skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I have a perpetual frozen store of taco meat

Now I'm fantasizing about taco starter that works just like sourdough starter. Take out a couple scoops for dinner, add back a few oz of your meat choice and a shake of seasoning, repeat.
You have a very simplistic view of the history. Many Arabs actually aren’t native to the land either, they moved there for work that the new Jewish immigrants provided. In fact there was significant mutual cooperation and benefit. Land wasn’t stolen either, but bought after the Ottomans empire fell and it became legal for Jews to buy Muslim land (the ottomans had some nasty rules).
If you’re referring to 700k Palestinians leaving in 1948, there was no historical order to evict anyone from outside the future Israeli borders, fact is they fled either from fear or through encouragement. Many millions of people have fled war, more numerous than this, but yet that is the most infamous.
I can't find the exact article I read it in at the moment, but ChatGPT was definitely a turning point where a bunch of people reeled in their predictions by a decade.

(The median expert prediction was between 2040-2060 previously, now quite a few people have moved that timeline to before 2035).

https://medium.com/@paul.k.pallaghy/chatgpt-did-any-one-remo...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hQysqfSEzciRazx8k/forecastin...
If someone could comment on https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/28146, the comment by Solomon Slow is almost right.

The detailed history can be found in https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/unix-linux-history. In short, Unix was initially developed as an experiment in operating system design. But the investment of buying a PDP-11 to port it to was justified on the promise of creating a typesetting system for patent applications. And so it needed both upper and lower case early in its history. Since most English text is lower case, that was a sensible default to use.
They certainly should, when one actually happens. Luckily most military members are (hopefully) smart enough to tell the difference between a real threat and some fake video popularized by Bret Weinstein or Alex Jones.
It's kinda like building Legos vs building actual Skyscrapers. The gap between compute shaders and CUDA is massive. At least it feels massive because CUDA has some key features that compute shaders lack, and which make it so much easier to build complex, powerful and fast applications.

One of the features that would get compute shaders far ahead compared to now would be pointers and pointer casting - Just let me have a byte buffer and easily cast the bytes to whatever I want. Another would be function pointers. These two are pretty much the main reason I had to stop doing a project in OpenGL/Vulkan, and start using CUDA. There are so many more, however, that make life easier like cooperative groups with device-wide sync, being able to allocate a single buffer with all the GPU memory, recursion, etc.

Khronos should start supporting C++20 for shaders (basically what CUDA is) and stop the glsl or spirv nonsense.
That would make sense if we were talking about something that changes dramatically over time; like a human heart for transplants. Or a nuclear fission core without its carbon bars. But trains don’t change significantly in a 10-day period. I doubt they degrade much after a full year, even. They need to be sturdy.
Tesla seeks public policy manager to achieve positive change in the Nordics
That is what Go does. BSDs hate it. https://github.com/redox-os/relibc could be repurposed for this easily enough.
> To play devil's advocate here, I did not _really_ get training for my software engineering role

Yeah and that is my point. It would be way better for the entire field of QA if there were at least a commonly agreed base framework of concepts and ways to do and especially to name things, if alone because the lack of standardization wrecks one's ability to even get testers and makes onboarding them to your "in house standards" a very costly endeavour.
This is a symptom of a larger issue in tech where C/E suites are trying really hard to turn engineers into some sort of fungible cogs in the system that can be swapped in and out and in different parts of the system and still have everything work perfectly in order.
We're in 2023, he's been in the CEO seat for 2 years already. He's had plenty of time to show the world his intent and where they are going. All that has happened is they launched a very mid GPU and have yielded more ground to AMD. Meanwhile AMD continue to eat away at Intel's talent pool, market share, and still managed to push into the AI space.

He should be sweating.
The button is: loss of privacy and anonymity for everyone, even those who the law is not suppose to be targeting.
QA Engineers are some of the best debuggers too. They have their hands in the pipeline, src and test directories, and often work with all aspects of developing and deploying the application.

When I was a QA lead I often ran into software engineers that couldn’t be bothered to read a pipeline error message (and would complain daily in Slack) and when it came to optimizing the pipeline they would ignore base problems and pretend the issues that stemmed from the base problems were magical and not understood. Wasting days guessing at a solution.

The disrespect a QA engineer sees is not exaggerated in this article. Since most companies with QA orgs do not have a rigorous interviewing process like the Engineering orgs, the QA engineers are seen as lesser. The only SWE that have respect for them that I’ve met are the people who worked in QA themselves. The disrespect is so rampant that I myself have switched back to the Engineering org (I tried using seniority as a principal engineer and even shifted as a manager to make changes, but this failed because Engineering could not see past their own hubris and leadership peoples will not help you). My previous company before I was laid off hired a new CTO who claimed we could just automate away QA needs but had no examples of what she was talking about. This is the level of respect poured down from the top about building good software.
You can do quite a lot with cloud. A lot of regular company data engineering is not steady state load, it's bursty with having to churn through ancient data on occasion for financial reasons, audit reasons, migration to new systems, etc.

My previous company did a lot of work to move to BigQuery, which really does work quite well for data we needed to regularly access, and for things that were more rare we'd just store in GCS.

We used Apache Beam/Dataflow to do the imports/exports and the occasional custom script for data munging when necessary.

At one point we needed hundreds of nodes to do some data transformation from on prem to cloud, but on average we only needed a handful of nodes running much smaller jobs.
Code for the new algorithm: https://github.com/keeganryan/flatter

It does indeed perform better than traditional LLL for some classes of matrix, and serves as a nice drop-in replacement for those problems. It doesn’t always seem to yield a speedup though, and the program is prone to crashing sometimes. Such is academic code…
> What if my MP already voted no? Do you pick random MPs and email them?

Call and tell them you support that decision (and, just as importantly, why).

They'll be receiving pressure from both sides, and it's important to demonstrate that people continue to care about their opposition.
No, falsifiability is referring to the nature of the test, not the end result. Falsifiability means you can conduct a test that, if it gave a negative result, would mean the claim has to be false. The claim that the sun will rise tomorrow is falsifiable; the claim the sun will rise eventually is not falsifiable. Both claims are true, both will be observed, but only for the first would a negative result contradict the claim.
Your advice could be generalized into:

- Take whatever it is you want to do and break it down into N jira tickets

- Make an OKR saying “solve these N jira tickets by date X”, with the result indicator being “number of those particular jira tickets solved”

- At the end, your OKR percentage is some fraction of N

This works regardless of what the thing you’re trying to do is. It goes against the spirit of OKR’s which is to use metrics that matter to the business (number of users onboarded, page load time, conversion percentage, etc) to justify work. That’s what the “results” in OKR’s are supposed to mean.
I stepping-stoned through QA on my way into development, now a decade something ago, and this part stands out as especially true in my experience:

> This created a self-reinforcing spiral, in which anyone “good enough at coding” or fed up with being treated poorly would leave QA. Similarly, others would assume anyone in QA wasn’t “good enough” to exit the discipline. No one recommends the field to new grads. Eventually, the whole thing seemed like it wasn’t worth it any more. Our divorce with QA was a cold one — companies just said “we’re no longer going to have that function, figure it out.”

I've worked with a handful of talented career software QA people in the past. The sanity they can bring to a complex system is amazing, but it seems like a shrinking niche. The writing was on the wall for me that I needed and wanted to get into fulltime dev as QA got increasingly squeezed, mistreated, and misunderstood. At so many companies QA roles went into a death spiral and haven't recovered.

Now, as the author points out, a lot of younger engineers have never worked with a QA team in their career. Or maybe have worked with a crappy QA team because its been devalued so much. So many people have never seen good QA that no one advocates for it.
Mathematical discoveries from program search with large language models
Satire is bound to fly over some people's heads, that's what makes it satire.
Presupposing completely optimal 50mW/m^2, could you origami that surface? Because then you could probably have something pretty useful.
An underground lunch delivery train comes to the Atlanta suburbs
Which is why modern insulin is super cheap to the end user right?
I'm not rejecting the theory, I'm embracing it. It says that information cannot escape and I'm saying "OK".

The leap that I'm raising an eyebrow at is the assumption that GR is applicable "inside" of a black hole. It's a very nice theory: it knows its boundaries. It's a little strange that we're trying to apply it on both sides of those boundaries, given that they are also our boundaries.

I wouldn't go so far as saying that applying GR inside a black hole is like applying GR in a critique of Star Wars, but I do think that that's the sort of distinction we're talking about here. Assuming the consistency of the laws of physics across separate universes might be kid of cool, but it's never going to be as justified as assuming their consistency within the same universe. And that's what the inside of a black hole is, supposing it exists: a separate universe, a place that will never be in our light cone.

(Or, GR is wrong, and we actually can get information from there, which would be interesting too, but I'm assuming for the present that GR will continue to make good predictions.)
I wouldn't say that far, maybe a month. It gets regular updates.
Centralized ownership is not a requirement of communism, but of Marxism-Leninism. Workers can own the means of production decentrally.
> Who will watch the watchers?

The voyeurs.
Very much depends where you are. It can handle most of CA well in my experience (and from a lot of videos posted on Twitter).
FTC investigating Adobe over making it too hard to cancel subscriptions
Yes, indeed, AMO means addons.mozilla.org
Literally, every single announcement (and action) coming out of AMD these days is that they are serious about the software. I don't see any reason at this point to doubt them.

The larger issue is that they need to fix the access to their high end GPUs. You can't rent a MI250... or even a MI300x (yet, I'm working on that myself!). But that said, you can't rent an H100 either... there are none available.
1. No one dies from "cookies poisoning". No one loses a liver or other organs from too many cookies. Alcohol, by definition, is a poison. The comparison to chocolate chips simply doesn't apply.

No, but too much sugar/butter does cause health issues. There's a certain threshold for damage. Does alcohol cause damage to offspring via genetic alteration to sperm? Perhaps it does, but we can't really say anything concrete about it based on a study of this quality.
Guys need to do ye olde embrace, extend maneuver. What wine did, what Javas of the world did. CUDA driver API and CUDA runtime API either translation or implementation layer that offers compatibility and speed. I see no way around it at this point, for now.
The browser WebGPU implementations are available as native standalone libraries and are fairly easy (YMMV, especially for Dawn) to integrate into regular native applications:

Chrome's implementation (C++): https://dawn.googlesource.com/dawn

Firefox's implementation (Rust): https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu/
True, but I don't actually trust it. And the last time I tried manually building it, it didn't entirely work.
I agree a significant amount of work (and often insight too) is needed to translate an architecture idea into something that works in practice, and there are certainly plenty of ideas that are obvious in the abstract. But I also think it's important to avoid dismissing work only on the basis that it doesn't involve "real life datasets".

Deep learning is a relatively unexplored field and there are many open mathematical and scientific questions to ask that involve only model equations or contrived datasets. Novel theoretical results are not just about some architecture idea but about proving facts that can be useful for understanding how the model class would perform in different scenarios. Which in turn can help shape the search space for applied work.

Additionally, I don't think credit assignment should be so discrete. 100% agree that vomiting out vague ideas shouldn't grant claims to credit, but academic science much too often gives only a single author the "real" credit.

Incidentally, in other fields the person who actually makes it work very well may not be the person that receives this credit. Like biology can involve a lot of hard manual work (that isn't really intellectual) in order to realize a project plan. It varies how much of the credit those people receive, and I'm not even sure how much they should receive. This topic is extremely nuanced.
A subset that lacks pointers, which makes compute shaders a toy language next to CUDA.
I remember a time before agile and devops. Seems like QA has always been looked down on, and always considered a bottleneck.
> The advent and rise of AI-based code assistants are already impacting the data that populates RedMonk’s language rankings.

Not only that, they are impacting the actual languages people use. Why use some new / esoteric language that an LLM doesn't know much about, when you can get the same job done much faster using a language that the LLM knows well and can debug?

It's going to get increasingly difficult to bootstrap new languages unless they are available in LLMs.
I’m curious what kind of person would come into my home and think I’m fancy because they saw my old ass MacBook Pro thrown on a bookshelf.

Or someone that saw me getting coffee and were like “woooow, that guys rich! He has an iPhone!”

Who the hell thinks like that?
Gas Contracts Are Just a Suggestion
That sounds like an overly specific target audience:

- you need more than 16 or 32 GB of ram.

- but less than 100.

- speed is important.

- but losing a factor 4 compared to a GPU is fine.

- money is very limited.

- but paying 6000 for a mac studio is cheap.

- this is very important professional work.

- but I don't need servers, ECC ram, raid, another OS...

Don't get me wrong, I also think Nvidia is heavily price gouging, but there are definitely trade offs and it is not clear at all why 80GB is your magical number and not, say, 108 or 28.
Your answer doesn't actually get deep enough. You say "because teletypes only had uppercase" -- but there is still a "why?" there -- they could have only had lowercase instead. The article answers this in a more comprehensive way by examining the history of typesetting and written script.
Did you forget about R?
I'm totally OK with it if that "someone" is me. And it will probably be the case in controlling superintelligence because a separate controlling system can get out of sync with growing superintelligence capabilities, while a system that is an integral part of the superintelligence will always be on par with it.
This is because there is no formal way to run a QA org, people get hired and are told to “figure it out”. Then as other posters said the other orgs ignore the QA org because they have no understanding of the need. What you’re describing is a leadership problem, not a QA usefulness problem.
Would you consider “I follow your reasoning, but I'm still not going to be swayed by it” to be a violation of evaluating first order statements? It's clearly part of critical thinking to be _capable_ of suspicion of purely logical reasoning, which to me is a pretty plain demonstration of my point.

Or would you argue that any computation that admits its own potential for error isn't really critical thinking? It seems to me that you can't have it both ways here, while salvaging “first order logic” as a suitable formalization of the argument that this is all about in the first place.

Remember, the point was not that this is or isn't a convincing argument, it's that it's so air-tight that the argument is _logically_ _invalid_. That's a _really_ high bar, and I'm not inclined to forgive its use as a colloqialism in this context.
> If nothing else, it sends a loud "I'm taking daddyhood d*mned seriously" signal to your wife.

Also to yourself, surely? Why is the wife here being framed as the judge of moral character for the other parent? Men also have agency and the ability to self-reflect.
Yup. Circa 1997, I switched from AfterStep to (then-new) Enlightenment briefly before settling on WindowMaker as a good balance between bling and performance.

My PC at the time was a hand-me-down white box AMD 386 (40 MHz) running FreeBSD 2.x.
Which one are you thinking? It feels to me this was the first post I've written with real emotion.
Which parental controls would, say, allow a kid to visit /r/roblox but not /r/nsfw? Best I can tell, Firefox literally does not have any parental controls built in, and they have a note that extensions to provide it are easily bypassed.

It seems reasonable to me to at least start requiring sites and commercial software vendors to build a system that makes parental controls possible. And if a commercial site like reddit is going to have child focused content like a Roblox forum, then it should be easily separated from porn without requiring parents to set up a MITM proxy with complicated filtering rules.

There are simple privacy and (adult) autonomy preserving ways filtering or access control could be done, but after 30 years it still seems to be an impossible task. Chuck-E-Cheese doesn't have a porn theatre in the back where an employee just asks if you're 18 and accepts any 7 year old saying yes.
> A lot of activity when learning

Oh, this made me connect some dots. At first I figured increase in GitHub activity during the pandemic was because people were home more and had more time to contribute to open source.

But a lot of people took that time to learn software development. And a lot of courses will have you publish your learning projects to GitHub as a way to learn version control and processes (and also to promulgate awareness of, and analyze their course since there's often templates involved).

Often this is just creating repos and pushing them, and since TFA directly looks at pull requests, perhaps this isn't it, unless these courses regularly include lessons on how to do a pull request (perhaps from yourself to your own repo).

If that was a significant factor, it would make sense why the activity is down.

> They need another datasource.

Agreed here, the source is very imperfect.
I think it's kinda weird that a lot of the toplevel comments here are offering (incomplete and sometimes incorrect) answers to the question, clearly without having read the highest-rated answer after following the link. That answer is much more comprehensive and goes into the history of typesetting and even writing.
I had a boss at Yahoo who gave our QA to another team because "Facebook doesn't use QA, we shouldn't either". I can't remember if it was Facebook or MS, but he was willing to buy all of us a book talking about how amazing it was.

Long story short, it wasn't. It was like taking away a crutch. Of course we could have been more diligent about testing before having QA validate it, but it slowed development down so much trying to learn all the things we never thought to test that QA did automatically.
This point is brought up in the article but I think it is at the real heart of the issue.

QA is almost always seen as a 'cost center' by the business and upper management. I have a hypothesis that you never ought to work in a department that is seen as a 'cost center'. The bonuses, the recognition, and the respect always goes to the money makers. The cost center is the first place to get more work with less hands, get blamed for failures, and ultimately fired when the business needs to slim up. I think the same thing applies to IT.

This spiral is why QA will always be a harder career than just taking similar skills and being a developer. It self reinforces that the best people get fed up and switch out as soon as they can.
I think this trend favours unpopular languages.

ChatGPT can only provide answers for programming languages and libraries that were included in its training. Granted, unpopular programming languages have online activity, too, but sample size matters.
Nah, the Canadians on HN are too nice to blame us.
Personally, the ability to always have access to my money, accept contracts internationally, and to be protected from a fickle financial system.

For other people I’ve seen a wide variety of things they consider valuable that I don’t care for. Trading, community, loans, art, gaming for examples.
> An LLM can discover a new solution in high dimensional geometry that hasn’t advanced in 20 years!?

LLM + brute force coded by humans.
I don't disagree but I generally do this by putting thw abstractions in place ij the software.

An example is for crud, use the (onion|hexagonal|whatever you want to call it) architecture, you business logic has nothing to do with how the data is stored persistently (or not), build your application using abstract APIs.

It's slightly more code up from but if I was using a map in memory it is trivial to move to using redis if I build with the abstractions in place to begin with.

Generally in the prototype stage I won't care about that either but I expect the prototype / poc code to be deleted.

Same idea with SQLite, moving feom sqlite to a full blown database isn't that difficult but this is one of the places where I would conceded and say if you have the infra in place just use what is available, it may be easier to get a DB on thr current cluster in the long run if there is already a cluster that you can get a DB on.

If you however are in a completely greenfields position and really have no idea where the product is going, sqlite scales to a decent amount of RPS and so does a simple go/rust server on a host.

Many webservices really don't need more than that and not worrying about being distributed when you don't know if you ever do need to be distributed makes whole hosts of problems trivial to solve and allows you to use technologies that would usually be inconvenient.