skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are naive if you think you have 10-15 years. GPT-5 will most likely be out by the end of the year. It will be significantly better than GPT-4. I expect it will replace millions of people - not explicitly - companies will gradually have fewer people doing more work, resulting in increasing layoffs and decreasing hiring. This has already started happening: I spoke to several startup founders recently who use GPT-4 instead of hiring marketing people.

GPT-5 will be significantly better at coding, to the point where it might no longer make any sense to hire junior developers.

And this is just GPT-5, this year. Next year there will be GPT-6, or an equivalent from Google or Anthropic, and at that point I fully expect a lot of people everywhere getting the boot. Sometime next year I expect these powerful models will start effectively controlling robots, and that will start the process of automation of a lot of physical work.

So, to summarize, you have at best 2 years left as a software engineer. After that we can hope there will be some new types of professions that we could pivot to, but I’m struggling to think what could people possibly do better than GPT-6, so I’m not optimistic. I’d love for someone to provide a convincing argument why there would be any delay to the timeline I outlined above.

p.s. I just looked at the other 20 responses in this thread, and it seems that every single one is based on current (GPT-4) LLM capabilities. Do people seriously not see any progress happening in the nearest future? Why? I’m utterly baffled by this.
Windows did not invent the concept. "Window Systems" predated Windows by quite a bit and applications ran in "windows". Quite obviously the name was not originally coined by Microsoft.
I think metal work started with gold. It naturally occurs in a 'ready for use' form of nuggets. You don't need to melt anything and nuggets are very soft and easy to form into any desirable shape. Most likely it's initial use was the jewelry because shiny!
Google has announced on-device only encrypted back options.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/15/24002693/google-maps-upd...
Talking on the Moon: The quest to establish lunar wi-fi
I wonder if you could use the multilingual capabilities to workaround it's own censorship? I.e. what would happen if you asked it to translate the query to English, asked it in English, and then asked it to translate back to Chinese.
No, swapin kills performance. Swapout is always efficient and always just makes your RAM more efficient.

Any normal workload has hot and cold pages.
Or, don’t enter anything into the to: field until you’re done writing.
I prefer state to protect children from their parents... Elon Musk is perfect example of this. "X Æ A-Xii" is just a joke... And exactly type of name that should not be given to children...

Nothing wrong with "Elon" I agree...
When I worked at Google in storage, we had our own figures of merit that showed that we were the best and Amazon's durability was trash in comparison to us.

As far as I can tell, every cloud provider's object store is too durable to actually measure ("14 9's"), and it's not a problem.
In some situations the incentives align. Same as it's desirable for Youtube, Patreon, etc to pay & attract their creators.
If the users of open source project bring value to the project they should be rewarded proportionally.
Show HN: Wife couldn't find a dev job so I built a tool to automate the search
Hey everyone,

My wife graduated in 2022 and she was fortunate enough to land an internship at a small startup which then offered her a permanent position. But ever since then she has been trying to find another job as a frontend dev since the current one doesn't offer any growth opportunities. She started looking in 2023 right when the job market started tanking.

She's been at it for months with no success as there are little to no junior roles available and she spent most of her day refreshing linkedin to check for new opportunities.

At the beginning of this year I had this idea that I could automate the job search part for her by web scraping the search results page in linkedin. This way she could focus on work/portfolio projects and check when the tool finds new job opennings.

Long story short, what started as a small script evolved into a full fledged project since I realised this could help other people too.

The app is an electron desktop app which uses the underlying chromium instance to download the HTML of job sites and sends it to a Supabase edge function for parsing. It doesn't search the entire site, just what jobs are shown in the URL you paste into it. As of now it supports more that 10 sources including linkedin, indeed, dice, glassdoor, flexjobs, bestjobs, we work remotely and constantly looking to add more.
Oh, that's stunning!

Ancient people really did like digging holes and hanging out underground. Mind you, modern people do too.
That's a good idea! There's actually a paper [1] that does something very similar with the "device description" and "indications for use" sections. They use Word2Vec on these sections and compare similarity.

Fig 2 [2] shows a graph of similarity of all devices to their predicate for each year.

However the discussion sections mentions difficulty with using Word2Vec because of the jargon used to describe these devices, so I'm not totally sure how to interpret the graph.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8496833/

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8496833/figure/...
From the average user perspective those settings are equally impossible to change, as they neither know nor care that they even exist.
Ask HN: Should scripting engines distinguish between "null" and "undefined"?
i'm working on porting/rewriting my language-agnostic scripting engine[^1] from C to C++ and i have a small conundrum:

Do scripting languages really need both "null" and "undefined" values?

i have long liked that JavaScript provides both "null" and "undefined", and have modeled my scripting languages after that since tinkering with them first became a hobby (right at 20 years ago). In the C++ rewrite, however, having both null and undefined would be slightly awkward, in exactly one of the two would require non-NULL (as in C++ nullptr) value, and that just feels odd.

The simplest solution to this is to consolidate undefined/null into the same conceptual non-value and leave it at that. The more complex solution is to make one or the other of them a full-fledged value, with its own memory address, which seems somewhat counter-intuitive. (In this project's C predecessor[^1], both null and undefined have distinct C addresses, and that works well within that framework. It works _less well_ within the rewrite's framework, where _one_ of them will fit quite nicely but the other will require some shoehorning and special-casing).

One of the inspirations for this rewrite is my recent first-time work with the Java Native Interface (JNI), which treats a Java null as a C NULL. That initially bugged me, but in practice it's more comfortable than having a distinct C value representing a Java null. In Java, however, null also fills the roll of "undefined," whereas JavaScript has both (and i rather _like_ that, as the distinction is occasionally relevant and/or interesting... but also doesn't seem game-breaking if they're combined into one concept).

What say you, dear internet, on the matter of having separate "null" and "undefined" values? Yes? No? It depends? (On what does it depend?)

PS: suggestions that it instead be rewritten in Rust will be tactfully ignored.

[^1]: the being-rewritten project is: https://fossil.wanderinghorse.net/r/cwal
This is super common. There are still many Windows95/98/XP machines in use in manufacturing environments. The control software often hasn’t been upgraded in ages and the company that made the equipment often doesn‘t exist anymore. But what are you gonna do? Throw away a 10M€ piece of equipment because you’re not getting windows updates anymore?
So when does Netflix make a limited series based on this.
> With a custom tool like this it becomes a dead end with the data.

Not sure if you're referring to Postman or Bruno. The biggest purported benefit of Bruno over Postman is that it saves API request collection files in simple, human-readable text files that are designed to be committed to a source control repo and easily shared, in a way that's not particularly tied to the Bruno app.

The demo video explains in detail: https://youtu.be/b_ctmKlEOXg
There's a list of allowed names in Portugal too, but you can also request an exception.
The US Congress empowered the SEC with strong whistleblower protections to avoid dilemmas like that.[1]

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower/retaliation
They were upstarts who got sent to prison for bilking the rich and famous. They were from well-off families, but not the 'halls of power', really.
I know a lot of Boeing people. Boeing’s management shit-show is legendary around here. The night of the door plug incident a former Boeing coworker of mine very confidently told me his hypothesis of what happened — and he was exactly right when the details came out. He worked there more than ten years ago.
No lawyers are dumb enough to want less safe commercial planes.
If I wanted to use S3 as a filesystem in the manner people are describing I would probably start looking at storing filesystem metadata in a sidecar database so you can get directory listings, permissions bits, xattrs and only have to round-trip to S3 when you need the content.
SDET (Software Developer Engineer in Test) as a title/career path seems to have gone mostly out of vogue in the past decade or so unfortunately. Most companies I've worked for seem to hold the philosophy that the engineers developing the features themselves should do the testing. Which is a legitimate viewpoint, but there are of course pros and cons to everything and not every use case is really suited for that.

I think part of the problem for SDET is that pay bands are often different (read: lower) for SDET, and if you are doing SDET you already probably have the skills to be a developer and are going to opt for the higher pay band/career path. A lot of companies seem to hold a weird perspective that SDET is "lesser" or requires less skills than just a typical feature developer.
Dude, that’s so sad
It is definitely an attitude thing. However, you shouldn’t be focusing on improving your soft skills so much as it’s improving your mindset, and then the soft skills will just flow like hot butter.

This is what I tell my friends:

Don’t see interviews as an adversarial thing. At the end of the day, your mindset should be:

* The company is looking for someone to do a specific job

* You have a unique set of skills and you are very good at doing certain things

* You are looking for certain things from a job

Interviewing is finding out if a relationship will work out — like a first date.

When I look at job qualifications, I am trying to figure out what actual job they need done and whether my experience and skills would be good for that. I honestly don’t even care that they are looking for X years of Y. They’re not looking for a warm bag of bones with a laundry list of skills: they’re looking for someone to do a specific job.

When an interviewer asks me questions, it’s because they like to do things a certain way and they just want to check if I do things similarly. They’re really asking about scenarios they’ve personally dealt with and trying to figure out my approach. I just tell them a story from the closest scenario that I’ve dealt with.

And when it’s my turn to ask questions, it’s the reverse. I know that I like to do things a certain way too and I want to find out if they do things like me. I just have question after question on the spot to build out a mental image of how they work, from day to day to overall company culture.

If you come in with a mindset of “be honest” without making yourself look inexperienced, you don’t have to be worrying about bullshitting, which they will pick up on anyway.

While there is an imbalance of power for sure, seeing interviews as a “fitting” process is much more advantageous and makes interviewing a breeze. It’s a first date. Don’t make it weird.
It's important to differentiate concern(a feeling) from choosing to upload or not. In the calculus of benefits and risks, The feeling of concern(potentially leaking PII/health information) may be outweighed by the benefit in education. Even if someone is concerned, they may still see the positives outweigh the risks. It's a subjective decision at the end of the day.
I've had several offers to work in startups in California that don't do remote. Instead of just saying no outright I ask the HR person where the office is or look it up. It's usually near Silicon Valley and I have to explain that they'd have to pay me CEO pay to make up for the increase in living/home expenses. I mean...$1.5M to get a home similar to what I paid $150k for not that long ago is hard to justify.
> GPGPU is a thing.

Indeed.

GPGPU means "using a GPU for things that are General Purpose (GPGPU)". The aforementioned IC is not a GPU that is used for general-purpose computations, but a specialized chip for AI computations.
Question: Do you like to work unplugged with the laptop on your lap?

Answer-Yes: get a macbook. The apple M chips are the best (only?) way to get desktop power in a battery efficient package.

Answer-No: don't get a laptop at all. Get a big fat juicy desktop, AMD chip, linux.
Just a guess, 1.21 GW?
This doesn’t quite ring true for me in Florida at least. Most recently, floridas cost of housing is raising ridiculously due to home insurance, with several homes refusing to be insured by anyone for any price. On top of that, assessments on condos and other buildings are raising the costs of high rises as well due to government regulations them to get inspected and implement necessary repairs (after HOAs and condos associations have been skimping on necessary maintenance for decades…)
Arxiv is a group blog, not a journal.

Once you've been admitted to club (admission is by invitation from a current member), you can post whatever you want. Calling it "publishing" is gauche.

https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html
Nice! My name made the list.
I'm not a fan of the reliance on case law to clear up ambiguity in legislation. How do countries without it handle ambiguity?
I really want to see stuff like this tested in massive cohorts (ie. 1 billion+ participants) via variable dosing.

Here's how it would work:

* Companies that make products would randomly increase by 5% or decrease by 5% the dosage of each ingredient in a product headed to a specific town.

* The government would publish A/B groupings for every town in the US and every chemical they track.

* Average health data would be collected, and whenever a specific chemicals A/B group difference exceeds some threshold, investigation is done.

The main downside is production costs of products goes up, since every product will now have a final step of adding all the A/B adjustment doses to the bottle before sealing. But I believe this is worth it for rooting out chemicals that have low level yet very widespread negative effects.
Got any picks for past, present, or future 'Fosbury Flops' of programming languages (which could use a game-changing technique!)? And no, language-X-on-ChatGPT doesn't count! :-)
I doubt it. Toolkits like TensorRT are specifically optimised, and NVIDIA already segregated their HPC vs gaming dies (and corresponding, die space).

The H100s feature a minuscule amount of ROPs and TMUs (mainly for graphics); and doesn’t come with NVENC/DEC, etc. DirectX, Vulkan is not supported.

You’ll just see more and more tensor cores, optimised CUDA cores for bfloat, etc.
Good post, and the pat response is "vote them out". The problem with this is that the neither party really thinks this kind of corruption is a problem, and the individual pols that do can't get elected on that issue alone. That is, there's a critical "bundling" problem with modern politics: you have to accept a bundle of 100 positions, and "integrity issues" are usually pretty low. Even worse, a cynical body politic begins to perceive "integrity" as a liability, that someone with conscience and self-restraint is actually LESS capable of "winning" within a corrupt system. You've now allowed your short-term need to win to further degrade the system, which of course becomes a positive feedback loop.

(This bundling problem affects all kinds of products. When you're shopping, you pay attention to price, and everything else is secondary. In a perfect market, you'd price in the forced arbitration clause, or you'd price in the social cost of anti-competitive business practices of the vendor. But it just doesn't happen because the cognitive load is too high.)

I really miss the days when we at least paid lip-service to the idea that character and integrity mattered most in our pols. Even that system was gamed, its still better than overtly, cynically abandoning society's most laudable values.
Thank you for making this. Simplifying any aspect of RL is always welcome.
Well, we do use it in most hand-sanitizer solutions. I assume alcohol isn't a popular (home) cleaner because it is volatile and requires high concentrations (70%+) to be effective.

From a cost perspective, the Clorox Company no doubt prefers to add a few grams of a quat to multiple gallons of scented water, which means they're basically selling a spray bottle of a nearly-free solution that is 99.5% water for $5. Shipping 70% alcohol also brings with it a Flammability-3 (high) hazard label.
Whole 787 program that relied on subcontractors. Wiki:

> development budget estimated at US$7 billion as Boeing management claimed that they would "require subcontractors to foot the majority of costs"

> The accumulated losses for the 787 totaled almost $27 billion (~$32.8 billion in 2022) by May 2015.
Seems the snark detector just went off :)

Back on topic, I'd hope all of us would expect value for money for any and all services we recommend or purchase. Search for "site:news.ycombinator.com Away From AWS" to find dozens of discussions on how to save money by leaving AWS.

EDIT: just one article of the many I've read recently:

"What I’ve always found surprising about egress is just how expensive it is. On AWS, downloading a file from S3 to your computer once costs 4 times more than storing it for an entire month"

https://robaboukhalil.medium.com/youre-paying-too-much-for-e...
Kernel Hardening: Protect Linux user accounts against brute force attacks
For completeness: The orignal post says:

S3 has no rename or move operation.
Renaming is CopyObject and then DeleteObject.
CopyObject takes linear time to the size of the file(s).
This comes up fairly often when someone has written a lot of files
to the wrong place - moving the files back is very slow.

This is right:

In a normal file system, renaming a directory is fast O(1), in S3 it's slow O(all recursive children).

And Amazon S3 has not added a delimiter-based function to reduce its complexity, even though that would be easily possible in a lexicographic prefix tree (re-rooting the subtree).

So here the original post has indeed found a case where S3 is much slower than a normal file system.
Not always, but yes sometimes. Not sure what the solution is, but I don't think it should be legal for a former regulator to get employed for a company they're regulating. It sets the standard to go easy and a cushy desk job will be waiting for you where you get paid a lot to do nothing. Properly done, regulators push back on cost increases unless we'll justified. A lot of utilities lose rate cases.
I can easily imagine them to be greedy enough though.
General software QA does, or at least should, work like that but games QA isn't like general software QA. Since games software is basically a one-shot project (i.e. there's no expectation of long term support beyond a few patches) and not really amenable to automation, games QA are usually non-technical manual testers given fixed scripts to execute.
Apparently he started to develop his technique already at age 16, which is seriously impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Fosbury

My grandfather was a high jumper in the former Soviet Union, and he crossed 1.85 m in the 1950s using the "straddle technique": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straddle_technique

Looking for the specialist terms in English, I found a paper with a bunch of geeky figures to compare the different techniques :) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-mechanics-of-the-c...
I’m with you on this, it seems pointlessly fucking restrictive and incompatible with individual liberties.
Some of those numbers are very weird.
The title is actually shortened, the project offers much more, make sure you read the Readme.
The problem of the parasitic drag of real estate speculation is spreading to every major market in the U.S. We’re quickly on track to things getting as bad as they are in Canada. But California has been leading the pack for some time because of some especially stupid laws it passed decades ago.
What about suspending the ethanol like in alcohol gel? Could we find a gelling agent that is less irritating than the quat disinfectant residue?
Hickey's definition of simple is wrong. It's not the opposite of complex at all. They are not opposites, nor mutually exclusive.

- Easy is when something does not require much effort.
- Simple means the least complex it can be and still work.
- Complex means there are lots of components.

These are all quite different concepts:

- Easy is a concept that distinguishes the amount of work needed to use a solution
- Simple is a concept that distinguishes whether or not there is an excess number of interacting properties in a system
- Complex is a concept describing the quality of having a number of interacting properties in a system

Hickey's talk is useful in terms of thinking about software, but it also contains many over-generalizations which are incorrect and lead to incorrect thinking about things that aren't software. (Even some of his declarations about software are wrong)

"Deep", in the context of software complexity, probably only makes sense in terms of describing the number of layers involved in a piece of technology. You could make something have many layers, and it could still be simple, or be complex, or easy.
Job seekers could soon face an 'employer's market' as unemployment rate rises
Respectfully, it sounds like the FDA is trying to implement requirements for manufacturers to do what they should've been doing all along. The shitty flipside to my point is that market forces pushed manufacturers to cut costs and externalize the infosec risk onto the patients. The secure products aren't interesting to medical healthcare providers.

I'm, admittedly, a bit salty because I recently looked at a healthcare device that I was prescribed and found evidence that my data is likely being trivially exposed by anyone who wants to look. I can't verify this because it's very likely illegal, and I don't feel comfortable reporting it to the device vendor for fear of being accused of hacking. If there's a way to report it to the FDA, I'd be thrilled -- but I don't know what that looks like.
If high payed tech workers are being priced out, imagine how it is for people in other roles.
That's "bunnie" Andrew Huang. He's great and been working on this for a long time!
Did you thoroughly read through the linked sources?

Because in source number 5, it mentions that some fraction of Class III submissions are cleared through the 510(k) process and not exclusively through the PMA process.

> In 2007, Congress asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review the 510(k) process. The resulting 2009 GAO report described the 510(k) process as less stringent, faster, and less expensive than the PMA process and concluded that 66% of Class III submissions cleared through the 510(k) process in recent years were “implantable, life sustaining, or of significant risk,”
California is full, plain and simple. The people who live there and control the land have decided so, both implicitly and explicitly.