skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you referring to a UCSB dormitory proposed back in 2021. Here are the highlights of the design. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether the students and faculty were right to shut this project down.

"Charlie Munger, a 97-year-old billionaire and Warren Buffett's right-hand man, gifted UCSB a casual $200 million to build the dorm under one condition: he gets to make all of the design decisions."

"Because it's Munger's way or the highway, he has decided that 94% of the bedrooms (which, by the way, are only 7x10") will not have windows. Instead, only some of the common areas will have windows, in an attempt to get students out of their bedrooms to socialize."

"In addition to the whole no windows thing, Munger's design requires eight students to share one bathroom. The entire building also only features two exits. For 4,000 people."

https://www.buzzfeed.com/madisonmcgee/billionaire-builds-win...
> Why can't you?

Honestly not trying to be rude, but that would be because of how eyes work. The moment you do anything that goes beyond looking at code, is the moment you've met that limitation I described above.

The other part you brought is totally valid, it's just all about tradeoffs. If you prefer using a debugger in situations where I would read the code, then more power to you.

Actually, it's funny, because the original article talked about the One True Way (or whatever his exact wording was), and how we all go through a phase where we discover that for ourselves. I think this thread in a way has been an expression of that concept. Anyways, thanks for your thoughts, I'll remember this next time I'm struggling with the ol' brain debugger ;-)
Wow, this is the best way to describe the flow state to my non technical manager. Thanks.

However, I don’t think she will still able to understand and empathise.
I never was tbh.

But I use Perplexity.ai instead of search and I use it to write the first pass of my code now (and I'm a 40 year programming veteran), which I modify in Cursor IDE with built in ChatGPT.
Kafka wrote a little story like that: I won't quote it. They let them choose between being kings or being messengers for the kings. Because they were children, they all chose to be messengers for the kings, and now they were running all over the world carrying messages that nobody understood. Well, that was the Internet, wasn't it?
Yeah, but what else can you do? I stare out of the window sometimes but it gets old when you're commuting 2+ hours a day. I would find it difficult to read a book in a distracting environment like public transport, plus I have to switch between multiple trains which would tear me out of focus. Can't always get a seat either.

I know that doing random shit on my phone during my commute absolutely fries my attention span, but I don't have any solution.
I've owned two houses now that were older than 100 years, and both of them were the best houses I've had. No money pits that were any worse than the money pits new houses are.
Who loves it? As a Gaucho alum, I'm glad he got ripped to shreds for that idea. I couldn't imagine living in such a beautiful setting and not being able to see outside. No one wants a 99 year old billionaire foisting their social engineering ideas on teenagers.
Succession – Across the Universe
I am a frequent user of other rental scooter services, but I could never get the Bird app to work. I wonder how large a role low-quality software development may have played in their inability to make a profit.
Thank you for sharing this acronym. For a while I was using the concept of marketing awareness stages to foster change in my engineering teams. In marketing people are either unaware, problem-aware, solution-aware, product-aware, or fully aware. ADKAR seems to map out similar phases. Will try it out.
Web development makes me want to cry
I agree with this history, but don't think the meaning was acquired independently so much as naturally grew. Ward presents it in a sort of "optimal development" context, where what we did last year was the right thing last year, but we know more now/things have changed and we know what the right thing would be today. This is definitely happens, but doesn't allow for a lot of other real-world reasons for this mismatch between the current and ideal state.

The effect is the roughly the same though, there is an impedance mismatch between what you want to do to/with the system today, and what the system actual is today, and that has a cost. The work of reducing this impedance is real work, and can be thought of as "paying off debt".
I like to think of technical debt with a counter balance of a “credit score”. Ie: as an organization, what is our ability and track record to manage complexity over time.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but the difference between a low interest rate mortgage and a high interest payday loan have parallels to the balance made in delivering software while limiting complexity. A developer that is a bit of a tornado, rapidly churning out new and exciting capabilities at the expense of reliability, brittleness, and complexity, will surely catch up with an organization sooner or later.
I agree with many of this essay's points, but the flamboyant headline is a reductive way to view software (and a bit of a dangerous meme.)

Your job as an engineer is, amongst other things, to identify the (sometimes rare!) instances in which code creates leverage beyond the business value it creates. Good abstractions are valuable assets!
The obvious use for it is to mount it in a VW Bug.
There’s another heuristic that he broke.

If you can easily read and understand some code, then it’s good code and you should leave it alone.
Happy to bet on this (and indeed I have, by buying GM stock). Cruise is definitely dealing with a huge, self-inflected PR disaster here. But all signs I have seen is that their tech is very advanced (although, as previously noted, probably a bit behind Waymo). Cruise and Waymo are heads and shoulders above their competitors, and there won't be only one winner (if for no other reason than the threat of anti-trust), so Cruise is likely to succeed.

Again, if you have data that shows Cruise is behind Waymo by a lot, or is behind any other company, please link it.
Not sure if it varies, but I did get to see all 5 before the restriction.
Looks to be back up and running faster! Possibly cause this is no longer on the front page. Also I have confirmation that someone at snowflake is looking into it :) Enjoy the dataset -- still uploading...
There is one programming language that fascinated me (maybe it was Ada) where it tried to have some basic tests inline with the code, by defining basic guidelines for legitimate results of the function.

For example, you could make a function called `addLaunchThrusterAndBlastRadius` (I know it make no sense, but bear with me), and then right alongside declaring it was an integer, you could put a limit saying that all results that this function can return must be greater than 5, less than 100, and not between 25 and 45. You could also do it when declaring variables - say, `blastRadius` may never be greater than 100 or less than 10, ever, without an exception.

I wish we could go further that direction. That's pretty cool. Sure, you can get that manually by throwing exceptions, but it was just so elegant that there was just no reason not to do it for every function possible.
Sure but it depends on the location. I guess in China fraud committed by a company with strong party connections (as all companies have) is not illegal. Otherwise half the alibaba sellers would be arrested :) :)

But I generally don't like to throw legal terms around unless it's been proven in court.
You should check out ZorinOS:
https://zorin.com/

It does something very similar to your ask. I use it as a daily driver OS and it works really well and I love the UI.
> In less than four minutes, Coscientist had designed an accurate procedure for producing the required reactions using chemicals provided by the team. When it sought to carry out its procedure in the physical world with robots, it made a mistake in the code it wrote to control a device that heats and shakes liquid samples. Without prompting from humans, Coscientist spotted the problem, referred back to the technical manual for the device, corrected its code and tried again.

What does it matter that it looked up the reactions on Wikipedia? They're building a "coscientist", not an AI-based Nobel prize winning researcher.
Porting Age of Empires to Rust (2018)
Well, for example, when I worked at the Baltimore Sun, the owners at Tribune Media sold the already owned outright headquarters of the Sun, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, etc. and has us all lease office space from somewhere else instead. This is an insane business decision. No one who wants to keep a business alive would think to replace a money making asset (just lease out the other floors of the building) with a money losing ongoing expense. But it gives you one quarter of extremely high profitability in exchange for lower profits for the rest of time, so they did it.
Holy moly, the static method is pretty horrible.
Quite sad.
Fair enough. I only suggested it because it turned out to be the root cause the last time my video flaked that badly. Heat sink had failed.
I worked directly with unhoused people in San Francisco as a direct service provider for 2 years, and I promise you, what is more insulting is when people refuse to accept the findings of the large, long-term empirical studies on this subject.
> which isn't quite as bad as it sounds

It is as bad as it sounds: not only the apologists of this rhetoric believe in the false securities of it themselves, but they aggressively try to persuade everyone what if you don't want to be a nobody or have anything what you don't want to share with a complete strangers, including the government - then you are doing something illegal.
Solitary thinking and reflecting, I guess.
That looks like it, I take it the "solid state" aspect of using a metal rod as the source of material to ionize is the main claim to fame here. It does mean 'refueling' is easy, just pop another rod in (easy if you happen to in orbit nearby, that is). The suggestion that you could make new rods from asteroids etc. is cool, but there's quite a gap between theory and practice still...
> Is Tor still considered secure?

Define "secure." Secure from what attackers, in what threat model, with what resources devoted to the attack, etc.

There are several categories of attack against Tor, and several ways to mitigate them, depending on who you are and what you use Tor for.

For a typical end user of Tor, the main one to worry about is "browser beaconing" style attacks - where a compromised onion website causes the browser to beacon out, on the clearnet, with something that links the browser's request on the clearnet to the browser's activity on the onion network. If you just use a regular browser proxied to Tor, this is a rather high risk, as browsers leak all sorts of things (I believe WebRTC was a common way of doing it for a while). The solution here is Whonix - a multi-VM setup in which your workstation (with a stripped down browser) is only connected to a Torification VM that routes all inbound traffic over Tor. So, if the browser tries to beacon out, it doesn't matter. Pop open a command shell and use ping, it still goes out through Tor. Etc. I consider this a reasonable way to use Tor, and any lesser construct is probably a dumb idea unless you're using it for things like sysadmin where beaconing out doesn't matter. Of note, Qubes supports the Whonix configuration as a first party sort of setup, and can route all your traffic through Tor, should you care.

There's also the risk of traffic correlation for end users, but I don't have a sense for the scale of this risk - I wouldn't leave long running connections over Tor, but I don't know if it matters for "casual use."

If you're hosting hidden services, the "guardian nodes" that know your identity are a risk, and given how many nodes seem to be run by three letter agencies, you'll want to deeply understand Tor and how to protect your services if you're going to host something - I believe you can limit guardian nodes to those you trust (and run yourself, perhaps?), but that changes some of the risk equations in ways I don't fully understand how to reason about (not running hidden services that matter - my blog has an .onion address, but it's literally just the same content as the clearnet version).

And then, we get into the problem that "computers in general" could be argued very convincingly to be "not in the slightest bit secure against a high level adversary," which is another can of worms...
Yes, missing prior work at best can impact your review, and at worst can mean you waste a significant amount of research time
Yes, they do have use. They are also very oversold and literally being sold for jobs they cannot do.
It does help write things that were either formulaic or entirely without real content.

Allowing them to do analysis or summary of anything that isn't already in a Wikipedia entry is radically dangerous because of how good they are at hallucinating and lying (and we can't detect that at scale). It is like an automated "yes man". This is the most dangerous bubble in living memory and the cost of it popping will be in the failure of any industry that is foolish enough to rely on them at scale.

And to attack that study in particular, "help people who couldn't write well write better" is complicated, increasing accessibility is good, but there is a BIG difference in an increase in writing quality versus an increase in productivity AND correctness.
monsecchris wrote "If that’s the best they can say about $750 a month, it sounds like a terrible investment."

Good point that there is no explicit reference to the headline. And yet it was completely clear to me, at first glance, that this was about the headline.

There is a reference. "THAT" refers to the headline's criteria ("improved"). The headline is the closest thing to this "that" - rather than some other part of the article. It's still slim because really the rest of the article is not much further (Good luck LLMs). What clinches it is "that" reference matches logically:

Logically: First this was also my immediate reaction to the headline: it is content-free. "$750/m no questions asked" would improve anyone's life. "improve" is not a useful way to judge this experiment. The headline is absurd. Second: I expected that the study looked at more than that - but only so far - more "hoped" than expected. Third: Then "If THAT's the best they can say" makes sense. It's a quip (short, sarcastic, funny, sadly true) and a realistic one, at the bar that the article editorial crew picked. We often see studies that boast ... but show very marginal results. Is THAT really the best the study got? In fact no, the study measured more (arguably - it's far from bullet proof because of dumb self reporting [did you buy drugs with this? how about with other money?]). They have more of a claim to success. But either the editors were stupid in writing their headline, OR - quite possible - they were sarcastic. Indeed people are aware that it's going to be easy to dismiss the study "It may not be earth-shattering that providing money is going to help meet basic needs" says one of the people involved.

So anyway, "that" was a weak reference. But it had a strong logical match to the headline.
I forgot Win7 had a theme other than the "classic" one, so was briefly taken aback when I clicked the link and saw the screenshots.

Classic theme Win7 is peak Windows, aside from the installation footprint being incredibly bloated compared to WinXP.
"a magic box capable of novel work"

or a box whose content can be cleanly swapped out with future iterations which already demonstrate the potential for novel discovery:

https://thenextweb.com/news/deepminds-ai-finds-solution-to-d...

"Researchers claim it is the first time an LLM has made a novel scientific discovery"
Indeed very insightful thanks for sharing.
Pressure testing the context window of open LLMs
Oh just maybe (yikes) ..I'm on the fence about buying an EV as gas car provides me the best experience for my needs. I drive a Ton and in remote areas too
I'm assuming I own the vehicle. Whether there's a driver or a computer, I also assume that routine 2-4 hour round trips in a taxi of some form aren't going to be viable for most people.
I disagree; there is almost never a "right way" and pragmatism and reality-based outlook always trumps "right way"-ism. This is especially true for mature products, which almost always have some history behind them: shifting requirements, "seemed like a good idea at the time, but with the experience we have now it probably wasn't", shifting trends in the industry, constraints in terms of dev time or budget, etc. Often this is sub-optimal, but it works well enough, so it's fine.

And never mind that opinions on "the right way" differ. Previous poster mentioned ORM: some people think "the right way" is to never use an ORM, some think "the right way" is to always use it.

Right Way Guys will insist that your codebase will always needs to be scalable, whether it makes sense or not. You've got a B2B product that will only have a few hundred customers? Doesn't matter. It needs to be scalable. It's the Right Way.

Right Way Guys will insist that this kind of ugly module that hardly sees any changes and is basically bug-free will need to be rewritten to The Right Way once they add a minor trivial feature. It doesn't mater it works fine. It's The Right Way.

Right Way Guys make things worse. Always.

In the case of juniors: they can be taught. They're just juniors. That's okay.

In the case of seniors: good luck... I'd argue these are among the worst people you can hire.

And you really don't need to be a Right Way Guy to write a few docs or set up a staging environment.
> So to give a quick recap, as adding more code to a product will slow down development, we should view all code as technical debt.

Not a fan of this habit of taking a perfectly good technical term and redefining for another purpose; especially if there is already good, existing measures, such as code complexity.

Rather, than calling all new code "technical debt", how about every planned feature, as part of it's total cost calculation, include the incremental costs of any increased code and/or architectural complexity it introduces.
How is this related to the transit in any way? It's solving for speed of delivery, not congestion...
Early in my career I worked with an engineer more senior than me who was responsible for performance optimization. He once told me "the fastest thing you can do is nothing at all" which was his way of saying it is better to find unnecessary steps to eliminate rather than making necessary steps execute faster.
There was a time not long ago when subways had those free newspapers ("Metro" etc), and people would read them (and they would clutter the place).

What's wrong with people being on their phone though? I barely use my phone, but if I'm in a tunnel and there is nowhere to look, yeah, I'll read a book, online news or email. I rarely socialize on the subway and I have one of those glances that make people uncomfortable.

Anecdotally: I just came back from London. Big fan of the new Elizabeth line. The Piccadilly (and most lines) low ceilings are a bit soul crushing (I'm tall, but I suspect for most people too), although I really like the character of the old stations.
Building 13 @ MIT is named after him.

Cool to think this tech will be there soon :)
Could you explore this more? Except for the tab bar, I can't even identify differences. It's been a while since I used this version of Windows.
"Say, that's a nice 'democratic' governmental organization you have there....would be a real shame if something was to happen to it."
Arguably, biochem also has "solid foundations" in physics. Would you recommend someone in your field to "follow the physics" in their journey?
Went to the same school, was on the same math team, but was a year ahead of the author. Quit math team in my junior year because I wasn't at a competitive level, but it was a great time while I was on it. As a SWE, I rarely get to exercise the tenacity and problem solving skills I learned on the math team, but when I do they are "transformative" to the rest of the team.

> Nights were for other worthless extracurriculars to pad out our applications. ... The worst part was knowing that it was all going to be extruded into a few lines in an application form, that a committee would review for about ninety seconds

This is the tail wagging the dog; work really hard for 4 years in HS so that the next 4 years will be spent at a comparatively more prestigious college. I don't think we should expect high school students to be able to optimize this correctly themselves, and from my experience guidance counselors weren't particularly helpful. College admissions feel like a local maxima that have a lot of unintended side effects but would be difficult to change.

Personally, I didn't do the extracurriculars that would look good for college, but rather the ones I enjoyed; I didn't study very hard either. Didn't get into Stanford or an Ivy, but I look upon my experience in high school/college fondly rather than bitterly. Life seems to have turned out ok too.
I walk on the bike paths now and then. There isn't remotely the traffic on them like the parallel road. And that's in good weather. 6 months of the year, when it's wet and chilly, it's empty.

While transit would be carrying lots more people year round.

Then there's the rail line that used to run from Renton to Bothell, paralleling 405 which is gridlocked every day. A couple of people are on the bike path now and then, when the weather is good.
Yeah. Refactors and rewrites (i.e. removing lots of code) are risky, but so is having critical CVEs and data loss events every year because of your insanely over-complicated architecture that has never been rethought in the past decade+.

It's a cultural issue where we think major faults "just happen" and are not directly tied to prior product decisions, and therefore there isn't much accountability.

But if you propose a major refactor, there is no question about (rightly) where the blame lies.
Not preserving buildings is typically developers thinking their new shiny would be better (mainly because they get paid for it) are always keen to getting rid of the existing building. If the building is lost to a fire, probably an insurance thing. It gets really intriguing when a building owner really really wants a new building but the existing vacant building has been marked historic and cannot be demolished suddenly is lost in a fire.
Absolutely agreed (which is why I did not say that it did) :)
> Not unless EU blocks them.

I would love to see EU try mass-blocking VPNs without managing to unintentionally block a bunch of AWS ranges and other accidental targets. I spin up an AWS EC2 instance, use it as a VPN, and then what is EU gonna do? Ban AWS IPs?

Sure, you can say an average person wouldn’t even really know what AWS is. So being able to spin up an AWS instance and use it as a VPN is beyond reach for for an average person. But don’t worry, there are a lot of products (some of which are nearly free) and providers addressing that exact issue.

Spoiler: EU won’t ban VPNs, unless they end up fully committed to looking like clowns that are chasing CCP ambitions, but without the CCP level of expertise and skill.
I can do plenty of that while working ;-)