skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A low-tech example to create a good blog post title for submission to Hacker News would be a system prompt like:

You are an expert copywriter. Write five distinct blog post titles optimized for high clickthrough for Hacker News for the article the user provides.

Your response must follow the style of these titles:
- The ü/ü Conundrum
- Why isn't preprint review being adopted?
- Majority of web apps could just run on a single server
- Weather Planning for Eclipse Day
- PSChess – A chess engine in PostScript

Then provide the blog post as the user message input.

I just ran one of my blog posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495476) with the workflow through Claude Haiku and got this:

Here are five distinct blog post titles optimized for high clickthrough on Hacker News for the article provided:

1. Tipping ChatGPT: Does Offering Monetary Incentives Improve AI Text Generation?

2. Quantifying the Impact of Incentives on Large Language Model Performance

3. Carrot or Stick? Exploring the Effects of Positive and Negative Prompts on ChatGPT

4. Gamifying AI: Using "Generation Golf" to Test ChatGPT's Ability to Follow Length Constraints

5. The Curious Case of ChatGPT's Motivations: Can an AI Be Incentivized Like Humans?

Not bad titles, although more verbose than the 5 input examples I gave. I only gave 5 for simplicity: my main point is that you can give it a lot more than five and/or be more aggressive with constraints, like the blog post linked incidentially.
The root cause is the decade of zero interest rates which led to companies intentionally overcomplicating their stacks to justify neverending VC rounds. Early prospective employees took notice and adjusted their skills as a result.

The dangerous part is that in the meantime we've got brand new and budding talent that actually took this charade seriously and effectively got high on their own supply, seeing this performance art as the actual normality even in a post-ZIRP world where tech/engineering is primarily there to drive business profits and not a VC mating ritual.

The only winners are the cloud/infra/tooling providers who got an entire generation of "engineers" to do perpetuate their con without even realizing it.
Syncing to the cloud is an opt-in setting in Google Auth.
My experience is that the expectation of "lovable" tends make the development process far more toxic. Whatever your definition, "love" is a relationship that takes investment from both sides. Customers will interact with dozens of different applications on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Having a relationship with any or all of them is a significant burden to the customer. Think about the appliances in your home. Do you love them? Do you even want to?

"Lovable" is also toxic to product developers. Any usage that doesn't build a relationship starts to look like a failure. If you're making tax software, people aren't going to love it no matter what you do. Even if you manage to build that "loving" relationship with the customer, do you really want to invest that deeply maintaining it with every customer (including the demanding ones)? Remember that if they love your software, they're now invested in you not changing it and they'll expect the norms of that relationship in all interactions with you. If you fail to meet those expectations, some of them will go out of their way to talk about it. If you do meet those expectations, their "love" may actually scare others away from using it to avoid being associated with them. Think of the stereotypes about people who like Vim, Rust, or Excel. Maybe that's what you want, but it shouldn't be a universal development goal.
I'm self employed as a developer maintaining my own project. I think I am facing burnout for the first time ever. I am not sure if it's burn out, or just me getting older, etc.

I just can't push myself to be productive anymore.
I agree this kind of sucks (I have about 40 tokens on there), but it's relatively well mitigated with the search functionality and typing the first few characters of the service. This works for all that I've tried except the root MFA token from AWS, and I could easily fix that by exporting and changing the name and re-importing if I wanted to.

This has two things about it that make me actively not want it:

1. Does not work offline (requires an internet connection to work). The current design for TOTP is super flexible as they only require time syncronization, which doesn't require an internet connection.

2. It means I have to install an app for each service, which I absoulutely do not want to do. I would prefer to only use native apps for things that actually need to be native. PWAs and web UIs are strongly preferred for me. A comprehensive and robust way to manage permissions would mitigate my dislike for native apps somewhat, but this is getting harder and harder (though praise be unto GrapheneOS for their efforts!)

From an engineering perspective, it also feels like unnecesary bloat/complexity and coupling.
Print photos degrade over time, if you want them to last you'll need to preserve them in an additional way.
#1 infuriates me on a regular basis. Yet another data point on why I would rather WFH - I like my privacy when I am on the john.

I do not care at all if someone wants to use the bathroom for sex or drugs or whatever other pearl-clutching deviation is supposed to be deterred by the bathroom gaps,
As a German macOS user with US keyboard I run into a related issue every now and then. What's nice about macOS is I can easily combine Umlaute but also other common letters from European languages without any extra configuration. But some (Web) Applications stumble upon it, while entering because it's like: 1. ¨ (Option-u) 2. ü (u pressed)
How is this not literally the same kind of monopolistic behavior (abusing dominance in one platform to gain an advantage in another) that Microsoft has gotten in trouble over in the past?

Between injecting "hey edge is a perfectly good browser" when trying to download Chrome [0, 1], repeatedly clobbering default browser settings across OS updates [2], ignoring the default browser settings [3], and now injecting prompts of "hey you should use our search engine", I'm surprised that the current administration isn't seeking any antitrust action against Microsoft. Maybe they have their hands full between suing Amazon, Facebook, and Google, but I would expect this to be an open-and-shut case (especially since Microsoft has a history of doing this).

[0] https://www.extremetech.com/internet/329450-microsoft-edge-g...

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-is-displaying-multiple-...

[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3032751/windows-10-for...

[3] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...
You'd be surprised how close to 100% uptime you can get on one machine with well-engineered software. Schedule an automated update and reboot for a time and day of the week you have the fewest customers monthly, and if you have an SSD as the boot drive, unless you are a huge company nobody will notice or care that at 4 AM on Sunday your service was down for a minute and a half.
They can be drawn the same, but when combining fonts (one latin, one greek), they might not. Or, put differently, you don’t want to require the latin and greek glyphs to be designed by the same font designer so that “A” is consistent with both.

There are more reasons:

– As a basic principle, Unicode uses separate encodings when the lower/upper case mappings differ. (The one exception, as far as I know, being the Turkish “I”.)

– Unicode was designed for round-trip compatibility with legacy encodings (which weren’t legacy yet at the time). To that effect, a given script would often be added as whole, in a contiguous block, to simplify transcoding.

– Unifying characters in that way would cause additional complications when sorting.
You can deploy k8s on a single machine though. This way you get the benefit of a standardized, documented API without the burden of multiple machines.
IMO reproducing findings could/should be a mandatory part of PhD training.
Not sure, but it’s insignificant whatever it is. I buy new toilet paper maybe twice a year.
Effectively forcing their gov't to decouple from the West. Good move. Even if their chips are 30% as effective, it will still work. Lots of pain the rear, but it will work.
I swear, I've come to identify myself simple stacker. Complexity should be avoided wherever reasonably possible. But where it's not, it's best left and maintained with the devs who want it.
> like Facebook, that eventually all people will leave for something simple(r)

You'd be surprised how alive it is outside the US-American / Western European thought bubble
I once worked a job where I easily spent 4 times as much time fighting with Terraform files than actually writing features. This company got less than 1,000 hits per day. I think about this a lot
Because graphemes and glyphs are different things.
And used ones are even cheaper!
I think this law world get us a substantial amount of the way. There are so many seemingly abandoned works, sometimes even ownership rights aren't clear. Many of those would likely just end in the public domain.

I think a bigger issue is that video games and movies frequently have licensed other media like music in it. The musician might be very actively selling and licensing their music but now I can just get this abandoned video game and extract the song?
Isn't that just because Kubernetes makes it unreasonably hard to configure access to logs like that?
I get it, i had used a half dozen blogging platforms before switching to wordpress in the early 2000s and beyond the ease of creating a new site, the ui felt very crowded with tons of menus I didn’t need or care about initially. Yes it relatively simple and everything one needs but I get it can be intimidating and feel bloated if you just want a simple blog. The menu structure takes some getting used to. It’s easy to forget after using it for a time. I’m back to thinking it is bloated after a decade of using it, but for different (philosophical) reasons now.
ASCII should be enough for anyone.
> cheaper than famous cloud instances

Not just cheaper, fixed cost.

Everyone who cried about exit fees on AWS needed the lesson of failing to plan ahead...
It's not even close to all the cool stuff from the first book. Hopefully someone who has scrolled this far has seen spoiler warnings, but the explanation of the Sophons is one of the more stunning and imaginative ideas in the book, and foundational to its premise.
I always thought the "made with love" taglines were inspired by the same Clay Shirky talk: https://youtu.be/Xe1TZaElTAs?si=3hUBnk8IXIzlXw4i
I also just use ASCII when possible; it is the most likely to work and to be portable. For some purposes, other character sets/encodings are better, but which ones are better depends on the specific case (not only what language of text but also the use of the text in the computer, etc).
From reading the OpenRCT2 code base it was C-style with PUSHA features. You basically need to create a bunch of wrappers over function calls, to construct a sort of domain specific language/macro collection for your specific application.

I can respect the dude but in many ways RCT was a continuation of his previous games.

As people who study software development we have to sometimes call it like it is.

Using ASM was not the right choice as it didn't provide any obvious advantages compared to languages like C.

The genius of OpenRCT2 wasn't in the language choice but rather in the immersive world available in your cereal box.
It was not in my case. I found out about this feature when I saw the green cloud icon and pressed it to find out what it meant. At that time I was made aware the my data was saved in my Google account.
Running two instances of a stateful application in parallel forces you to consider nasty and hard problems such as CAP theorem, etc. If your requirements allow, it's much easier to have an active-standby architecture over active-active.
> still makes it fixed to the surface for the most part

Which makes sense. That’s what we’re trying to measure. You could fix it to a point on the core’s surface, but what wouldn’t be practically useful.
In AI work - which naturally lends itself to replicability improvements - we could get truly solid replicability by ratcheting up the standards for code quality, testing, and automation in AI projects. And I think llms can start doing a lot of that kind of QA and engineering / pre-operationalization work, because the best llms are already better at software and value engineering than the average postdoc AI researcher.

Most AI codes are missing key replicability factors - either the training data/trainer are missing, the code has a poor testing / benchmark automation strategy, the code documentation is meager, or there's no real CI/CD practice for advancing the project or operationalizing it against problems caused by the anthropocentric collapse.

Some researchers are even hardened against such things, seeing them as false worship of harmful business metrics, rather than a fundamental duty that could really improve the impact of their research, and it's applicability towards a universal crisis that faces us all.

But we can put the lie to this view with just one glance at their code. Too much additional work is necessary to turn it into anything useful, either for further research iterations or productive operationalization. The gaps in code quality exist not because that form of code is optimal for research aims, but because researchers lack software engineering expertise, and cannot afford software engineering labor.

But thankfully the level of software engineering labor is not even that great - llms can now help swing that effort.

As a result I believe that we should work to create standards for AI assisted research repos that correct the major deficits of replicability, usability, and code quality that we see in most AI repos. Then we should campaign to adopt those standards into peer review. Let one of the reviewers be an AI that really grills your code on its quality. And actually incorporate the PRs that it proposes.

I think that would change the situation, from the current standard where academic AI repos are mainly nonreplicating throw-away code, to an opposite situation where the majority of AI research repos are easy to replicate, improve, and mobilize against the social and environmental problems facing humanity, as it navigates through the anthropocene disaster.
I'm currently a happy user of 2FAS[1], any idea how Aegis compares to it? A quick search suggests that Aegis doesn't support multiple devices and is not available on desktop.

[1]: https://2fas.com/
> Really, Microsoft? Most of us rely on Windows, it has an absolute stranglehold on the OS market, [...]

It only has a stranglehold on you, if you or your employer let it.

Personally, I did the hard switch from MS one day in grad school, in a lab where we had to meet with companies on an almost daily basis, but many students disliked how a particular software company behaved. (Besides company practices, the reps I saw in lab meetings and demos/posters did this weird interrogating ideas-stealing, unlike any other reps.) Knowing this, the PI told my research group that nobody had to meet with this particular company if they didn't want to, "...but don't you dare use their software."

Challenge accepted. I installed Linux, made a Web page for other people in my lab to do the same ("https://www.neilvandyke.org/lab-linux-1999/"), and was very quickly glad to be free of that company.

(I also volunteered to be the one to meet with the tobacco-involved conglomerate company, which was the other company that many students didn't like, since I wanted to still be seen as a team player, and it was the lesser of two evils, from my perspective thinking about the future of information/computation/communication.)
"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." - Scotty, and good IT people everywhere.

When you add all of the necessary layers of abstraction to get three computers to act as one computer, you added dozens of new points of failure. In the conventional case, yeah, you can now shut one down and people aren't impacted. But there's now a bunch of new ways it can break and take the system down and it is much harder to figure out why.
At Standard Ebooks we serve a respectable number of page views and ebooks each month - and have been on the front page of HN three or four times - all of it done with a single 4GB VPS. And the only reason we upgraded to 4GB from 2GB is because we needed more RAM for the server to build the extremely large Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ebook - if it weren't for that, our 2GB server would still have been just fine for all that traffic.

I wrote a blog post about how we do it here: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-...
Haiti's 'deal with the Devil': A malicious tale that emerges each crisis
Maybe without details or knowing exactly what he means. But I've worked with people that decided you don't get to see any logs on a server except for a select few through some web ui or a log aggregator.
>I've never come across a devops person who'd say "Hey, that sofware is too simple to prematurely scale...

I'd argue it's just as much the dogmatic nature of all things software-related, together with the attendant shiny new object syndrome.

See SPAs, NoSQL, micro-services, etc. There's generally a use case for all of these, but they tend to be too easily extrapolated into, "if you're not using these, you're not doing it right."
What is a "word of code"? I've seen "lines of code" but what's a "word" in C?
Use Gemini 1.5 Pro, which has 1.5 million tokens. Prompt it with a logical question and observe it struggling to answer. Then, upload a book on logical thinking in PDF format and ask the same question again. Notice how it can now answer the question effectively.
VMs going down is not an unexpected event. It's not going to happen even day, but hosts crash, network goes down, datacentres experience thermal events, etc. Your solution may work for your own system crashes, but not most of the rented platform failure modes.
Although the article uses the term bidets, it seems to actually be about Japanese washlets rather than French-style bidets. But that may be complicated for some people too.
I also try to avoid non-ASCII characters in file names (and I am also on Linux). I also like to avoid spaces and most punctuations in file names (if I need word separation I can use underscores or hyphens).
Your still setting up K8's... I have scp'd my go binary and set it up in system d.

Nothing about K8 or containers are light... they are buckets where bad devs hide the bodies in most cases.
> I've never come across a devops person who'd say "Hey, that sofware is too simple to prematurely scale for sudden spikes of irrational amounts of traffic, so why not just deploy it on a cheap vps?"

Was a devops engineer at my previous job.

We already had k8s clusters setup, pre-made CI templates and pre-tailored helm charts (along with monitoring and much more). All those things you (a developer) could mostly clone, slightly customize and ship both to a development k8s cluster and to a prod k8s cluster (with all the safety nets already in place).

Creating (and maintaining) a single vm for a pet project is way more work than using the pre-made and pre-customized and curated toolkit.

This was at a 100+ developers organisation.

If you think you could easily get off with a single vm then you've never seen devops done right, i'm fairly sure.

EDIT: I probably fell for the bait, but the post i'm replying to really made me remember why we went on a killing spree in order to eradicate everything that was not k8s at my previous job and removing as much developer access to prod as possible. Some idiot developers think they know better, usually end up re-inventing a square wheel that breaks as soon as it's not running on their laptop anymore.
Actually it started like that, but eventually they started sharing code with VS, not that it matters any longer, as VS4Mac has been killed.
One major advantage of FinGPT or Bloomberg's LLM is that the embeddings produced by the model can be used for downstream prediction tasks. GPT-4 does not expose its embeddings so it cannot be used for this.
> the peak of your civilization

The more I think of it, the more I think this time was the actual peak of civilization (from a westerner's point of view). The Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Nagano in 98, when the world was singing the Ode to Joy was that peak moment for me [0]. After that, it went all downhill.

[0] https://youtu.be/7aGNei01fzQ?feature=shared&t=6290
Chiming in late to wholeheartedly endorse Seveneves.
Most of what needs breaking up is in the old guard money printing circles between military and established contractors. As with any oligopoly, step one is getting fresh blood in the mix.
You're wrong. Look at this graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL or https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1iSvr M2 isn't shrinking much, and it certainly increased throughout 2021. I would point you to M3 as well but that series was discontinued.
It's the 3rd most populous country in the world, and it's filled with English speakers?
I do this on AWS so the load balancer is managed for me. Never had issues. Two randomly provisioned vms are unlikely to be on the same bare metal.
Juries need some basis on which to make a decision. The law is ridiculous if it only turns on whether you had a lawyer ahead of time to tell you what not to say while operating the identical scam.

It's not clear why telling people you think a stock is going to go up after you've already bought it would require altruism, and more than that you would benefit by building a reputation as someone who makes accurate predictions if you turn out to be right, independent of whether anyone acts on your statement by buying the stock.
interesting thank you.

intuitively, prompting like this to get an answer seems basically like the first part of a fine tuning process (more exemplars).

what is your thought here behind why reinforcing good output via a loss optimization is worse than the one shot example? does the model start to over fit at some point towards some local minima? and this is avoided in this scenario?
And? As someone harassed and stalked by police officers (many years ago now) I assure you, restitution after the fact fixes nothing. I’d rather not be harassed and stalked in the first place, especially when such activities have led to a life long distrust of the people who in theoryyy I should be able to turn to in trust. Today I wouldn’t engage with a police officer regardless of circumstance. they are just another armed gang to me.
Eventually they started sharing some .NET infrastructure, until they decided to kill it.
ASCII is good for a lot of stuff, but not for everything. Sometimes, other character sets/encodings will be better, but which one is better depends on the circumstances. (Unicode does have many problems, though. My opinion is that Unicode is no good.)
I'm not sure I understand. On the one hand you seem to be saying that users should be able to choose which normalisation form to use (not sure why). On the other hand you're unhappy about macOS sending NFD.

If it's a user choice then CMSs have to be able to deal with all normalisation forms anyway and shouldn't care one bit whether macOS sends NFD or NFC. Mac users could of course complain about their choice not being honoured by macOS but that's of no concern to CMSs.
Nearly no one is competent and able to setup a true load balancer. If you have one either it’s provided by your (most likely vm based) hosting provider or you are a big enterprise.

If you are in one of those two categories then setting up something more robust than a single server isn’t much more complicated than a single server.

That is to say, I think it very much does change the equation around the original statement.