skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My observation has been that the causality is the other way around: the pointless mindgames of employers trying to find "the best" people via interviews led to job-seekers finding ways to game a system that was rigged against them.

However, regardless of "who started it" in this round, ultimately, it is unquestionably a situation we can lay at the feed of industry, which abandoned decades ago the practice of actually training new hires for their positions. Sure, there are prerequisites they can expect (eg, in a programming position, you can expect some level of school learning or experience with programming in general, or particular categories of program/lanugauge), but the degree to which employers are willing to train people on the stuff they use has declined precipitously since the late 20th century. This is a well-known phenomenon, and it is substantially responsible for the modern arms race between job-seekers and prospective employers: if you know that whoever you bring on will get 3 months of well-designed training for the role they'll be filling, you don't need to spend 6 months vetting them over 10 rounds of interviews for an entry-level position.
Probably the case, but the iterated version of this is far worse: imagine the process is optimized so that qualified candidates are made offers 25% of the time (vs 100% ideally) and unqualified are made offers 1% of the time (va 0% ideally).

This isn’t a single round N-choose-1 game; the unqualified candidates don’t dematerialize, but rather keep applying and may even engage with automation tools to apply to hundreds of roles every day. So, they become wildly over-represented in the applicant pool for any given role.
“Continue reading your article with a WSJ subscription”

It’s not circumventing the paywall.
Classical versus non-classical has nothing to do with it. HoTT does not work to capture what a mathematician means by "unique isomorphism" because witnesses of equality in HoTT are very much not unique.
The hardware tends to be very proprietary. You can make some parts of it work, but is that worth it?
> Apparently the production of greenhouse gasses has gone up in past years regardless of the negotiations aimed at reducing them.

Second derivatives matter. The growth in CO2 emissions from 2013 to 2023 was like 1/4th of the growth from 2003 to 2013.

And it's now being driven by the profit motive, not by treaties that might be reneged on at any time, so there's no reason to believe the trend will stop. All that's needed is for governments to not actively screw things up. (Which I guess is a possibility in the US due to the hyper-partisan nature of their politics, but China and India are what really matter, and both stand to gain so much from cheap energy that it's hard to imagine them being willing to stop the transition just out of spite.)

Honestly, there has probably not been more cause for optimism on climate change in like three decades.
potato, overpotato
IIRC from the Feynman apendix, Nasa claimed in the official reports that the SLS had 1/10.000 or 1/1.000.000 chance of failures, but the real numeber was close to 1/100.

If they now claim 1/75 in the official reports, I'm very worried.
I've actually gotten more sensitive over time. I used to be practically immune to poison ivy. I've also become somewhat sensitive to low quality cashews (they can contain urushiol from the shells).
Ongoing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40414249
All valid points. I guess I’m hesitant to put time into documentation and similar, if I can’t somehow find a steady stream of sales prospects.

> even though our writes far outpace our reads, this pricing makes your system about ten times more expensive than an RDS cluster

That indeed sounds off… Are you sure you’re comparing the total cost to that of an RDS cluster? I am aware that reads will be more expensive (due to the write optimization), but I was hoping most customers would make it back on cheap writes. Also the storage itself ($0.23 per GB-month) should be much cheaper than RDS.
> You're missing the point entirely

I think not.

> "covering interstellar distances" is misleading

It can be read in 2 ways yes (is the interstellar distance crossed by the swarm who do that together, or does the radius of the swarm encompass interstellar distance) but it's clear which one is intended. Again, "The swarm ends up around 100,000km wide" tells you which one it is. Non-naïve people know or look up that 100,000km is not even an interplanetary distance, let alone an interstellar one. It's relatively tightly bunched when crossing the 40,208,000,000,000 km to Proxima Centauri. Yes I look this kind of thing up.

> a certain naivete in thinking about space travel that compromises

Don't be absurd.
No, a corporate death penalty is not sufficiently preventative. The people making these decisions are sociopaths. In order to provide a proper safe guard against future bad behavior target the behavior by attacking the person.

More specifically hold the executives, as well as their primary staff, personally liable for the decisions they make. Criminal liability can be a factor, but what really hurts the sociopaths is civil restitution. Take money from their personal coffers to be redistributed to persons harmed while simultaneously destroying their reputations in the public.

Do not punish the company, as this only punishes the remaining employees. Furthermore, nobody else is as typically well suited for applying corrective actions as the companies inflicting the original harms. If application of corrective actions financially destroys a given company then let that be your corporate death penalty.
As clicks dry up for news sites, could Apple News be a lifeline?
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40414249
> we’re hiring people to learn our problems and figure new ways to solve them.

I might steal this line in the future if you don't mind. That's a decent way to explain it.
As the author 10 years later, I agree. A hard-and-fast rule to ban switch, as that rule seems to advocate, is silly and terrible.

Switch has many valid uses. However, I also often see switch used in places where functional decomposition would've been much better (maintainable / testable / extensible). So I think there's still value in advocating for those switch alternatives, such as that rule's text covers. Not that I agree with everything there either. But, useful for discussion!
AI is already changing management – companies must decide how
It's a market like any other, sure it's very hard to evaluate a software developer. But if prices meet demand the problem will fix itself. Right now the market is flooded with new workers. But employers want people with experience and those are very few and in high demand. Also all those new people without experience are asking for too high salaries. When I started my first engeneering job I worked for 10 bucks an hour, and that was with over 5 years of prior coding experience building games and websites. I wold actually have made the same or more money working in a grocery store.
Indiana Jokes
I spotted Podcini <https://github.com/XilinJia/Podcini#readme> on f-droid <https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ac.mdiq.podcini/> over the weekend and it is the first contender to remove Podcast Addict from my phone. I just need to fix a few UX bugs (for my workflow) but I'm stoked about it
Cool, they've added support for long message queue monitoring: https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/7651
It is interesting to me that prefix notation gets brought up so much in the context of Lisp. Most operations in most languages use prefix notation (function calls, procedure calls, method calls, and most macro systems). The only thing that makes Lisp unique in this context is that it also makes arithmetic operations prefix. This is just the natural side effect of treating "primitive operators" as first class functions. It's something that other languages that treat these operators as non-primitive constructs awkwardly work around, like some syntax magic in Haskell or operator overloading in other languages.

What makes Lisp macros so intuitive is not the prefix notation, it's the homoiconicity of the language. Writing a macro is just a list operation, where the familiar map / filter / reduce applies.
Then the same happens as when there is a bug in Aurora's replication. You lose data. I know this from personal experience.
These days no one seems to talk with janitors … there’s an infinitesimally small chance any of them had any information to withhold in the first place.
> Because everything is toxic in large-enough quantities.

We mostly don't take things in the large-enough quantities to make them poisonous. We cook on teflon for entire lifetimes, scraping food off of it, throwing out the pans when we visibly see the coating coming off.

> Threads like this always end up semantically identical to the Unabomber's manifesto.

No, they don't. But suggestions of regulation or political change somehow always get compared to terrorism.
wow, this is incredibly useful information! thank you so much. i didn't know flutter offered so much
After being burn waaay too many times with one of:
1) write only code (for the sake of “speed”
2) optimization of the wrong piece of code

I do think it is much better to prioritize readability; then measure where the code has to be sped up, and then do changes, but try HARD to first find a better algorithm, and if that does not work, and more processor, or equipment is not viable or still does not work, go for less readable code, which is microoptimized
> Lots of Countries/Government have gotten away with it, though.

Going there is a derail. And it doesn't even work because my analogy relied on the relationship between private groups/individuals and the legal system, which is quite different than the relationship between a country/government and the legal system.
Farfalle: AI search engine – self-host with local or cloud LLMs
users constantly ask for a native app!
I suppose LLM injection vulnerability will be the next security product trend
Generate entire books in seconds using Groq and Llama3
What's the purpose of this comment?

My point is that a random dev running a pretty plain adblock (aren't we all?) simply cannot view their post. This is down to uber, their practices, an external developer and how uber create their blog (they don't just have the content in the page). If I'm not a special case with extremely weird luck, a bunch of devs seeing links to their posts will open them and not see any actual content. They will then, I assume, be less likely to upvote them.

Given that they are seeing problems with posts being upvoted this seems somewhat relevant.
Humans are also trained on what they’ve ‘seen’. What else is there? Idk if humans actually come up with ‘new’ ideas or just hallucinate on what they’ve experienced in combination with observation and experimental evidence. Humans also don’t do well ‘ignoring what’s been said’ either. Why is a human ‘predicting’ called reasoning, but an AI doing it is not?
What about OpenXPS (ECMA-388)?
This is exactly what I mean. Take the Obamacare exchange website for example. It cost $800 million, didn't work, and nobody got so much as fired for it because that money was wasted, not stolen, and the contract was given out in accordance to procedure. If the execs had pocketed any of that money, they would be in jail.

In China it would have been given to a friend of the bureaucrat in charge of giving out the contract, and they would know it would cost $40 million to build, but they can charge 80 and kickback 10 to the official. And more importantly, that friend would be damn sure to deliver a working website because he knows if he doesn't he will be investigated and punished for his stealing.

So while our system is less "corrupt" I guess, China gets a working website for $80 million when we get a broken one for 10x the cost.
> So, if it were to be as cheap to go into space as to go to St. Louis

Obviously there is a breakpoint at which the cost differential would no longer matter, I agree.

It's just as obvious however, that this breakpoint won't be reached in the near future, or even the forseeable future.

It would require a radically new propulsion technology, which, and this is the sad truth, we don't have. The way we launch rockets today has remained pretty much the same for more than half a century: By burning chemicals in a tube.

As long as that doesn't change, I can pretty much guarantee that the cost differential between doing space-exploration using humans, and doing it with robotic probes, will not look good for good 'ol humans any time soon.
To consider your product an alternative I'd like to see benchmarks that seem trustworthy, something like a Jepsen analysis or case studies at existing customers, and be able to test it within the EU, i.e. not on US:ian services.

Seems you're in the vicinity of Lund, should be a 'science park' or similar close to the uni where you can find companies that have problems you could solve. Talk to 'incubators', 'accelerators' and the like there.
Breed says street homelessness is down. Confused? You're not alone
Computer Engineering or any of the other legitimately useful CS degree paths instead of CS itself.

At least at the school I went to, CS was kind of a joke for undergrad.

The students that cared about CPU design, low level software (firmware, drivers, kernel, embedded), or robotics (including computer vision, etc) all went computer engineering.

The students that cared about cryptography or the formal maths side of computing all went to the mathematics dept in their applied discrete maths or applied computational mathematics degree paths.

The students that cared primarily about high performance computing or applied computing in general (but didn't go one of the aforementioned routes) went through the computational modelling and data analytics program.

And the students that wanted to learn CS for the purpose of game design or creative arts had their own program within the school of arts (can't remember the name).

So out of the students who were interested in computing that went to my uni for undergrad, the ones that were left in the CS department were those who were told "get a CS degree for lots of money", those that didn't bother researching any other programs, and those who wanted to be web devs or enterprise java/c# devs.
This is usually what happens when you try to tease out another skill or separate "intelligence" from the general factor, it ends up being correlated in the end.
> developing nations

Yet the population in developed economies will fall drastically in the next 50-100 yrs. Let developing nations have their chance at improving quality of life through cheap energy like developed nations did. Mass immigration is but bandaid at maintaining population and the resulting economic demand within the existing order.

Developing economies account for a negligible percentage of global emissions at the moment. By the time they catch up, some iterations of nuclear energy research will have resulted in more efficient energy production.
Wouldn't that take a separate vulnerability? This is why Google serves attachments off something like googleusercontent.com.
Fifteen years ago or so I had a conversation with a colleague about automated development. I pointed out that it should be possible, in principle, for you to specify all the tests for a system and the algorithm, genetic algorithms were the fad du jour, could work to produce the desired result. Test-driven development (TDD) was also really popular, so I was combining the two.

We agreed that such an endeavor should be possible, but he protested that you haven't really gained anything: you will have just as much complexity in your tests as you do in your implementation, so what's the point?

I pointed out it was complexity of a different kind, and one that humans are much better equipped to handle. Most people I've told this story have agreed with me. If a "bug" is encountered, well, add a new test and re-generate the code! Maybe the system should have the old set of tests, old code that was generated, and the new tests as an input - as an optimization.

Can LLMs generate the needed code from a set of test specifications? I doubt it. Then again, neither could genetic algorithms. Maybe the two together can move the ball forward a bit - and that's the most fascinating thing to me. We don't need perfection to achieve useful. If I can create test specifications for a narrow sliver of functionality and have the needed code automatically generated - that's huge! But, and to answer the question this title asks, I would expect we'll still be using programming languages for quite some time.
Discussion [0] (18 points, 2 days ago, 9 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40402343
It's not a BitCoin, so transaction has been reversed since then, righ?
Who they?!
ok, very thoughtful response, thanks so much!!

the app doesn't need extremely complex modules, it's crud with some extra steps. most of the magic is on the backend.

i'll take a look at flutter before deciding what to do.
Only do it if you want the illusion of LLM's to be shattered. Suddenly every day you'll see two to three highly upvoted links on HN and be unable to keep your eyes from rolling.
I’m confused, wouldn’t RUST_BACKTRACE=1 effectively give you a stack trace?
At one point I realized Arch's firefox was greater than a week out of date and I promptly did exactly that. I don't know if it was a regular occurrence or something weird with that release though.
Tesla doing damage-control, discounts for European fleet buyers
Can you tell when art is AI generated? I already can and that is what I am talking about. In time this will become more and more clear to the the market and in cases where it matters they will hire a human.
Yeah. 7 jobs in a row. Maybe the next dice roll will work out, or maybe I'll finally leave the industry.
The risk is that they hire someone who doesn't know GWT and six weeks later (and six months later) they still don't know it.

The ability to do self directed learning of a new skill / technology is something that is difficult to find (a lot of developers that I know don't know how to learn a new version of Java or framework and are still writing code exactly as they did when they graduated college... and they could put down "Java developer - 5 years experience" and apply for senior positions.)

There are a lot of devs who appear decent with current tech, but lack the ability to learn new tech without someone hand holding them for several months.
> Where is everyone?

In the countryside, farming land for food? I wouldn't expect North Korea to be heavily urbanized.
Eh, this is pretty cynical. Google doesn't do business in China despite it probably being very lucrative for them. Unlike say, Apple, which gets lots of praise for privacy or whatever. Different companies "sell-out" in different ways.

Honestly, it's probably a good thing for YouTube to be available in Russia. It allows for western media to be seen by their population. If Russians only had access to Russian and Chinese media, the propaganda machine would be much stronger.

Now I'm not saying Google is a charity. They are probably also making money, but there's a non-zero chance someone thought about not cutting them off for non-monetary reasons.
But they will save more than $6M the second year because AWS will up their prices.
Maybe a "why it works" post would be useful, as in "this part of the demo does x because I was trying to do y but ran into this issue, which caused me to experiment with z and then a side effect inspired me to switch abc to def", etc. Personally I think explaining the creative process is more interesting than explaining the end result.
Ships _spread out_ over 100,000km will literally cover interstellar distances as a swarm by _traveling to another star_. That's the whole point. A bunch of insects can swarm a thousand km from the time it forms to when it breaks up, even if the swarm itself is never more than a couple of km in diameter.
Forgive me because what follows will sound harsh, but I think you need to hear it based on your response.

> HaystackDB is designed from the ground up for write intensive workloads

Okay.

> so it’s much more economical than existing off-shelf-solutions for that type of workload.

That's a leap in logic. Just because you designed it with this workload in mind, well, doesn't automatically mean that it's any good for this workload (or any workload). If solving a problem was as easy as declaring "I will design my solution from the ground up for this problem", then we'd all live in peace and harmony. So that's what people are asking you here: how do you make your DB "much more economical" for that type of workload? What technology, what ideas have you had to make it possible? If you don't want to reveal that, then you need proof that it's better than the competition, not a declaration, that it's better than the competition.

> Is that not clear from the landing page?

It's clear that you want to market your solution as something good for write-heavy workloads. Why should we believe you've done a good job designing your solution?

> From pricing: “$0.2 per million writes, $20 per million reads”. The typical cost profile is $2 per million read/writes, or even more for writes.

Who knows how you came up with pricing? Perhaps you're betting on your customers being stupid and not realizing that taking a 10x hit on the price of reads will lose them (and earn you) more money in the long run. After all, what good is writing to a DB if you never read from it...? Or perhaps it's some kind of promotional / loss leader pricing that will change soon in the future. In any case, it's, again, not proof that your solution is adapted to the customer's problem.
I think there are several issues in this area.

Certifications are useless and sadly necessary. Certifications are substitutes or proxy to validate one's expertise in the field the cert is in. Alas, most certification organizations concentrating on how to rake in more money, not how validate someone's knowledge. Hiring managers & recruiters often mistake certification for experience versus knowledge and soft skills. (Let's not even talk about the crammers, cert cheats, etc.)

The intermediary between hiring team and candidate supposed to be recruitment or HR. As others have noted, often recruitment does not know how to properly translate the requirement, they force-insert themselves into the recruitment process. A MITM attack.

From hiring perspective, I have seen a few new trends I have not seen before.

AI generated resumes/CVs to match the job offer. I know they were AI generated because some of them will have the left-in tell-tale ChatGPT prompts, or three of four resumes near identical in structure and contents.

During video conference call, using the computer to find answers. At 4K, I can see mostly see the applicant's screen reflection in their glasses, I can hear the keys clicking, and see their eyes moving to read the answer.
In one instance, jokingly I asked if they are "looking it up on ChatGPT", and the candidate responded, "I just want to make sure you get the best answer"...
Their latest game, Firmament was a bit of a let down. The puzzles were far too easy and the game was far too short. It felt like they spent a lot of time making it look pretty, adding VR support, etc instead of just making good puzzles.

The one before that, Obduction, was pretty great. I really loved it.
Not if you're in the EU, due to, among other things, Schrems II.
Craig Wright Lied About Creating Bitcoin and Faked Evidence, Judge Rules
> A single mov.cc instruction can be patched to remove the voltage limit. However, it's in bootmain, which is signed, so we can't just patch bootmain and flash the eeprom.
>
> However, as a root linux user on Raspberry Pi full access to system memory, including memory used by the videocore. I mmap'd /dev/vc-mem, searched for the instruction and replaced it, but i'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. I don't want people blaming me if their Pi decides to halt and catch fire.

Does this need to be reapplied every time at boot? Guessing yes...