skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I can be so bold as to chime in, perhaps "fundamentally flawed" because it's design means it will never be more than a very clever BS engine. By design it is a stochastic token generator and its output will only ever be fundamentally some shade of random unless a fundamental redesign occurs.

I was also fooled and gave it too much credit, if you engage in a philosophical discussion with it it seems purpose-built for passing the turing test.

If LLMs are good at one thing, it's tricking people. I can't think of a more dangerous or valueless creation.
Personally I’m not worried about my employability. Until AGI arrives (which may coincide with an apocalypse for all we know) AI will simply allow me to move faster. If it lets me move 1000x faster then the art will be in what to build. 1000x still does nothing compared to an exponentially exploding field of possibilities. And technical knowledge, experience working as a product focused engineer, and general human intelligence should be enough to beat AI at that art form.
I've had issues with my camera manufacturer's app for syncing photos on Android for years, so I finally built a super lightweight replacement which is faster and more reliable.[0] I used it for a year or so before finally going through the hassle of publishing it to the Play Store.

The app has a very limited audience. In the first month, I've had approximately 28 purchases. If I had to find 20 people to use the app for a couple weeks before I could publish, it wouldn't have been published.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.johnmaguire...
duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38256608
With today's mid level programmers, yes. But by that time, many of today's mid level programmers will be able to do stuff high level programmers do today.

Many people underestimate an LLM's most powerful feature when comparing it with something like Stackoverflow: the ability to ask followup questions and immediately get clarification on anything that is unclear.

I wish I had had access to LLM's when I was younger. So much time wasted on repetitive, mundane in-between code...
I still have a working X60s from 2006. Really liked that laptop. Unfortunately, for modern standards, the battery life is not great, a couple of hours at most. And the resolution is just a little bit too low, 1024 × 768.
Would you say the same about math or reading?
Let's be real. It's not TikTok, it's social media. Twitter had a reputation as a cesspool where people yell increasingy extreme political opinions at each other long before TikTok was popular. Gamergate was before TikTok.

TikTok is just the most refined version of the same rotten medium.
Not even close. CRC32 can easily run at >50GB/s single thread on this i7-12700K CPU (VPCLMULQDQ implementation). The BLAKE3 page claims around 7GB/s single thread. Fudging the figures a bit to cater to CPU differences, BLAKE3 is still a far cry from CRC32.
> I don't really care about our species.

People would be smart to ignore you then.
More likely, the reason why ChatGPT can do it is because all necessary code is available on StackOverflow.

I don't understand unbound excitement about using a paid online tool (!) that does not have reproducible source code (!!) and can sometimes (!!!) generate correct implementations of extremely well-known algorithms if given perfect description.
Microsoft used to keep a really good Shim library to hot patch troublesome applications. Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT)/Microsoft Windows Application Compatibility Infrastructure.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/plannin...

This hack could be accomplished with one of those. In fact here is something that might work https://ryanwill.com/create-and-use-shims-with-microsoft-app...

>CorrectFilePaths – These are similar to symbolic links, but are defined per .EXE instead of system wide
green-on-black for a ][+ is what I have, but should be getting a recapped ][e model
While I don't want to go as far as saying that it sucks, I do largely agree with the sentiment. Personally, I do like coding a little bit but mostly as a puzzle but for the most part it is a means to an end.

Lately, I have been using ChatGPT and the OpenAI API to do exactly that for a few projects. I used it to help me round out the design, brainstorm about approaches, tune database requirements, etc. I basically got to the point where I had a proof of concept for all the separate components in a very short amount of time. Then for the implementation it was a similar story. I already had a much more solid idea (technical and functional design, if you will) of how I wanted to implement things than I normally do. And, for most of the things where I would get slowed down normally, I could just turn to the chat. Then by just telling it what part I had trouble with, it would get me back on track in no time.

Having said all that, I couldn't have used it in such a way without any knowledge of programming. Because if you just tell it that you want to "create an application that does X" it will come up with overly broad solution. All the questions and problems I presented to it were based from a position where I already knew the language, platform and had a general sense of requirements.
> But in say east Asia, extensive social shaming over weight helps people stay slim.

Does it help people stay slim with fewer overall negative effects then if people didn't stay slim? Eating disorders and mental health do come into the equation. There's many ways to keep people slim that doesn't result in a healthier society.
Compare to veterinarians, where you get an itemized bill when you leave and the credit card terminal to pay, even for emergency vet care. If it’s possible to do it for animals, then it’s possible to do it for humans too.
You'll need a ton more programmers each 10x more productive at half the salary.
Ladies and gentleman, I present you the company, that prides itself on hiring only the best and the brightest!
sick days are just allowed with the approval of an doctor, it's an European country. btw, you would not go to jail if you would not cooperate but could be you are sued for compensation
Except, I intentionally don’t use either form because they don’t extend nicely (and I dislike using flags when I could use another pipe segment or positional arguments when I could use standard input). I can iterate quickly by adding pipeline segments on top of the basic formula, because all of the segments have the same general shape and “calling convention”.

Finally, because I’ve built up familiarity with the shell over my career, I can come up with this formula as fast as I can type it. At this point, ChatGPT would slow me down: (1) because this sort of thing is basically muscle memory and (2) I have to actually think about the code ChatGPT produces to verify it is correct, which is almost as difficult as producing it in the first place.
I am in the same boat.

Lenovo Z50-70 bought 2015. 8 GB RAM upgraded to 16 GB recently. It has got 4GB Nvidia graphics, does mild AI stuff as well. Hard Disc replaced with Samsung SSD few years back. Full HD screen. I even bought a 4K-27 inch monitor to connect to it last week. Thought it struggles to play beyond 1440p. Win10 works and is totally responsive. I hope it keeps going for 3 more years. :)
I don’t feel connected to this like I did to NASA ventures. To me it’s like going to watch the launch of a billionaire’s mega yacht. Why would I want to see that?

This isn’t about exploration. It’s about profit. And there’s not an easy way to shine that.
They Want to Be Gatekeepers: Car Dealers Are Stopping Customers from Buying EVs
That's absolutely terrible and not clear at all.

I've been tempted to go back to Arch and I think this can be a good motivator.
10 years of LTS.
It’s nice to read these articles as someone with advanced stage testicular cancer and a 50% 5 year survival. Current treatment is chemo + surgery.

Really appreciate all the smart people in this field. Thank you for the work you do!
You the same george ashworth that used to work at d&b?
Sure, but the number of truly competent software engineers is maybe 10% of employed software engineers. So, 90% of people might need to worry.
I still use a fully specced out (i7, 8GiB memory, 512GiB SSD) Macbook Air 2013 daily . With OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1] it runs Sonoma well enough and dual boots OpenBSD for an even more lean experience.

Had to replace the battery, fan and thermal paste over the years - and it's surprisingly easy to work on, just a few screws on the bottom to take it apart and access to everything.

1. https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
Not bad, but suppose the dictionary has n lines and you only want to randomly sample k=100 of them, where n is so huge that you don't want to scan over the whole file at all.

Can you use random access into the file to sample k lines in O(k) time instead of O(n) time?
100MW sounds manageable if expensive.

But once you’re talking about anything near 100% efficient pumps, you can have generators too, and a lot of that water is, in principle, recoverable. A bigger issue may be doing any of this without bringing too much salt along with the upward-moving ships.

(Hmm. How about picking up the ships, sans water? I wonder if a way to do this safely could be engineered. Sounds quite challenging.)
I think they were getting at the concept that there's more refinement between left vs right so placing MSM as a position representing that side of the isle not making a distinction that there aren't those on another side completely that will always be upset. I mean AOC, Bernie, and Biden are fairly distinct politically but all "left."

I do think it is a reasonable complaint that you're not using your platform to be a bit more specific and place a foot down rather than maintaining the air of ambiguity and generalizes. It is reasonable to interpret the latter as a political move rather than one of personal convictions, though they may be honest. But similarly one can see someone like her as having a lot to lose as well as seeing her have nothing to lose. Former because she can lose her yearly profits but latter because she's a billionaire and so fucking rich that it's pretty difficult for her to lose a billionaire lifestyle and it's not like she's going to lose all her fans no matter what she does. Of course she could be sued by her employers... But either way it does say how much she values her own convictions compared to the other things. Messy, but I don't think unreasonable to call her out.

FWIW I don't know anything about Swift but I at least can say I haven't heard of this controversy. That's at least some signal. Not a strong signal. Definite not one that says one of you are right or wrong, but it is _a_ signal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (I'm definitely not making a claim on knowing what her actual convictions and beliefs are. Woefully unqualified and honestly don't care too much. Just trying to provide a bridge because I see reasonable miscommunication and I think there's probably ground for a good conversation between both of you)
So glad I saw this on November 10 before the deadline. I quickly set up a Play Console account, verified my ID and set up a draft of my app to ensure I'd be in the clear.

Been working on an indie game for the last couple of years - would have been a huge pain trying to find 20 people with Android devices to meet this arbitrary threshold.
Spreadsheets didn’t replace accountants, however, it made them more efficient. I don’t personally believe AI will replace software engineers anytime soon, but it’s already making us more efficient. Just as Excel experience is required to crunch numbers, I suspect AI experience will be required to write code.

I use chat-gpt every day for programming and there are times where it’s spot on and more times where it’s blatantly wrong. I like to use it as a rubber duck to help me think and work through problems. But I’ve learned that whatever the output is requires as much scrutiny as a good code review. I fear there’s a lot of copy and pasting of wrong answers out there. The good news is that for now they will need real engineers to come in and clean up the mess.
Starship will crash into the ocean at terminal velocity off Hawaii (with no belly flop maneuver to stop descent right above the ocean), there may be some floating bits but not recoverable in any significant sense. The booster will do a landing burn, they will most likely sink it in the gulf and not attempt to tow it back to port.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...
I'm struggling / thinking about this myself a lot.

I've learnt a bit of Django's app-centric model (which is similar to rail's "engines")

I work for a company that enforced the data/domain/interface with a plug-in approach to custom code.. and I liked it.

But for my own projects, I get stuck choosing between the two, I see more benefits in the layered approach, but I feel like I'm fighting the tide with every project I start
Ubuntu Pro has pricing on its page. That Debian thing is "Contact us for quote" that is "you are probably too poor to afford us"
I'm all for this, as long as we programmers continue to capture a reasonable amount of the value we create.

The danger doesn't come from some immutable law of nature, it comes from humans organizing. Some people want to be able to hire programmers cheaply, programmers want to continue to be expensive (maybe get more expensive because now we can deliver more value?).

It will be up to us, the people living in this moment, to determine what balance is struck.
Guayaquil, where I saw armed guards (with rifles/shotguns?) at shopping mall entrances.
Keep in mind that many CPUs out there don't support those instructions (notably Intel's Skylake and ARM's Cortex A72). BLAKE3 will be significantly faster than SHA2 on many platforms out there.
Hig and low
You are not alone.
People are reading papers, not building things.
orbital, definitely
That one seems to have gotten removed from the main page.
Horrible decision
Can you provide a prompt that does this for your chosen specific language?
The question is how many thousands of tons it will lift into orbit before being taken out of service.
Ask HN: Why doesn't USB C need many pins?
I’ve seen com/serial ports, parallel ports, DVI, SCSI ports, etc. All have many many pins, but now USB C (and USB in general) can do everything those ports did with simpler physical interface and fewer pins. How does USB do that? What has been changed or advanced to make those ports look so dumb and silly? :D
As a grayhead who does not code daily anymore, I was impressed with ChatGPT as a programming sidekick. It's like having an on-call junior developer who only costs $20/mo.

I needed a quick and dirty utility developed last month and by breaking the problem down into 4-5 steps myself I got ChatGPT to write functions for those steps and then I bolted them together. Most of it went smooth but one part took far too much coaxing and refinement before it generated the right thing.
That website has some pretty heavy ungodly JavaScript or scroll hijacking, so I can't really read it (I'm on mobile).

However, isn't there a law that forces hospitals (at least in the US) to provide itemized bills?
Spreadsheets actually did put many accountants and “computers” (the term for people that tallied and computed numbers, ironically a fairly menial job) out of business. And it’s usually the case that disruptive technology’s benefits are not evenly distributed.

In any case, the unfortunate truth is that AI as it exists today is EXPLICITLY designed to replace people. That’s a far cry from technologies such as the telephone (which by the way put thousands of Morse code telegraph operators out of business)
I have a new phrase in my lexicon. Thank you!
The US barely squeaks into the top 10 richest countries (GDP per capita), and even during the worst days of post-Communist chaos I doubt there was ever a case of a camera crew getting robbed at gunpoint in Prague.
Can you pls rewrite your comment in rust.
Given the quality of DDG search results? I bet they would.
Staying indoors with games and videos can only do so much. Sooner or later, we will get bored.
I get most of my TikTok content via Facebook. I didn’t even really try it before Facebook started putting TikTok videos in my feed. I’m not clear if it’s a Facebook platform that is sucking in TikTok videos or if it’s some kind of agreement with them?
If your prestige is based solely on "arcane software knowledge", then sure, LLMs might be a threat. Especially as they get better.

But that is just one part of being a good software engineer. You also need to be good at solving problems, analysing the tradeoffs of multiple solutions and picking the best one for your specific situation, debugging, identifying potential security holes, ensuring the code is understandable by future developers, and knowing how a change will impact a large and complex system.

Maybe some future AI will be able to do all of that well. I can't see the future. But I'm very doubtful it will just be a better LLM.

I think the threat from LLMs isn't that it can replace developers. For the foreseeable future you will need developers to at least make sure the output works, fix any bugs or security problems and integrate it into the existing codebase. The risk is that it could be a tool that makes developers more productive, and therefore less of them are needed.
Pardus, which is also Debian based and follows a release cadence similar to Ubuntu LTS?
Don't forget the USB3 of X230
I don’t think this will happen because we’ll just increase the complexity of the systems we imagine. I think a variant of Wirth’s law applies here: the overall difficulty of programming tasks stays constant because, when a new tool simplifies a previously hard task, we increase our ambitions.
I had a T420s I think? It got me well through college and for some years after, although I eventually retired it. It was a workhorse that stood up to a lot of abuse being thrown around in my backpack every day. After I wasn't using it all the time I set it up as a dedicated server to mess with and kept it constantly plugged in and running for a few more years.

I remember when the screen broke I got a perfect replacement for less than 40 dollars, and it was trivially easy to take the old one out and install the new one with a regular screwdriver and no other special tools. Similar experience when I broke the keyboard, easy to buy a new one and swap the whole thing out myself. I think I also replaced a battery when one started to drain a bit too quickly and the battery of course was something you just pop out and back in.

Now with my new MacBook any of those is easily hundreds of dollars plus either needing a trained repairman or seriously risking I break something using specialized tools to melt the glue or pop out the bezel or something like that.
>it's undeniable that it's a general system.

it's very deniable, as Yann Lecun correctly pointed out, it can't even walk up a set of stairs (https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1721648856260050970).

It can't cook, it can talk about cooking. It wouldn't be able to get a pan out of a drawer. I know all we do these days is produce text tokens on the internet, but it is in fact in itself a domain specific task. If you can talk about opening a can of beans you're an LLM. If you can do that and actually open the physical can we may be a little bit further towards general intelligence.

We don't even have a full self driving system, the limited systems we have are not LLMs, and there isn't even a system on the Horizon that can drive and talk to you about the news and cook you a dinner.
> The jump from Level 1 to Level 2 is significant

That's a speculative claim because we don't really know what's involved. We could be one simple generalization trick away, which wouldn't be very significant in terms of effort, just effect.
Hmm, this will probably create indie devs going around and begging people to test their apps. Finding 20 people is not easy if you are just one person having idea, skills to build the idea but not much else.
It's still happening through the credit card companies and such... What do you think cancel culture is about?
> Am I the only one becoming less impressed by LLMs as time passes?

Not at all.

I was very impressed at first but it's gotten to the point where I can no longer trust anything it says other than very high level overviews. For example, I asked it to help me implement my own sound synthesizer from scratch. I wanted to generate audio samples and save them to wave files. The high level overview was helpful and enabled me to understand the concepts involved.

The code on the other hand was subtly wrong in ways I simply couldn't be sure of. Details like calculating the lengths of structures and whether something did or did not count towards the length were notoriously difficult for it to get right. Worse, as a beginner just encountering the subject matter I could not be sure if it was correct or not, I just thought it didn't look right. I'd ask for confirmation and it would just apologize and change the response to what I expected to hear. I couldn't trust it.

It's pretty great at reducing the loneliness of solo programming though. Just bouncing ideas and seeing what it says helps a lot. It's not like other people would want to listen.
I get the trend (and need) to personalize a company, to give it a "face", but SpaceX is not Elon, Tesla is not Elon, even Twitter is not Elon.

There are thousands of people doing the heavy lifting every day which ultimately determine success or failure.

Yes Elon takes a driving interest in one or the other (currently X) from time to time, and yes, because the media likes personalities, and cultivating personalities, you are encouraged to think of those companies as "Elon" - but in truth his daily impact is minimal. (Sure, he can fire half the staff, load it up with debt, kill an iconic brand, and do other ceo stuff, all with predictable impacts, but ultimately he doesn't actually do the work that is required.)
I've noticed that over the years, coding has gotten easier.

I've been able to express myself better with each year.

I see AI as another higher-level way of expressing myself.

Also, people don't write as much new code as they think they do.

Still, I have many many... MANY projects that I have on my wishlist. Maybe AI will help, but my list won't go away.
Much higher signal frequencies allow more data per wire.
I could believe Facebook is a good player in terms of “public interest” or “social harmony” or whatnot if they weren’t credibly accused of enabling a genocide in Myanmar, which is a larger country in roughly the same region as Nepal.
> As a thought experiment for the reader: consider a complex system you've worked on. And now try to imagine writing down a specification for the system in natural language that an LLM could use to generate the code that powers the system.

But you didn't write it down, so how did the system get made?

The answer is that the program exists in your head as much as it exists in bytes in your source files. There might be a mismatch between your head-program and the source-program, or between your head-program and what the customer actually wants.

But the existence of the head-program is what Naur was articulating in 1985's "Programming as Theory-Building", and is what LLM proponents are rediscovering.
Universe is supported on a "best effort" basis.

https://ubuntu.com/security/esm