skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But, even still, its fair to argue that the separation of powers between the state and citizenry should be narrow.

I think that ship sailed a long time ago.

Beyond the wiretapping example you mentioned:

Qualified immunity: cops can do a wide range of things in the line of duty (or even vaguely approximating the line of duty) and not have liability for the consequences of their actions (including like, killing random bystanders).

Firearms: cops can get new machineguns. Cops are explicitly granted exceptions from almost all gun laws (and in some cases, even ex cops).

(Practically speaking) traffic laws: maybe not ubiquitous in every city, but cops can just disregard traffic laws when they want, with impunity.

Lying: a cop can go to great lengths to lie and decieve you while conducting their business, interviewing or interrogation, etc. If you lie to them, it gets you in a really bad spot when it comes time for court. In many jurisdictions (for example my own state), just lying to a cop is technically punishable by thousands of dollars and/or up to a year of jail.

Etc etc etc
What do you mean by the abyss? Serious question. I don't recall there being critical industries grinding to a halt, people starving, or anything like that from the Suez being blocked.
> voting for and against the causes celebs put up

Thereby turning every issue into a cause célèbre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cause_c%C3%A9l%C3%A8bre
Cash is reversible in a way that you find person that you exhanged goods and services with and they give you your money back, whether voluntarily or forced by court order.
i kind of agree but also it kind of sucks spending hours debugging code in which gpt-4 has carefully concealed numerous bugs

i mean raise your hand if debugging code that looks obviously correct is the part of programming you enjoy most?

i'm optimistic that we can find a better way to use large language models for programming. run it in a loop trying to pass a test suite, say, or deliver code together with a proof-assistant-verified correctness proof
Anyone ought to be able to see the new truth; that AI is multiplying the power and importance of the programming and software engineering discipline, by allowing us to churn out far more software in far less time. Entire genres of code tasks will get wiped out (data adaption layers come to mind.)

Software engineers, even if just reduced to AI-bot controllers, will still be essential links between people who have no idea how computers work and the actual machines.
Apple employs some of the people who built Google search so obviously they could if they wanted to.
usually higher parameter models do better with less training data,
seperate from few shot learners, but related in other ways.
Can confirm. I work in financial services, we employ Imperva for WAF + DDoS.

Initial onboard was 2 FTE for ~6 months.

We are now at probably .5-.75 FTE. Onboarding new sites, responding to “waf broke the site”, type things and doing exceptions (for pen tests and what not).

Not sure of the TCO, but I shudder to think what would happen if we didnt have it.

We have a lot of…old…java…
This _is_ called FaaS generally.

Serverless is kinda confusing though. Like whenever I say I work with serverless functions I always have to explain there are unmanaged servers involved
Turn any site into a custom GPT with just a URL
If I have to choose between a phone that's "secure" and one that I can actually run the apps I want to on, guess which I'm choosing. What's the point in a phone that you can't even look at porn on?
If you train LLMs on code from GitHub it will output what the average GitHub repo has in it. That is, "competent level", not expert or virtuoso.

And it will also carry over bugs found at the "competent" level.
Start here, friend: https://www.railstutorial.org/

It looks like maybe it's paid now, I don't know. Hartl's tutorial was my introduction to ruby, rails, and TDD all in one go. It's a great tutorial, he's a great instructor. I would recommend anyone to start there. If it's paid, in hindsight, I would have paid quite a lot for the tutorial the first round. (Also, maybe you can find an archived version and learn with an older rails, if money is a concern?)

Ruby felt easy for me to pickup. I think Rails was harder to learn than Ruby.

Have fun!

Edit: Also, a bunch of rails nerds were talking in here today, maybe they left some thoughts about how they started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38248421
Do people have problems with Leetcode stuff or something? Aside from generating code I already know how to write before hand quickly, I find AI super useless for coding. It's never been able to solve a single problem I have worked on - mostly involving infrastructure deployment and config.
No argument from me -- I agree with you, it's a reflection of the state of the economy right now. My other comment was mostly a reaction to the stigma that often surrounds living at home past university (or even sometimes high school) graduation, and how it seems like an increasingly unreasonable standard to hold people to.
I may be in the minority, but after the initial “wow” period, I have been underwhelmed with co-pilot.

Don’t get me wrong, there are few times it has really really impressed me. And there are a few things it really shines at, but most of the time I find it getting in the way.

I’m not so concerned about the craft of programming. But those that make a good living automating trivial tasks should be more worried.
I mean this in the least offensive way possible, but whenever one of these flowery ChatGPT pieces comes out, it's always written like this

"at one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. "[...]

I returned to the crossword project. Our puzzle generator printed its output in an ugly text format, with lines like "s""c""a""r""""k""u""n""i""s""" "a""r""e""a". I wanted to turn output like that into a pretty Web page that allowed me to explore the words in the grid, showing scoring information at a glance. But I knew the task would be tricky[...]

This man has written software professionally for 20 years? The last part of the article is at least correct. Code generation isn't going to replace programmers. Almost all SNES and NES games were written in Assembly. Modern game devs learn Unity and Unreal and visual scripting. Are there now more or fewer game devs? Writing a few lines of code that generate a metric ton of more code is what most of us have been doing for many years now. Abstraction and tooling does not change the nature of the profession and it certainly doesn't end it.
theres a whole literature on distilation and student teacher networks
Counterpoint: HackerNews does trust you. If they didn't, they would restrict or delete your account, and potentially block your IP. Just because trust is assumed by default doesn't mean there is no trust.
Nah, the internet will survive these goons.
> Overall, Millennials are slower when it comes to leaving the nest compared to previous generations: 18% of Baby Boomers and 17% of Gen X were living with their parents at the same age as today's average Millennials. Likewise, Zoomers also struggle: By 22 years old, 66% of Millennials, 65% of Gen X and 61% of Baby Boomers were still at home, which was surpassed by a 68% share of Gen Z.

There, the part of this that makes the bare stats mean anything whatsoever.
I think Bing would also be happy to pay for this position.
Which learning? If anything AI will render (highly) skilled humans even more relevant in most creative fields: the literature translator and it's ability to transfer emotion, the artist that can create art outside AI reach, the software engineer who can architect a solution, etc.

What is menaced is low to mid quality work, and less educated/skilled people. This is in my opinion where the real danger of AI lies: a world where it's so easy to let a program write an email that the sheer ability to think about it's content, then type it is lost to the majority. Some with anything requiring some effort the learn. This will exacerbate the divide between classes, with a handful people who can understand and act on the world, and those who don't.
Imagine a doctor 100 years post-Galen "considering the waning days of medicine". We are a young, young discipline.
"Carnal knowledge". https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/carnal_knowledge
Do you really think that the former CEO of AWS is not referring to the addressable market for cloud?
You think cola is poison?
I don't know why people downvote this.

Am I missing something or everyone agrees that there are no gender related or ideology issues in modern schools at all?
> Google’s search results are awful these days.

Absolutely agree. One of the reasons I switched to Kagi.
i've fired a lot of negativity at people for treating the entropy monster as a trustworthy information source. it's a waste of my time to prove it wrong to their satisfaction. it's great at creativity and recall but shitty at accuracy, and sometimes accuracy is what counts most
Darwin has been released as open source. I haven't looked at it in a really long time. Has it's availability situation changed? Is it woefully out of date from current releases? hell, does macOS still use Darwin underneath?
AI taking over one of the only professions able to afford someone a proper middle class existence is pretty shitty. It will be great for capitalists though.
All these interviews seem intended to bolster (exaggerate?) Geoffrey Hinton's contributions to the development of AI.
I can only speak as someone who was homeschooled, as I haven't had a chance to practice it from the other side yet, but:

I wouldn't have traded it for the world. However I was very lucky to grow up in an area with an exceptionally bad school system so there were quite a few other homeschooled families around. I learned math at my friend David's house from his dad who was a 3D visualization software engineer. I learned electronics from the neighborhood "elmer" who helped us all get our ham radio licenses. We did art and history at a bunch of places, and we did "field trips" with our friends to all sorts of places.

I've spent my whole life fighting the "ahh, an ill-mannered anti-social homeschooler eh?!" stereotype, but I have to admit that I've met my share of them too. This is my biggest concern with eventually homeschooling my own kids. Having people around, having a group, learning to get along with people, are all critical. Nevermind the fact that we learned all sorts of things that we weren't ourselves interested in because one of our friends was interested. Would I ever have gone on a field trip to learn to ride horses? No, but the neighbors wanted to, so we did! And they learned about hydroelectric dams when I wanted to go to those. I think I would've turned out a lot worse if I hadn't had that diversity of exposure.

I started community college at age 16 (paid for by the local high school) and was well prepared for it. (Except for chemistry. I still don't grok chemistry.) Neither of my parents ever went to college, and they've told me that they had the same concerns about being able to effectively teach. Kids are curious, and the resources to learn are out there. Don't get too hung up on following a curriculum and being an expert at everything yourself, get them with other kids and encourage curiosity. Learning how to learn is THE critical factor, and in my observation one of the things that public schools fail ridiculously at. (But I'm rather biased.)

Look into homeschooling groups in your area, or the newer related phenomena of "co-op schooling". (Essentially what I got.) Try and meet some of the parents in those group and see what it's like for their kids. If you've got any sort of support system around like that you'll do just fine!
That human would likely do much worse than the algorithms. This is a real problem and as far as I know there is no way to get this resolved because the main reason the algorithm is able to outperform the human is because it enables a larger volume and so you have more data to work with.

This is the same reason why a PSP will always give you better fraud protection than rolling your own, they look at so much more data than you ever will that they will be able to better tell friend from foe. Fewer false positives and fewer false negatives. Still too much, but the theory is that in order to be able to detect fraud you will have to have some fraud!
Put such protections and limitations in the constitution and make it harder to subvert.

“The right of a citizen to use public spaces without causing the creation of a long term, indexable, searchable, hashable record of their presence shall not be curtailed.”

Side note - I’m not even an American citizen but can evoke the style of the second amendment without much trouble. That’s soft power!
I'd fit the bill, I've talked to a few people about working together and realized I'd be building the product and it was unclear what they would be contributing.
Actually building a PRNG yourself would still be hard though!

Well, coming up with a crappy one isn't hard. Coming up with a new good one, with good efficiency is hard, though.

It would be cool if modern devices had a solid state radiation detector for this purpose.

Don't current chips already do this with noise from a diode? Quick google: Yes. There are quite a number of these sorts of methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generat...

Nothing is perfect, it turns out.
Define “right now”
they already could, they just had to debug it, which is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place
Nostradamus wannabes are everywhere, in every field.
always has been .jpg

coordination dilemmas, particularly resource allocation, are The Problem
Lovely essay (and the visuals are great). I had not seen this before even though it's from 2015.
You will find a non-negligible number of serious gardeners who insist that speaking to your plants makes them grow better.
I hope the DOJ breaks the deal so that Apple is forced to reveal its "secret" search engine, gain for consumers and the industry as a whole.
Stage 4 melanoma used to mean you'd be dead in a year. I personally know someone who was flat-out cured of stage 4 melanoma.

Her only treatment was three doses of immunotherapy. Her tumors shrank by two-thirds almost immediately. For the next seven years they just monitored, and finally they declared her cancer-free. She doesn't even have to go in for scans anymore.
It's not compatible with the idea that you can just use the project for commercial purposes without giving some form of contribution back. That's a good outcome imho.
That doesn't negate the validity of the basic idea. Algorithms shouldn't be patentable becasue they are more abstract than machines and they give too much monopoly power to those who claim to own them.

Legal logic that explains it should be worked out if for some reasons it still isn't.
Something to note here is that copilot is pretty old tech at this point already - GPT4 API is just absolutely worlds better, and it is also about to be old news soon too! With GPT5 coming probably next year, we don’t know what advances it will make but surely basing your understanding of it on copilot will leave you shocked soon enough.
At this point I'll gladly accept Anduril bots circling the city streets and shooting nets and stun darts at miscreants.
Recurring fines in the hundreds of millions is much more better than an absolute ban.

The regulators get millions out of repeat offenders until TikTok caves and complies with the demands of the regulators.

Win for regulators, Win for users and Tiktok can still operate as long as it follows the rules.
> to what percentage of skilled human workers it can replace

Any levels of insanity that makes people believe such statements?
Back in the day a former NSA employee told me that they almost never crack the encryption algorithm. Rather, they crack errors in the implementation.
My sister is a young millennial in her late 20s and lives at home with our mom. They live in Los Angeles. My sister will likely NEVER be able to afford to buy a house in Los Angeles, and there is no sense in paying rent when our mom is happy for the company.

My mom is an immigrant, and she has always welcomed her adult children to live with her (even to the point of insistence). I fully expect to go live with her when she reaches her elderly years. I'm even kind of looking forward to it. I live across the country from my whole family and this has been a very isolating experience, even if it was my choice to do so.

I don't think it is weird for adults to live with their family. I actually think it's weirder and more unnatural NOT to live near or close to your family.
America Is Getting Lonelier and More Indoorsy. That's Not a Coincidence
But 70's rock makes the fruit so much sweeter.
You're being downvoted, but this is true.

The American Way of moving out from your parents' home ASAP to be so-called "independent" at any and all costs is not the only (or even best) way.
I feel like the headline does not match the article here. The headline implies that programming as a craft is to be replaced but the article ultimately argues that it will change significantly which matches my intuition as well.

At the end of the day, the bar is being lowered. Is that a bad thing? From a selfish perspective, yes. From a societal perspective, no. At the risk of digressing, I think one of the issues that my part of the world (Canada and to a lesser extent, America) has been faced with is inequality. I know people who work more "average" service jobs and they make substantially less than engineers do and that's something that's made me pretty uneasy over the past few years. The societal value of generative AI is in making knowledge work such as law, medicine, and software engineering much more accessible to "average" people.

Are there downsides to that? Probably but I think granting power evenly is probably a better path to utopia than misguided elitism. The latter sounds like the path to despotism.
Solving search now, after decades of enshittification, much of which was driven by Google themselves, is a different kind of problem.
Genuinely curious, what would the accessibility problems be? Screen readers seem like they'd do great with this format.
Can you provide some evidence for your statement?
Available capacity is not falling, production output is. This is the purpose of reserve energy. Cheap renewable energy is produced when the weather allows it, and fossil fuels produce energy when demand exceed supply. In order to keep fossil fueled power plants ready to supply energy, the state steps in and provide a paycheck in order to keep them available (this is the program that the twitter post talks about).

This is the strategy that Germany has. It is also why getting rid of fossil fuel subsidies is close to impossible. The more fossil fuel power plants a country need to have standing by, the more subsidies are needed to keep them staffed and fueled up. In general it did reduce emissions compared to running exclusively on fossil fuels, while reducing costs at the same time since at peak weather the efficiency of renewables are very high.
The author makes this conceit in the next sentence

> everybody looks them up anyway. It’s not real programming
Melodramatic, pretentious, they just love these puff pieces outside of tech
Even as a kid I'd always thought diamonds were bland and didn't understand why so many people wanted them. Any other gemstone looked better to me, and I think still would.
I think it is crazy. Lots of businesses would be destroyed if it was that high.
gladwell made a career out of compelling, convincing writing about things he didn't understand and came to the wrong conclusions about, like a human chatgpt, so probably; google 'igon value'
I see. I used to look askance at stories of living with parents from a place like Italy back in the early 2000s, but in retrospect they were the canary in the coal mine. This is becoming a global phenomenon. It's hiding standards of living that are falling fast for younger generations. It's easier to keep people off the poverty rolls when they can move back in with parents and forgo starting families of their own.
Millennial here. If I didn’t hit the tech job lotto I would still be living with my parents with my wife and kids. It’s a shitty cycle. You have kids, and it’s either my wife stays home or she works and gives all her wage to daycare. The only way to stay positive financially is to get “free” help which is to have your parents take care of their grandkids. I know the alternative is to just not have kids, but it absolutely sucks how it feels financially impossible it is to have kids.
Definitely not the only one. Both Google and Apple (and their very highly paid economists, analysts, and CXOs) are betting that this deal is more beneficial to them than the alternatives.
If you ask an LLM "did Alice on the X forum write Y?", you can get a justifiable answer.

Sure, but that’s not a very interesting question and search engines tend to be much better at answering it anyway.

Historians have access to more than just texts about the past. They have access to physical evidence. Radiometric dating, artifacts, geographic data about where things were found.

At the same time, if you ask historians about (say) the Peloponnesian War they will tell you about the account of Thucydides. What they won’t say is that they know about it personally.

That’s a mistake a lot of non-scientists make about science. They’ll hear scientists say things like “we know this” or “we know that” and think that they are committing to some privileged knowledge of the world. They aren’t. They’re using the words “we know X” as shorthand for “our best theory about X.” In fact, many scientists identify as scientific anti-realists [1] which means they don’t believe science has any true facts about the nature of reality at all and that the only job of science is to make better predictions about the outcome of experiments.

Of course, if you take anti-realism to its logical conclusion then you have to admit that fossils are only evidence that you may find more fossils in the future, and that you have no basis to talk about the existence of dinosaurs.

Personally, I think our actual knowledge of things directly outside our personal experience is very limited. But then I want to encourage people not just to believe everything they read. People should be exploring and trying their own science experiments and trying to build things to understand how the world works.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/#AntiF...
Do you consider the network with the highest viewership and ratings numbers to be mainstream, or are you using "MSM" as coded language? Taylor Swift's advocacy was disfavored on Fox
The same argument was made for Eugenics. Less human suffering if we sterilize people now vs. let them starve later.

Turns out all it took to solve food production was inventing a process to extra Nitrogen from the air.

Even scientists are notoriously bad at predicting future tech breakthroughs.
But there's a definitional problem here. Do celebrities avoid talking about anything controversial, or does anything that lots of celebrities talk about become perceived as non-controversial? You talk about the "MSM" and the "establishment", but quite a lot of news outlets and politicians in the US don't agree with what Taylor Swift has to say about LGBT rights.