skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recognize a lot of the author's feelings.

Some of us are apparently built to be fixers, solvers, and supporters. We are the elves at night that are not seen, but problems that would have happened without us now don't happen. And a problem that doesn't happen is a problem that's not noticed.

However, that drive to make things better eventually gets bogged down by the apparent lack of care or concern by many other people which leads to more new problems that often shouldn't exist. At some point, you step back and say, "Perhaps if I stop making things better, collapse will come sooner and then people will wake up and decide to pay more attention to their actions and outcomes."

Technical debt is sometimes an intentional trade-off between short term and long term goals. There are times when we would agree that we can cut some corners or not plan for certain expected futures because our time is precious and limited.

When such decisions are weighed before taking action, technical debt is acceptable. But when people are either too inexperienced or simply don't care, the tech debt is just wrong.

What's even more demotivating is watching inferior tools become the most successful, especially as those tools seem to attract the kind of developers who don't see or don't care about software and system quality. These are the people who, when you show them an alternative approach (which has less risk or long term cost - and even without much additional upfront cost), they inevitably say, "Why would you do that? This works fine." And so you end up with 200 line functions, horribly tight coupling everywhere, copy/pasted blocks of code everywhere, etc.

Another demotivator is when key decision makers are too comfortable with "how it has always been done" and are unwilling to grow to the new challenges and company size. You could hustle and deliver proof of concepts which show how company wide shared architectures would reduce effort across most teams (silos) while increasing reliability of systems... and ease of employee migration from one team to another. But after doing things like this and making traction perhaps 1 in 10 times, you eventually decide it's not worth trying. CBF. Meanwhile, the same tech leader is constantly harping about our need to hire more engineers. So clearly, the answer is not work smarter, but throw more people at it and build more variations of tech debt. (When a new engineer is faced with maintaining a debt-ridden legacy project, they don't stick around long.)

I'm sure every profession has some version of all of this, but our seems especially nasty in this regard. I used to balk at the idea of professional certifications before one could be a software engineer, but now I think it would be worth it. Everyone should have to understand and demonstrate more than just passing Leetcode challenges to work in this field.
"Primary energy" is bullshit, we care about "final energy". You're basically giving fossil fuels extra credit for being about 4x less efficient.

Hers some numbers that made that explicit:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/uk-ev-electricity-...

> If we were to electrify transport, we’d need much less energy overall.

> When we look at the amount of energy that countries currently use, it can seem like an overwhelming challenge to replace all of this with low-carbon sources.

> But, we don’t need to produce the equivalent amount of low-carbon energy. Our current energy stack includes the energy that we actually need, but it also includes all of the wasted energy in converting fossil fuels to something useful. When we switch to electric cars or low-carbon electricity, a lot of that disappears.

> We can demonstrate that with transport.
These LLMs are confabulation machines. They're as good as the knowledge of the person who is driving the current session. For coding problems this makes them like a very good teddy bear debugger, but do not expect independently produced creative work from them.
> In contrast, most of us work in organizations with the exact opposite leadership mentality, namely "get your work done as quickly as possible so we can sell more product, and fudge whatever you have to to make it through quality testing unscathed".

When I was in leadership and advocated for getting things done as quickly as possible, the principle reason is that it didn't matter: the company already failed by the time I had subordinates. My reward was that I got 4 extra years of my life back by leaving 1 year in rather than at the bitter end, compared to my colleagues.

It's my opinion that most companies are 90% operating failures / doing stuff that doesn't make sense, while there is 10% that does make sense and subsidizes all the failure. Some people call this taking risks, and indeed the worst places to work take the fewest risks, but I don't think the two are related.

Also the Lisa was a disaster. I don't think there is generalized advice here, even if you have all the conditions where craftsmanship and aesthetics are literally the #1 values your product has.
> I don't think it's acceptable to force students who want to succeed into classrooms with those that don't

Now you're ascribing a specific cause and moralizing, assuming that it's harder for some subset of students because they want to fail, and that they deserve to fail. The utilitarian calculus does matter, you feel fine dooming some set of kids to a poor education because you think they deserve it.

No child deserves a poor education. We do have to choose who we prioritize and I don't really think your analysis of who "deserves" more help is sound.
This is highly misleading. Deep learning was not what did the discovery, the find was handmade. They're trying to make a deep learning model do what was done by hand here, but so far they haven't had success in it finding actual letters.
What was the time for the event that didn't show up in the calendar? Was it something till midnight?
This looks exactly what I started building awhile ago (and then bailed when I discovered Foundry). Do you think you'll ever release the code so it can be self-hosted?
My mother called me freezing cold. Her nest thermostat had a "wifi connectivity lost" message on the screen and she couldn't (or didn't know how) to bypass it and turn up the heat.
The problem 10% bring down everyone else by monopolizing teacher attention. Let’s also not forget that many of these problem students are extremely violent with broken homes. Many of them eventually get transferred to prisons masquerading as schools, but that can take time, and long after they’ve done the damage to everyone else.
> nothing can be deleted from the internet

In theory that's true; anything Donald Trump says, for instance, can never be deleted.

In practice, if someone on Reddit deletes their post, it's extremely unlikely you'll be able to recover it. It's not a probability of zero, but pretty close to it. You could file a lawsuit and then Reddit will have to find it, but otherwise, it's gone.
you also had the right to read the reddit terms of service, granting them ability to do this with "your" information
Philip Rosedale: On that Mark and Lex demo and stuff that's not done yet
What’s your target for percentage of ancillary appointments that are accepted? I’m intrigued by the idea, but in the screenshot it shows 2 use cases that don’t make much sense to me: do most people really schedule dry cleaning around a meeting? Would I really carve out time to pick up flowers for an airport pickup?

The suggestions could be nice, but if I find myself rejecting 90%+ then they would be a hassle…
Jobs uniquely understood that promoting exclusively sales people is the primary cause of legendary product degradation.

It’s a little absurd to state “uniquely” there, because obviously, “everyone” understands this except the people that need to understand it.
That's an interesting idea to think about: if the thought of not completing a challenge in an expected timeline bothered me so much that I took every step to meet the timeline, and leaving something undone didn't give me a very strong icky feeling, what would I do differently when things inevitably turn out to be more complicated than I originally thought? Turn in my code in a non-working state and say it's done?
But notably not threatening or committing violence toward anyone else!
3D-printable replacement for the plastic clips, https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6014514
We are trying. It is very difficult though, the most effective people don’t want the job, and the Board pushes “feel good” politics on everyone, and they do the best they can to hide bad news (although sunshine laws thwarts that if you know how to dig and where to look).

Use of software like Board docks makes finding info 10x harder as well, what a steaming pile of crap that is.
History of the Mackintosh: 200 years of the classic raincoat
self hosted screenshot OCR and aggregation server https://github.com/sentriz/socr
Also consider what happens when you sell your home. Or be careful buying a house with a system.

A friend of mine bought a house with an expensive system, but it wasn't very useful and later had a fault. To remove it would require replacing all the switch plates - I would guess $1000 to get rid of it. He was technical so he fixed it instead.
hm interesting.. I didn't know that it was illegal. I've been living many years in Germany and always jaywalked, or more precisely always looked at the car traffic typically ignoring the traffic lights (as it's common everywhere else in the world outside EU+US).

And I've never been fined, while I'm sure it already happened the police had seen me. But I will admit that Germans are happily waiting while there is no car in sight - until they see people crossing by red, and then they join ...
Are you sure the hardware you are going to use for firewall purposes is not biased towards letting the traffic from/to Intel ME to be unnoticed? What filters are you going to set?
That's actually a super good idea for a metric I didn't think about tracking and I love that you commented that.
Who loves you Hacker News?
> oh, product management/leadership didn't sponsor our tech debt fixing" - it's often because we fail to articulate the real cost of that problem

I disagree. they simply don't care because from the top down, new shiny stuff gets attention, not keeping the old stuff going.

edit: I also wanted to add this, if I do convince them of its importance, MAKE NO MISTAKE, management will agree that work must be done but it has absolutely NO BEARING on having a positive job performance. I just convinced management of something important that I have to do that I will receive no benefit from - unless it goes wrong then I'll get reprimanded.
Go ahead and spend an afternoon exploring sinusoidal waves: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/w9jrdpvsmk
This industry is so arrogant lmao. The Manhattan project? Get fucking real.
Strong doubts about voice service being useful, assuming 2-4mbps per 50 km diameter spot.

The point of cellular is frequency reuse. If your cell is huge that's one channel blocked for that entire area. You can't reuse the it within that area to serve more terminals with more bandwidth. So the system capacity will suck.

Number of simultaneous voice users would be limited to the capacity of a single channel for 2000 sqkm. Don't hope for much.
On Having Children: The Most Private Choice Has Potent Public Consequences
Lemur-70B: Open SOTA LMs for Language Agents, matching ChatGPT on 15 agent tasks
No. That isn't complaining, that's observing.

I observe that there is crap, or that a certain set of incentives produces crap. So what?

What makes it not complaining is I didn't write a blog post about it to try to convince anyone of anything, and I'm just doing my own thing and don't care about them doing their thing, until they tried tondo more than that and also tried to convince everyone else to applaud them for it.

But if the question is raised to evaluate the situation as part of a discussion, this is my evaluation. That isn't complaining even if it is critiquing.

Here is what the real conundrum is about open vs proprietary software:

No one has to sell software to have roofs and bread, even while working on software as your living. You can live very comfortably, better than 80% of everyone around you, and all without any blown out knees, backs, ears, lungs, etc. Just doing support and custom work. You can have all the homes and cars and vacations and health insurance and kids educations you want, and no stress with cash in the bank and complete security.

But getting paid for work instead of paid for copies of work doesn't scale. In fact the fact that it doesn't scale is ecactly why there is enough to go around and everyone can have that life.

But you can never get a $billion unless you can do one days work for a cost of $1k and sell a million copies of it for $5k each.
No one needs that, and no one deserves any pity that they want that and can't get it, EVEN IF someone like amazon can, using something you wrote and gave away no less.

Amazon can make a billion off of the same open source thing that you can't, but so what? Amazon also makes a billion off of driving their trucks on the road out in front of my house that I paid for with taxes. It doesn't change the fact that it's incalculably valuable to me that the road is there and usable by anyone. It has to be that wide open or else it's actually not valuable to me either, both directly and indirectly.

It's not a perfect analogy because they pay taxes too, except then again no they don't really, like all big companies they pay a tiny fraction of what they should and what you and I pay. And the maintenance of the road is more like the servers and stuff, the core value software would be the engineering knowledge how to build roads and maybe the road laying machines and the formulation of asphalt. Whoever did that work was just plugging away at their regular job and got a days pay for it. And so what?
Equating underperforming students with disciplinary problem students seems to be a common problem in this thread. There are many underperforming students who would perform much better without being subjected to a threatening or harassing environment.
Public schools attempt to provide universal education, which is at direct odds with bad-faith students that poison the well.
In fact, in some places where this is legal, public schools get better when they can expel criminal minors into the charter system.
Separating the worst offenders from the other students might also match these students with resources that are most equipped to help them (eg. counselors that might help to reduce gang violence).
> The best way to get started with Hacker News is to sign up for an account.
Well, these ones aren't "half-baked," but they are no longer being maintained (archived):

[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_IPAddress

[1] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_ParseXMLDuration

[2] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_ONVIF

This project is unfinished (I just walked away from it, as it wasn't really giving me what I wanted):

[3] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_GTDriver

This one is "half-baked," I believe. I never really took it particularly far:

[4] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_MediaServer
What if your competitors copycat your items for cheap and throw a bunch of them in the trash?
Why are some stories duplicates and others merely related?
Aye, open models from Meta are tearing at the moat.
> It's obvious major regulation was needed, and not just for pedestrians.

Wait why would your impulse be to regulate pedestrians at all? The street doesn't even seem that dangerous without high-speed vehicles.
Hightouch Is Just Blindly Copying Rudderstack
What about accelerating the natural outcome?

One side wins. Takes it all. We who are remaining adapt.

At some point we must enter the middle or end game.
Sure, but "end the contract" doesn't mean "upgrade to a higher paying plan without consent".
AI Assistant Update – October 2023
1. Those numbers on Latka, ZoomInfo, etc. are often educated guesses.

2. The graph on Latka shows that $35M figure as being from 2021.

3. The 2021 fundraising announcement[0] said they grew revenue 1100% YoY that year, so the 30x multiple might be warranted.

[0] https://a16z.com/announcement/investing-in-loom/
A Q&A with Meta Employees on Blind
Note: not working well in the 70s and 80s, working will up until the 70s and 80s. But gladly, this is a great resource: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf.

Combine with this: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1804780.

At the exact point in our history that we should've accelerated spending in public resources we did an about face in the opposite direction towards privatization and the growth of the administrator class. All of our institutions (healthcare, finance, infrastructure, education, etc.) have been low-productivity money pits since then.
The main flaw I see in the argument is that assumes that AIs should be generalists... But if you look at the reality of our current human economy, you will notice that generalists cannot even get jobs; the economy needs specialists. I think the same will happen with AI; companies will need specialist AIs, not generalists.

And since there are many different industries/specializations with a lot of nuanced, undocumented knowledge which is not available online, it will be difficult for a single large company to acquire all that specialist information. I think the bottleneck isn't going to be hardware costs, but merely putting together the optimal training data. To do this, you need to find the top experts in the world in any given field.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to do right now because top experts are often not given credit these days. Those who are promoted as the top people in any given field are often mostly good at politics and lack the deep nuanced knowledge that would be required to produce top quality training data.
Zigbee light switch that fits over existing physical light switch, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37861815
That is metal af drilled into the bone. Edging closer to cyberpunk

This is the kind of stuff I wish I worked on tech wise, I genuinely feel empathy
The law in the UK has just changed to explicitly give priority to pedestrians already crossing the road, particularly in the context of a car turning off a main road and finding pedestrians crossing the road.
Malbolge - A programming language designed to be almost impossible to use
I've seen quite a few of his videos and never got that impression. He seems to love explaining stuff on camera.
https://github.com/bigjk/virtualcard

My last evening project was a virtual business card webapp. Cards can be designed with web technology and you can drag to rotate to see the back-side :)
Yep. I wonder why there is not more features that would differentiate your LLM API, like for example the Functions in OpenAI LLM APIs. While not perfect it is extremely useful and not aware of a similar offering (I do know that there are Python packages offering similar functionality but it is my understanding that they don't work as well as the OpenAI Functions).
I still remember the slightly aggressive Panos Panay intro to the original.
... create?
The Locations of Star Trek and Other Sci-Fi in Real Space [video]
They also lied about having better quality than cable. They only do 720p while comcast does 1080. Also their customer service is crazy bad. Did the stream fail for the 5th time? Ok give me all your browser info because of course we didn’t collect that and fingerprint you in the error reporting form you just filed.
>The more people have to all independently agree that something is the right thing to do, the harder....

It is for anything to get done.

I mean come on... This is giving the world access to the internet. They have worked on "Cloaking" the devices to ensure they are not interfering with astronomy, have utilized materials that are sure to burn up in the atmosphere, have contributed code to NASA to be able to track these objects.

What happened to people that they are so cynical nowadays? Is it just me, or does everyone just hate everything nowadays? Any kind of technological advances/ Space fairing adventure is met with criticism like this.

To the OP's comment, "How can one man controls so much?" Because without that man, this wouldn't exist for another 10-15 years. Also, "Control" here is "We don't want our satellites used for offensive operations and WAR...." This is the exact kind of man i would like to be in control of such resources.
Philip Morris lobbying to stop WHO 'attack' on vapes
“Allowing poor students from families that value education to go to schools with like minded students is an unequivocally good thing compared to what the public schools currently do.“

If this were unequivocal, people like me wouldn’t fundamentally hate the concept of charter schools. You think “one bad apple spoils the bunch” and that’s an observed effect not a law of nature.

You can like charter schools, but don’t pretend that privatization of public resources for means tested approved individuals is an absolute virtue. The world is complicated.
I guess the difference with me is that by the time it got too faded to read, I felt kindof invested.
> where one car trying to go from point A to point C is effectively given total preference over all the people trying to live their lives (and cross the street) in B.

That's a very simplistic view - it was never questionable and no one was "given preference". It was simply a practical decision in order to allow cars to use the road.

The car took a few seconds to stop from even a pedestrians walking speed. The pedestrian takes a few hundred milliseconds to stop from a walking speed.

Giving the pedestrian the right of way would simply result in a lot of dead pedestrians.

It's a no-brainer that the party to yield should be the one who can yield.

The physics didn't allow your preference, and that turned out to be an incredibly good thing as the automobile was one of the biggest drivers of trade and industry the world over.

We all benefited, yourself included, from having those early laws on the books.
Anecdote incoming so take it with a grain of salt.

Visible is great, but struggles with moving service between phones. I was told it would take at least a week to move from iPhone to iPhone (both eSIM!).

In my experience, US Mobile (not to be confused with US Cellular) is every bit as good as Visible, but has better customer support.
https://github.com/halftheopposite/TOSIOS: never brought the game to the "fun" part of what a game is supposed to be, but at least it serves as educational.

https://github.com/halftheopposite/graph-dungeon-generator: what was supposed to be circular graph dungeon generator, ended up being a tree dungeon generator.

https://webcursors.click - I should have spent more time thinking about solving a problem that doesn't exist and clearly you can feel that there's something missing.
Pretty damn life changing, actually, for the vast majority of even gasp Californians.
Interesting ideas. I'll take a look at how those would feel. Thanks for the feedback!
Android has had built in OCR for a few releases. You can copy and paste text from any image/app you can display on the screen.

To use, go to the app switcher and just start selecting text.

It's funny trying to select text in a video while the video is playing...
Graduation rates don't actually reflect on the quality of education, I don't think, unless you're controlling for a lot of other variables. I don't typically see people controlling for them, e.g. a politician might brag that graduation rates are up in their district, arguing that education has improved, while ignoring the underlying reason that standardized tests got easier or the schools spent more time test-prepping and less time educating.
No Fakes Act wants to protect actors and singers from unauthorized AI replicas