skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think he’s right. The tech industry has been trying to commodify devs for a long time (COBOL, Java).

But there’s a sort of essential quality that reasserts itself no matter what you abstract. Despite the seemingly simple requirements paired with high level frameworks, a lot of our software still doesn’t even work well.

As the author notes. The only real fix is talented devs that care.

You can make a career out of that.
> most file name encodings

You just repeated what I said. Just read it again. You already know the answer, you just need to understand it.

> Completely disagree.

And make no worthwhile argument.

> You can simply declare and accept `Union[str, os.PathLike]`

What does this have to do with debugging? Do you know what "debugging" means?
As much as I'd like to agree with your sentiment, it is a rather flawed argument to state that if some elements of a set have a property, that all elements must have that property.

There are scientific breakthroughs such as the proof of Fermat's theorem [1], for which I find it very hard to envision a way in which it will kill our planet.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiles%27s_proof_of_Fermat%27...
Data hoarding doesn't immediately or visibly affect you. It's a mistake to compare it to oppression.

> Gen z and alpha will be the ones to solve these problems after the boomer luddites making insanely uninformed decisions are out of the picture.

That's a very optimistic hope, and I dare say naive. Aside from name-calling, I don't see an argument for your prediction.
>For example, fossil fuels

You're effectively arguing, on a website, that humanity should not have started the industrial revolution.
It would be ridiculous if the car just shut down and stopped immediately. I really shouldn’t have to point out that it obviously doesn’t work this way.

In-vehicle breathalysers have existed for decades. They way they work is they give you a warning that the vehicle will shut off in X amount of time. Eg 5 minutes. The car doesn’t just shut off without warning leaving you without boosted brakes or power steering mid-corner.

With modern technology, most cars could also take over control from the driver when they deem safe to do so.
This introduces a complex view of truth and then just kind of gives up.

I agree that fact checkers can't do much against people putting too much emphasis on specific true facts and ignoring others to build a narrative.

But, they became a thing because people were just making shit up about things that did not happen. Quotes that were not said. Social media posts that totally misrepresented something.

We now have even better tools for faking images, audio and video.

So, they'll not singlehandedly save the world from itself, but they have a vital role.

Not only do they let you look up a bit of surprising news and find out whether it is false they'll generally give a bit of context.

It not perfect but it's useful, and the people doing it don't need to solve every problem.

Imagine trying to counter a narrative when basic reality can be manufactured at will.
> is a crime

A legal wrong, generally, as in most cases it's not under criminal law.
Have you tried not using a monolithic display server?
> Firstly, I've seen people who have DWI get a special license to drive to work and to get groceries.

Do they get a licence to drive while intoxicated? Or people with a history of driving while intoxicated are bared from general driving, but get a special licence so they can drive but only to work and to get groceries?
That's obviously a fault with that insurance company and the recourse is to show that the particular road had a 60mph maximum limit. I'd expect you could sue them for breach of contract too if they suspend your insurance for a false reason.
Of course every car already has a non-remote kill switch: turn the key or press the power button. So merely talking about a kill switch in cars is imprecise.

But not only is this article imprecise in its criticism of the law, it sounds to me like the law (which I haven't actually read) is also imprecise in mandating technology that doesn't currently exist. You want a computer to decide on whether the driver is too drunk to drive, but how do you determine that? And what do you do if you decide the driver is too drunk? Killing the car is a terrible idea if this decision is made in busy traffic at speed. Should an autopilot take over? How well has that technology been going lately?

The article may be bad, but the law also sounds bad. This shouldn't be hidden away in another giant bill, but deserves some discussion on its own.
This article isn't great...

> Some charged particles in the air shower travel faster than the speed of light

Better article: https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/cosmic-ray-2023/

Science paper for those with access: https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.abo5095
Ask HN: Big C++ projects that uses Exceptions and RTTI?
In my career the places I have been that uses C++ (with success) have all been using -fno-exceptions and -fno-rtti. All major open-source C++ projects seem to do the same. Chromium, LLVM, Electron, protobuf etc.

I guess if you want to excel at this language and build software (in C++) that people actually use you have to learn to use it without exceptions and rtti?

Some projects do use them like CMake.
I think bloomberg also uses exceptions??

Maybe Meta also uses them but again if you look at another Meta C++ project like Hermes they prohibit use of both rtti and exceptions.

Do you use exceptions in your codebase? If you intend to keep coding in C++ are you not better off learning how to use the language without exceptions and rtti?
The big city where I live has an annual average growth rate of 1.4%, which is the fastest large city in the US. The growth rate is accelerating as the population grows, so a decade from now that average annual growth rate should be a much larger number. The city is already, by far, the fastest growing city in the US in terms of adding new residents per year.

My city is in tight competition with Austin, San Jose, and Jacksonville to be the 12th or 13th largest city in the US. At its current growth rate it will be the first of those to achieve (rebound in the case of San Jose) 1 million residents. Discounting growth acceleration by 2045 it may surpass Dallas to become the 8th largest city in the US provided that Phoenix does not continue to grow at its current rate. Accounting for a consistent growth acceleration trend it could happen as early as 2030, but that is unlikely.
Spider-Man 2's Brooklyn Is a Beautiful, Empty Place
Can't send them back because that would mean processing asylum claims, and that can't be done without acknowledging that the majority of them are valid. Better to keep people in a legal limbo in ever-worsening conditions so voters can lie to themselves that "deterrence" is somehow valid, and that all we need to do is punch down harder.
Well, I don't care about nonhuman animals.

And being sincere, I don't care about 99% of human animals.

I cry for the deaths of my loved ones, and forget the rest. It is the only way to remain sane.
Friday Factorio Facts #386 – Vulcanus
https://archive.ph/aSJ6W
I think that's fair, actually. Appliances, not computers.

But why the scare quotes?
Considering what happened when Renault announced massive layoffs, I'd not be too happy jeopardising the company either.
Hongkong happened, Ukraine happened. A failure of stopping dictatorship by the Western world will result in immigrants, period.
> Qualcomm seems the only company I'm able to find that makes lte cat 20 hardware, let alone cat 24. I wonder why.

Because Qualcomm is the main supplier of modems for nearly all devices in US, and nearly all flagship devices and LTE-routers globally.

It's nearly impossible to compete with Qualcomm on pure modem-chipset pricing, because:

1) The sheer volume of chipsets they produce

2) The fact that their modem firmware of those few-dollar component is largely validated (and paid for) by Smartphone device manufacturers and carriers when they launch their 800+ USD Premium Smartphones with the same modem.

3) Qualcomm's iron grip of patents and manufacturer contracting practice

Few have tried over the years, including juggernauts like Huawei, Samsung, LG. All failed.
Oppression takes on many faces, are you so sure we haven't been living with some level of oppression in the US that everyone is okay with because it's all we know?

Would you consider income taxes oppression? Or maybe mandatory schooling? What about universal surveillance? Mandatory vaccinations?

By no means am I likening the US today to the many examples of much worse oppression, but oppression is a spectrum and ultimately defined by the individual who either does or does not feel oppressed.
Gabriel Weinberg could you share what did you learn about traction these years?
You already have the right to not get killed by a drunk driver on a public road.
Maybe you can educate us then..
I have lived the majority of my life in Southern California and the fastest emergency personnel could get to my home is 25 minutes, speeding.

I assume you are unfamiliar with rural living, a common shortsightedness I see on this forum.
Your claim is covered by this part of the post you replied to:

> nor is it best for combinations of things.

In other words, you are wrong. No, Python isn't second best, nor is it anywhere in the top-ten. It's worthless as a language, as in it's not worth paying attention to if you are interested in how you can solve programming problems by making better languages. It's worth knowing Python if you want a programming job, and this is where it shines. Anything else about it is either "meh" or just hands down awful.
>In the US, iOS has no search engine choice at all, in europe DDG quietly pays Apple a fee to be one of the choices.

I’m in the US and I chose DDG from the iOS default search engine list.

Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia are my choices.
I'm continuously surprised it doesn't get renamed to GNU Imp.
The problem is that beyond the boilerplate we aren't solving commodity problems most of the time.

If you've worked in the same field long enough, you'll see that things certainly rhyme, but everyone has slightly different business requirements. At each level of the stack this grows, and so in total there's a ton of non-commodity, bespoke work to do.

That's why no two products are exactly alike and we don't just have 1 giant all world megacorp producing everything.
In reading the article that was the same sentence I copy-pasted to bring back here for discussion. Anyone have an idea what the reporter garbled into "faster than the speed of light?" I guess just "nearly the speed of light"?
if [ a = b ] || grep -q ^hello$ /usr/share/dict/words; then
echo "test failed and grep succeeded"
fi

> “You pick whether to be amused or horrified. I don’t know how exactly my coworker reacted when I hinted at this during a recent code review I did for them.”

Isn't that normal everyday shell use?
ESA is not just Galileo. Sentinel is leading platform for Earth observation.
Selling ads
Apart from "detecting whether you are drunk" I can think off a new bill (once majority of the cars will have that thing installed) that will give certain authorities the 'button' to use that kill-switch.

So, your car is stolen, and a helicopter is following your car in a high-speed-chase that we see on TV/YT? No more! Now the relevant agencies will be able to kill you engine and you will slow down - to a halt.
~ 8%
> Drunk driving already has very harsh penalties

There are no penalties if you don’t get caught.

I think the OP is saying that if it’s triggered, you can override it, but a report would be filed with the police so they can investigate.
I completely disagree with that. If the people can't access whatever they want to access or what they need isn't available at price/condition they can agree to they will just switch to something else. Just like when a shop starts charging too much or that it hasn't taken care of maintenance.

For now, it looks like they have no competition, but the foundation is here, it's just that the potential competitors are starved for ressource. Just a bit of redirection will get the ball rolling and a lot of choices will suddenly appear.

The only thing is that most people do not care and have very basic needs. We mostly shouldn't care about those people. They cannot for the life of them being interested in anything technical and will not make any effort to learn and use worthwhile tools. They also have very low interest in knowledge. So, they will follow without much questioning, I know this for a fact from all the servicing I do around me. They will do what you tell them, if you tell them Google or Chrome is bad, they will accept.

The problem is getting something as good as Google or Chrome. So far nothing really match...
Once neuralink-like devices become ubiquitous, they will ask for a "kill switch" in people's brain.

And the same HN users on this thread will say that's not such a big deal. Law enforcers can already track people and arrest them physically, that's just a faster way to do that.

But no, it's bonkers.

And yes, a kill switch in cars is bonkers.

You want to stop a car? You should do that manually because:

- it requires efforts and has a high cost, for something that should not be common

- it implies skin in the game

- it's very hard to mass scale

- it's not nearly has much subject to hacking, corporate abuses, rogue cops, dirty politicians or bugs

- you can throttle things like speed and capabilities from the car, no need for a kill switch

The fact that some people here even debates that shows how much we are screwed.

A significant part of our population, even the educated and smart one as this thread demonstrates, cannot think in a way that will lead to maintain a decent amount freedom given a enough time.

You could never, you cannot, and you will never be able to assume benevolence and competence from the people in power. Their power must always be restricted, for us to keep being free on the long run.

It's not a matter of morality.

It's causality at work.

But sure, the biggest problem is that "it's a not violation of privacy".

And sure, it's just "for impaired drivers". Just like the patriot act was only temporary, right?
Creator Black Friday
As an employee or job candidate try to object the slightest against Windows on your laptop, or Azure for services and very quickly your monthly income will approach zero. Companies are looking for specialists with ten years of experience in Windows and Azure, who will do stuff with Windows and Azure. The decision making generous for MS is happening higher up in the corporate hierarchy. Folks higher up in corporate hierarchy want to pay off their leveraged mortgages, drive BMW or Mercedes, and vacation in Santorini, they don't care about dumb computer stuff.
Deciding it based on driving pattern is too late. Do they want to shut down the car while it's driving through traffic? Doing that would require an autopilot that takes over and steers the car to a safe location. If you want to do it before the driving starts, I guess every car needs to come equipped with a breathalyzer.

Not to mention that false positives could leave someone stranded in a potentially dangerous situation with their primary transportation disabled.
I am really interested in the solution. I have some ideas and I think there are potential solutions.
It's run by human hallucinating stochastic parrots now. Replacing them with LLMs would lead to significant cost savings without worsening our current strategic performance.
Possibly "faster than the speed of light in air"
Oh, Purism. The guys who included a separate chip to deny the user the ability to upgrade the firmware, so that they could meet FSF's completely arbitrary requirements for a honorary badge of freedom (see the hypocrisy?), but neglected an IOMMU, so the baseband (or any other device on the bus) can wreak unlimited havoc (see the irony?). Great alternative indeed.
Who could have predicted, right? It's just what conservative parties in Europe have done every time they've gotten the chance in the past few decades.
"Elon Musk (or any other person for that matter) says..." and "last quarters results show that" are not even in the same universe so.

Edit: This is the first time I hear the term "Cash-Flow Break-even"... Is this metric from the same set as "Cash-flow before outside investment" and "Community adjusted EBITDA"?
Meanwhile, infrastructure is rapidly deteriorating rather than being expanded at a similar rate.

Even housing, the most profitable thing to build, can't keep up with rising demand. Although there do seem to be a lot of houses being built - but no sign of the additional roads, railways, schools, hospitals etc needed to support growing towns and cities.
There are plenty of other situations where the inability to drive could be life-threatening: in a snow storm, on a dessert road, on a highway at night, etc. The unintended consequences of this could easily outweigh its benefit without even factoring in the privacy issues.
It’s a security concern more than a privacy concern.
Google is a competitor… Apple isn’t
> Sometimes sudden braking is due to other drivers, animals, etc.

Those events will be much rarer than the type of late braking that poor drivers will make due to lack of observation. It'd be trivial to separate out the emergency stops from the everyday driving data.
The problem is that beyond the boilerplate we aren't solving commodity problems most of the time.

The only people that see it is a problem are the ones that wish programmers were commoditized. Your complexity is my salary.
OK, sure, it's a better answer given that it does actually try and address his arguments and includes sources.

But then you've included some very unfair/invalid lines of attack. You've used quote marks when attributing arguments to him, but these are not actual quotes. You've asserted that he argues that "current AI research ... presents an existential risk" - which he recently said he specifically doesn't believe [1].

For the record, I've been aware of Gary Marcus and his positions on AI research since he was on EconTalk in 2014 [2]. I don't consider him the most compelling skeptic on contemporary AI, but I find it beneficial to hear and consider what he has to say. I'm also very familiar with ‘Mr Wern’
and his approach to discussing this and other topics. I've personally debated him on this website over a different topic, and whilst I benefited by learning new things about that topic, which was good, I was also surprised how much somebody of that persuasion would resort to emotion-charged, flawed or fallacious arguments when pressed.

And this is the main issue I'm wanting to confront: whether it's in this thread, or on LW/OB, or Sam Altman himself (in this tweet [3] that to me was a pretty alarming mask-slip for someone who has worked so hard to portray himself as a good operator over the years), it's striking how quickly the arguments turn personal and nasty rather than just pointing to simple proof that he's wrong. Which is just further evidence that discussion about this topic is so much more driven by emotion and grandiosity than sober examination of evidence.

As for Gary Marcus, sure, for someone who speaks/writes publicly a lot, you can always find specific details on which they might be wrong at a point in time. And where he's clearly factually wrong he should be corrected and he should welcome that. But I'm yet to see any slam-dunk evidence that the central position that he's continued to argue and explain for years is wrong.

Indeed, this quote from a post of his from 2018 [4] seems to be identical in substance to what Sam Altman said at Cambridge this very month [5]:

"Possibly. I do think that deep learning might play an important role in getting us to AGI, if some key things (many not yet discovered) are added in first."

[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230604-human-extinct...

[2] https://www.econtalk.org/gary-marcus-on-the-future-of-artifi...

[3] https://x.com/sama/status/1512471289545383940

[4] https://medium.com/@GaryMarcus/in-defense-of-skepticism-abou...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17wknc5/altman...
Ex-owners of sex work site Backpage convicted of prostitution scheme
What's your point here out of interest? Maybe I'm miss-reading, but the "how's that going?" seems like it might be a little passive aggressive?

Politicians promised that Brexit would allow us to take control of our borders, yet I see a variant of the following argument a lot – "those who voted for Brexit are dumb because they actually believed politicians would keep their promises". Presumably the implication here is that the smart thing to do have done was to be so cynical of the democratic process that you just vote remain even if you want to reduce migration because you should know the promises of Brexit would be broken anyway.

I guess I never really understood that argument. Let's say I vote for labour in the next GE because they promise to invest in the NHS but then when they're in power they actually reduce spending, is that then my fault as a voter? Would I be a dumb voter who should have just voted Tory because I wasn't smart enough to know that Labour would break their promise?

But I'll be honest, I voted Brexit and I explicitly told people at the time voting Brexit would not reduce migration. Politicians have made it quite clear in recent decades that mass migration is not something we as the public have any choice over. We simply must accept it and preferably if we don't like it shut up about it.

So yeah, while we probably should assume they will break any migration related promises, I don't really know what else people are suppose to do but to just vote and hope maybe one day they'll listen? What would you suggest the smart move here is?
If they were being honest, or at least more complete in their debunking description, the law doesn't need to require a kill switch as car computers can already disable your vehicle.

Any number of sensors on the car can trigger the computer to disable the vehicle. The law is only needing to require a new type of data collection and software kill switch trigger.
Do you know how long it would take to do this? You'd also have to be doing it while educating people "the old way". Schools don't even teach handwriting now.
also the ibm 360 was 32-bit and shipped in 01965. it's a lot more similar to a vax or 68000 or 80386 than a cadr or pdp-10 is
Anything that you paid for and the govement can just turn off is a invasion of your rights. Only a fool thinks the goverment will not abuse this power. Specially because the policies of goverment can drastically change every 4 years depending of who is ellected.

Fuck new cars. Buy an old toyota hilux. Good luck turning that shit off.
Have we even moved past the first stage yet? My uncle was lecturing me yesterday about how warming is apparently caused by sun spots and burning coal is actually good for the environment because forest fires are natural, lol. And anyone who thinks otherwise is just a member of the deep state.