skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Performance, security, and written communication. In my experience CS graduates are hilariously and profoundly bad at each of those.

When it comes to performance most developers are absolutely and utterly incapable of measuring things, a bridge too far. As a result most developers simply just guess at this. The problem with guessing is that people tend to guess wrong more 80% of the time and more those 50% of those wrong guesses are off by one to three orders of magnitude.

In my experience most developers have absolutely no idea about security best practices and yet somehow believe themselves quite brilliant at it. Security in software is Dunning-Kruger at its finest, and the confidence therein is superbly comedic. Don’t lie to yourself about security. If you want to prove to the world just how much you aren’t full of shit get a CASP, CISA, or CISSP. In my experience you are typically much safer listening to the security opinions of software developers and executing the exact opposite.

Written communication is also a poor developed skill for most software developers. I have seen people insane things to avoid having to send brief emails. Your ability to articulate your thoughts in writing with precision and clarity are the best way to unintentionally prove to the world just how brilliant you are. Good written communication requires practice. Don’t be that coward that hides from this because you are only harming your own professional development.
> new stuff that does not exist or has it infancy.

If it was new stuff, then the people doing it must not be very low at the bottom (by virtue of the org being quite shallow - such as a startup).

Even new stuff in a big company with lots of layers of management cannot make new stuff with excellence. Eventually, probably sooner rather than later, it gets polluted.

Not to mention that in a big org, the people at the bottom do not get rewarded for making excellence in engineering, if the top doesn't appreciate it. SO why go that extra mile, when a mediocre job will earn you the same salary? You'd be more incentivized to move jobs to grow your pay instead, and use this as a stepping stone.
This is not unique to X. Windows for example uses the same kind of "HWND" object for buttons as for top-level windows. Windows doesn't have the same client/server overhead as X though.

In Qt, there is an option to use either native windows for individual widgets or "alien" windows, in which only the top level widget is a native window - https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qwidget.html#native-widgets-vs-alien-....
As I understand it, naval reactors are cooled by seawater. Couldn't the coolant be diverted, causing the reactor to overheat and eventually meltdown? How dangerous a naval reactor meltdown would be I have no idea.
How much pollution will they produce by just manufacturing and installing this "curtain"?
In 2020, ransomware was $29 million of $4.3 billion in online scams. Digital currencies were involved in $246 million of that $4.3 billion. The rest was wire transfers, gift cards, checks, ACH, and cash. Perhaps we should ban those, too.

Blockchain analysis shows less than 1% of transactions are considered illicit.

Unless this data is wrong or misleading, then it stands to reason the approach you suggest won't make a difference.

https://www.ic3.gov/Media/PDF/AnnualReport/2020_IC3Report.pd...

https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2024-crypto-crime-report-in...
So do we know how much are the egress costs for AWS?

In other words how much AWS is overcharging?

I guess they make every effort / creative bookkeeping trick to exaggerate their egress costs and it will take years until EU completes their investigation and fines them and more years until courts have had their final word.
In your opinion then, what is the biggest problem France faces today?
Swift is really an underrated language mainly due to the Apple baggage.
It hits the sweet spot between Rust and C++ due to it's sane design choices like structured concurrency or simple things like tagged enums, Result<T,E> etc.

I wish it gains more popularity outside Apple land and is discussed more like Zig or Rust.
So move out to a cloud that doesn’t charge egress.

Unless of course you went all in on IAM, Lambda, API gateway etc etc instead of just running software on Linux.

In which case you’ll need to stay.
That in 2024 it takes 120 seconds to locate a website is an embarrassing joke.
>Society is approaching them as some type of universal ethical arbiter, expecting an omniscient sense of justice

Does anyone, even the most stereotypical hn SV techbro, thing this kind of thing? That's preposterous.
> Rust is better for this since your program won’t even compile until you’ve handled those error states.

How is that better for developing a sense of paranoia around error states?

"Throw it at the wall and see what sticks" does not exactly lead to "extreme paranoia managing errors".
As a former child who had his mind blown by the utter magic that my parents' Windows 3.11 and then Windows 95 machines had, no: I want real software I can play and learn the ins-and-outs with. I want games that are made with care for the children who play them (Oregon Trail, Math Blasters, JumpStart series, etc.)

Whether it's paid or libre is irrelevant, kids literally don't care about Adult(tm) concepts like that.
Be careful with rule 34, though.
I pay cents for GPT4. Please I urge everyone to stop paying this ridiculous $20 monthly fee if you just occasionally use chatGPT.
In the past I truly wanted to be a good programmer, maybe even make games. Unfortunately my serious dyscalculia made this impossible.

That and some logic processing issues.
Wait until you discover PowerQuery in Excel.
I don't think Swift's enum with associated values are pattern matching. You can use pattern matching to unpack them though. (https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...)
'Programming X is like reading one of those French philosophers where afterwards you start wondering whether you really know anything for sure.' [1]

[1] Thomas Thurman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://people.freedesktop.org/~daniels/lca2013-wayland-x11....
It is in file picker.
These vulnerabilities don't seem to be related to Helvitica. I was expecting a critique related to fonts themselves and not bugs with general font rendering.
> To cause harm, discrimination requires power.

For the sake of argument, I'll grant that rather controversial view. We're talking about discrimination by university administrators and admissions. They hold immense power in world where the college you attend determines the opportunities available to you. They fall in category "(3) Even minimal discrimination by the powerful can cause significant harm".

The rest of your comment is irrelevant and only obscures the issue. The question about a rich white male graduate of Exeter vs a poor Latina graduate of public school, muddles sex, race, and class into one bad example.

When all else is equal, should universities admit a male student before a female student in order to reduce the gender gap?
The lack of self-awareness of whoever wrote this, and of all those who signed it, is mind boggling.
owning and using are different. try that on the DC Mall and see how well it goes buddy
Can you expand on the “adding ?” - I’m unclear what you mean..?
Ok, but what makes OS an operating system? Versus a virtualization mechanism or an app?
To be fair, we've locked ourselves into this to some extent with the focus on lithography and general processors. Because of the 10-1000W bounds of a consumer power supply, there's little point to building a chip that falls outside this range. Peak speed sells, power saving doesn't. Data center processors tend to be clocked a bit lower than desktops for just this reason - but not too much lower, because they share a software ecosystem. Could we build chips that draw microwatts and run at megahertz speeds? Sure, probably, but they wouldn't be very useful to the things that people actually do with chips. So imo the difficulty with matching the brain on efficiency isn't so much that we can't do it as that nobody wants it. (Yet!)

edit: Another major contributing factor is that so far, chips are more bottlenecked on production than operation. Almost any female human can produce more humans using onboard technology. Comparatively, first-rate chips can be made in like three buildings in the entire world and they each cost billions to equip. If we wanted to build a brain with photolithography, we'd need to rent out TSMC for a lot longer than nine months. That results in a much bigger focus on peak performance. We have to go "high" because we cannot practically go "wide".
From the comments of the Max Gergel one. I think my reading list just got longer:

... equally worth a read.
This habit of publishing personal memoirs has a long and honorable history in chemistry. One need only consider E. Emmett Reid (My First Hundred Years in Chemistry) or Louis Fieser (The Scientific Method). Fieser's book was removed (and presumably destroyed) by most libraries in the late sixties because of its comprehensive description of the construction of some very loud devices.
And of course, the grand effort that started it all, the Berichte der Durstigen Chemischen Gesellschaft, a special edition of Berichte published when August Kekule himself was Vorsitzer. I could locate only two existing copies, about 50 years ago. ...
Really glad to see so much Kagi love here. It’s such a great search experience
I've had to work around keyboards on phones that try. How is that different? Given enough trying, you could get what you want from the LLM too, they're just better at directing you than the shitty keyboard app.
That is actually a good question. Now that I think about it, the Cortex CPU in the Pi might not be get more TOPS/Wh than the newest AMD CPUs. The Pi's single-board design and the lack of 12V/24V circuits should make it somewhat more power efficient than a computer that uses all 4 voltages. In conclusion I have no hard data and was influenced by the Pi's reputation.
How is it not? How could anyone possibly know that number? And what gives you any inkling that it has the remotest chance of being true?
Generative AI will make the world on general a worse place to be. They are not very good at writing truth, but they are very excellent at writing convincing bullshit. It's already difficult to distinguish generated text/image/video from human responses / real footage, its only gonna get more difficult to do so and cheaper to generate.

In other words, it's very likely generative AI will be very good at creating fake simulacra of reality, and very unlikely it will actually be good AGI. The worst possible outcome.
I suppose you could argue that once the activist position is adopted as the party line it is now "reporting" and not activism. I don't really think the distinction matters for the purpose of examining the merits of the position itself.
I mean, you have accurately summarized the exact thing that safety advocates want. :)

> legally halt ai progress everywhere in the world and carefully monitor large compute clusters

This is in fact the thing they're working on. That's the whole point of the flops-based training run reporting requirements.
because it's a completely made up claim with a random number thrown in. How do you end up with "5.5" years for a process that doesn't have a timetable, number of estimated emails required for EU accession divided by number of emails ChatGPT can generate per day?
Yeah, there are better ways to do this, I wonder if it's purely an excersize in cgpt useages.
I have seen a rack with power and 10Gig ethernet advertised for $700 per month; so my guess is that Amazon pays less than 25 cents per Mbps per month and in some cases, nothing.
The .proto file is not included in the project. It was used only for creating the class that handles the Google protobuf message. Anyway, I'll be putting up the code on GitHub regardless.
What evidence do we have that it's impossible or even just very unlikely?
I am not a mathematician but have some interest on a pop-sci level.
I believe this presentation at G-Research by Alex Davies would be of interest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp_skPK-X9M
Yeah, they could definitely optimize it quite a lot further. With investment in code structure and caching I bet they could get below 5min at that scale. But also for edit/refresh that should be on the order of a second or two, never minutes.
Back when every developer had to build their own failure detection code and display messages to help themselves debug anything that meant that almost every developer was good at communicating errors to the user.

Today developers don't build that skill, so you see applications that just fails silently everywhere or produce nonsense errors. The better developer tools you have the less your developers will need to learn UX skills to be able to do their work.
I used OS/2 in order to develop Zortech C++ further. Its great advantage was protected mode. When there were memory bugs, instead of scrambling my hard disk it would seg fault. I'd get everything working perfectly on OS/2. Then, I'd port it to Rational's 286 DOS Extender, which also operated in protected mode. This would purge all the bugs in the compiler related to the mixed 16 bit memory model. Then the last step was to port it to real mode DOS.

OS/2 saved me an enormous amount of debugging time.

I always laugh when people complain about null pointer seg faults. Those are a feature, not a bug. Finding bugs in your code immediately, rather than a few miles further down the road, is a great attribute.

Writing through a null pointer in real mode DOS meant overwriting the interrupt vector table. Probably the worst CPU architectural mistake of all time is locating that table at address 0. If you were lucky, DOS would just freeze up, and you could reboot it. If you were unlucky, it would scramble your hard disk, and you'd have to re-install the operating system and all your files.

The ROMs (i.e. boot address) should have been located at address 0, and the interrupt table at FFFFF.
I have still lived in the obviously false belief that AWS charges for every egress byte (regular operation not take out, except Lightsail, which always had rather large quota included.) Now they claim every account has big free tier. When has that changed?

Edit: My search engine found December 2021:

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/11/aws-price...
The automotive industry is one of the most subsidized industries in the west both directly and indirectly, and that is when you don’t account for the massive bailouts that happen every decade or so.

I have also yet to see anything of substance that compares subsidies between the US, Europe and China.

All I know is that the VW ID.3 which starts at €40,000 here in Europe can be had as cheap as $16,000 in China.

The prices of new cars whether they are EV or ICE at least in Europe was been inflating well past inflation over the past 10 years or so.

Base trims are getting harder and harder to the point of near impossible to find at dealerships and the cost of basic addons has inflated to the point in which the most economical buy tends to be the top of 2nd to top trim level which is usually now 25-30% more expensive than the base price.
You're right, but "if" is doing a lot of work. We all know how well banning cocaine has worked, after all.
I spoke in the past tense, and already learned this lesson back 20 years ago; you can tell that I believe software can and should be coded to avoid such issues from the position I took with my comment: that it was concerning that the software would stop working not if but when people do not read this "important" notice. Although, maybe you didn't actually bother to read the rest of my comment, and so failed to appreciate my actual point, given how you just quoted something near the beginning which was mere evidence and focused on it with what feels a bit like an axe to grind ;P.

Which, though, leads me to something I will say in response to your reframing: while I do believe that one must build systems with the understanding that people will not read any of the documentation, we should still judge people for the behavior. I am pro commingled recycling, and yet I also believe that people who don't even try to read the signs on top of a series of trash bins are shirking a duty they have to not be a jerk, the same way we should be angry at people for not knowing local laws even if we put them on giant signs on the street as they'd rather just be lazy.
I interned there and got an offer over a decade ago; notnsure if better now, but starting pay was 50% silicon valley.
> Very cool result but the title is overselling the "AI" contribution. It seems like they trained a few standard binary classifiers (Naive Bayes, decision trees, kNN).

But it seems they would never have even suspected there were such patterns if the "AI" had not provided evidence for them?

By the way: the tools mentioned, like decision trees, Bayes and kNN were all taught in the AI course I attended one and a half decade ago... AI was basically ML at the time, but nowadays it seems that ML has become "just statistics", and AI only includes LLMs.
The History of Ferrari
Fake revenge porn, nearly undetectable bot creation on social media with realistic profiles (I've already seen this on HN), generated artwork passed off as originals, chatbots that replace real-time human customer service but have none of the agency... I can keep going.

All of these are things that have already happened. These all were previously possible of course but now they are trivially scalable.
No, I think exploratory programming is exactly that. Solutions to a problem is the very thing to be explored.
How does that flow go?
If everyone generally agreed that injecting messenger RNA into the eyeballs of infants provided a social benefit you would go along with it.

So you're saying that if the Nazis didn't have subsidized train rides for tourists they would not have been able to collapse the Soviet Union in 1991 and regain East Germany? Interesting. Very interesting, sir.
Amazon, Google and Azure are anything but free market; they have been getting subsidies and abatements in the 10s of billions all along.
With the way they name these "subsystem for" products I can never tell if it makes A run on B, or B run on A.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39604590.
If they are using GNOME stuff they definitly are.
So you still believe the open internet has any chance of surviving what is coming? I admire your optimism.

Reliable information and communication will soon be opt-in only. The "open internet" will become an eclectic collection of random experiences, where any real human output will be a pleasant, rare surprise, that stirs the pot for a short blip before it is assimilated and buried under the flood.
Again, as objectively as I can, it looks like he believes the country is having an existential crisis deserving of his attention.

"Useless" is your opinion, not an objective measure. "Culture wars" is a trope designed to broadly smear the target, disregarding specifics.

Do you want Musk to be an inspiration vending machine? Your insistence he tighten his inspiration schedule to meet your expectations, is odd.
In my country (Georgia), I received dozens of reports from people saying that after the outage, they have been offered to sign in to other users' Facebook accounts and were successful in doing that. I can't confirm it, but it appears that this was happening to accounts that were co-admins of Facebook pages.
Wasn't the performance and tooling poor in Linux and Windows? Has something changed there?
> C#, for example, does not necessarily store value types on the stack

It does if you use the right set of keywords, learn them.
Nah. Unenforceable for one. Bad actors can literally just use a VPN.
It helps because the instinct is to write lazy code that may fail and the rust compiler will annoy you until it compiles. Every annoyance to fix is a thing you usually need to think about in other languages.

For example, if I'm coding in C# it's easier for me to understand the impact of passing our resources that need to be disposed and good patterns to handle that after Rust has made me lose hairs on this concept.
FWIW, Homebrew (no longer) deserves quite such ire as you will note that it explicitly does NOT pipe the result to a copy of bash: by downloading it first it and quoting it using a subshell it prevents the web server from being able to get interactive access.
> We are dedicated to the OpenAI mission and have pursued it every step of the way. (emphasis added)

> We intend to move to dismiss all of Elon’s claims. (emphasis added)

I feel somewhat surprised but more worried that people working in a space riddled with so much uncertainty seem to use so much certainty in their statements.
Well, isn't it good that the public learns more about the bad stuff they're doing?
So it is worse, therefore it is better?

Exceptions are exceptionally good at error handling - they always do the correct default (bubbling up if not handled, bringing a stacktrace with them, and by default they auto-unwrap the correct return value, not making the actual business logic hard to decipher), plus they make error handling possible on as wide scope as needed (try block vs a single return value).

I absolutely fail to see how a “random” C program would fair better, I’m sure the errno state is not checked at every line, as it is a trivial human error to leave that out. You can’t forget exceptions, which is how it should be!

If anything, that java/python text editor will catch every exception at the top level, save the file and exit with an error message and it will be the C program that either randomly crashes, or ignores some exceptional state.
Exactly, like Amazon /s dumbass
You're placing a lot of trust in it not being undefined behavior.

Additionally, of course anything can be done with enough time and effort but the costs add up when you are doing things manually rather than letting the compiler handle it. Compiler has had many person-years of effort spent in ensuring the output is correct, can we do the same for all the code we write?
I use ChatGPT every day, and from the conversations I see in AI circles, the main competition is not coming from Google/Gemini.

More to the point, why does your post read like an ad for Google?
The big difference with curl|bash is that the download itself gets to execute in the context of the computer as it is downloading, which is a super power that makes it much easier to hide behaviors as you can make it extremely difficult for people to ever be able to just download a dead copy of the script to analyze it for malware.
FGA4 cause Google Analytics 4 sucks
We used to love Google (Universal) Analytics, then came GA4 and it's no bueno.

We are launching https://fga4.com to bring back the reports we lost.

The new reports are built with open source technologies like Python, Pandas and Streamlit to make sure that this never happens again.

Connect with us at https://twitter.com/F__GA4
Specifically, if the money is just as gone if the instructions are "wire 22 million to this Russian bank address" instead of "wire 22 million to this Bitcoin address".
It's funny how they avoid using 'AI' term in the post when mentioning the reasons of spam. Given that Google is now an AI company, it may create a bad impression.
But contrast that to Microsoft's absolutely hilariously inept attempts at bringing Windows to ARM. The amount of cumulative money spent over the last 15 or so years versus the actual market penetration is insane.
If it would already be in their products, there wouldn't be much to pursue, right?
iOS 17.4 alternative iPhone app stores will stop working outside the EU
and yet SamA says it's actual trillions of dollars in entirely new compute capacity to reach the next level. hmmm. to believe him or you... so hard to decide.