Of course not. But that's why we discuss probabilities.

We also can't discuss definitively about things that we have no reasonable ways to detect. So claims about there's no life because we would have seen them is completely worthless given that we have very, very few, if any, ways to detect such life.

Assuming it existed, are we even able to detect a planet like Earth with similar animal and human activity in any other solar system, even in the Milky Way? I am personally not aware of such general capability.
Funnily enough, literally the previous article from the same series praises Margaret Thatcher.

Lol.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-the-ownership-re...
The hate on big Pharma is crazy to me. They're actually a pretty small part of the healthcare bill: 8.9%. Even if drugs were free your health insurance bill would be pretty much the same. https://www.ama-assn.org/about/research/trends-health-care-s...
This is ridiculous victim blaming. Anyone can fall for a scam in the wrong moment with the wrong luck, this mentality of thinking you’re too intelligent to be scammed is how people get scammed
Incentives are important -- unlike other commentators, I agree with my management that paying extra for time spent actually working when on-call is not a great idea: it sets up a perverse incentive. We have a base hourly rate for on-call (with a half-hour response time) and time off in lieu for actual call-outs. Teams differ, but my team has separate rotas for in-hours and out-of-hours. This means that if you're up all night, you get time to sleep without needing someone to take on-call from you during the day.

An average week of out-of-hours involves precicely zero pages. This is also important: when we get paged for something, we take steps to avoid being paged for the same thing again. Not just because we value our sleep, but because management values our services being up and running so we're encouraged to fix stuff that's broken.

We did have a team saying that their services were noisier than other teams', and asking if they could be paid more as a consequence. The answer was to fix their service reliability, not to incentivise people to wait until out-of-hours to declare an incident so they trigger the bonus payment.

So long as I've got mobile coverage, I'm free to get on with my life. I carry my laptop if I'm more than 30 minutes from home, but I don't expect to need to use it.
It's true for moving collectors.

Go does not have a moving collector so I'm guessing it is doing something like an arena allocation (perhaps just relying on jemalloc and calling free at the right times?). In which case go's allocation speed will be around C's speed. They could be doing something different but I didn't stumble across that googling.
I agree, writing Python is easier without an editor than writing Java, Scala, Kotlin, Rust or C++.

This said, Python is often completely unsuitable for jobs solved by Java, Scala, Kotlin, Rust or C++. So I don't think it is a fair comparison.
I recall an anecdote by a mathematician about his approach to peer-reviewing proofs of theorems. He said he glosses over most of it, but very thoroughly checks anything the author claims to be "obvious" because it's the things that seem obvious that screw people up.
I like the discussions, but the idea of 'smartest' is dumb, for people to be pondering.

There are original singular ideas/proofs which shake our world, such as Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Each such case is incomparable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...

This particular article may as well as said IQ, which is biased nonsense:

> Implicit in this definition of intelligence is general knowledge.

Why is this requirement there? So that this most intelligent being is still "like us"?
That was new and unique. It had huge economic and strategic implications.

This is the same old tiresome story. No more relevant to our daily lives than war in Sudan, Libya, Syria, quakes in Afghanistan etc.
I have always found this to be a weird take from a forum largely populated by software people. Every piece of software I have ever used has been riddled with bugs and security defects. This despite the fact that we have dedicated sub-fields for both (security engineering / test engineering). So when a journalist notices a bug in their article and has to "retract a release", how is that not what we do every single day?

I think you might just be disappointed in humanity, rather than any particular agency or person. Humans come together to get the right answer eventually; not multiple times a day, every day, without fail. Sometimes the software doesn't do what you want. Sometimes that article has a factual error. Eventually we figure it out. It's not the end of the world.
It takes much less space (including storage for waste of current generation power plants, and we could close fuel cycle if we spent a tiny fraction of money used to whitewash oil companies to this research) that all fields of wind generators and solar panels. Also, modern nuclear station has resource much larger than modern wind generators, which is made of glass and resin. Nuclear power plant don't take space needed to graze cattle and seed crops, don't kill soil with vibration as wind turbines, don't change local micro climate as solar panels deployed on square kilometers. "Only" problem with nuclear plant is possible terrorist attack (modern control systems should exclude manual control and Chernobyl scenario).

Yes, uranium is theoretically finite, but only now known reserves is enough for something like 100'000 years on current level of power production of whole planet (not current power production of existing nuclear power plants, but total power production as-if it is made only by nuclear plants). And it is not all reserves for sure, and in 100'000 years, I hope, fusion power plants will be reality
This looks nice, especially the small runtime. One nitpick: Why not "if" expressions, or even "for" expressions? Ternary operators aren't something any new language should copy. It might even reduce parser code.
This happened to me yesterday, I don't remember the query but I remember I was quite surprised because it never happens. Turns out I misspelled a brand/product name by one letter - Funny enough, I would have wanted them to correct my query in this case.
Related:

The evidence behind strong claims about static vs. dynamic languages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16287083 - Feb 2018 (1 comment)

The empirical evidence that types affect productivity and correctness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8594769 - Nov 2014 (25 comments)

Also a couple references in this recent thread:

Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37764326 - Oct 2023 (847 comments)
> From what I hear in the US, their banking system is slow to innovate outside of fintech providers.

Actually, the FedNow system, which will provide very fast transactions, is currently being deployed in the US:

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
A Man Who Killed Millions and Saved Billions (Clean Version) [video]
Educational video of Veritasium got age-restricted and demonetized
Ducat
Though I don't think it was the root cause of 68k's demise, offering poor backwards compatibility between generations was an unforced error by Motorola. Everything was changing so fast in computing in the 80s-90s, and Wintel's soft guarantee that you could just write/buy software and it'd work in the future was a big selling point.
Throwaway so I can talk honestly.

I used to work on call in non-software, as a blood analyzer Field Service Engineer for medtech companies, like Siemens, Roche, Beckman-Coulter, Bio-Rad, etc. I spent 5 years doing this.

In that industry and job it's standard to work on call rotations that last for 7 days through the weekend and repeat every 3-5 weeks depending on team size. Because the job is hands-on and at customer sites, the minimum response time is usually a bit more than 15 minutes.

If anyone is considering accepting an on-call rotation, don't. It takes over your life. At first you may think it's fun to swoop in and be the hero fixit person, or maybe you at least tolerate it because of high base pay or something. Eventually you grow to hate the sound that accompanies the callout text or email. By the end, it triggered a visceral physical negative reaction I later learned was a minor anxiety attack.

The thing managers seeking to add on-call don't understand (those who haven't done it themselves), is that when you're on call you can't do anything. Not only can you not drink (minor annoyance), you can't even leave the house for normal stuff like a movie (medium), or attend events like a kids graduation or recital (major).

And before you say "just swap rotations around on your team," I worked with about 10-15 guys and you'd be surprised how hard it is to swap. Everyone makes plans for things all the time without realizing it would interfere with on-call, like going to the gym. At the start of the year when the on-call rotations would be released to us, there was a mad rush to submit vacation requests to get it locked in before illness or other things required swapping on-call around, much less having to take field requests from colleagues that you may (will) have to rely on when you in turn need a swap, so you can't just ignore every request.

This manager and CTO are hilariously unprepared and uninformed, bordering on pure dreaming. A 15 minute max response time is criminally unrealistic, you can't even go to the grocery store. And once a week seems low on paper until you realize that depending on team size, you can easily wind up being forced to give up a quarter of your weekends for the year (as I had to).

I haven't worked on-call for software, so maybe it's different, but I doubt it's really too different.

After 5 years of all that lost time, the amount I'd have to be paid to go back on-call is so astronomically high no company would ever pay it. Actually, now that I have a kid, there's probably no amount I could be paid if it means missing time with them.
No, and must likely the ethical committee review would reject the use of a placebo group in the study.
Yeah, I put in the first two paras of today's featured article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boukephala_and_Nikaia

And it said 91% chance it was generated by AI
What a great article! He seems a bit skeptical which honestly is not my view, but actually overall the article is very balanced.

The article compresses quite a lot of these LLM discussions and balances with point and counterpoint.

To pick up on the "what do you do with them" question, one trend on the horizon might be virtual employees (aka Agents) and virtual teams.

So the starting interface might go from a chat session that opens with some example prompts, to pictures of fake people with their job titles and skills under them.

The agents you select would plug in to a team and iterate on whatever tasks they are assigned in your project, up to your given budget.

So the thing you need to figure out is more like a mission statement for a company with occasionally a few high level goals, rather than a lot of detailed instructions and corrections for every individual task.

Another route along these lines would be an assistant that follows you around, watches what you are doing, and provides suggestions on demand that automatically incorporate context. I think many (if not most) large software providers are building this in.
Quite possibly people that are healthy and don’t get dementia can stand for longer.
> Given all the recent buzz, you might be surprised to learn that you use heat pumps already—there’s probably more than one in your home and another in your car. You just don’t call them heat pumps: You use the terms refrigerator or air conditioner.
Yet many/most companies rent their offices or facilites, because they don't want to be in the property management business. It may cost more in the end, but it's more predictable and lower risk.

I think the analogy works best for SaaS but not necessarily for PaaS in most cases.
Transparency is the key to trust and journalistic integrity. Even an article that was mostly wrong/written from a failed premise should remain accessible with a timestamped correction statement explaining the problem.

Making your mistakes suddenly disappear as if they never happened is tempting, but it's going to leave users feeling gaslit, distrustful, or even just misinformed.