skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the past year the most common topic whenever I go to any conference or meetup has always been that the economy sucks and that economists have no idea what they're talking about. I hardly know anyone under 65 who is particularly well; certainly not in comparison to even 2 years ago. Many people who used to be financially secure are in much more precarious situations now.

It's not just anecdotal. I see it at a large scale too. I'm at a top-ranked university and I see it in our students. 2 years ago, they were choosing between multiple job offers and hardly had to apply anywhere. Now, students with CS undergrads or Master's degrees from a university whose name everyone knows where virtually everyone used to get FAANG offers are now having trouble getting reasonable jobs.

As a scientist I find the attitude of my colleagues in the economics department totally insane. They claim that we're all wrong and that the economy is amazing. They say that to me and to students who literally apply for dozens of jobs; they say it to our faces. In my neck of the scientific woods we would be publishing papers about how our metrics are totally wrong and we need to reform our science because we're disconnected from reality. In economics it seems like they publish papers about how stupid the public are. It's just crazy.

All of this doesn't bode well for the election. I can't describe the lack of enthusiasm students have for Biden when they're literally hurting financially and he's doing a victory lap on how great the economy is.
Anything that is done in large scale and used by the entire society becomes civilizational infrastructure and it needs to be maintained in a coordinated, centralized fashion. From the transportation infrastructure to justice, military, food.

These things were provided and maintained by the nature when human civilization was just loose collectives of roving bands of hunter-gatherers. At the stage we reached today, that's impossible.

The problem with modern world is not that it mimics Soviet Union's central planning and governance of infrastructure. If it did mimic the Soviet Union, the fundamental things that everyone needs from housing to education would be provided to everyone.

The problem is that we privatized large swaths of this modern infrastructure and we are allowing sociopaths to profit off of these fundamental societal infrastructures at great cost to entire society. Privatizing things like healthcare is as crazy as privatizing military or the police.
There aren't any vaccines I can think of that made it past clinical trials and were a net negative. There are possibly some cases where they were a net negative for a subgroup of the population or where a batch was contaminated, but I don't think that counts as overall "bad".

Either you're using a different definition of bad, or you've got some information I don't have, or you're wrong.
But currently BTC is at an all time high while rates are the highest they've been since Bitcoin's inception?
It is, but unfortunately, pure knowledge, shared freely, isn’t going to be able to pay the bills. Academia is a world separate from the rest of society sometimes, but it still exists in a world that runs on money. Food, power bills, taxes, rent; they all need to get paid. Even that big institutions like Harvard with unfathomably large endowments still have bills to pay and that’s the mindset that people still operate under. If they were able to make a new society, free of money then they could avoid the need to profit. But we tried that and human nature got in the way. so we’re left with the unfortunate reality that universities do see a need to profit. I don’t disagree that it’s a rot but I don’t see how it could be any other way.
"Wouldn't this mean that capital is flowing in..."

Not really. If the price of shares in your company goes up it doesn't mean you have more cash in your pocket. You would need to sell shares or issue additional shares to have more cash to pay people with. There's other ways an increased price could be beneficial of course.
In an old comment that I can't find, dang explained that the problem of enabling the comment section in the job posts is repetition. Jobs post of each company are very similar, and they may even be equal if theay are hiring a second person or the first try didn't get any candidate. So everyone that likes the company will repost the same comment, and everyine that dislije the compay will repost the same comnent, and the result will be the same discussion again and again each time.

If you are interested in what they are doing, I sugest to look at their blog and pick the most interesting article (in your opinion), and post it to create a new discussion. (You can even post the first commemt to sugest the topic you want to discuss.)
The data? layoffs.fyi shows that the market has had massive layoffs recently.

I can just look at the rate of recruitment emails arriving in my inbox, too. It's all but dried up.
And can you share the assistant with other users?

Also, the system prompt in assistants doesn't consume tokens?
Same situation on the hiring side.

I understand that people gotta hustle to eat, but we get hundreds of applications, and so many resumes are fake and just an attempt to get through the screening... plus lots of cheating, sometimes just good old ChatGPT or someone whispering behind the screen, other times with people giving perfect memorized answers but not a peep when I go off script.

Makes me want to hold on to this job...
I took it as a joke (I hope).
How long have you been in the software market? 2008 was terrible and dot com for a while was also a death knell. If anything the last 15 years have been absolutely amazing for working in software
This idea that the problem with western society is that we allow people to live in detached houses with yards instead of inner-city apartment buildings is bollocks. People need privacy, something to work on, freedom to move about, and agency over their environment to thrive psychologically. That's why prison is the opposite of this. "Something to work on" is partially being met by video games, and it's not going well for us. The rest are much harder to fake out. It's possible to have those things in the city, but only if you are extremely wealthy. For everybody else, it's a life of being tolerated by the people who own and control your world, so long as you keep paying out most of what you earn, don't make any noise or waves, and aren't interested in doing anything that doesn't already have the required space or vendor already within your designated, walkable, or public transport-safe area.
Yeah, crypto maxis (and especially bitcoin maxis) really do talk about it like it's the next coming of Jesus.

Crypto absolutely will not solve that specific problem of any monetary system. It may solve some others though, in addition to introducing many novel problems
Those threads would probably get filled with negativity. (Why does this company even exist? I could do this in a weekend!) It would also create a conflict of interest for the moderator (dang); if he kills posts trashing YC companies then it's censorship but if he allows them it's like throwing startups directly into an orange crab bucket.
Consumers can just turn "secure boot" off.
You're first question should be, "How much are you willing to pay?". And if they dodge it, it's not a good sign.

Edited to add:

Sure, be polite, but don't be trapped into 8/16/24 hours of interviewing over the course of a week/month/months before only to get a below average offer
> One employer asked for my high school graduation transcript!

I've been asked for transcripts all the way to primary school. Ages 6 to 10.

I took that as an opportunity to even get those documents that I didn't have.
In no other professional field is someone with 7 years of experience considered “senior” anything.

Edit to clarify my meaning: I’m not trying to come at you, just pointing out that this seems to be symptomatic of the problem as a whole.
Food prices hold steady, but Americans have a beef with the cost of a burger
I remember being a naive college student and hearing about a "software engineer shortage."

I was too young and dumb to understand that meant that the owners of companies that needed software engineers wanted cheaper labor and that I was to play a part in the devaluation of engineering labor by helping supply exceed demand, thereby allowing company owners to commodify software labor to ultimately pay wages proportional to hours worked rather than offering a share in company ownership, which allows for compensation proportional to company success.

If H1B's were legitimately about labor shortages, it would be required that all companies fire/layoff their H1B's first. I am pretty liberal, but market dynamics are market dynamics, and I am surprised I haven't seen more anti H1B sentiment to bring scarcity (and therefore leverage) back into the labor market.

A lot of the history of racial atrocity has been a direct result of desperate (and therefore exploitable) foreign labor de-valuing incumbent labor and the following retribution to the weaker vulnerable foreign laborers, rather than the harder work of solidarity and demanding a fair share via things like trade unions/guilds.
Federal workers are not project-fungible in such a way as to make what you suggest possible. And it's not just the federal government, either; ask any large corporation. There is no path to "well the IRS's developers should just go make Login.gov happen faster", even if you get a hall pass from the mythical man-month.

So, now that we've acknowledged reality--what now? Do nothing, while the active harm continues, because of fear of a hypothetical future (but with a limited time horizon) one?
So did, and do, many others, past and present (both wish and lived).

We can create our own such society.

Wanna sign up?

Refs:

Robinson Crusoe (book).

The Swiss Family Robinson (book).

I read both of them as a kid.

The USA (country).
This was one of the limitations of the Assistants API that made me entirely ignore it up until now.

I am curious if the Assistants API lets you edit/remove/retry messages yet. I don't see anything implying this has changed. It's annoying that the Assistants API doesn't give you enough control to support basic things that the ChatGPT app does.
For instance, there is no easy way to empty your Google Photos at one go. I had to do mine in a span of two weeks[1] and one of the key step was deleting photos "manually" via a script. I believe this tool can be used in similar situations where you set instructions for the steps to the task and let it just run.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...
I don’t know anyone who is recommending against flakes these days. The “experimental” label is more about the API stability than completeness, bugginess, or anything else.

There are certain scenarios where the performance can be problematic, but there are workarounds and permanent solutions are being worked on. Nevertheless, using flakes extensively at home and work.
I was applying a few months ago and most seem to not be real postings. Many of them I’d get a generic rejection months after the fact.
You're Métis? So which of your parents is an Indian? (2011)
Covid was the easiest time ever to find a software job
Anthony Epstein (1921–2024), discoverer of virus causing cancer in humans
My first question is usually "Hey, how are you? Good to meet you."

Politeness usually leads the way.
Ben_bai said it pretty well. water is good but it can cause rust, pressure, freeze, leak, etc. sand avoids most of this. the big thing is that sand can be heated much much hotter and this helps make up for its shortcomings relative to water. they likely charge and discharge with air blowing thru stainless steel network of pipes thru the sand. this would require special tuning. as someone else mentioned, the thing with water is that the temp is uniform everywhere because water transfers heat within its volume easily. sand doesn’t, so you need pipes spaced out right.
i’ve wondered about insulation but, i think you can step it out with refractory bricks first then a mineral insulation, then something like perlite or fiberglass. the hot air would interface with heat exchanger to transfer the heat to whichever fluid that would go on to heat the home/s. since the sand can be heated to 1700F or more, a kiln or quartz heating element that can exceed this temp is needed. last, a thermally isolated heat temp tolerance fan would be required. i guess a slew of sensors in the sand and at the exchanger unit and output, i can imagine wanting sensors everywhere for tuning sake.
I think you're looking for Nix flakes proper! This is one of the promises!

Given so, this means many tools based on nix provide this too, though it's not as easily surfaced.
The article says
"so far he has been able to build file, scheduling and messaging systems in DBOS by running SQL queries" but all I saw shown was typescript?
But don't you need a unique phone number for each Apple ID, which makes it kind of difficult to just create a throwaway account? Or is there a way to circumvent that requirement?
Sounds like a classic Beans and Noses thing: https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-nos...
The faster you charge a battery, the more you reduce its longevity. You can do it, but you may pay for it eventually. Caveat emptor.
Small towns and semi-rural areas squander their land with the exact same ass-ugly car-centric public realms you'll find in the suburbs of major metro areas. They just get less attention for it since the land in question is abundant.

There are examples of small towns with good urbanism - a lot of college towns fit this bill - but they are so rare that they just replicate big-city level prices, without the high-productivity jobs to pay them.
I am actively looking to hire - either freelance or full-time - an engineer to write open source golang code for my YC startup.

However, I literally cannot afford FAANG salaries at my stage. It would literally bring my runway from n to n/5 years. And many candidates are asking for 400k+ salaries. I’d love to hire someone who knows what they’re doing but I’m just not able to find people who are both qualified and interested in the work. (If this is you then message me!)

I had one person today - with lots of FAANG experience who’d recently gone freelance - tell me that they weren’t willing to work with me to write code but they were willing to do advising for $450/hr. We just weren’t on the same page.

I don’t know what’s going on, and I hurt for people who are looking for work. I’m launching more slowly than I’d like because I am not able to find a partner to build things with who is willing to work for less than what they made after 10 years at Google.
This is kind of ignoring other NN's. You're very focused on LLM's as the example.

AlphaGo learned by playing itself. And is able to anticipate multiple moves ahead.

Then, that same 'engine', was able to be applied to Chess, and learned how to beat a master from scratch, by playing itself, in just a few hours.

There was no lookups, or zip'ing of aggregated data.

A lot of what you are postulating as cognition, humans don't do either. Humans didn't figure out gravity from photos of the sky (unless you mean tracing stars and planets, and then yes an NN probably can figure it out). Many humans go through their whole day without analyzing propositions and inferring reality and what to do next. Humans are similarly un-conscious.

A lot of AI news all the time. This link is from today. A little more in the theme of 'world building models', than this current post about LLM's.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39692387

There was another on also about an NN that could pass some international Geometry competition. It was based on propositions, and reasoning.
For some reason the link wouldn't work for me on Safari, kept getting:

"Safari cannot open the page because the address is invalid."

after accepting the invitation. It did work on Chrome though
My experience at least from 2010-2011 was that selenium type tests were woefully brittle and unreliable. Are they generally better these days? If so, is it due to different protocols like remote debugging and headless browsers? Please be kind to this old man and his outdated views.
Having been on the hiring end over the last few years, it’s not surprising. Other than there being a glut of applicants, there is also a HUGE variation in what people consider to be “experienced”. The signal to noise ratio is pretty bad when sifting through applicants, so I can certainly see how it’s hard for qualified people to make it through. Especially since there are a lot of people who oversell their capabilities and experience, so it’s even harder to distinguish an actually-experienced, actually-qualified applicant from a skilled bullshitter. It doesn’t help that the industry has totally destroyed the meaning of terms like “senior”, so it’s hard to even use someone’s past history to make an educated guess at their actual experience level. As a result, experienced and qualified people get lost in the sea of suboptimal applicants. At this point the best hires I’ve made over that last few years are ones that came via networking / trusted references.
Is there a handy guide to tell them apart? I live in south Texas and we have a redwood tree in our backyard, which was planted by our previous owner when he moved here from California. I have no idea which type of redwood it is. It is not Texas redwood, though.
You can on x86 machines, but AIUI they require ARM machines that ship with Windows to have secure boot permanently enabled. That hasn't been much of a factor so far given the false starts that Windows ARM has gone through, but with Qualcomm set to launch their Apple M-series competitor soon it might start to actually matter.
> Sometimes I wonder if the human brain is just another LLM

The brain is a lot about predicting situations/telling you what comes next and how to adjust your behavior to that prediction - i guess that is the common part with the LLM. The difference is that the LLM is predicting the most likely word, while the brain is matching a given situation/frame to your knowledge and past experience - it's about understanding stuff on a different level.

what i still don't get is how predicting the next word can come up with an answer that actually makes sense most of the time, that came as a big surprise to me...
I've read this thread exchange with interest, but what about the results that quantum computers are simulatable by classical computers? See David Deutsch 1985. This would reduce the issue of infinite Hilbert spaces to simulation using quantum computers, and in turn, Deutsch's result which says classical Turing machines can actually simulate quantum computers.
I swear I'm not making this up.

I read Politeness as Pointless until I re-read it a third time.
Almost a year back, someone proposed about TaxyAI[1], a chrome extension for browser automation. TaxyAI looks more matured compared to this. Are there any other similar tools that exist for browser automation using large language models

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35344354
Sounds vaguely Great Gatsbyish; you should write it up into a story.
You don't actually need to rebuild the world, just the part that changed. It's rare to have other nix derivations depend on the dotfiles directly, so changes don't "cascade" to the rest of the system. I just timed how long it takes to rebuild my system after changing my neovim config and it's ~30 seconds. Which sounds like a lot compared to the zero seconds it takes to edit the config without nix, but it's fast enough that I personally don't mind.

Some people do use nix just for their system config and manage their dotfiles separately, but for me it's simpler to just have one system that installs the software I want and configures it the way I like it, rather than two things I'd need to keep in sync with each other.
It sounds like: "Dropbox is a small UX improvement over rsync"
We have laws against foreign ownership of broadcast TV and radio. Our legal system already acknowledges that foreign ownership of the media is a bad thing that should be prevented. The problem is that these laws haven't been updated for the modern era. TikTok is not covered.

But this due to a failure of our politicians to respond to the modern era, not because the bill of rights enshrines or applies to foreign companies.

That's why Rupert Murdoch had to become a US citizen in order to start FOX in the 80s. This then enabled him to build FOX News with the specific intent to become the media arm of the Republican party, by tapping Roger Ailes as the first and guiding CEO. Ailes had already worked on media campaigns for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, often credited as a major factor in their victories. So he got to run the day to day of the party's new media arm.

Murdoch himself was an international operator who wanted political power for the benefits rather than the ideology. This is demonstrated by the much more liberal leanings in Australia when that was the party willing to grant him power.

What could the impacts be today, if FOX News was owned by the CCP instead of an Aussie of negotiable political virtue?
Paddling a ball into a destructive path toward obliterating other people’s demand for my time is just the rando reminder of priorities in life I needed this week. Thank you!
The first time I've learned of an iron lung was from The Big Lebowski, "Is this your homework Larry" scene. Larry's father was in the iron lung, in the living room. I was very curious about the machine, so I've looked it up. Quite an incredible machine, and led me into a deep Wikipedia rabbit hole.
I think you're right. But in my view it's an incredibly sad future. Imagine a class of kids where no one's best friends with eachother but their AI's, no ones gaming together, no one as connected or have to time for their human peers, instead spending all of their time with hyper ultra addictive and friendly AI's.

Extreme solipsism and loneliness in reality, maybe not experienced but in reality.

No one will have time for the chaotic and very human traits that is the essence of actual human existence instead craving the super engineered dopamine machines AI will become.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but...out of a thousand applicants--who presumably had college degrees/and or years of experience programming for other companies--there just has to be some who would have been successful at your company. I mean, if you lined up 600 random people grabbed from off the street, you'd find 6 to 10 of them with a genius level IQ.

In fact, you'd have a good chance of finding somebody smarter than anybody in your company. You are obviously filtering too much.

And it would be one thing if the system merely filtered out too many good people, but the ones the system let's pass are not the ones you are looking for! Its bad in every possible way a filter can be bad--filtering out what you want, and letting through what you don't want.

> disqualified for not meeting the basic requirements

What is a basic requirement? If a basic requirement is something like "5 years of Java experience" its filtering out topflight c++ and c# programmers. Good programmers can make anything work; bad programmers will remain bad programmers no matter what programming language is used.

> dozens interviewed

Over my 40-year career, programming interviews haven't changed at all, basically testing how much of corman, leiserson, and rivest you have memorized, and how much oof the book "Cracking the Coding interview" you can regurgitate.

That was ok 40 years ago, when programming was largely creating new systems from scratch. But these days, with all the frameworks, not so much. There's 40 more years of infrastructure which has been created, and to be a successful programmer, you need to be able to leverage other people's code. But who interviews to test that skill?

Again, the fact that the one person the system let through didn't thrive in your company just screams that it is not testing for what you really need. Such a "stringent" process shouldn't be a point of pride.