skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
unprecedented disruption at a macro scale that humanity has never seen before

Exactly.

How likely do you think this will happen?

I estimate the chance of this happening after the release of GPT-5: 50%.
Chance of this happening after GPT-6 is released: 90%.

You painted a pretty bleak picture of what might happen. I tend to agree with your assessment, but there's a chance that the total automation of everything will make things so cheap that quality of life will actually improve for majority of humankind. In any case, we still have a few years to prepare for this disruption.

p.s. I'm not sure why people are talking about software engineering as some sort of a subtle skill that is hard to automate. It's quite likely that GPT-5 will be able to talk to my boss, colleagues, and any other other stakeholders to understand what needs to be done, access all relevant information, iterate on requirements, ask for help, and problem solve, and it will do so better than me, or anyone else in this thread. Even if GPT-5 is not quite there yet, it's almost guaranteed that GPT-6 will be (barring some unlikely global catastrophic events preventing further technological progress). At that point, there will be no reason for my boss to employ me, or for his boss to employ him, and so on.
You know, I spent some time in college learning economics, and lots of time after that listening to podcasts about economics ("Planet Money" has long been great), but like almost every other belief I had when I was younger, I seem to have lost this one as well.

Supposedly we've had decades of productivity growth, so you'd think that it would be possible for a smaller cohort of workers to keep everything going, and yet it is apparently a creeping disaster that there may not be enough of them to maintain modern civilization in the not-so-distant future. Like many aspects of modern life, it just isn't really adding up to me.
You are misunderstanding how much of a travesty this is.

No government organisation (typically the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales) was involved in bringing these prosecutions.

The Post Office itself was legislatively empowered to bring private prosecutions of their employees to the state courts of England.

The whole thing is insane.
How would you classify CSIS which is the successor to what the RCMP was doing?
And both applications are terrible and recommended against. I never use them and I don’t know anyone who actively does out of those I know with headsets.
New youtube rabbit hole unlocked, thanks.
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38758355 - Dec 2023 (180 comments)
[edit: if you're joking, good -- ignore my reply]

It's a desert. There's arguably less biodiversity there than most places. I'm pretty sure there's enough room for there to still be plenty of cactuses and jackrabbits AND a massive amount of solar panels.

Rooftop and parking lot solar isn't the same thing. It's not automatically better. The efficiency of rooftop solar isn't nearly as good as an array that can follow the sun. Given finite resources you could make a case we're better off deploying those panels in a desert and connecting a big fat cable to them vs. a million houses all paying individual installers to install tiny, inefficient arrays piecemeal.
Maybe? Apparently if we blanket the Sahara with solar it could actually increase cloud cover and reduce solar potential in a lot of the rest of the world: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-01117-5.

I guess my answer is no, it would literally cause the climate to change so by definition that's not mitigating climate change. It would be a form of geoengineering, which is sort of its own category separate from mitigation, which refers to action that reduces change.
You bring up a good point, and it elicits the question:

Once a company is overwhelmingly infested with folks who are cashing-in-till-they-bounce, should you stick around anyway, even though that'll hurt your career?
Funny, I guess it can be difficult. I do manage all the accounts and finances for a >>90yr old family member, but it is easier because I manage all of it.
The naming framework for these groups isn't even consistent, with every vendor having their own scheme. Midnight Animal to one vendor is Dancing Bear to another and known by Wet Cat to yet another.

They all sound like bad translations to bargain-bin porno movies.
Oh cool, I didn't realize Factorio had such an extensive dev blog. I see it goes back over a decade! It'll be a treat to read through this :)

And ugh, I can believe it with DF. I'm trying to deliver something with similar quality graphics and naively thought that setting the bar so low would make that aspect of the project "free" :)... but it's about the journey not the destination and it is so rewarding making all the little micro-improvements over time. So, I'll stick with it and hope to get quicker as I gain more experience.
They probably aren't familiar with US journalistic practices about background, on/off record etc. Prudence would dictate more circumspection, but I prefer frankness to the obfuscatory nonsense that US PR spokespersons foist on the public, with the help of journalists who uncritically repeat it.
Prevented how? I've had fire alarms go off at the office in a Minnesota winter and half the people outside were in their cars. No way were you going to be able to stop people from doing that when it's below 0F.
My go-to has been checking Skyscanner, Google Flights, and Momondo then booking through the airlines website.
Aren't they just providing access to their service? Different companies provide different billing methods and that's fine!

For example you could pay $20/month for ChatGPT and use it as much or little as you like, or pay $/per API call... But not every company needs to offer both.
if your goal is just to look up prices, google flights is amazing!
Chevron USA, Inc. vs. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc
16x PCIe 4.0 is 32GB/s 16x PCIe 5.0 should be 64 GB/s, how is any computer using 100 GB/s ?
I agree, the specific applications of AI are what truly show its transformative power. For instance, I came across IntervueIQ (https://chat.openai.com/g/g-94nPIWIgi-intervueiq), a GPT designed for recruitment. It's fascinating to see how such specialized AI tools are targeting niche problems and streamlining processes. It's a small, yet potent example of AI's practical impact.
Is this satire?

They’re clearly not talking about the benign strains.
I think a mechanistic universe is not necessarily a computation, so purely physical intelligence is also not necessarily a computation. But I'm not prepared at the moment to go dig up the alternatives to "computation" and "metaphysical process", or to figure out how a deterministic (or even stochastic) process could be uncomputable.
"PlayStation 2 a Weapons Development Platform?"

https://games.slashdot.org/story/00/04/16/1953243/ps2-a-weap...
A Neopanamax vessel is allowed to transport 120,000 metric tons of cargo [1]. ~60 K$ would only amount to 0.50 $/t of extra cost. That is only low single-digit percentage increased shipping cost [2].

And again, that is the cost of desalinating 100% seawater, not the proportionally cheaper cost of desalinating whatever single-digit to maybe low double-digit percent you would actually get from incidental mixture during reclamation.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamax

[2] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2022_en...
They needed to make a profit.
https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion8.html

"[...]I was shocked the other day, when I was browsing in the Web, that the AMS journals are not available freely for downloading, but charge subscription fees. Some `non-profit' organization! Let me remind you that there are several excellent electronic journals, that are viewable free of charge, for example New York Journal of Mathematics and the Electronic J. of Combinatorics. If you publish your papers there, you would be accessible to the ten millions people who surf the Web regularly. Of course, if you are already a tenured full professor, it is even pointless to publish there, since a publication reachable from your Home Page is equally accessible, although the journals might reach more browsers.

"Let's hope that the new medium will destroy the old organizations with their corrupt paper mentality and elitism, or at least reform them. After all, thanks to the Web and E-mail, both journals and conferences are becoming increasingly pointless. Then again, institutions have a very strong inertia, look at established religion, so perhaps, unfortunately, it is too soon to rejoice in the devil's death."

Opinion 8: Organized Mathematics = Organized Crime, Dec. 1, 1995
We should just agree to disagree.

Was ancient Egypt capitalist and the pyramids a commercial enterprise?

Again I am not advocating for anything except that we don’t turn economic systems into religious beliefs.
In two years the job of a senior software engineer will be completely redefined, so I'm not sure how we could test your prediction. Would someone who tells an AI model to build something still be an engineer, or would we call that person a manager?
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this offtopic subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39054206.
They specially tune their own drivers, firmware, etc.
Best Buy I needed a printer ASAP and buying was cheaper than paying per page.
thereg joins the click bait crowd.

> crew stops using phishing
> now sends an email with a password PDF
> when victim asks for password they send a EXE with the generic backdoor.
"one account for all the money in the world"

yeah, until you mention that you are using their service for bitcoin.

The inverse HN theorem: If the vc and woke tech bros like it, then it's worthless.
But it's been almost 10 years since the claim and there is still no evidence. How long do we have to wait?
>> It is not known whether this hacking group is private, government sponsored, or government run.

Coming from Russia, that's a distinction without a difference.

Sure, private groups can 'freelance', but not without at least tacit permission from the FSB, GRU, and/or SVR (more accurately, cant freelance for long). Especially so for sch a high visibility target such as Microsoft.

And when the RU govt isdues a denial, it's confirmed.

But still no reason for MS to escalate the wording. They put enough in there that anyone with a clue knows it's serious.
His argument against infinities is interesting. He's making an argument for finite constructive mathematics.
It's interesting to see that coming around again.

Several decades ago, when I was working on early program proof of correctness, I spent a lot of time with the original Boyer-Moore theorem prover. This is a constructive theory of mathematics, similar to the Piano axioms. It really is possible to have useful mathematics without undecidablity. But you have to give up infinity. Boyer-Moore theory has recursion, but all recursions must have an upper bound. There must be some nonnegative integer that gets smaller with each recursion.

Set theory is possible in the Boyer-Moore system. Boyer and Moore usually added the traditional axioms of set theory. But I tried doing without that to get to a McCarthy-like theory of arrays without set theory first. Arrays had a concrete representation as an ordered sequence of (index, value) tuples. The sequence has to be ordered so that array equality works. So all the functions for operating on arrays are rather clunky. Here's the sequence of machine proofs for that.[3]

Back then, mathematicians hated such approaches. Infinity is a useful trick for handling the edge cases within the main case. Formulas become simpler. You can do things on blackboards with chalk more easily.
Constructive math is boring and kind of ugly, because there's a lot of case analysis.
But it's sound. You can avoid undecidability and Russel's class of all classes paradox.
You don't actually need infinities for much of mathematics.

Today there's more acceptance of machine proofs and case analysis. Everybody has computers, after all.
I'm not a mathematician; I just used formal math as a tool to improve programs.
This is a problem for the theorists.

(A few years ago, I converted the original Boyer-Moore code to run under Gnu Common LISP, so it can be run today.[2] Proving the basics of number theory now takes under a second. It took about 45 minutes in 1981.)

[1] https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion160.html

[2] https://github.com/John-Nagle/nqthm

[3] https://github.com/John-Nagle/pasv/blob/master/src/work/temp...
I believe “Actions taken by Microsoft following an attack by a group named Midnight Blizzard, who are backed by a nation-state”.
"Correctly".

Manual transmissions (and sport shifting automatics) of most cars from 1904-2024 of sports coupes to trucks don't illuminate the brake lights when engine braking. Drivers following cars should be basing most decisions based on relative speed based on these existing.

If you were to follow behind me in my 2004 manual sports car or a 2021 automatic and only applied brakes when I did, you'd be speeding in my neighborhood and rear ending me, as I keep both in second gear and it keeps me at 20mph.
Magnetron still sounds futuristic to me.
Already did. I've pirated terabytes of movies and shows from all around the world.
Is there an indication it won't be?
You shouldn’t have to accept the beliefs, just the virtues, if it’s a religion with a stated goal of making people virtuous (excluding some polytheistic faiths, for instance).
>How do you make something like this right?

The UK government reckon it takes about £600,000 each

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66843548
You don't want military drones for consumer applications. Consumer drones are designed to last the length of warranty + 1 day. Military drones are designed to last long enough to deliver their cargo or provide essential intel. Because of their limited lifespan, some of them are made of cardboard https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/09/13/cardboard-drone-v...
Useful for dementia patients.
Excellent, good point, thanks
The iOS app “MLCChat”
As of 2023, there were 6727 subpostmasters.

So about 10% committed fraud.

Seems a little high - but I could believe it if the subpostmasters are the local "boss", handling cash, and are supposed to pay 'the blokes in London' who they never meet.

Also, most subpostmasters had many employees - and I believe if any one of their employees was commiting fraud/stealing money, then it was the sub postmaster responsible - so that 10% number might actually only be 1% if every branch had 10 people involved in the running of it.
Orb also runs linux machines, a feature I miss for the first few weeks of using it!

https://docs.orbstack.dev/machines/
Not only that, but people really underestimate how locked into a difficult financial situation you can get. Yeah, you can just get a better job or just move where there are more opportunities, except you need time to make all of that happen; if you're working dogshit hours just to keep the lights on and you have a family to feed, finding the time to go to interviews or to figure out where to live may not be on the table, at least not immediately. Especially if one can't even afford the move itself.

Those whom have reached financial escape velocity, or never had to reach it because of good fortune, often are biased towards believing that their current lifestyle is entirely the result of their own decisions and didn't involve luck.

People should act with personal responsibility, but all the personal responsibility in the world won't make a winner in a losing situation. Anyone can do what Warren Buffet does, but Buffet doesn't risk starvation or having his children live on the street when things don't work out.
I'm using a service called Subly that keeps track of all of my recurring payments and puts them into a database that I can view at a glance. It shows me which day of the month it renews, how much, and to which card or account it will be charged. This includes my annual renewal fees as well. It then shows me what my average monthly expenditure is.

With this I can see that I'm spending roughly $112/month on subscriptions. The whole thing couldn't be much easier.

The service costs $4/month. The irony of that is not lost on me, but the convenience of seeing my recurring monthly charges is worth it for me.

https://web.subly.app
> If you work at a bank, maybe pitch a notifications system that detects reoccurring transactions that are in fixed amounts that notifies customers when they change.

I get exactly these types of notifications from both Discover and Citi.
when i was young, being in a niche area allowed me to get jobs on 3 different continents and travel too. but eventually, that was not enough. i had to leave that niche and accept a python job so that i could work and live in china. it was great while it lasted, but in the long term it proved to limiting because the jobs weren't where i wanted to be (if there were any jobs at all. i stopped looking)

the problem is of course to figure out what has potential, and what it takes to get into that field.
> Good context, but not a geopolitical crisis, it was an internal civil conflict.

Do you think clandestine services pursue their goals by declaring war on countries?
In Asia, the transformation to a life where education takes 22 years and marriage only happens after 28 years is pretty new.

When so much of life is given to the pursuit of jobs, careers, mortgages, and the general rat race, there is little time left for dating, marriages, child birth, and raising kids.
I may be the outlier but sync and async are both tools in the tool belt and ignoring one or the other is mostly silly?
Hopefully less than the 38M acres of federal lands leased out for oil extraction?
Thanks for sharing this. I would be interested to see a more detailed pie chart on the 2023 expenditures. Approximately half the expenses (1.5 million dollars) spent on "Membership & Admin". What does that mean exactly?
Whoever can invest the most into constant blatant propaganda is the one whose message sticks. And the fossil fuel lobby's been doing it since the 60s while being funded by a large share of all of our paychecks.
No it's not.

There are plenty of small cheese makers with diverse biomes and we buy from them every day.

They all have their own batch, many are unique passed from generations or affected by the animals they raise.

Nobody expect supermarket cheese to be sustainable anymore than their standardized vegetable.
So dealerships were a good idea after all.

> Rural people have been waiting since the nineties for fiber, the government has spent billions and yet they have never seen it.

Verizon have seen every cent of those billions (twice and counting)
Yes, that's because indeed, bitcoin is not money
Couldn’t find the exact number, but anywhere from 9k-12k according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_Limited#Services

That’s ~8.5% of their subpostmasters that were arrested (the actual number according to Wikipedia is 900 not 700). That seems really high to me.

Also I think you meant to say that 700 out of millions would be unimpressive instead of impressive right?
> There isn't really anything in terms of cultural or organization changes that Google could have done to prevent this.

If you're familiar with the political infighting between Brain, Deepmind, and subteams within Brain, you'd know there was a lot of room for improvement.

Also Google would benefit from being able to use and build off more open source stuff. Tensorflow losing to Torch for researchers was a pretty big blow imo.

Macro cultural trends at Google didn't help either. Stuff like not incentivizing work with longer term payoffs, and too many layers of middle management.

> Only that the tech became production-ready and the rest of the world took notice, and these researchers and engineers decided that they no longer needed Google's money since there was so much available from everyone else.

All that said this is very true and probably unavoidable.
The Library of Consciousness – Alan Watts
I drive my manual and auto cars like this, downshifting instead of using the brakes and preventing dangerous acceleration. I often only use the brakes from 20mph and below (though may touch them during a downshift)

Thinking it's more dangerous is odd as it's a great example of fail safe.
Why is that problematic? Doesn't the fact that is has very exceptions make it a rule? This basically means there is a wide set of confouding factors at play...
But surely the fewest assumptions here points to incompetence? Or more kindly a lack of knowledge about the way the fraud was commited? Based on the information provided I'd side with belligerent incompetence.

Based on the information would you conclude it was racist if the accused person was white? Would you conclude it was racist if the cop was also a first nation/aboriginal? I doubt it. What would your conclusion be then?
> store(int*, int, int):
> slli a1,a1,2 // writes to a1
> add a0,a0,a1 // writes to a0
> sw a2,0(a0)
> ret

Three points:

1) you could argue that's bad code generation, which could easily be fixed in the compiler, as `a1` could be used as the result of the `add`

2) since late 2021 RISC-V has the `sh2add` instruction (and shifts of 1 and 3, and also versions that widen and shift a 32 bit unsigned value on a 64 bit CPU) that replaces the `slli` and `add`, thus naturally clobbering only one register. These instructions are already present in the popular RISC-V boards that use the JH7110 SoC (VisionFive 2, Star64, Mars, PineTab-V, Roma)

3) using a function like this to prove anything actually verges on dishonest (and erincandescent did the same thing) because no real program where anyone cares about performance will have such a function in hot code. If you care about the performance it's going to be because it's in a loop, and the function will be inlined, and strength-reduced, and the actual code will look like:

sw a2,(a0)
addi a0,a0,4

I have in the past proposed adding simple reg+reg indexing to loads (only), as that fits within the 2r1w framework and loads are more numerous than stores. Similarly, stores could write the effective address back to the base register, which would also fit in the 2r1w framework.

This would allow something like ...

void arrAdd(int *dst, int *src1, int *src2, int n) {
for (int i=0; i<n; ++i)
dst[i] = src1[i] + src2[i];
}

... to be compiled as ...

arrAdd:
sh2add a3,a3,a0 // just past end of dst
addi a0,a0,-4 // bias for incr by 4 in the store
sub a1,a1,a0 // bias for indexed addressing
sub a2,a2,a0
1:
lw a4,(a1,a0)
lw a5,(a2,a0)
add a4,a4,a5
swwb a4,4(a0) // store AND a0 = a0+4
blt a0,a3,1b
ret

This is the same number of instructions as now (no code size saving) but three fewer instructions in the loop.

> For any implementation above the purely educational level, 3+ register file read ports is the norm, but AFAIK the RISC-V authors have claimed that the base integer ISA will never require more than two source operands. I think that this philosophy weighs very heavily - more so than optimal performance.

It gives optimal price-performance. Having three read ports is rather expensive, and nowhere near justified by the number of integer instructions that would ever actually make use of the 3rd port, even if you added indexed stores, conditional selects, double-width shifts with dynamic shift count, multiply-add. Three read ports are justified in FP code as multiply-add is the fundamental and by far most popular instruction in FP code and besides IEEE rules require a single rounding in a multiply-add.
Your question was, “Who’s buying these inkjet printers?” I just answered the part of that question that I know the answer to.
I think there is already a nuclear powered chaotic nation right next to China. Why would Russia be more dangerous if they lose than if they win?