skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> we eventually reach a level of AI where you can just ask AI to implement stuff for you – I don't know, port this program to linux or whatever – without you having to learn how to code

it will not happen unless we reach AGI. You need to know programming (please don't call it coding, I hate it) to verify the generated program works as you expect and won't fail at 12am on a Saturday in production because the AI added a buggy code block that only get triggered in specific conditions. It's like making a plane without QA. Not gonna happen. And the very low risk programs already have alternatives today that don't require technical skill
You can make buildings that get ample light (and don’t require as much internal climate control) without covering them in windows.
https://www.nand2tetris.org/

As a good refresher on assembly and compilers
All those are factors.

They also leave out the biggest single problem: years of very low interest rates inflating prices, making it hard for people to afford deposits though. There is BoE research showing interest rates are the biggest factor in the earnings to house price ration.

"Immigrants" also leaves something out. Foreign investors and rich foreigners buying holiday homes/second (or third or fourth etc.) homes are a factor in some places (especially London) - in much the same way that people from London and other big cities push up prices in places like Cornwall.
totally untested. no way I'm gonna be a guinea pig for this
It definitely was for me too, and because it had _everything_, thanks to piracy. I started listening mostly mainstream bands, because that's what I knew, and within a few months I was listening to absolutely random authors, genres and "things" I didn't know existed. And by that I mean stuff like old sega genesis video game music somebody uploaded - without even knowing what the genesis was.

I never BOUGHT so much music since. It was eye opening for me how little I cared about radio/mainstream music after that.

The closest I've found so far is soundcloud. Thanks in no small part due to the barely-working recommendation engine, which doesn't get stuck in a local maxima, frequently going offtrack in pleasant unexpected ways.
That’s absolutely a thing. It’s usually under the broader category of anti-malware. Why is the web server suddenly mining bitcoin?

Edit: Source: have been through a few SOC 2 audits, enough to understand why they ask for most of the things in there. My personal thoughts on the matter aside, modern audits spend a lot more time on other malware than viruses.
I set up a server with Seafile 6 yrs ago and its been running pretty solid and stable.
Its free, and needs minimal maintenance.
I run it using docker-compose and the only thing i need yo do is update the seafile-server every few months.

They also have a nice iOS client which integrates well with the iOS Files app.
AI is the solution to this issue. AI increases the amount of variation that automation can produce, and we can bring back all those maximalist designs from the past.
In particular, TfL Go also has a focus on upcoming nearby departures rather than directions which Google Maps and Apple Maps prioritise. For anyone with some public transport familiarity, it’s quite nice being about to see your approximate position on a schematic tube/rail map or easily view nearby bus stops.

However, a friend who was briefly visiting London found this quite confusing as it wasn’t focused on navigation. Separately, I find the UI far too information-sparse for my taste compared to some other official apps (Zurich, Prague, etc.) which makes it somewhat inefficient to use, but perhaps this works for some.
It does feel somewhat ironic to complain about the subway system… and then move to New Jersey. It’s also hardly a low tax haven, the property taxes are eye watering.

Generally speaking, as an NYC resident I’ll be curious to see longer term trends for people leaving the city. There was a notable exodus when COVID hit but my anecdotal experience is that it didn’t continue.
[Ask HN]: Is there any evidence for the efficacy of prompt engineering?
Hi HN,

I understand how mechanical prompts that shape the process or output, such as "list out the steps to do x, y, z" can lead to a better output.

I'm skeptical of techniques such as "roleplay as a world expert in X field", or "If you do this well, I will reward you with $200". Are there any articles or reviews of these approaches?
There is much more value in using tools that detect anomalous behavior and living-off-the-land techniques than classic malware-by-hash.
Please take a look at:

[1] https://netdevconf.info/0x14/session.html?talk-linux-network...
[2] https://netdevconf.info/0x17/sessions/talk/scripting-the-lin...

I'm currently updating XDPLua and we might have a GSoC project on updating NFLua this year =)..

[3] http://www.lua.inf.puc-rio.br/gsoc/ideas2024.html#lunatik-ne...
About 20 years ago I was a programmer at a manufacturing company. I worked on a project to automate part of materials requirements planning. The woman who was in charge of it was spending about 20 hours per week wrangling Excel spreadsheets to figure out what materials they needed. It was all based on data we had: inventory, orders, etc. A few weeks later, and with a fair amount of her help, I'd automated the whole thing. She was happy, it was her least favorite part of her job and she desperately needed time for other things. I was happy, I was showing that I was worth what they were paying me! (Salaried at the equivalent of $12.50 per hour.) BUT: That project took half a job out of the economy. A decent one at that, a nice cushy desk job.

Automation is definitely having an impact on labor demand, with software driving out some jobs much the way cars and trucks drove horses out of our economy. I think it points to an increasing bifurcation, with jobs being high skill / high pay or low skill / low pay, without much in the middle.

Of course here in the U.S. this is also being driven by our monetary policy, our tax policy, our trade policy, our labor policy, I could go on. I'm in favor of UBI, but that seems about as likely as the use of any of those levers to reduce income inequality and spread the wealth our society generates in a way that supports most of those contributing to it.
The EDPTB GDPR guide for small business
Having an in-place battery swap is the equivalent of having to eat lunch at your workstation.
Is there an example of manager who has lots of reports, organized into teams which have secretaries?
(1), (3), (4) and (5) are all covert admissions that there's not enough available housing. For example, (1) says that net migration is outstripping housing, (3) usually comes down to the "land-banking" theory or this idea that heterogeneous developers are colluding to restrict housing, while (4) and (5) are about investors restricting housing for tenants.

In my experience, the people adopting these explanations are usually neutral or hostile to actual new housing, aside from their pet solution of punishing their chosen scapegoat.

The challenge is there's a grain of truth to all of these explanations. House prices and rents would go down if vacancies were outlawed. But these solutions that target scapegoats are probably insufficient to move the dial much. The vacancy rate in Ireland has gone down over the last decade while prices and rents have skyrocketed. AirBNBs are a small fraction of housing.

The two biggest things you can do to reduce prices and rents is to build a lot by removing obstacles (whether private or public housing), and reduce incentives (tax and otherwise) for investors to buy and hold land.
Well that explains why Git has such a god awful API. Maybe he should've done some prototyping too.
People usually complain about mid and late stage hipsters. The late actors, imitators and wannabes and that keep repeating the same behavior to signal ingroup inclusion. But that has more to do with the commodification of hipsterisum by millenials (hipsters), boomers (hippies) and generations before them.

I'm not really sure what the basis of you complaint is. Has anyone else been releasing albums on GeoCities?
As someone who tried it on a couple of things, no one I know has heard of it. So I suspect it’s marketing and hype that is missing.
It should've been called The Beginner's Guide to Language Models.
Has this author ever interacted with e.g. a monkey or a dog? Utterly insane to think consciousness is dependent upon language, oh and also good luck defining language: lots of animals communicate perfectly sufficiently for their purposes. Is gesture not a language? Then are ASL speakers (?) not conscious?

Glad you arrived at the right question nonetheless. Personally I think panpsychism is (inconveniently and rather alarmingly) the only viable theory of consciousness I’ve ever heard. There’s just no sensible place to draw a line between conscious and not conscious in the development of an organism or in the development of a species.
Meh.
There aren’t so many rats and now business are required to containerize trash which will reduce rats. Soon all residents will have to as well.
There aren’t any more potholes than you’d find in any city that goes thru something called Winter
Milk is not $16/gallon (and don’t post some random link at one spot where it is). I don’t buy organic, a regular gallon is about the same at Whole Foods as at an aldi in NJ. Organic probably double.
Congestion pricing will fund the MTA to improve on its system. The 2nd avenue line is quite nice.
That's a bit condescending on your part to judge other's lives, just because world doesn't revolve around your values doesn't mean others are wrong and their life is shit.

I for example hate places like London with moderate passion, living there I consider very low quality life and certainly prefer touch with real nature, no crowds, little to no air/noise pollution, and society being more... social, to certain point of course.

40 minute commute 2x a week is fine with me, most Londoners have way more (not from there nor GB, what I write applies to all big cities to some extent). For raising kids there is no discussion, cities mostly suck despite all benefits and many kids from there show it very clearly.
How did customer service get so bad?
Indian PM's 25-year roadmap laid out with help from AI
It's simple. For every high income person who moves out many more low-income people move in.

Meanwhile, those who stick around are ready to shell out more cash to upgrade to a safer area of the city.

It's a feedback loop.
I woule adjust city density based on surroundings. I remember getting lost in Maps.me while in northern Russia: zooming out will not display any tiny villages of the area whereas zooming in will not place any of those on the screen. So you got a blank slate.

Meanwhile, displaying every suburb of a metropolis possessing a town status may be superfluous.
Show HN: I made a tool to convert webpages to ePub
shhhhhh - dont give it up :)

Part of whats nice about it is that there isnt a ton of people and the NJ stereotypes work out in our favor.
Foreign money is far more of a problem than foreign people.

Notoriously, many newbuild flats end up empty because not many people can afford the rent, and they're really just investment tokens anyway.

Property is like Bitcoin with bricks.
On my phone it's hold power button down until the menu appears then hit lockdown, but I'm not sure if I had to do anything to enable that. Lockdown is the keyword, anyway.
It is too bad Thomas Heatherwick’s “let’s try AI” project is sarcastic.

Imagine CAD is first invented and your world class creative shop is like, “Let’s make a poop doodle.”

Then there are comments here noting some of these buildings are pretty nice looking. Sarcastic is 200% the wrong approach. And anyway, people who know architecture tend to appreciate Brutalism.
> so the amount of available housing stock to cheaply rent diminished sharply

And so did the number of people needing to rent.

> There was a 'bedroom tax' imposed on people still living in Council housing that had empty bedrooms which didn't apply to private housing.

A tax massively opposed by the left.

A couple on minimum wage and 37.5 hours a week has a £3,200 a month net wage after tax. Even just 33% on a mortgage means you can get a c. 180k mortgage at 5%, enough to buy a 3 bed house in many parts of England, assuming you can find the required deposit.

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/146612411#/?channel=R...

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/146822492#/?channel=R...

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/146953640#/?channel=R...

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/147046655#/?channel=R...

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/144397493#/?channel=R...

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/144533690#/?channel=R...

https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/146820380#/?channel=R...

One problem the UK has with wages is while minimum wage has nearly doubled in real terms since 1999, median wage has increased just 27%. This means far more people earning about the same, and many jobs simply aren't worth the extra time to do it. Why spend 6 years in education and below-minimum-wage training when you can just stack shelves or roll pizzas for basically the same wage.

The other problem we have with housing is the south east, but the solution to that is easy -- just move. You can live in 80% of the UK with a minimum wage job, so drop the sentimentalism and move 100 miles. Hell Americans think 100 miles is a trip to the local theatre.
The bigger problem here is the manager getting involved with code.

Even when done with good intentions, managers being involved in code/reviews almost always ends up being net negative for the team.
unfortunately that is exactly what the humans are doing an alarming fraction of the time
There is a 62 year old man in Germany who went and got 217 Covid vaccines in the span of 29 months.[1] Covid was probably afraid to catch him.

Funny how with Germany's extensive paperwork bureaucracy where every little detail must be recorded and tracked, the healthcare workers couldn't catch this guy earlier.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68477735
Why don't you get more specific about your claims?
Here in The Netherlands there was a big scandal in the 70s concerning Pakistani scientist Dr Abdul Qadir Khan who worked in a nuclear research lab and was accused of being a spy. He's regarded as the 'father' of the Pakistani atom bomb.
What system are you running on? Currently only Linux is supported. I've been running it on Ubuntu LTS.
Housing seems to be a disaster almost everywhere in the world these days. This makes me think the issue is not a local one (or perhaps there are some traits in all of us as humans that are causing this mess). What is odd to me is that previous real-estate bubbles have been localized. Now, every single place I would consider living has had significant housing price increases/bidding wars, etc.

From an economics perspective, lets assume there was no govt regulation at all. I am not sure if the problem would be fixed. There is a trite old sayings .. "they aren't making any more land" or "location-location-location". But this inelastic supply of land is nothing new. So why is this happening now?
As another parent in NYC I agree with you. We take the subway a lot and 90% of our trips are absolutely fine but at times you will pass a mentally ill person and it can definitely put you on edge. But to my mind it’s akin to driving with my kids in the suburbs and having a near miss with a reckless driver. I’ve never felt truly unsafe though, and for us the perks of living here outweigh the negatives. That can always change though.

Free city-funded Pre-K is a big deal for parents and is a great use of tax dollars but if you don’t have kids you won’t be aware of it. So it’s not like the NYC gov can’t do good things. I just wish it did more.
Xgo trace: a powerful visualization tool in go
I'm not quite sure I get it, the album itself is kind of...mid? It's 2+ hours of an aggressively boring take on the previous decade's music ideals desperately in need of an editor.

Honestly, it solidifies the ideal that with the vast quantity of new music released today, that if damn near every song isn't worth the listener's time, those songs don't belong on an album, they don't belong on a remix album, they don't belong on a deluxe edition, they really only have a place in live shows, livestreams, or anthologies when you're dead.
What is an “angry state” - the people? The politics? …?
I quit, and I don't miss it. It's too strong these days, and recreational shops being everywhere makes it tacky. CBD seems like a milder alternative, but I just don't care enough.
Sounds helpful if you're using an existing server that can run PHP. I use dufs (https://github.com/sigoden/dufs) as a standalone lightweight file server, sometimes reverse-proxied into an existing site.
>and it isn’t any better than last year”.

This. I think Apple gets the most benefits of doubt when things dont work. And for 99% of the time it works fine. It is that 1%, when it happens, how long would it be fixed, is it actually better than M$ or Google questions pops up.

Basically just stay away from iCloud. You get far less headache.
NLNet awards grants to 41 new projects
This looks like it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZQ7x0-MZcI
Ask HN: What would be the first thing you ask from an AGI chatbot?
I’ve had great experiences with iCloud Drive. Moved from Dropbox and Google Apps a few years ago. iCloud+ 2TB shared with family is quite cost-effective for our use. Mail with custom domain too. I tend to buy devices with base storage because Optimise Storage in Drive and Photos works seamlessly. To collaborate with others using Dropbox, I much prefer to use Panic’s Transmit than keep sync running (I no longer have the Dropbox app installed).
I am not sure the comparison between England and Scotland is valid. Scotland is is much less densely populated has much smaller cities. The population of the whole of Scotland is much smaller than that of greater London.

> There is surely a generation of older people living in 2/3/4 bedroom houses that don't really need that space, but aren't willing to pay today's prices for a smaller place that hasn't been made their own home

Yes, but what do you do about it?

In the areas I know all sizes of house have gone up in price, so they would make a MUCH bigger profit on downsizing than when they bought houses a few decades ago.

> There was a 'bedroom tax' imposed on people still living in Council housing that had empty bedrooms which didn't apply to private housing.

I thought it applied to housing benefit? You no longer get housing benefit to pay for the extra room. Its also not empty rooms as such: its having more rooms than the govt thinks you need, so things such as young kids having their own rooms rather than sharing.
Military drones have to be covered in a Farraday cage layer to prevent jamming, so that would double as nuclear EMP protection. Finding a place to charge afterwards might be tricky though...
I've looked at your posting history, and it's very obvious that you are a hateful bitter uninteresting person who should just delete your account and go away. This is not a place for you to post that kind of worthless bullshit, like calling people subhuman and marginalizing them like you just did in another recent post.

You've got absolutely nothing useful to contribute, your posts are uninteresting and full of lies and false attacks and accusations, and the stuff you do post is vicious, bullying, untrue, and worse than useless. Most of your posts are rightfully immediately downvoted by the community until dead and invisible. You should take that as a clear sign that your behavior is inappropriate and nobody cares what you say or wants to hear anything from you.

This one non-dead post I'm responding to is remarkable in that it hasn't already been downvoted until dead (thus I can still reply to it), but it's also amusing that the interesting, important, noteworthy, decent, and intelligent person you were aggressively and unjustifiably and childishly insulting actually replied directly to you, and politely and succinctly handed you your ass on a platter, which was quite hilarious.

But there was nothing interesting or enlightening or even correct about what you posted, or anything else you post, so I am taking this one rare opportunity to reply to your single non-dead post, when I can.

Face it buddy, LLMs may be bad, but YOU are MUCH MUCH worse. And you're actually that way on purpose, with no chance of improvement, which is pathetic, shameful, and disgraceful.

So please do the world a favor and delete your account, and go get some professional help for your mental and emotional problems. Since almost every one of your posts are immediately downvoted until they are dead, nobody but people with showdead set can even see any of your posts. And the people who read your dead posts like me don't ever bother vouching for them so they come back to life. People with enough points can do that, but of course you don't know that, because obviously you've never read the rules, and wouldn't follow them if you had, and certainly you will never have enough points yourself to vouch for anyone.
> Increasing supply is the best way to make housing affordable

It’s also the best way to redistribute wealth from the 50%[0] who own their own homes, and tend to vote, to those who don’t, while also giving those home owners with mortgages negative equity. By which I mean, it’s a total non-starter politically forever.

I don’t own a house and I’d like to, and this affects me directly, but this is purely and 100% an issue of politics and has no solution[1]

0: ish, I can’t find any decent numbers that aren’t completely contradicted by others

1: That I’ve seen, that could get through parliament
The Tyranny of Content Algorithms
Is this the list you were looking at [0]? NY is 20/100 for murder, 16/100 for rape, 40/100 for robbery (where 1 is safest). Below the national average for murder & rape according to [1] (above it for robbery, which isn’t great, but at 40/100 I’m guessing that robbery overall is more prevalent in cities and NY is still doing okay compared to other cities.)

Not sure what maps you’re looking at either, but visualizations of stuff like this sometimes mess up if they aren’t accounting for pop density well. NY is very big and very dense, over twice as many people as the next biggest (LA) and twice as dense as the next densest big (>1M people) city (Chicago). [2] (Note these are actual city boundaries comparisons, not metro area, which I believe is consistent with the crime stats used.)

I think the person you responded to is still technically wrong that “NY is the safest it’s ever been”. Crime rose nationally around 2020 and I think it’s only this year we’re starting to see pre-COVID crime levels again a lot of places. I think they were probably thinking of in comparison to the bad old days of the 70s, when NY was decidedly unsafe.

NY has problems like everywhere else. And with >8M people terrible things that make the news will happen every day even at below-average crime rates. But put in the perspective of large urban dense cities I feel like the city is kinda okay from a crime perspective.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
If we also sufficiently automated food production, there ought to be enough calories to feed everyone, right? Right?
Reality isn't like that, according to a pressure group that says empty homes is a major problem (and are thus unlikely to be underestimating)

https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/

London, where the main problem is (two people on minimum wage can buy a 3 bed house pretty much everywhere in the country outside the south east) has under 2.5% either empty, in use for short term lets like airbnb, or used for people who have a flat in London and a family home elsewhere.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6553693f7d629a133b6a4...