skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I get better at programming as a hobbyist?
Based on the "I love programming but I hate the programming industry" I wanted to ask the following:

I am a hobbyist and I like to build small and tiny projects.

My gripe is that I don't want to go into software engineering as a professional career (for the reasons outlined in the previous post), however that hinders the progress of learning quite a bit, especially doing it part-time in the free time.

I do have some expectations potentially to build something that people pay for (eventually but not in a rush). Right now its just about solving puzzles, jogging my brain and solving for problems I personally have. But I do want to increase the pace of learning.

Any tips, stories and resources are appreciated!
With Google, I always feel like the side hustles (waymo, X, etc.) Really exist to be sold off in the future to prop up the add/search business and ensure future profitability. Everything not adds/search is on that list, and anything shut down despite being useful isn't seen as future-sellable.

Google today is starting to smell of future financial engineering games, like when a car maker earns more through financing than selling core product.
The AI Human Replacement era has begun.
I think we actually agree here: it's not "untranslatable", it just does not translate easily or well.

But regarding translating it as "we're finally here", that's not what it means: it's not an expression of satisfaction, it's acknowledging that to others that it's been a long trip for them.
This seems to be tone deaf fluffy theory in the face of "well, I can't afford to eat but at least some guy online says it's fine wine"

Printer driver is a nice motivating story but in practice its a lotta work for no benefit
IBM used to be bigger than MS, it's a 10th of it today.

But most importantly all the above listed companies with the exception of Meta are those that are heavily ingrained in large companies operations. IBM still provides mainframes, MS has Exchange and Windows domains and is successfully transitioning a lot of customers to Azure, Oracle has their databases and other products, SAP their ERP systems.

Once a non-IT company has their internal IT systems and some legacy working they're going to be very very slow in changing them out if it works, companies that provide those and get a critical are going to have very very long runways compared to regular b2c companies if a significant portion of their revenue comes from this.

Google has Chromebooks that are used in schools and some GCP usage but could that save Google long enough if search revenue was cut into a fraction? And GCP is kinda of an also-ran today, people looking at larger options usually look at AWS(nr 1) or Azure (Windows legacy).
Fell for the Crosstrek but then got the ick with that dash tablet
I was reading “Working in Public” and one of the ideas I agree the most was that the community can use the software, but not direct it. While communication is important, I’d restrict it to the appropriate channel: Using a bug report tools for issue; A feeback/roadmap tool for enhancement request; A forum for user/user support; A wiki for Guides. The actual project management would be read-only.
Damn that looks like a cool car. Shame it's Japan only
> significantly mitigates this.

not if patents become a weapon against actual innovation - which it has devolved into being today.

Far from being made to progress science and the arts, patents have become a method for which large corporations can add moats to competition. Things like codecs for video/audio, which are purely mathematical expressions, have been patented. Genes and molecules, even tho they might occur naturally, can be patented (a very tenuous form of invention - it's discovered, even if not naturally occurring!).

And not to mention design patents.

I say the entire patent system needs to be abolished, or at least, made such that only applicable to physical mechanisms, and not software, nor biological systems.
the othering of creators because they use a different paintbrush was bothering me.
If this were indeed the average attitude, there wouldn't be this big of an outcry with regards to the move from fully open-source to source-available licenses (Mongo/ELK/Hashicorp/etc.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=40137096

Recursion!
I think it very much extends the non-fun bits of the thing.
Lots of practice. Read books about programming. I don't see how not wanting to go into programming as a career prevents you doing the things professional programmers do to enter the profession.

I learned how to maintain my motorcycles with no intention of becoming a mechanic, but I still had to read the service manuals and practice and ask for help.
That's good to hear! I suppose some of the sale for it is that the tunnel was already done, so the value was very clear. People were already taking that train on a slower version for business/tourism, so there was obvious value to be made expanding it.

Though, somewhat funny to me that it seems like it all got paid for by Canadian pensions?
A model with 1 trillion parameters isn't going to perfectly recall 10 trillion random facts. To use round numbers.

Contrary to the article, what it does do is generalize and perform fallible but quick ordinary off the cuff reasoning. And often much better than a human, at the speed of its well worded responses.

(Obviously humans have the option to take longer, and do better. But we are definitely entering the territory of humans and machines differentiating where each is best, across a great deal of what humans do, vs. one being universally overwhelmingly better.)
that is a wonderful parallel - well worth expanding into a blog post, if you have a blog.
It’s amusing that the characters even look like a conveyor belt.
Not alarmist at all. The can was kicked in 08. We are in a debt spiral. Government spending is a component of GDP, % of GDP is NOT the context. We are insolvent. 210+ trillion in unfunded liabilities! And about 70% of spending is mandatory.

The USD as world reserve currency is the biggest sword the US has.

At current rates or higher we just piss off every country as they trade in eurodollars. They have started the process and will move off USD unless we get back to a favorable rate for their debt loads.

With our debt load, it's either lower rates and continue to print and inflation (traditional and/or more asset bubbles). Or elevate rates and boost our interest expense and suppress the economy while fighting inflation until entities quit buying our debt and we lose significant power. And then, we still need our money printer and more inflation occurs.

As for me, I'm going with keeping recent "elevated" rates so big banks can scoop up smaller ones in short term and inflation has some check, then back to lower rates after election. I'll hold inflation hedging assets indefinitely.

US is screwed financially. Still better than most economies, but still screwed. Unfunded liabilities, AI, wage gap, education and housing costs, populism, political divide, geopolitical battles. There is no thesis that is great for the US unfortunately. It's best pitch is other countries are just as screwed or more.

There is no way out of the debt load. All solutions require printing like crazy. Or defaulting but you cannot give up the world reserve currency and the fallout would be catastrophic.
I think the root of your mis-expectation is in thinking that companies behave like people.

Your viewpoint is personal "I would do this" and for you it's easy, it's your money so you just write a check.

Companies don't work like that. Firstly because individuals get budgets, and there's no point wasting limited resources on free stuff.
Secondly because individuals are accountable. There are procurement processes, multiple-level sign-offs, justifications, invoices etc.

In truth most OSS projects make it really hard to get "financial support". If you give away your product for free you make it almost impossible for a company to pay you.

My advice: if you plan to write OSS for a living -start- by understanding how company purchasing and invoicing work. Get that part right -before- you even decide what to build.
How does this compare to MLX? As far as I understand MLX is equivalent to PyTorch but optimized for Apple Silicon.

Is this meant for training MLX models in a distributed manner? Or what is its purpose?
There are an insane number of Apple Silicon devices out there.

If your product runs on an iPhone or iPad, I’m sure this is great.

If you only ever want to run on 4090s or other server stuff, yeah this probably isn’t that interesting.

Maybe it’s a good design for the tools or something, I have no experience to know. Maybe someone else can build off it.

But it makes sense Apple is releasing tools to make stuff that works better on Apple platforms.
> give iPhones the ability to control most aspects of the car's infotainment functions

Because the solutions the auto makers came up with _sucked_ and as it’s not core to the operation of the car, I’d prefer it be done by someone that even approximately knows what they’re doing with software?

I am not buying the car for their infotainment features, I’m buying it for the car. I’d like it the entertainment bits were just delegated to the setup I already have…
none of the "fathers of opensource" had a problem with people coding for money, and it was always presented as a choice to donate code to the commonweal. And they knew how to handle and put constraints on people who were rude and asked too much, LART them or send a clue by four. But it's "you", the people who demand snowflake "codes of conduct", who don't know how to handle the negative energy and then you wind up exhausted and depressed and flailing. I'm not criticizing anybody or the way you/they want things to be, I just think you are mischaracterizing the past because you don't understand the social contract.
> If China can push 286 mph in Shanghai

Are you talking about the Maglev train connecting Longyang Road Station on the Shanghai Subway Line 2, to Pudong International Airport?

If so, it is only 30km (19mi) long…
Yea, I suppose I should have been more specific - it's also obviously easier to "upgrade" a line you already have the land and space for. It's not trivial, since you have to sacrifice some of the throughput in the meantime to support the construction, but it's easier than building an entirely new line.

Also, kinda tough reading that Stuttgart link where it seems like it was generally unpopular and the police did crimes to suppress dissent. I don't really know the details to have an opinion on if they're right, but still.
I’m very skeptical about this story. There aren’t any suitable solutions like turning on the sprinklers for a few minutes before landing? AstroTurf? A concrete landing pad? Deflectors on the exhaust? This doesn’t seem like a hard problem, which makes me suspect there’s a lot more to it.
Great article. But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years.

In a previous avatar, Raghavan was a pure theoretical computer scientist. As a student, he won the best student paper in FOCS, the Machtey award, which is kind of a big deal. The work was related to randomized rounding, which is a bread-and-butter technique for LP relaxation approaches to integer optimization, similar to knapsack problems.

This is not to defend any bad decisions he may have made at Google and Yahoo, but to make him an anonymous clueless corporate honcho who is good only at scheming and wrecking companies is bizarre. All this information, moreover, is available on Wikipedia and (cough) Google scholar.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FtMADIMAAAAJ&hl=en...
A downvoted but an interesting comment. Years ago I shared this same opinion. When I first learned about Stallman's take on how software should be free, I thought the guy was insane.

But with time, it's now obvious he was right about a lot of things. Very few things in the history of humanity made as much impact as OSS and all the things it has inspired and enabled: Linux, gcc, Postges, and so on. Think about how many things are derived from Linux alone, e.g. Android. Zuck hacked on early Facebook in php and MySQL, it's his choice not mine, but still, the impact is obvious. Before people start piling up on me and downvoting, think about the things that Facebook open sourced like React, PyTorch, LLaMA, and so on. How can this be bad?
Machine learning or not, seo spam sort of killed search. It’s more or less impossible to find real sites by interesting humans these days. Almost all results are Reddit, YouTube, content marketing, or seo spam. And google’s failure here killed the old school blogosphere (medium and substack only slightly count), personal websites, and forums

Same is happening to YouTube as well. Feels like it’s nothing but promoters pushing content to gain followers to sell ads or other stuff because nobody else’s videos ever surface. Just a million people gaming the algorithm and the only winners are the people who devote the most time to it. And by the way, would I like to sign up for their patreon and maybe one of their online courses?
They're following the well-trodden path of after-the-fact philanthropy practiced by robber barons (Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller) to clean up their public image following unscrupulous business practices that brought them those billions. Less cynically, there's only so many things one can spend money on, and philanthropy is least controversial.
They’re three separate bills, Israel aid, Ukraine aid, and Tiktok. You can find them on congress.gov.

Each congress critter voted on each bill separately.
Personal Saving Rate (PSAVERT)
Apple also contributed substantially to OpenCL (I mean, they were the originators of it), though CUDA (the closed, proprietary solution) ate that world.
This should be backed up by GS hiring statistics only.
It looks like MLX is a part of this initiative. https://github.com/apple/corenet lists "MLX examples" as one of the components being released in April.
Building a full Django project, starting with a single file
> I think he's saying that his "professional journey building OSS" is over. ie his day job needs to generate income.

I agree that he’s saying this. But FTA:

> Open source is great, but it's not sustainable. We self-sabotaged ourselves over decades, and now we're at a point where it's hard to turn back. Publishing source code for the greater good is a noble cause, but to be honest, I think that over the years, using "open source" has become an excuse to avoid paying for software.

I interpreted this as something beyond just his personal position, and seemed like a broader indictment of the OSS model.
https://opendayz.net/threads/bliss-hiatus.7490/ From the person who was the straw that broke the camel's back, per say.

> I am continually innundated with support requests from users who fail to read even the most perfunctory of documentation. I do not have time to support and maintain the project at this time.

Fairly ironic.
i see seems like thats the general view with LLMs with anything 3d or spatial

I just want an easy way to get into PCB design but there is just so much learning curve
I don't use this, personally, but it strikes me as a fantastic idea. I made a sensor board and wrote my own firmware for it, maybe I'll see if I can easily configure ESPhome to run on it.

The only thing I'd need that my thing already has is pull-based OTA updates. Right now I just copy a firmware to a folder, and all my sensors around the house automatically update to that firmware via an HTTP server. With ESPhome, I'd have to push the update to each sensor separately, which is tedious when you have tens of them.
Just skimming the README it looks like it’s a layer above MLX. So looks like a framework around it to ease ML
I think the main advantage of Movidius was its memory architecture. They had to disclose the HW arch for some sort of a tender in the EU which is how I stumbled upon their HW documentation years ago. Basically IIRC even though you’re right and 128 bit is weak sauce, the strength of that arch was that the memory was much “closer” to the cores and it was partitioned and accessed by multiple cores at the same time, boosting overall available bandwidth. The weakness of it was that it was (IMO) overly complicated for no good reason, and imposed a rather inflexible programmability model which if their software layer didn’t do certain things, you couldn’t do them at all. Which was a problem before transformers, because models tended to use a greater variety of ops
The link should go here I think: https://github.com/apple/corenet/tree/main/projects/catlip
Seeking to a certain part of the video. On mobile, you can do it by dragging the progress bar at the bottom of the screen.
Watch a video of one on YouTube... wtf... it the platypus of birds! What is up with its mouth?!
They're using the I-15 median which can be a little curvy and hilly, so they're probably considering passenger comfort: https://www.flattestroute.com/Las-Vegas-to-Los-Angeles
The obvious solution to this is to pre-compile a list of all possible Unicode strings up to the required length, sort them, and create a lookup table using their indices. I wonder for what kind of project this would be useful.
I think CarPlay is kind of stupid because the ONLY apps that make any sense are audio and maps. Both of which don’t need much variety… Google Maps, plus a handful of audio apps, and the infotainment system is complete.
Google's AI is just as bad as the rest. I remember when it couldn't get past a traffic cone after not being in an accident for "countless hours":

https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742

These companies should be fined hefty amounts and barred from beta testing out in public and putting people in danger. Governments should carry out comprehensive tests on a self-driving car's capabilities, same as cars without proven passenger safety (Euro NCAP) aren't allowed to be on roads carrying passengers.

And now this great AI company is also providing AI services to pariah states like Apartheid Israel to be used on people. That's scary.
Great! This reminds me of FileMaker and similar RAD desktop tools. Curious to know what kind of projects people are using it for?
As a tourist, maybe. Bopomofo (aka. zhuyin) is universal in all children's books until 3rd-4th grade, and is the most common keyboard input system used in Taiwan.
Patents also require disclosure of how something is done, and the history of innovation in the Western world has been one of iterative improvements on patented inventions so as to be granted a new patent.

Software arguably is not suited for a patent system, but patents have worked well for centuries.
[dupe]

Discussion on official release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40136010
> (bye-bye GM!)

To be fair, at this point only the Ultium EV-based models won't have CarPlay, and they are struggling to build them anyway. Even if they do figure out the production issues and achieve the targets of their wildest dreams, they will still only account for around 6% of all the vehicles GM produces. They're not exactly betting the farm on it.
We self-sabotaged ourselves over decades, and now we're at a point where it's hard to turn back. Publishing source code for the greater good is a noble cause, but to be honest, I think that over the years, using "open source" has become an excuse to avoid paying for software.

i agree with most of what the author says, except this.

we sabotaged ourselves? by not predicting that people are greedy and have the nerve to complain about free stuff?

by giving code away and not expecting anything in return?

by building an entire operating system that now dominates the world?

i see no sabotage. nor do i see an excuse to avoid paying for software.

sure, there are freeloaders. and yes, there are idiots that feel entitled to get free support. and yes, companies are exploiting this.

but despite all that, thanks to an entirely free and open to modify operating system, the world is a better place for many.

what we failed to do is to make FOSS self sustainable in the sense that people can live off it.

but we have to ask, is that an error, or should we accept that as by design?

if it is the latter then we also have to accept that not everyone will be able to contribute. especially most will not be able to make a living from contributing to FOSS. but i believe this is fine.

contributing to FOSS should not expect a monetary reward. if you expect monetary reward, consider that the available FOSS software is comparable to other software that i'd have to pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for.

that is my monetary reward. but i am not making a living off it, nor do i expect to.
This is a big deal for increasing performance past fp8. We'll see Nvidia/AMD/Intel etc adopt this in their products in the next year.
It's pretty much that Bjarne Stroustrup quote: “There are only two kinds of [open source projects]: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses”.
Maybe fewer bugs and need to make changes with this?

I have a fair number of esp devices with temp probes around the house, and I’ve been meaning to switch to esp home so I have less code to maintain
Agree with this, you touched on all the points from corporate teams being shielded to support not being offended because it isn't their ego.

For those who dare to create and release things to the wild as an individual - hope you have thick skin! People are mean, lazy, heartless, cruel, brainless, but also occasionally helpful, thoughtful, and sometimes even smart - and can correct and improve you.

So it's overall worth it!

A lot of people have mastered this better than me, but you can see yourself in a sort of 3rd person sense instead of a 1st person sense (I think it's called "being objective") and when you do it fully and purely, you can't be offended, it's impossible, because if done correctly you no longer identify with yourself but as the bird's eye point-of-view - but because you are still in control of yourself, from this vantage point you can direct your intentionality from a much wiser position. And if somebody unjustly judges you out of spite, jealousy, resentment, etc. you can see it as clearly as if you viewed someone doing that to someone else. A powerful mindset to hold for public-facing creators. You get the benefits of being shielded, and "it's not my ego" and also ego when you want it - at night, under the stars, having a beer, when it's safe to feel proud.
Putting up with abuse and good people skills are orthogonal.

Also I never said anything about an “unstable core contributor”.

I fully disagree that nothing can be done about this. I never said people shouldn’t have to deal with disagreements or unlicensed use. Yeah that’s going to happen.

All I’m saying is projects should take a much much harder line on abusive/rude treatment. The people who act that way will never change if they don’t face consequences. When project A puts up with it, they learn they can do it to B and C too.

But if A and B stood up, maybe C and D wouldn’t even see it.

It will never be zero. But it can be a lot less than it is now.
[dupe]

More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40128798
I agree. No matter how good LLMs and voice recognition get, having a screen is still the best way of inputting and reading information in many scenarios. If I'm trying to find a restaurant to go to, unless I'm in a real "just decide for me" mood, I want a screen. I can read fast, see pictures of the food, open multiple browser tabs to remember potential options, quickly scroll menus, etc. I don't want a voice slowly reading me out the names of restaurants one-by-one.

And that's just finding a restaurant. Imagine using voice input to book a flight. I feel sick just thinking about it.
I'd like to add that ChatGPT also pointed out this error and suggested some alternative solutions.
Duct Tape and Fence Posts