skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You honestly believe that the prequels are worse than the sequels??

I think you reversed that.

I think they're about equal levels of bad. To be fair, the prequels are "stiffer" than the sequels. However, the bad writing of the sequels severely overall damages the lore, while the bad writing of the prequels somehow manages to overall improve it.
Thanks! I was hoping I'd discover some nice LaTex class, but alas :)
Lume: Create 3D web applications with HTML
The tooling and supply chain for the 757 is gone. It is unclear if Boeing can, due to both management and resources, leapfrog the competition with a better, safer plane.

Boeing has no good options. The 787, which is very pleasant to ride in, was a disastrous project in the opposite way as the 737MAX: Waaaay over budget, way late. Way beyond the target price. Less range than initially spec'ed, and an outsourcing disaster.
This makes no sense.

So what do I do if I'm at the point where I'm doing sophisticated analysis of on-prem costs? Do I move to the cloud?
Perfect example of "confident sounding hallucinations", I was just googling (a moment ago) why olive oil caused a burning sensation. It turns out there's a substance called oleocanthol[1] and there are receptors for that mainly in the throat. But while googling it, I see on Quora (which made it to the previews on Google) an "Assistant - Bot" response that is completely wrong: "Drinking olive oil can cause a burning sensation in the back of your throat due to its high fat content[...]"[2]

It wouldn't be notable if someone specifically asked ChatGPT, knowing its limitation, but using it to automatically populate Quora and Google with it is pretty bad. People are using LLM to fill the web with BS.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3073417/

[2] https://www.quora.com/Why-does-drinking-olive-oil-burn-the-b...
California is close.

It's amazing how big these states are compared to say, Colorado where I grew up.
I agree that agile methodologies are a whole lot of bullshit, but the problem really is cargo cult.

Most people working in software are juniors, and that includes most managers. The fact that they have a title of "VP operations" 2 years after graduating does not magically make them experienced. What do they do then? They read books about "how to lead a team", and they blindly apply what they find there.

Because they have no clue. Many times they have not even had a team lead in there professional career themselves: they jumped right into management. And of course their team of junior developers (with high titles that don't make them experienced either) don't know better. So it ends up in a big cargo cult. Which sucks.
I understand what you're saying, and I agree with you, but I think it's more of a case of "small pocket computers" swallowed the cell phone than vice versa. Every brand of phone I owned pre-iPhone/Android (Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson) basically got killed because the cell phone's functionality got subsumed into these "small pocket computers".
I’m the son of a software engineer, I’m a software engineer, and I am also recently a new father to a daughter.

When I think back to my childhood — I really appreciated my dad showing me how computers work, letting me build them, explaining to me what a transistor did, how ISA and PCI worked, etc. It obviously had a profound influence on me given my career.

What really sucked was his work at all costs attitude; I rarely saw him, and this stayed true for his second crop of children w/ my step mother.

In sum; I loved the technical learnings offered, didn’t really care about his work (early 90s tech wasn’t that fun/interedting?), and I certainly chafe, now, at how absentee he was due to his career.
See this all the time. There is a huge distinction between teams that are oriented to be proactively planned and teams that are oriented to be reactive. Neither is bad and both need to exist. Things will break people will have to fix them and therefore reactive work will exist.
I maintain this one for native macOS chat https://github.com/psugihara/FreeChat
Perhaps give a reason for Flagging

Boeing "We were caught cutting corners, lets add some inspections and call it a day."
I know Nuclear is super popular solution for Climate Change.

But remember, Boeing has peoples lives in their hands everyday, and the pressure to cut costs is still enough to overcome any qualms about deaths.

Remember the Boeing 737.

Remember how they tried to bypass regulations?

Remember outsourcing Software Testing to cut costs?

Now the door blow out?

Now a cracked windshield?

Cost Cutting will always win over lives.

So just remember that when advocating the return of Nuclear Power.

Chernobyl? Fukushima? These are NOT Exceptions when it comes to industrial accidents. They just happened to be what happened that wasn't caught or covered up and big enough to be remembered. In any industry with cost pressures lives are secondary.

Instead of a single plane, it will be countries destroyed.
Uniqlo has by far the best self checkout implementation I've used. My first experience with it, I was so suspicious that it was going to mess something up because I'm used to poor self checkout experiences, but now I'm over that and wish self checkout was implemented this well everywhere else.
They have stores in the nice parts of china that you badge in with your wechat login, grab stuff, and rfid readers read the tagged stuff you took and charge you for it as you leave. Zero staff required aside from stocking.

Amazon has similar, but staffed, stores like this in the US.

So it is possible to do seamlessly-ish, we just aren't there yet in terms of adoption.
> Were you actually saying that you really did believe everyone else was worse at programming?

What? I'm surely just as vulnerable to giving a shit about the happy path as everyone else. I'm just saying this leads to bad software, and anywhere you see good software produced you see people giving inspection to the code paths they suspected were error-free. The conception that giving extra attention to the error path leads to better software seems to entirely confuse the concept of a flawed program with some kind of finite bulk work that needs to be done.
Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accelerated Novel View Synthesis
Operation Dumbo Drop
I think I heard the system in Mexico works well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexicable

The system in London works, but was not built in a very useful place. While it's a handy way to get from the O2 arena to the Excel convention centre (something people needed during the 2012 Olympics), it's very rare for a longer journey to be made quicker by connecting to it - most of the time you can go to a different station and change. While it is part of the London Oyster fares system, it costs extra to ride.
SO answers, SEO-driven blog posts and YouTube videos are not good learning tools. They provide shallow answers to specific questions. They don't teach you deeper lessons or give a nuanced understanding, and they don't give the experience of practice. I believe programmers have become worse over time due to depending on them.
You have to like being challenged.

I've seen incredibly smart people in the coding space (definitely smarter than I) basically "smart themselves out of it" because they felt it wasn't challenging anymore. Or they felt tired of the "wrong" challenge, like "waiting for everyone else to catch up to them." (They were usually involved with bleeding-edge tech that ended up being the norm years later.)

If fascination is motivating, I guess be happy that you're not too smart? ;)
Agreed, I'm "on the inside" a bit and agreed. There are very few "big idea" projects around now, many are "me too" stuff.
Your brain still ingests it even if you're pretending not to watch it
I will always prefer the self-checkout option, and scan-as-you-go as long as the pickup of the scanner is easy. The queue for the self-checkout will have to be significantly larger for me to consider wasting someone else's life to scan my products. Maybe I'm jaded, but not long ago there were scandals of till workers being asked to use diapers for the holiday season.
I think the error of self-checkout was installing self-checkout terminals as a replacement for traditional checkouts as opposed to a speedy option. Particularly in grocery stores, I really enjoy scan-and-shop style self checkouts, as I am able to pack my bags as I go through the store. I can then present myself at a till, pay, and leave. That actually saves me time.

What I don't enjoy are paranoid self-checkout machines with scales that are constantly complaining about unexpected items, or self-checkout machines in locations where pretty much every customer is making an age-restricted purchase or a large portion of the items have security tags. There needs to be a sensible attempt to understand the purchase habits of the people using a particular store and tailor the checkout experience accordingly.

On a related note: I was in a Boots (similar to Walgreens) earlier today and I witnessed a truly crazy amount of shoplifting: 3 times whilst I was there. Partially that was down to the layout of this particular store, which had a number of different exits and an insufficient amount of staff. The self checkouts don't help at all, because they cause far more false positives with the exit alarm, where a security tag doesn't get removed.

It would be straightforward for an inventory system to hook up directly to the security tags, rather than having them be totally separate from the SKUs which are actually scanned into the POS. You'd then have item-level tracking of stock, which I'm sure would help from more than just a shrinkage perspective.
> People will happily trade off more energy consumption for personal convenience

This must be why European cars are generally smaller than American cars. It has nothing to do with the lack of tax breaks on large vehicles, historically higher gas prices, and notoriously smaller parking spots. Nothing at all. Europeans just like smaller cars, right?

And let’s not get into why half of Asia seems to ride around on tiny little 50cc vespas/scooters. I’m sure that’s just more comfortable there what with all the extremely hot weather and monsoon rains.
I don't go to supermarkets much (my partner does that) but I hate the self-service kiosks at airports. I would much rather deal with a human being.
Semitic tribal warfare shouldn’t try to take global trade hostage.
Use a Youtube proxy like Invidious [1], problem solved and you get to subscribe to channels without telling the Beast about your interests. Add Sponsorblock (which supports Invidious) to get rid of any in-stream advertising which remains and you'll be transported back to those hallowed times of yore when men were men, women were women and advertising was something you found in newspapers. Youtube will try to make this harder just like Xitter is trying to make it harder to use proxies like Nitter [2].

[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

[2] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
How to help AI developers understand the societal implication of their creations
The hype train has no brakes. This kind of stuff will continue until some of these companies have such steep declines in revenue due to crappy products that they file for bankruptcy. I just seriously hope this doesn’t lead to another AI winter, because the progress that has been made is quite real, quite good, and waiting for someone to find that killer use case to transform human lives for the better.
Yeah, in the last few years I have not seen any stores in my area (in the US) decrease the number of self-checkout lanes, while several have increased the self-checkout lanes and/or decreased the number of cashiers working. This is despite increasing anti-theft measures in other ways like locking up more items in cabinets. Perhaps this article is based on interviewing management about upcoming changes that have not occurred yet, but otherwise it doesn't match my experiences.
oh alright, my bad
It keeps laying off humans

I predict that someday soon, "it" will refer to an AI.
I agree with that article that recursion is better introduced with relevant data structures than with Fibonacci. And I agree that Fibonacci is also too simple to explain dynamic programming, which is why I showed how it works with edit distance, and they with AoC 2023-12-18.
YMMV. For me in the UK — where all supermarkets except the discounters will deliver cheaply — it's ENORMOUSLY more convenient: it saves me hours a week that I'd otherwise spend at a supermarket.
I'm not sure if it will pan out that way. It sounds awfully complex.

I rather suspect that people will do some lowest common denominator inferencing on-device and shift everything else to the cloud.
Some self checkouts are slow and unreliable. However that is a bug in those particular units. Some of them are just as fast and reliable as what the clerks get - plus I'm never in line behind someone else who is slow. I've had enough waiting for someone who can't figure out which lottery ticket they want to lose their money on. I've had enough waiting on someone else who picks an item that is missing a tag. I have places to be, and lines are not serving me.
Booths, which has 27 shops...

[Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booths]
The far biggest time sink is not what you logged though, but how you need to pad estimates and delay work to please the Scrum Lords.

Like, the burndown chart has to be nice and steadely go to zero. There is no way to do that without decoupling reported hours and estimated hours from actual hours. Or points. It doesn't matter which.
I use Wayland. Perhaps that's your issue?
Why Germany Is Rich but Germans Are Poor and Angry
Same. I shut down a ticket last week that would create an “final” error handling path that happened to re-invoke half the code paths that could error.
I dropped out of CS after a 3 months, had never programmed before. I sat in my mom's basement for 8 months and taught myself the basics of JS and was able to get a job.

Since then, I've spent a metric fuck-ton of time programming (tens of thousands of hours to date). I've worked on compilers, 3D graphics, semiconductors and game engines.

I guess my experience kind of supports both sides of the coin. I was relatively easily able to get into industry with little experience (circa ~2012), although since then I've put in a ton of work to become a good engineer that people with interesting projects want to hire. Take that as you will :)
As a current AI researchers, my opinion is while AI may surpass the average human soon (if not already) in a game of 9s humans are always better. So I wouldn’t trust a system with 0 humans in it for failsafe.
Are we sure this is true? The last few years we have seen huge amounts of psychology research be discredited and overturned. Is it possible that the foundational ideas of advertising wouldn’t replicate, but everybody is too scared to look?
Yes, your pay in the United States would be much higher than you'd get paid in the same position in Europe. Taxes are also higher in Europe than in the US. It evens out a bit if you have dependents, or some other special circumstances. For a young person with no dependents or chronic medical conditions, financially US is going to be a much better choice.

That being said, you're not going to just automatically get a jr. dev position in the US right now. The layoffs have been brutal, and there are a lot of developers looking for jobs at the moment. I don't know how long the current conditions are going to last, but generally speaking a bad job market is the perfect time to go to school.

How confident are you about your startup employer's ability to operate? Startups are notoriously fickle. I would take a very hard look at the company, its funding, leaders and business idea before deciding to rely on them for enabling you to immigrate to Germany.
I've seen this handled in various ways. Usually, the scrum master/PM will set aside extra "bandwidth" during a period that is expected to be heavy in interruptions. However, getting that right is almost impossible, and you can easily end up with way too much work in a sprint or way too little.
I think the opposite - LLMs will cause programming language development to become stagnant because the language that compliments an LLM the best is the language that has the most code out there in the wild.

So the "LLM language" already exists - its Javascript, Java, C#, etc.
Now listed as destination .. "TR ARM GUARD ONBOARD"?

https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/details/9702508

Also general reminder that the Houthis are not "Yemen", but an armed rebel faction that has taken over part of the country and are sponsored by Iran against Saudi Arabia. There is supposedly a ceasefire in place in the Yemeni civil war.
Yes there will be a tiny percentage of the population like that, but by most accounts it's WallE (before they returned) and Idiocracy.
Apparently we're doing the impossible for over 12 years now. Who knew?

Some people act like it's some kind of black magic. It's not. We've some customers in our DC and some on AWS for various reasons. AWS isn't less problematic. AWS is about 10x more expensive. Both on prem and cloud require people familiar with them and cloud-engineers are in no way cheaper.

Only meaningful problem is that on-prem requires some up front cost&time. That can be mitigated by leasing and other means, but indeed can be an issue for small businesses.
Aside: We need an alternate viewing filter for medium like how nitter is to X.

Every time I open a medium hosted link it is just unbearable.

Edit: The firefox reader view (F9) works very well at getting rid of Medium nonsense and making it clean.
This kind of comedy propaganda, while I haven't a/b tested its efficacy, strikes me as incredibly efficient.

"lol you mean the Houthis not only can't take out a cargo ship with their Iranian ASBMs, but also outright fail to launch them regularly?"

I assume the angle is to downplay the risk and impact, given the US' inevitable failure to guarantee passage security.
Iceland has had some VEI 6 eruptions in the past, meaning 10 km^3 of material (called tephra) was ejected. That's 100 times larger than the VEI 4 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volcanic_eruptions_in_...
It's not just expertise, but division of labor: while you unload the cart another person can be scanning in parallel. Plus checkout lines are optimized to make scanning fast - unlike most self-checkouts. If I have more than a handful of items I prefer the speed of a regular checkout.
Last Tweets of the Krell (2017)
I'm not a nutrition scientist, so obviously not at all an expert that can probably chime in with some more findings.

But generally - yes, afaik there's mostly a consensus that total caloric intake is the driver of amount of adiposity, that maintaining a 10%-20% body fat percentage (for men) is optimal for long term health, that most diets are close from a health and fat-loss perspective - meaning, amount of adiposity is the main driver of long-term bad health, especially as compared to individual ingredients. There are some things that are known to be specifically problematic, e.g. trans-fats, at any amounts. And there are healthier and less healthy foods, some of which we know - but total caloric intake is the only driver of body composition, and a bigger driver of body health.

Most of this is basic - probably because, as I said, I'm not a nutrition scientist myself so only understand the basics myself.

That said, a large part of the population doesn't even understand these basics either, preferring to constantly talk about and argue about specific diets, keto vs. vegan vs. whatever. And science mostly has that question covered, as far as we can tell right now.

For a more in-depth take on this from someone who actually is an expert, I recommend videos by Mike Israetel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FM9VAH_EXw&list=PLyqKj7LwU2...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYeZVfPxwKM
The same people have been in power for almost 20 years, as the article says this is a consequence of policy. At no point have they made it easier to build homes, private or social.

There is an ongoing secondary scandal where people object to property planning permission for extortion purposes https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio/2023/12/05/the-p...

The majority of the elected government members are landlords.

Dublin in particular has a morally reprehensible limit on building anything new above 5 stories in the city centre.

At every stage this 'crisis' has been manufactured by those we wish to solve it. The sobering reality is, if you were born after about 1986 then you are not allowed ever have a home.

Oh and there's no rail outside of the wealthy coastal suburbs and the glacially slow tram lines don't even connect, so good luck with land use.
Agreed. The processes need to assume that humans are imperfect. Firing someone for being imperfect is pure window dressing and would do nothing to prevent the statistically inevitable next time.

Instead of performative scapegoating, we should be asking how it’s possible that there is no documentation showing critical steps were done correctly.
OpenStack is pretty okay these days
Oh please. All of these time estimates, from 24 hours to ten years to 10,000 hours are completely bogus.

The “24 hours” figure is marketing copy designed to unify and differentiate a brand of technical manuals.

The person who coined the 10,000 hours rule (Anders Ericsson) rejects it as an oversimplification of an arbitrary number, noting that half of the violinists in his study fell short of that number. The ten years figure is derived from this flawed rule.

The linked article is well-written, but the comments are giving “kids these days” insecurity and mid-life crisis.
Not tech, but AI is absolutely replacing people, just not wholly. To take an example, a friend of mine is releasing a small book of D&D one-shots she wrote. She was prepared to pay someone to make some art, but found that between AI and some editing skills, she got it close enough that she doesn't need to hire anyone. It's small scale of course, but that's money no longer going towards artists and instead to AI companies.
Not OP, but the buttons are a bit mushy, the shell a bit creaky and, worst of all, the the Steam and Quick Access buttons feel terrible. It's all much more apparent when I pick up my Switch Lite, which itself isn't something I'd consider high build quality. That said, I'm ok with the compromises considering the price point.
I would say at least 1 time in 5 I encounter some kind of issue with the self-service checkout at my local supermarket. The scale won't work, or it doesn't detect when I've put something in the bagging area, or a barcode isn't recognised, or something else. And that's leaving aside the times I try to buy alcohol (or NA beer...) and need approval.

And then I have to stand there like a twat for 20 minutes trying to get the attention of a member of staff because there is one staff member for 20+ machines and everyone is having the same issues.

The technology may or may not have delivered for shareholders, but in my experience it hasn't delivered value for customers. Perhaps the bigger question is why we put up with stuff like this.

Maybe it'll get better in time (though it has had many years to improve already). I used to despise the passport machines in the airport, now I merely dislike them.
I haven't used self-checkout voluntarily: if you go to Lowe's or Target too early, they don't have anyone on the checkout line yet, so you don't have a choice except to come back in an hour. But the experience is bad, and it exists solely to save money by putting people out of a job, with the side effect of making customers do free work. If they all go away tomorrow, good riddance.
How do people economically run multi-region databases for low latency?
Someone really should market a PC directly as a "midlife crisis gaming PC." I laughed so hard at that.