skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The most useful part of writing docs for me is that they shine a spotlight the sharp edges of your product.

I love this. I have written docs for dev tools companies and one section I love to write is the limitations section, especially if I am new to the product. This is helpful in so many ways.

* It lets me as a writer understand the built in limitations.

* It helps the team building the product get on the same page about areas to improve (or areas that are explicitly limited for business purposes)

* It helps with credibility for devs, as they can immediately determine if there a limitation that isa deal breaker.

The hard part is keeping it up to date, but that's true of most docs.
What’s an example of a type of work where an IDE is more of a hindrance?
Man am I glad I don't go to this conference anymore.

There is something in psychology called the blue dot effect where people primed to find blue dots will start identifying purple and green as blue as well.

I attended because of the edgy non-corporate but otherwise technically interesting stuff. But over time I just couldn't stand how everything that is coated in the cheap veneer of the anarcho cypher punk rebellion is accepted without any critical thought.

People don't like hearing what I am saying because the same crowd frequents this site, but I find your delusional paranoid ideation a bigger attack on my sanity then whatever big tech is putting in my social media feed.

You like pointing your fingers at everyone else and accuse them of a big psyops, but guess what, this is what you are doing. Now go and do your worst.
Every small developer should now start to ban government use. Even if they are not affected the law. To associate consequences to actions. They will never learn otherwise.
Lol crazy sounding right? I work at a large company though, so getting IT approval to run my own ground up Gentoo instance is not ever going to fly.

I was just thinking about what other kinds of computing possibilities are...well... possible. And also how much I dislike having this massive Windows API (or whatever) in my way.

As an engineer doing simulations, I really just need a workstation with a few primitives that I wouldn't want to build myself such as matrix routines, optimization solvers, graphics primitives, reports, and file I/O. If some company sold a workstation that glued all of that together in something like a modern C64, you'd have something pretty cool. Sure you can just run various apps on a modern OS...but there is just so much garbage going on there that makes it a pain to do your job (also a lot that makes things easier too of course).

I guess I'm wishing for something like a dedicated computer that's more like a modern lisp machine or smalltalk Xerox Park machine or something for scientists/engineers. None of this will ever happen of course unless I get a trillion dollars and can setup a team to design the hardware and software. I can prob find a better use for that kind of money too ;)

Anyway, just trying to talk about what I think about when I'm cobbling together things. I don't think Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS are very efficient for all needs and it's a bit of a shame when I think of how many scientists are stuck in configuration, software installation, and API hell when what they really need is some kind of super souped-up calculator.
It's not stored in ChatGPT actually, unlike Google's web search cache where it is stored verbatim, can be recalled perfectly, and is still fair use.

Fair use has nothing to do with reproducibility. LLMs are more clearly fair use than a search engine cache and those court cases are long settled. There's no world in which OpenAI doesn't win this entire thing.
That might have been what Alan Kay was going for with his "cells of an organism" thing, yes.

But even if you're not inspired by biology, it might just come up "naturally". Separating your data into structs, then operations on those structs, and not wanting to deal with all kinds of bookkeeping all the time, letting things manage their own - separation of concerns, aka single responsibility principle.

I think automatic memory management might be a big example of this. Who wants to bother with this malloc/free stuff all the time? Who wants to keep track of ownership everywhere? Instead, have a dedicated subsystem handle it. That allows a higher signal to noise ratio in all the rest of the code that would otherwise be polluted with malloc/free. It also removes the entire class of bugs that can happen when you inevitably forget either of those.

But having memory management in and of itself isn't "OOP". It's just an example of one of the principles that people tout when they talk of "OOP". Those principles can and do apply broadly.

Was Alan Kay thinking of all this? I really don't know. All I know is that the dude digs biology.
for now it's easy to catch up.
But after a few months they will be so far in the sky from all the vc money that it will be tremendously harder. Like the M1 chip for example
Makes is-odd/is-even popular; many downloads; raises their (and his) profile.
Maybe because it's incredibly effective?

> The campaigns exploit existing political fault lines like race and regionalism to increase polarization and disaffection with the political system. The complete lack of a coherent message across these campaigns is jarring until one realizes that the goal of the campaigns is not necessarily to convince anyone of anything, but rather to generate noise.

In other words, they simply don't care about the message as long as it's divisive. They will loudly support BLM or alt right or whoever as long as it sparks negative emotions and increases conflicts between Americans. And this strategy works incredibly well just because instead of inventing non-existent conflicts it rekindles the existing ones.

[0] https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/october/elections-russia-d...
Is this how it actually works?
>, if the main economic mechanisms that help the major players did not exist, we might not have so much spam in the first place.

Spam was a massive problem long before big tech existed.

- The old USENET network which was/is a federated ecosystem of servers run by universities etc was overrun with unwanted spam.

- Compuserve dialup network was blocking spam and they were also involved in a 1997 court case (1997 is a year before big tech like Google Inc existed in 1998.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe_Inc._v._Cyber_Promo....

- the infamous "spam solutions" webpage that was a snarky attempt at "educating" people about fixing spam was created around February 2004 which was 2 months before Gmail service was introduced: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Other "small" areas of the internet are also universally hit with spam abuse:

- blogs that allowed "readers' comments and feedback" got inundated with spam and the blog owners added CAPTCHAS or disabled comments completely.

- small web forums like vBulletin and phpBB forums got hit with spam and admins put in "email signup and valid email verification link" workflows.

- even the newer modern decentralized communication networks like Nostr attract spam:
https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/121ytwf/cutting_thro...

The existence of a big player like Gmail that was introduced in 2004 is not the reason for "so much spam".

Spam volume is always a problem on any communication network where the cost to create new identities is $0 and the cost to send messages is near $0.00. An extreme example of the opposite situation is Bloomberg Terminals chat system not having a spam problem. Why? Because it costs $25000 a year subscription to use. Bloomberg did recently "unbundle" their chat system for a lower price but the point is that the friction for new accounts is still high enough to deter spam abuse.
Well, it certainly isn’t “equivalent” given that the Russian version of the story/belief isn’t created and maintained in the open air of a free information environment. In the US, you’re welcome to (and people actually do) contradict “official narratives” whenever you want.
You should disable gif/image rendering by default and make it opt-in, this is basically a link to porn right now and HN should take it down.
Miele and Bosch are the only brands I'll rely on for "white goods". As far as I can tell, most other (european) brands are owned by Electrolux, and all built to fail the day after the warranty expires.

My toaster is a Dualit - pricey, but very reliable, and very repairable.

My coffee grinder is a manually-cranked burr grinder made of aluminium. There's nothing to fail (and I don't mind cranking for a minute in the morning).

My flat-screen is a Panasonic that used to belong to my father; it must be 15 years old. It's never failed.

I don't own a food processor; that would be me with a chef's knife, a grater, and a pestle-and-mortar.

The presence of an LCD display on a product is a big warning sign.
> big tech has commoditized the internet so much into a platform for consumerism that it becomes a valuable target for spam.

What? Spam existed long before the big tech was around (admittedly the first Spam was probably from DEC, but before 'big internet tech' existed anyway) - it grew because of the amount of people/consumers on the internet. And credit where credits due: getting rid of spam was very time consuming until Google came out with one of the first effective filters.
Yes, but also perhaps be explicit. Ban direct and transient government use.
using flutter would make it bigger not smaller
Let me google that for you: Advanced Impact Media Solutions (in short: AIMS).

Have fun in that rabbit hole.
So if I went to a cinema and didn't like the movie, I should be entitled for a return, right? Or if I went into a museum and didn't like the art displayed there?

If you are advocating for a free for all libertarian dystopia, well, I have some bad news for you - they never work.
It's a good day when CCC kicks off! I have weeks of content to watch :)

Suggestion: https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-12004-please_identify_yourself
But how to prove your particular nudge really worked? I'm reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point - ok, yes, maybe a bunch of kids in New York started a Hush Puppy revival, but a million other fads didn't take off, so if you try to study it you're just studying survivorship bias. Or maybe coincidence.
Difficult to have a sensible conversation about “shortages” without also talking about prices.

As a contrived example - If I want to hire an expert to design a data center. If I offer to pay $1000 for the job, I probably won’t get any takers. Does that mean there is a shortage of talent in this market? Is it actually rational to demand or expect that society/government produce more data-center designers until the cost of their labor falls to my liking?

Some numbers we do have in the post are $8.5tn revenue at risk and 40m unfilled jobs. $8.5tn / 40m = $212.5k of revenue per job. And keep in mind that is claimed _revenue at risk_ not profits after paying salaries, benefits, and taxes.
Poor training.

As a former JavaScript developer you need a moderately sized team of 4-7 people to do one person’s job because almost nobody knows what they are doing. Everyone is scared to death of the frontend compile target, the DOM, and they have no idea how to organize their thoughts or write original software. Fortunately there are large frameworks and billions of NPM dependencies to solve for that.

Really though, if they knew what they were doing one, maybe two, developer(s) are more than enough. I can assert that because I have proven it true at multiple employers during my 15 year career doing that work.

Consider the economics of this. A decent sized team of developers will cost their employer well over a million dollars per year irrespective of what they accomplish. Those one or two better trained developers can do the same work one time at a cost of about 20k-100k and then provide maintenance and bug fixes there after while moving on to different work for their employer.

In this respect the shortage of talent results in a choice for employers: hold out hope for a rare gem that knows what they are doing or set the baseline so very very low and just hire more people. The later is often the lower risk option when desired talent is tough to identify or is too expensive to produce internally.
Oh it's worse than that. The NYT is positing that any neural network that is trained on their data, and can summarize or very closely approximate an article's content on request, is in violation.

This reasoning would presumably apply to any neural network, including one made of neurons, dendrites, and axons. So any human reader of the NYT who is capable of accurately summarizing what they read is an evil copyright violator, and must be "deleted".

Effectively, the NYT legal department is setting the stage for mass murder.
Cool, that sounds hopeful. FreeCAD's Assembly workbench mess (aka several competing ones instead of a single blessed one) is why I stopped using it. So if that gets solved it'll be very welcome (by me). :)
Similar flip with China. I do read user comments on our Dutch news-sites, just to keep an eye on 'average Joe'. I am amazed by the hatred towards China.
OOP, FP and other paradigms are all useful. Just don't do extremes like everything is an object or everything is immutable or everything is without side effects.

I enjoy multi-paradigm languages the most.
simondev on youtube is porting his expertise across to js & three. Very entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQt0exToUEY
Hi craig wright, how are things?
I read Russian forums and these people are more sober than you may think. They are fed up with Putin and with what is happening to Russia now. It's not so much that they care about Ukrainians but more about the terrible direction the country is heading. For many, it's the return of the dark era of the collapse of the USSR, they don't see any bright light on the horizon.
There is no such thing like a free press. Most media is subject to financial incentives and right and left there are topics that will never be covered even without censorship.
> dishonest

Dishonest? You're saying I'm lying to support a trillion dollar corporation I have no financial stake in and never have? Is such an accusation really in the spirit of this forum?

I suggest you review the guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't be snarky. Don't sneer. Assume good faith.
IMHO where there are actual shortages it is because young people choose to study another domain in university or choose other jobs after university. Even those who choose software dev. tend to see that as a first step only.

It may depend on the country but in Western Europe I think it is because it is hard and if you're smart enough to go after hard subjects then there are better-paid, more prestigious options.
The key difference is that in autocracy you'd assume that most information on the controlled media is somehow propaganda from your government but in a free media environment you'd assume that you're getting a mix of psyops operations from all the major powers in addition to your own government's propaganda, and also media controlled by specific wealthy private players with a personal political agenda.
How are bugs "fixed in one place" that way?

You either accept updates of third party packages, with little to no vetting of your own, and get fixes "for free" or… you don't.

There's no middle ground: the only way to save effort is to trust others.
It seems Meta is one of their prized clients.

Color me surprised... not.
ow.
There's also anticipatory paging, the OS can guess which pages will be requested the next time around.
To be fair, for all its pitfalls, NPM does provide a limited version of that idea to millions of codebases.
> Russia might not have those capabilities yet

Apparently Russia does (as well as a pretty developed sense of humor and awareness):

https://rumble.com/v43fa28-project-grandpa-on-a-leash-biden-...
Russia, yes, but I'm not convinced China's going for an "amplify disagreements" strategy. Have you got any links?
I’m sure there is yet it’s not NATO troops trying to occupy land in Eastern Europe. When one party openly behaves like a villain then they most likely are one. You can blab about the US invasion of Afghanistan but the US didn’t go in to setup a totalitarian kleptocracy that replaces their culture with another.
On nuclear construction cost increases, from Crowley and Griffith 1982, “US construction cost rise threatens nuclear option” (via @whatisnuclear):

"""
Ironically, some of the decisions that have been made in the name of improving safety margins for low probability events, may have reduced the safety margins for high probability events. The UE&C piping study uncovered numerous areas where the tolerances requested in the piping design documents might be appropriate for a machine shop oriented manufacturing operation, but are totally unrealistic for field construction.
"""

via https://rootsofprogress.org/links-digest-2023-12-15

The whole quote is worth reading/skimming.

More importantly this zero risk approach has to be considered relative to all the other risks arising from building other types of power plants.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

(and of course a bit more on the problems with the process at the NRC https://thebreakthrough.org/blog/waiting-on-the-nuclear-regu... )
It ultimately depends upon what you mean by "as good". There is no clear single metric. Once you have >1 metric it becomes a subjective "who's priorities?" game of weighting them / projecting them into a single metric.

The best answer to a question like yours is: give it a try on some easy problems and see what you think yourself. No one else can really know the kinds of problems / answers / code you most work with (and sometimes the future is pretty murky even to oneself, even in these vague categories).

Disclaimers issued, some things can be said which might help. Since Nim is primarily a highly ergonomic static ahead-of-time compiled language with code running as fast as C often does, errors may be caught more conveniently. Because Python is popular, especially for teaching programming, training coverage will always be better, but Nim has some core features & keywords "kinda similar" to Python which may help on the other side.

Not sure about 4.0, but ChatGPT-3.5 does poorly on basic Nim things without Python equivalents. To give just one concrete example (out of many), `a,b = b,a` is a common way to manifest swapping in Python while in Nim one uses `swap a,b`.

So, if you are willing to do more "compiler-assisted clean-up" or have a/develop a knack at steering the random sampling toward code which compiles, Nim could be about as effective as Python used this way.

In terms of code entry work for your specific hands problem, parentheses can often be left off in Nim code and in general it seems to have much less punctuation / syntactic noise. Of course, keys can be rebound & such & maybe you do that, too. Nim definitely has more powerful abstraction mechanisms like user-defined operators, templates, and syntax macros.
Might depend on the interpretation of "roguelike" -- Rogue combined single-character adventure with grid tactics, so to many people, "roguelike" means single-character grid tactics, usually with some other less unique features (such as randomness), just like it did in the 80s. This was also the most important roguelike feature for the design of HyperRogue. While more commonly "roguelike" is used for marketing anything that takes whatever inspiration from a game marketed as roguelike. In the roguelike communities, mentioning The Binding of Isaac (in a way suggesting that roguelike means a game like it) happens regularly and yields very negative reactions, because it is not tactical and thus not interesting to the community. Similar for the other ones you mention.

Still, there are many very polished roguelikes on Steam (Dungeons of Dredmor, Crown Trick, Sproggiwood, Moonring, etc.).
[Citation needed]

I am a big fan of free markets, but the trend towards consolidation, at least in activities that profit from efficiencies of scale, is unmistakable, to the degree that it often kills the market unless prevented.

You probably cannot "consolidate" a market of book authors and musical bands, because quality of artistic expression does not scale with money. But the market of publishers and recording companies is quite consolidated, because money buys more efficiency there.
oh how joyous that would be. I so hope they win
At least in the US, copyright violation is a civil thing, it's handled by lawsuits. If the copyright violation is of such a small level that it's not worth the copyright owner to do anything about it then nothing's done. In this case it's worth a massive amount of money.
Modi and BJP are almost full dictatorships at this point. Hate these both. they are behaving like any other dictator cowards now. Instead of working for the people, they are more like now working for themselves to control as much of people as possible.

Apple should not back off here. Instead, release their names too.
I work on Microsoft's anti-spam team, AMA!
> At least in an autocracy you'd assume most "information" is somehow propaganda but here people believe whatever the press and government feed them

Pretty much the opposite. In authoritarian states, people grow up under the culture of just accepting things as truth, you don't have the option of not believing. What you are describing is not about believing the press, but polarization / radicalization / isolation - the fact you're even pointing to the 'press/propaganda' is a symptom of it.
They're all gangsters. All forcibly and immorally extracting wealth from others.

But media pretends that some force (the biggest one) is fine, that kings and governance structures (and the people that run them) aren't gangsters. They smear the potential threats to their racket - the abbot in this historical example, or terrorists, rogue states, or whatever.

The article is a nice historical example of this process.
Any page like that which is industry relevant is going to have to be associated with a company because you need the marketing team to go through the effort to get the case studies approved by each and every company. It's not an easy process since for example something like the Instron case study (https://juliahub.com/case-studies/auto-crash-simulation/) has details of upcoming projects like the Catapult Light which are major cost improvements passed on to customers, but you then have to go through the whole process of "well should we share this and let our competitors know what we used to get this advantage?" and contracts have to be signed before such a page can ever be built. The JuliaHub website has a whole list of case studies which have undergone this process and I couldn't see how you would get such detailed industrial accounts otherwise.

For open source accounts, there's the SciML showcase page https://sciml.ai/showcase/. Thats very focused in just one domain though, and I tend to just update it with what I remember to put in there so it probably only has about 1/4 of the blogs and news articles that it should, and the "External Applications Libraries and Large Projects using SciML" part is woefully incomplete, but at least it gives a picture of what's going on. It's hard to keep those kinds of pages up to date because exponential growth means that page requires exponential work.
The russian troll factories are pretty well documented by now [2,3,4,5,6]. You seem to deliberately downplay this.

Their boss even famously got killed this year [1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

2: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/14/europe/russia-yevgeny-pri...

3: https://www.severreal.org/a/priznannyy-smi-inoagentom-zhurna...

4: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-...

5: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-troll...

6: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/03/15/594062887/...