skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If Figma continues along this path I worry that they are doomed.

Generally, there are three paths to profitability: 1) increase pricing, 2) decrease expenses, or 3) offer new products and services with superior margin.

It seems like Figma has chosen to implement 1) but sell it to customers as 3). However, in contractionary periods like we are in now, 1) does not work -- no matter how much lock-in you have and how you sell it.
Woit's blog is a real treasure, and that extends to the comments section. Much of the technical material he writes about is far past my understanding, but he writes so cogently that it's still a pleasure to read when I'm far over my head. Like others here I also highly recommend his book of the same title.
“Driving” is solved. Driving with humans on the road - doing unpredictable human things - is far off still.

My guess is industrial and home robotics will solve a lot of the “doing things around humans” problems in the next ten years.

Why the hell people decided to automate giant death machines before perfecting small things never made sense to me.
I'm sorry, but it sounds like you're using ChatGPT3.5. I get very very few invented libraries unless it's a very specific version of an old or rare language. I tried your "ING" example and GPT4 got 100/100.

Idk, ymmv, but GPT4 beats the pants off of 3.5.
Here are the LaTeX versions from the article source:

\begin{align}
\begin{split}
\mathcal{C}(M) = &\: \Et^t(\theta,\S_t)^2
+ C_t M_t^{-\frac{2}{d}}
+ \Et^\pde(\theta,\S_\inte)^2 +C_\pde
M_\mathrm{int}^{-\frac{2}{d+1}}\\&+ C_1{T}^{\frac{1}{2}}
\bigg[\Et^\divv(\theta,\S_\inte) +C_\divv
M_\mathrm{int}^{-\frac{1}{d+1}}+(1+\nu)
big( \Et^s(\theta,\S_s) + C_s M_s^{-\frac{1}{d}}\big)\bigg],\\
\end{split}
\end{align}

and for 3.12:

\begin{align}
\begin{split}
\norm{(u_0)_j-\hu_j(t=0)}_{L^2(\mathbb{T}^d)} &\leq
\norm{u_j-\hu_j}_{L^2(\partial \Omega)} \\&\leq
\sqrt{\frac{2\max\left\{2h_\Omega,d+1\right\}}
{\rho_\Omega}}\norm{u_j-\hu_j}_{H^1(\Omega)}\\
&\leq \sqrt{\frac{2\max\left\{2h_\Omega,d+1\right\}}
{\rho_\Omega}}C_{1,k,d+1, u_1} \lambda_{1}(N)N^{-k+1},
\end{split}
\end{align}

Note that these rely on user-defined commands \Et, \pde, \inte, \divv, \S, \hu, for example \renewcommand{\S}{\mathcal{S}} and \newcommand{\Et}{\mathcal{E}_T}.
IMO public is generally critical of science unless they get some shiny toys out of it (and the causation is fairly immediate and obvious).

And, honestly, can you blame them? Nerdy places such as HN have a fascination of fundamental science that is nearly religious in some aspects - not in a sense of dogmaticism, but in a sense that pursuit of abstract knowledge is seen as noble and desirable in and of itself, with any justifications distinctly secondary. But from the perspective of your average person on the street, today, scientists are those people who ask for a lot of money, and use it to build those giant things that run some incomprehensible experiments which occasionally translate to some equally incomprehensible headlines in the news. And that person can think of many ways in which said money could be used to make their lives better instead.

Now, you can reasonably argue that long term, benefits are there regardless, even if they are not obvious, and thus the people actually in charge of allocation resources should disregard such simplistic takes and focus on that long term. But, either way, one cannot be surprised at the discontent.
Those places have that "frontier spirit", "trespassers will be shot again" signs, and houses that are at least a mile apart. I think they are self-selecting for people who like loneliness.
Only the v1 naive customer service bot will attempt to be helpful at all times.

The better product managers will quickly pick up on the (measurable) user frustration generated that way, and from there it's technically trivial to alter the LLM prompts such that the bot simulates being annoyed in a plausible way when tested like this.
> The question is not if I appear to act in bad faith, the question is if I did.

Alrighty then, i think i side with the other side after that nugget.
It's n=1 and huge survivorship bias. There is not that much useful or applicable in this essay. Yeah starting a company is one way to get rich, but the odds are not that good and start-up costs are higher than ever. Nothing is getting cheaper, whether it's advertising, labor, or developing the product.

The $ offered by YC wouldn't even cover a typical salary for a single coder or an adverting budget, although being chosen by YC does help to some degree in the latter though. Same for Thiel Fellowship: Not much $ either. You need a lot more than being offered by these incubators, which is a pittance. Back in the '90s it was easier to get decent funding, plus costs were way lower even adjusted for inflation. Now it's huge competition for bread crumbs, plus huge expenses.

On Reddit investing and 'FIRE' subs, way more young and middle-aged people getting rich (as in 7-8 figures) with lucrative white collar jobs or being early in a start-up, plus investing in stock market and real estate, than creating actual companies.

You can do well in computer science classes without ever really learning to program. In fact you can graduate with a degree in computer science from a top university and still not be any good at programming. That's why tech companies all make you take a coding test before they'll hire you, regardless of where you went to university or how well you did there. They know grades and exam results prove nothing.

Yeah, theoretical computer science is not the same as coding. The guys who did theoretical AI work seem to do okay though.
Not yet, but we're thinking about it!
> We found that language scaffolds sensorimotor representations such that activity for interrelated tasks shares a common geometry with the semantic representations of instructions, allowing language to cue the proper composition of practiced skills in unseen settings.

Sapir-Whorf with the surprise comeback?
I agree with everything you are saying. The temporary nature of a college internship is mutually beneficial. That's not in the case with general employment where workers desire more stability, so employers have to sweeten the deal to bring in equivalent workers.
Does Apple have higher tenure than other big tech companies? I was under the impression that they are all terrible at retaining employees.

According to this SO blog, Google had an average tenure of 1.1 years:

https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/04/19/whats-the-average-tenu...

Obviously this written before the big tech layoffs kicked off, but it's quite alarming if true.
Yeah, no doubt inspired by the .NET feature. I use it all the time for throwaway console apps.
Full List of 360 Nonprofits Who Received $2B+ from MacKenzie Scott
Developer Security – Software Composition Analysis
The differences between application security and developer security are simple enough in principle, but go significantly further as soon as you get past the surface. Many people in the cyber security community seem to place a great emphasis on the effectiveness of application security but in many cases, will completely negate the secondary portion of this which is securing the individual who is responsible for introducing security bugs to the software. I'm not saying that to be harsh, mistakes are a simple part of life and without the proper tooling and education it is very easy to continue to produce mistakes especially when greeted with constricted timelines and consistent budget crunch.
It's annoying that we have to suffer because of Joel's silly mistakes
It's made that way so that if you travel you can replace the wall side with the local connector. Some of them are always grounded.

Though, that's not really more convenient than carrying a power adapter around, so they didn't have to do it that way.
No, we need less AI, less robots, more (alive) humans.
Yes, I completely agree, I always fondly remember his game "drowning in problems"[1] because of the notable creativity behind it. Despite barely having an interface, it managed to entertain me until the end.

[1]http://game.notch.net/drowning/
Stardew Valley 1.6 Changelog
Fair enough. But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work. He’s always just waxing around nebulous desiderata and complaining about the status quo.
"After just 3 days of being incorporated and just 2 days of actual work performed, we have now created the best AI on the planet with trillions of active subscribers, per second.

The quality of our product is so high, it is being compared to a perfect diamond the size of the entire solar system. But, we are humble, and while we think our tech is pretty darn good, we know that we can do better. That's why we are introducing v2 in just 2 business days from today, which will render all other forms of intelligence (human and artificial) irrelevant."
Spreadsheet view https://yieldgiving.com/gifts?essay=20231206
I agree with the other commenters that if all you have are juniors this will cause problems and - unless some of them are more than what meets the eye - you are doomed. I was however once in the shoe of your Devs and I may have a few pointers that you can do that helps them, regardless of how successful your product will be.

0. Get a senior programmer next to them to be a tech lead. (Yeah yeah I know..)

1. Describe the problems they need to solve as detailed as you can then trust them as much as you dare to bring a solution. Do not try to invent/describe the solution. This helps critical thinking and independence.

2. If anything is finished, be happy for it and communicate your happiness. This gives them direct contact to a person whose problems they can solve and is a great motivator.

3. Get them an udemy or similar account and try to set together a learning/development path that interests them and can be used in their daily tasks. This helps gaining knowledge.

4. Praise them when they hit their goals
One, again they’re separate topics.

Two, we passed a billion dollar infrastructure bill for exactly this a couple of years ago. Were you aware of this? What more do you want?

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684

Discussing things like this on HN too often consists of people arguing based on what they assume is true without knowing what they want already exists.
Hey, this is a neat looking tool! I have a few thoughts about QA issues I ran into while playing around with Krata Maps:

1) When I went to create a polygon and put down a few points, I wasn't sure how to finish dropping points. I tried a few different strategies, and ended up accidentally deleting the polygon, before I found out the correct way to do it. First attempt was clicking on the black part of the top toolbar, but this did nothing. Second attempt was clicking on the mouse pointer tool, but that cleared the input. Third attempt was right clicking, but that cleared the polygon tool. Now I'm not someone who typically uses keyboard shortcuts when first using a product, so pressing "Enter" was the last thought on my mind. Before I tried "Enter" I made the mistake of pressing "Esc": shoot, another cancelled polygon.

Note that when using Figma, they provide a "Done" button while using the SVG tool. This was a bit of a frustrating experience to not only be stuck without a polygon on the page, but the app ended up deleting my work upto that point.

If someone was using this tool to draw something intricate and made a slip of their hand near the end, oof, that would make me want to rage-quit computers for the day.

2) Also, there was not undo functionality. It would be nice if I made a mistake and could press ctrl-z or press an undo button to get back into using the polygon tool with the previously placed dots put back in their correct spot

3) I think it's confusing a polygon isn't added to the features column as soon as you put down the first node.

This has some strange side-effects: one is I can click on other features, edit their properties, but still be in the polygon editing mode for the polygon which hasn't been added to the features yet. Another is I can click around and edit features, but when my mouse goes back to the map, it's still in polygon editing mode.

Again, I love this product concept and will keep a look out for updates. It has a slick looking UI and is a really cool concept. Good luck!
The Newton ended up a commercial failure in the end (although for a while it was successful enough to support a few independent software companies, including one of mine), but a whole ton of the lessons learned from producing it were applied to very successful products following it, such as the iPhone.

I think a reasonable case could be made that the Newton was not a failure in the big picture, in the sense that without it, a couple of Apple's later efforts would not have been as good.
You're welcome, I hope you'll like it this time!
You are talking about individual benefits. I am talking about the entire humanity. Cancerous cells also benefit from having their kill switches deactivated. They just happen to kill the system that they are a part of while optimizing for their own survival. I am making the point that selfishly wishing to live forever is exactly like that.
I've designed and shipped more than one multi-million line of code product that had parts in C, C++, Fortran, Python, Tcl, and even some assembly, plus the usual grab bag of open source dependencies. For none of those was anything more sophisticated than (admittedly fairly complex) hierarchical Makefile description to make it come together.

I'll be the first to admit that I've not seen it at all, but color me suspicious that it is an inherent problem of builds of a multi-language product, rather than unknown/unnecessary complexity in the architecture of the system being built.
Show HN: jnv: interactive JSON filter using jq
It's ridiculous and disingenuous to frame their car project as a negative. This project was $10b over the course of ~10 years.

Would any other company be called "irresponsible" for spending 6 days of revenue per year for R&D on a potential future product?

I highly doubt it.
Ask HN: Ever made a programming language at work? Why?
I know the history of major programming languages and how they came to be, but the ones that make it "out there" tend to always be generic enough for me to not understand under which set of circumstances a company decides to invest in creating a programming language for a given use case.

Do you have experiences worth sharing?
It doesn't matter, though. If you follow that advice, you'll probably be more successful as an employee.
Model M Keyboard
Do you actually repair power adapters? Sure I can see it for other things, but for high voltage home electronics it sounds dangerous. Like when you had to remember to discharge CRTs when opening an all in one computer case.
The 8080 is a simple processor, the "how to program" manual is only 60 pages.

Most of the instructions are changing registers in various ways, which is pretty simple. The Appendix A has all of them: https://altairclone.com/downloads/manuals/8080%20Programmers...
In one of the YC podcasts Michael says "did you Google the thing you are building". I was reminded of that.

I think what happens is people hit this "here's what you need to do to start a company" and like 40% of all founders see opportunity in those basics and build an email, CRM, survey, project management, etc. tool because it feels bad to pay high prices for something you could build themselves.

The engineering equivalent of this is an issue tracker, JS framework or "we simplified kubernetes".
He was talking about mac os.
Driving the giant death machines costs us billions of manhours every day. Hundreds of billions of manhours per year.

Which small thing puts a similar burden on mankind?
Sadly, the International Obfuscated C Code Contest has not been held in the past 3 years, the last one being the 27th IOCCC from 2020 [1].

Looking forward to seeing more editions in the future, and submitting another entry myself...

[1] https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2020
It's kind of startling to see how many places still use Java 8, estimated at ~1/3 of projects according to a survey i just googled. And something like half that still use java 11.
Is there a mailing list or something that I can register to in case that actually happens? I bet Ill miss the news.
New Node.js Website Design
You could make your own.

This is a 4 bay but it'll be configurable for any use case you can come up with. https://blog.briancmoses.com/2023/09/diy-nas-econonas-2023.h...
Not the case as far as I know, but RF interference can mess with touchscreens and other cables or WiFi, and of course it can catch fire and kill you.
Meanwhile Apple will sell you a chip with 96GB of unified memory for the price of two 4090s ... and that is with the Apple tax ... it's ridiculous. I know the memory bandwith of M2 Max is like 1/2 of a 4090, but still, the artificial kneecapping Nvidia does is absurd.
> Suggesting that Junio isn't infallible is a violation?

Junio never claimed to be infallible though
Nice in theory, in practice you have LaTeX tools with synctex, command, environment and references autocompletion, live math preview, proper syntax highlighting, jump to error line, etc. Nothing like that is available for pandoc markdown AFAIK, except perhaps for Quarto, which may have its uses but is too slow for small/medium sized documents and its tooling is not that capable anyway. Besides, it adds yet another complex layer on top of an already way too layered stack.
Relacy Race Detector
> I intended to make it simple to understand, it uses only four C keywords.

Fantastic
Umm, no I would not describe Ray Kurzweil's predictions as "disturbingly on target". Dan Luu checked everything and came up with 7% accuracy: https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/.
true, capitalism is causing deforestation. pretty bad already, no llm needed.
If anyone out there has questions about VM Squared, I'm happy to try to answer them.

Typo aside, the title certainly gives you the jist, but this is a great chance to move VM workloads off of VMware and onto something that's easy to use, rock solid table, with a great API and built by a company that's not antagonistic to its customers.
Yesterday I asked it the date. Then asked it if it was possible to give me the date. It gave a very different answer that contradicted what it just did. It is kind of hard to trust when it can not even make itself consistent between 2 prompts. For creative prompts this thing is very cool. For logical prompts it is frustrating to no end how much detail it gets wrong.
There is a mini-industry in China buying old NVidia GPUs, upgrading the memory, and reselling them.
... people might sweat or get dirty if they had to bike their office commute, so the only logical option is to accelerate a climate controlled 1-2 ton metal room for each worker

or we could reimagine commutes? they only exist because we redesigned our environments around cars.
For $150 I want a native app
it sounds like you need therapy more than you need neighbors.
No, I mean exactly US residents.

I live in US. I keep hearing stories how everything is better in Europe (they tend to cherry-pick good stories from different EU countries). The only areas where we get a consensus that US leads the way are probably gun rights and large pickup-trucks.
If 10000 more kids shoot for the moon they’ll build a lot of skills that the equivalent lifers won’t. He’s saying things like:

- Get good at tech
- Build projects that you want
- Get good grades and into the best university you can

I really hope my kid does that. I tried incredibly hard at projects I loved. That built me untold skills. Who cares if they start Google, or fail and get a job or get aquihired, they’ll be fine. They’ll know what their boss wants. They won’t just sit and bitch about parking. And at the back of their minds they might remember that this isn’t the only way to live so maybe they’ll be braver than they would otherwise.
It’s quite similar to Omnifocus’ pricing FWIW
Elicit – Analyze research papers at superhuman speed
Had you considered text input before this comment?
I don't think there is a contradiction. The argument is that building fun projects helps you gain expertise to the point where you can more easily recognize painful problems to solve.
If the goal is to maximize your chances it would not be to start a company. It would be get a degree from decent school + white collar work for 10-20 years (whilst paying off student loans) + diligently investing in index funds and home ownership. That is how guys are getting rich on Reddit 'FIRE' subs at 30-40-years old, not start-ups.
> Startups are high-risk high-reward

In SV, if you’re a founder then it’s medium-risk, high-reward. You’ll be propped up by investor funding, have acquihire>exec as escape route, and in the slim chance of actual success you’ll range from rich to mega-rich.

For non-founders (employees) it’s high-risk medium-reward. An acquihire will make you a rank-and-file employee, and if the startup is a true success you might still only bag a moderate sum, thanks to your tiny sub-percent of equity. Only huge IPOs bring wealth to non-founders.
This is a very strange comment to make on the Y combinator link sharing site. A site started as a space for a community of founders and aspiring founders to share their inspiration, ideas and stories. And you're responding to an article written by the founder of that community.
Yep!

Japan is basically Fordism on steroids. It has it's pros and it's cons, but it's fundamentally a different social structure and contract to North America or Western Europe (which itself have massive differences as well - someone's experiences in DACH are entirely different from the British Isles)

The only countries I can think of even safely comparing to Japan might be Taiwan, South Korea, and maybe Singapore.
I think one should argue that starting a business is high risk, mediocre reward. Most businesses just kinda trudge along, not leaving with the fairy tale returns of FAANG. Those are unicorns for a reason. Most of the businesses I've worked for, some of the founders are still working there and while they are pretty well off, they either havent sold yet (no big payday) or they made a meager sale netting them a very good pay, but probably averaged less than an engineer in SV on a 10 year horizon.
What Big Tech Does with Your Data
Not in my solar system I guess! To me it just seems a bit backwards to what these scientific efforts are supposed to be about. Are we trying to understand more about the universe in a publicly available manner, or are we simply trying to create a revenue stream for private stakeholders? I am continually disappointed how policy writers in recent years seem to hold for profit stakeholders at even parity or even a superior consideration than the public stakeholders when it comes time to make plans on natural resources that really shouldn’t be unilaterally exploited by anyone.
Groovy itself is a bad Groovy.
Maybe? YC seems to have an inconsistent view on things that are research vs product. But it’s probably more nuanced than that. Search was a market though at that time. If you pitched an AI LLM before chat-gpt what would the odds have been?
Are you sure that the multiple people who are assuming your implication and downvoting as a result are wrong?

I think it’s quite clear and obvious that your comment’s intention was to downplay the importance of the EPA’s ban and frame it against or redirect it toward the topic of naturally occurring threats.

If that’s NOT what you were doing, then your comment was essentially irrelevant.
Not entirely right. Remi Coulom's Monte Carlo Tree Search, in 2006, was the first really big discovery. It didn't make engines good enough to beat the best humans, but it steadily made them good enough to beat 99% of go playing humans, playing at up to 6 - 7 dan level. It was still part of AlphaGo, too (though as I recall AlphaGo Zero did away with it).
It’s not good at tasks where it doesn’t have a lot of data to lookup or predict from