skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, in the next few years the entire pop book industry is going to decimated. Just like the nearly gone magazine industry. However, what evolves to replace it is going to be very interesting. Humans are social animals, we're not going to stop communicating. Confusing prose? Will become a relic. Books that explain how to use some product or tool or adopt some behavior will become relics. LLMs will provide that learning resource. A hybrid LLM that tells a specific, intellectually challenging, Nobel quality narrative is what I hope is the result; it would be like talking to the survivor of an epic adventure, and you can both listen to the narrative as well as interrupt and ask questions. Likewise, new scientific theories would be published as an LLM that can explain at every level from Phd to 5 year old.
You're not wrong. I seriously attempted to use Emacs for about 5 years (after using it throughout university decades ago), and I got it to about 95%, but got exhausted of it being so fiddly. You can also never get away from the inherent performance flaws (single threaded, doesn't handle large files well), which comes up more than you'd think.

I just want to do my work and not spend time debugging why the latest package update broke my helm/ivy lookup, or why lsp-mode suddenly stopped working with x language server. I swapped to VSCode / Obsidian (to replace org mode) and haven't looked back. I can't even remember the last time I looked at my VSCode config, maybe 6 months ago.

The only thing I really miss are the editing capabilities, using evil-mode and various evil plugins. But coding is only about 10% editing speed imo, so not worth the pain for me.
I am pretty sure that is still the case in some areas. DB Navigator never covered all local tariffs.
Tax payers. In Germany, airplane fuel is not taxed.

See this Greenpeace study (in German) about how much cheaper flying is than train rides and why:

https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/regional/nordrheinwestfalen....
Fuck Google. They did the biggest pivot in all of tech history. From "do no evil" to "do ALL the evil first".
"refactor, no functional changes"

Narrator: There were functional changes
> Lisp code was data and could be formatted a "pretty printer".

Sure, I have used it. Not in the 1960s, but in the 1980s. I don't doubt it was old already then.

The problem is only that if the formatter is not mandatory, programmers will not use it and develop their own styles. In theory the reader could run it through the pretty printer before looking at it, but few people/systems have the tooling ready for it.
In the current US I don't think it's reasonable to believe that we can trust that something like digital IDs would not be abused. That does not necessarily mean that there are not other locations or times where that trust might be warranted.

Specifically, it's likely that police and/or national security would use them in ways that would result in false arrests and/or chilling online behavior. It is also becoming increasingly likely that Christian Nationalists would use them to censor speech that they don't like and/or to persecute people that they disagree with.
(NM I'm an idiot)
From my research into microscopes for fine electronics work, the keyword you are looking for is “trinocular”. They have standard camera mounts built in and you can attach almost any camera via an adapter.
If your standard of success is 'making good money' instead of leaving lasting impression and still being read hundreds of years after the author's death then you are still wrong. Only a tiny amount of all authors were able to make _any_ money from their books, let alone enough to live comfortable lives. Book publishing is like professional sport or entertainment, only the very top make any money. Hence if you are already wealthy you can keep trying and maybe finally you make it big. If you are poor you don't have that luxury.
Seems one was used as more than just inspiration for the other for my taste...
Not long ago I took a short trip in a small Cessna (I think it was a 152). The audio quality in the headphones wasn't any better than what I hear on those ATC YouTube channels. I didn't understand a word of it (well, that's not quite true, I understood some words here and there; not nearly enough to be able to safely fly).

A Cessna 152 is not an airliner, obviously, but I would think audio quality shouldn't differ all that much between them.
I wouldn't say that it's a moot point in every context. The metric we'd get here would amount to "given that this developer made a loc change, what is the monetary risk involved".

Developers that are high on this metric might want to allow down and think twice next time they commit.

Or not. Metrics are likely not very useful in general.
Did you read a different article? That is not what the author wrote about.
>Why don't you let the actual target audience decide whether the niche is served or not?

I do. Do you see me passing any laws or enforcing something to prevent it?

Am I allowed to criticize their decision though, or is that to much to ask?

>Nothing of what you wrote is a reason against the existence of more choices.

That's because writing against "the existence of more choices" wasn't my point. It was about criticizing stupid choices.
How much energy does a human use in 18 years of training?
Maybe I'm just being shortsighted, but I don't see that as a good comparison to this, since we read books for a deep exploration of an idea by the author, not just for the idea. It's not about the rareness, or physical quality of the binding. See e-books, even.

The reality is that the LLM is not adding better analysis, it's just padding the length and fluffing. If the author was going to pad with LLM garble, he might as well have made a blog post and saved everyone the time. Of course that's less profitable...
Not sure why you're downvoted. This appeal to human created is kind of silly. I've started plenty of terrible books created by humans. If AI makes good content, then what's the problem?
while it might, CBDCs are just around the corner and with automatic, transaction level taxes. there will be no need to file for 80% of people. Yes this will be a huge privacy issue but compared with the current system of guessing how much you supposedly owe the IRS.. people will jump at the time savings alone.
The fleet manager stuff shows how this is little but a Silicon Valley scam.

Offload all the risks to others so you can show tremendous growth and exit at high valuations leaving the entire mess to be picked up by others, yet again.

There are bike share systems across the world doing very well. Growing steadily as per demand and run by a single company. They don’t need “private contractors” to cook up their books.

It’s just a completely awful state of affairs today where creating a new company basically means using technology to offload risk and costs onto “gig workers”.

There are real and genuine businesses that can be built. But no one wants to build a business. They want to build the next Uber ie, find ways around laws and worker protections to pad their pockets while pretending they are entrepreneurs.
Your post makes me sad.

"The Value Of Owning More Books Than You’ll Ever Read" - https://clivethompson.medium.com/the-value-of-owning-more-bo...
Thanks! It's like people confuse criticizing an action with doing some dictator like thing against it happening.

I'm not passing some law preventing people buying a barebones text editor $100 (or $10/month). Just criticizing the wisdom of that decision.
One of the few non-webkit/blink/gecko open source browsers.

Dillo, Links, Ladybird, AWeb are the other ones I am aware of.
interestingly, that one misnames Rio de Janeiro as "Vila Rio de Janeiro" which is hilarious, considering the Rio metro area has ~12M people, so a bit bigger than my idea of a village

I'm not a fan of the design, tbh. I see no reason why these need to be cards, which actually forces the sliders to be next to each other (rather than below each other or combined into a single slider)
I do this for blog posts, articles, emails, etc. If i suspect in any way they are AI created I close it immediately.

The only reader AI deserves is another AI for the marketing side.
> I'm probably never going to read again, because I have absolutely no metric, however bad any more, for guessing about the quality of a the book.

Really? This might be the laziest thing I've read on HN. 30 seconds of Googling (DuckDuckGoing?)

https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/

https://nebulas.sfwa.org

https://www.sfadb.com

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/g39358054/best-s... (and tons of other lists like this)

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/19341.Best_Science_Ficti... (etc...)

Yes, searching on Amazon might not be the best discovery method anymore, but there are also institutions that curate.
>> but that's not what some people want, they specifically want RHEL, but for free.

Well in my world we used to run many Dev/Training/Non-Prod servers with CentOS and then Run the Prod Servers with Licensed RHEL

Similar to having a MSDN License for Windows vs Production licenses

Then with the announcement of CentOS Stream they tried to sell their Dev program, but that program was TERRIBLE for enterprise use, it was built for individual developers, and not at all compatible with the model many organizations where using. They have since tweaked the terms to make is somewhat more compatible but it still IMO, not very useful for many of the scenarios I found myself in over my life

And frankly I have enough problem keeping track with MS Licensing I do not need the additional headache I might as well just use windows at that point.

Red Hat was able to become a billion dollar company by providing great support, and being easy to do business with, even before IBM buyout and accelerating after their support was becoming less and less quality, and they became more and more hostile / harder to do business with

Many organizations where already questioning their continued use of Licensed RHEL because of this, this like played a part in them killing CENTOS (and yes they killed CentOS, CentOS Stream is not a compatible replacement) as that was easier that fixing the systemic internal issues around support and business processed.
Long functions are not hard to grok, if they have a logical flow and stay reasonably close to a common level of abstraction (which can be high or low, doesn't matter). You just read top to bottom and follow the story.

20 files with 20 functions each does not cause high cognitive load, if the scope of each file and each function makes sense. You easily find the file+function you need, whenever you need to look something up and the rest of the time it is as if the rest didn't exist.

Good code can come in any shape. It is not shape itself that is important, it is the "goodness" that is important.
I still disagree a bit. Their goals are the same: producing a product that fulfills the intended purpose and brings on value (financial or else or mixed). They may bring in their specialty learned beforehand (or even during) but this distribution of labour is not a goal but tool in reaching the common goal.

Also no such as a software engineer is trained to seeks business value while a scientist seeks proof with clear cut separation, not at all.
Maybe a good way to get competition is to give someone a possibly dubious (but fun!) goal of writing a systemd compatible alternative in rust.

Reimplementing such a massive piece of infrastructure is pretty daunting. I don't think many people who are not being paid to would embark on it and then keep up the momentum to actually cover all those edge cases and maintain a community around it.

Rewriting things in rust seems to be pretty motivating though, so maybe it could be a force for good here
Very high. The incident suggests that there will be many more incidents in the years to come with different parts of the plane. It's a quality control thing.
It reminds me of the famous exchange (which may have been apocryphal) between Dustin Hoffman and Sir Laurence Olivier. Hoffman was describing the "method" in which he got into the mind of the character he was going to portray by living as much as possible as the character did, wearing the same type of clothing, and trying to think like the character. Olivier, being a more traditional actor was said to have said "My boy, have you tried acting?"
Ah, that's what a merge train is. I always found the term confusing. We pay for Premium, but we don't use merge trains. We use only fast forward merging, so I guess it's a no-op in that case.
So Kagi is now partnering with Brave
> Reputations as “reliable quality content go-to points” will be made.

Can you expand on this? Are you saying people will look for publishers like o'reilly in order to find reliable quality books? How is this different than today’s landscape?
Books - It's doesn't mean it's the source with evidence. Books also has a message has bunch of lies and illogical theories to hallucinate the readers. Sapiens is one of the greatest fools book.

AI is really helpful in this case, reduce technical books, gives very short and sweet answers -> This all we need either book or AI.

AI can't become Adolf Hitler, so the view point of the Author still remains. AI can't replace it.
“Don’t mind that leak sailor, you can barely see it from the poop deck.”
many csv data sets cannot be handled by awk due to csv supporting things like commas inside fields, newlines inside fields, etc. Your solution would also fall over for any tabs within fields. Plenty of tools out there support RFC 4180 CSV files as well as common csv variants. And these tools have been around for a decade and have suites of cli commands that can be piped together, just speaking "CSV" as a format rather than pure text streams.
NSW here, I quit mine a few months back by email after being a member for 5 years. The reason being they increased the monthly fee from $65 in 2020 to $100 in 2023.
A first look at ULA's new Vulcan rocket
Kind of a weird reason to not read anymore. 1) I never even thought about sorting by Amazon ratings and 2) I never paid to the cover myself.

While I am sure it shares metrics, I have usually had success looking at past books I have read in goodreads and their related recommendations.
Yeah, not too worried. AI might kill the "self-published Amazon eBook market of garbage genre novels", but honestly there's very little value there. The suggestion that an LLM could write a Hilary Mantel novel, or a Robert Caro biography, is so far beyond ludicrous that it's not even worth arguing.

I don't know who these people are that are reading books so bad that an LLM could plausibly replicate the work, but if that market is killed by a swarm of AI-written nonsense, honestly: who cares?

> Now that AI books exist, the probability that I will ever blind purchase another eBook on Amazon from an unknown author drops to zero.

This is a thing people do? Like... before AI? Not even reading extract or anything? You just see a cover and a title and go like "sure, I'll spend my hard-earned cash to make a 30 hour investment in this thing I know nothing about"?

The best version of this argument you can make is that it's about the treadmill: great writers aren't born great writers, they have to write a lot of crap first to become great writers, and this market is how you do that. Take that away, you don't get any more great writers. But I don't particularly buy that either: there are very few writers I love that were able to successfully make a living selling self-published Amazon eBook garbage until they got good enough to actually be picked up by a publisher.

Journalism, however, is a different story: plenty of great writers (fiction or non-fiction) got their starts as journalists and honed their craft writing small pieces there, and that is a market that is under total threat from AI. That's maybe a cause for concern. But I don't think it's an existential threat to literature as an art form. I don't think that's ever going to go away.
as a tangent, I think the issue with Amazon goes way beyond just books. At this point it's just the American version of Wish imo.
Yes, they do, that was my point.
To be fair, this was the status quo even before AI. Arguably word processors were already a serious source of low effort garbage.
how did you come up with this idea, given that alternatives already exist?
Cool. Not $160 cool.
There's lots of places that it could stop:

The government ensures that realistic healthy options are available but doesn't force people to select them.

The government applies a minimal tax to the most obviously unhealthy options but doesn't otherwise restrict anything.

The government applies regulations before 18 years old but not afterwards.
Regular people filing taxes has little/nothing to do with CPAs, who mostly work at the larger accounting firms servicing corporations, who will always have tax situations to deal with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms
neither are jews. what's your point?
IMO, the real underlying issue is the fact that Google has this sort of personalized info in their possession.

Remember when the corporate line was that your personal data and search history was all anonymized? Clearly not true.
Royal Navy forced to recruit for tob job on social media
Northern European countries have people ride bikes all year long because they invest in keeping the infrastructure rideable.

In the U.S. the moment it snows the governments will send out a bunch of people and equipment to clear out the roads. In Northern European countries they will do the same for the bike lanes as well.
I think NetSurf is the most popular browser in the small community that still uses Amiga computers.

https://www.netsurf-browser.org/downloads/amiga/
I was recently at a lecture where Ted Chiang talked at length about this. He said there are already so many books published every year that he doesn’t think it will matter. The talk was moderated by a bookseller who agreed vehemently.

https://www.geekwire.com/2023/ai-chiang-bender-wishful-think...

I think the problem is curation more than generation. Amazon could do a much better job in general with poor goods showing up in their marketplaces.
Ask HN: Draw stickman in Linux TTY console with assembly (or bare C)
This question was inspired by a recent remark by Walter Bright on HN regarding C education; he mentioned that being an experienced assembly programmer allowed him to understand C right away. That triggered my sadness for the gone times of POKEing memory to write simple games. But hope dies last, so...

here is the setup: I am on a modern laptop with an x86-64 processor and running a modern Linux kernel with minimal userland: GNU core, no X, just dumped into a console tty, running bash and logged in as root. I am a time-traveling hobbyist from DOS-times and only understand assembly, real mode, as well as DPMI and relevant nightmares. I want to write an assembly program that blanks out the screen, draws a stickman figure, lets it sit for two seconds, and then returns to prompt.

If this is too difficult in the sense of tedium, replace assembly with C, but obviously without reliance on graphics libraries; the point it to peek at the barest graphics level the OS provides (if it does).

For the sake of simplicity, suppose I know the word 'framebuffer' but do not understand much about it; I also have enabled Kernel Mode Setting, but do not actually understand that either.

If the answer is still "this cannot be done" (without rewriting half of Xorg in assembly/C), I would love an explanation that goes into as much depth as you can give as to why it cannot be done.

[I also posted this question at r/learnprograming; I hope that by posting here I can get more feedback]
> The monoculture problem is one that I really tried to cover in the article, indeed.

The issue is that the previous "multi-culture" really sucked real bad. It was a shit show, really.

systemd is rising the bar by A LOT in terms of systems management, and most alternatives are simply not keeping up.

But can you really blame it on systemd making a stellar job on its own?

If anything, we could blame it on the "alternative projects" doing a fairly poor job and delivering very little.

edit: systemd is so good that FreeBSD people have already started pondering if they should build something similar for themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo
> Why not just ask it how to reach heaven with the lowest effort possible?

Becoming a martyr is the fastest way and with the lowest effort.
I said code that relies too heavily on precedence rules. Your example doesn't do so.

In another comment [0] I mentioned that the Ada and Pony languages force the programmer to use parentheses when the expression would otherwise be confusingly reliant on precedence rules. Neither language requires unwieldy overuse of parentheses.

This C programming style advice article similarly recommends a middle-ground approach. [1]

I agree that unnecessary syntactic noise is bad (although this is essentially true by definition, as it's always a derogative). It can harm readability and make bugs more likely.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38886613

[1] https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confluence/display/c/EXP00-C.+Use+p...
It may kill e-books, but nobody is going to go to the time and effort to print physical books written by AI.

If you want to read books, buy real books (or join a library).
> inevitably 'bad' law is backed by the politically and or financially powerful, those who oppose such law simply can never muster the critical mass necessary to achieve change

well, I don't know, some hard data would be good to have for this discussion.

to me it seems there is a big status quo bias for a lot of things, which keep bad stuff on the books, and during populist surges more bad stuff ends up on the pile (looking at the recent crazy anti-abortion laws)

that said it's really strange how things seem to be falling apart while intersectionality is on the news a lot. but of course performativity is also at its peak (and there's still some steps to go before we reach a McCarthy-era hysteria), but real coalition building is rare (and hard, and requires compromises, and due to the constant one-upmanship of keyboard warriors moderates are excommunicated by the raging mobs)

and due to one of the fundamental differences between progressive and reactionary ideology being conformity (and basically forced ideological homogeneity and purity) one group tends to push the needle during these populist surges not the other

so, as I said, data would probably shine some light on this, but after reading slowboring.com a lot one of the takeaways is that the median voter doesn't really have amazing politics, so whether they care or not doesn't lead to big progress.

but that's where persistent campaigns can make some difference, by educating people. (just as unfortunately propaganda can also make fine work of people's minds the same way.)
Tooling is the thing. To keep older languages popular with people new to the industry (and who never get properly introduced to older tools) it would take someone like JetBrains need to create COBOL and Fortran IDEs. People will always go for shiny and new, like it or not.
>I've found the problems that biologists cause are mostly 1. Not understanding dependencies, public/private, SCM or versioning, making their own code uninstallable after a few months

That's not on them though. That's on the state of the tooling in the industry.

Most of the time, dependencies could just be a folder you delete, and that's that (node_modules isn't very far from that). Instead it's a nightmare - and not for any good reason, except historical baggage.

The biologists writing scientific programs don't want "shared libraries" and other such BS. But the tooling often doesn't give them the option.

And the higher level abstractions like conda and pip and poetry and whatever, are just patches on top of a broken low level model.

None of those should be needed for isolated environments, only for dependency installation and update. Isolated environments should just come for free based on lower level implementation.