skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Style is hard to objectify. It’s a lot easier to determine whether a 3D model depicts Super Mario than whether it’s in the “modern Nintendo” style.

Style is also very broad. It’s even harder to determine whether an 8-bit NES sprite is in the “old Nintendo” style, because 8-bit sprites don’t have much flexibility to distinguish themselves.

Broadness: imagine if whoever first came up with the “low-poly 3D” or “flat material” or “voxel” aesthetics could copyright them and prevent anyone else from selling anything in those styles. What defines a style as narrow enough that it can be copyrighted? And what if that definition changes, e.g. if a a specific voxel style gets copyrighted, then someone else discovers a brand new way to render voxels super efficiently in only that style?

Objectivity and similarity: an artist can make a concrete object or character which is very similar to a copyrighted one but also clearly distinct. This is very important, because if “similar” objects could violate copyright, where is the line when something is dissimilar enough? Ultimately it would be very far for small artists, who can’t afford to risk lawsuits; vast swaths of clearly not similar characters and objects would be blocked off from them, because in the eyes of the law and without good representation, they’re no longer “clearly” not similar. In fact, it may be hard for an artist to even come up with an object or character that doesn’t risk a copyright lawsuit, since there are more copyrights that anyone could fully know. (At least to my knowledge, with copyrightable characters and objects this hasn’t been a frequent issue; but if it is, copyrightable style will make it worse, so for the sake of the argument...)

Copyrighting style is basically copyrighting the “similar” works. There’s a fine enough line between whether a character or object is “similar to” or “the same as” another (again to the best of my knowledge). But there’s no fine line with style. If one tries to define a style with objective criteria like making their “style” a specific stroke thickness and color scheme, generative AI users will just create art which falls right outside of this criteria. If one tries to use an AI classifier (ironically) to deduce whether something is “the same” or “similar but distinct”, it will be foiled by AI-adversarial manipulation and its effectiveness will be endlessly disputed in court. And if one defines their style with very subjective judgements, that leads to the issue above.
That acquisition is pretty light on proof:

> No astronauts or fellow trainees have verified Dwight's account of Yeager's treatment

I don’t think you would have trouble finding people that could say Yeager was disagreeable and difficult.

Sounds like someone wanted to posthumously slander a hero to sell books and get clicks.
The obviously reply to the question is: "Probably not!": see Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life https://www.amazon.com/Second-Act-Bloomers-Success-Reinventi...
Think about what things "cannot be doubted", with all the brain-in-a-vat types of caveats. It's not trying to be a scientific definition. It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied, and that might well be the only reasonable place to define consciousness. (I still can't call it a great definition, even if it did perfectly correspond with the concept. Too indirect.)
they lose on the unit item, but make it up on the volume!
Give me a break. Inflation, housing, healthcare, education, I can go on and on. You have no argument.

You either pay for things up front with taxes, or you pay for them later by way of inflation. There's no free lunch.

The government has chosen inflation. Really at this point they'd save money by shutting down the IRS, dismantling the entire tax system and just pay for things by printing what they need. Inflation is the ultimate flat tax.
I live in a coastal region that has hurricanes, ice storms and tornadoes. Gas stoves work during these storms, electric stoves often don't.

If you force me to use an electric stove then I will buy a wood-fired stove and use it. I will burn the (free) wood from trees downed by the storms and the (free) wood from homes downed by tornadoes. You will eat my pine resin smoke the remaining days of your life and I will give you my stove when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
> Is it too late to create a popular programming language after age 40?

> ...

> Average age: 37.5

So that would be a clear "no".
"We're at the tippity top of the mountain, but we're only halfway up".
I think the original URL was https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bellanguage.txt [0]

However, Yahoo Stores (which is the, er… CMS that 'pg uses) was aquired in 2022[1], and it seems that the new owner migrated some assets to a new domain.

[0] See https://web.archive.org/web/20191012073002/https://www.paulg...

[1] https://help.turbify.com/s/article/faq-merchant-solutions-up...
Some of y'all are too young to have heard of XSLT and should be profoundly grateful
Audi has sold less than 10k cars total with a 48v system since 2018 and isn't even double digit percent of their total US sales. MB does better with a few hundred thousand since 2018. Tesla will be shipping a couple million per year. I think it's still fair to say Tesla is spearheading the actual production of these cars, whenever it starts to happen for them.
> and have them enforced for no more cost than any other language

By which I mean that you get the sound policy enforcement for free, without any additional programming effort, where in typical programming languages this isn't the case.
This would be a piece of advice, a law is supposed to describe an outcome :-)
How do you reconcile this belief with the Fine Article's finding that the average age of a program creator is 37.5 years?
Storage, transcoding/encoding, and any other compute operations (rendering, etc) are small compared to data transfer costs.

At the scale of the largest streaming apps (Disney, Netflix, YouTube, etc) you are moving petabytes of data PER DAY. At that size, you have access to significant savings on CDNs, backbone providers, etc. in many cases the discounts will be 90% - I have seen as high as 99% - or higher off the “list” price (which are usually never paid by anyone anyway).

You also tend to own your own backbone and can link in whichever ISP wherever you want for the “final mile.”

Final note, when you have been doing this long enough, you can start shaping the traffic based off previous patterns. I remember an eBay listing years ago for a Netflix local storage device that was meant to store shows at an ISP’s data center.
because it annoys HN commenters
Apparently they could shoot them down with patriot missiles except the US doesn't want them used in Russia territory. I'm not sure of the virtue of making Ukraine fight with one arm behind it's back where Russia can destroy all it can in Ukraine's territory but they are largely restricted on striking back in a similar way.

I mean I can understand the desire not to escalate but it would seem reasonable to reciprocate whatever attacks the Russians are carrying out.
> Programming Language Creation Peaks In Your 30's

No.

This is just the observation that programming languages are created mostly by people in their 30s.

Whether or not your ability to do so peaks in your 30s is a totally different claim.
When General MIDI standard sounds became widespread in early-mid 90s I already wet my feet with synthesizers, samplers and the Amiga .MOD scene, so I was eager to try this new format and its standard library of sounds, but was surprised how absolutely awful they sounded compared to pretty much everything I used, cheap keyboards included. No way I would swap any of my cheap synthesizers with a MT32 or any similar expander. I may have a very unpopular opinion, but hated those sounds since day one, and still hate them. The demos linked sound just terrible to my ears; you can't make a general purpose sound and expect it to fit any song in any genre as much as you can't have a single type of cheese and expect it to be good in all meals. I completely understand the reason why they existed, but no, I don't feel any nostalgia.
Peak consumption happens around 45-54, and then declines. Kids are out of the house (which is paid for). At retirement, consumption is more conservative because the retiree is on a fixed income.

Speaking of fixed incomes, these retirees are dependent on risky investments like real estate (collapsing) and public pension schemes (about to collapse). On top of this, retirees aren’t generally the consumers of the supply chain components that China makes. Remember, they never moved up the value chain of sophisticated goods manufacturing. They got too expensive before that.
Back in the late 80s, the first "real" compiler I had was Logitech Modula-2 (yes, they used to sell stuff other than mice). Even then, Turbo Pascal 3 felt like a toy. Modula-2 was the real thing. And it was slow! Granted that was on an 80286, but the compiler was slow. (The generated code was fine.)

I had used a different flavour of Pascal previously, but Modula-2 felt right. I liked the case sensitivity compared to Pascal's ambivalence. I liked the strong typing with clear differences between signed and unsigned integers. I liked the better block structures that omitted Pascal's "begin" keyword. I liked the way modules were organised.

What happened to Modula-2, in my case, was Turbo Pascal again. I got a job, where we used Turbo Pascal 4. Then 5, and then 5.5 which introduced single inheritance OOP. Then we needed to migrate to this new fangled "Windows 3.1" thing, which at the time we chose C++ and MFC. I stuck with C++ for many years and never went back to Pascal (which evolved into Delphi, successful in its own right).

I think in the broader sense, C++ happened to Modula-2. In the early 90s, C++ was the hot new thing and people were using either that or C. The next shakeup had to wait until Java in the mid 90s.
I'm guessing live video looks a lot different from a more static video site. I think encoding and storage are both quite expensive. You want to encode videos that are likely to be watched in the most efficient ways possible to reduce network bandwidth usage, and every video needs at least some encoding.

Based on some power laws etc., I would guess most videos have only a handful of views, so storing them forever and the cost to encode them initially is probably significant.
I don't think you're ever too old. But before you create a popular programming language, perhaps you ought to aim for an unpopular, slow and crappy one first. At least then you won't discourage yourself if it doesn't take off.
What you're saying is what Yann LeCun says (and therefore presumably what he thinks), and appears to be what Facebook is doing by publishing their models (just like they appear to have paid little more than lip service to content moderation leading to them being named by the UN as having played a "determining role" in the Myanmar genocide).

I know people at OpenAI, who have said "we should join the 'Pause AI' protest [outside our office]", so I have reason to think OpenAI is 100% sincere.

They may also be wrong, I hope they are, but definitely 100% sincere.
I learned Modula-2 in college 30+ years ago (hot on the heels of Pascal, which I used for Mac development), and actually sort of liked it, but C was king across VAXen and UNIXes, so I went that way and never looked back.

I am still pretty amazed at the size and performance of Pascal-like compilers, and still smile whenever I come across ancient code with Pascal calling conventions, but am also sort of happy I don't have to type BEGIN and END ever again (or brackets--I became a Python and LISP fan).

I have to wonder if there is anything _as good_ from a compiler perspective but with a nicer syntax.
It's possible that your model wasn't great, for my experience, in the past I uploaded an AI image in the same style of a certain artist to a website that organizes anime images, someone tagged it with the artist's tag because they thought it was made by him, also the image I uploaded got much more "likes" than anything made by the artist in months, and it's not like I'm spamming images, that was the only upload. (I later removed the tag, of course)
The data is a little bit off in the case of collaborative languages. For example, Scheme is credited to Guy Steele and Gerry Sussman, but only Steele's age is listed in the chart.

Independently, this kind of analysis furthers the mythology that popular programming languages have singular creators. It's true that the vast majority of these projects were started and led by a singular leader or small group in their initial days, but by the time anyone has heard of them, they typically are the result of a collaboration between a team and a community of users and this is only more true in the modern age.
> I do think there needs to be some kind of protection from having your 'style' commoditized without consent, using unauthorized images of your own art

I worry any attempt at that will strangle all creative endevours. Copying others style is not a new thing. It is the stuff culture is made of.
I'm young but I had the misfortune of working with it once (when interacting with some Austrian VAT authority APIs, some of which were SOAP and XSLT still in 2022 lol)

Indeed grateful I don't have to touch it again, but I suppose ChatGPT would be huge help these days for writing boilerplate magic incantations.
There are people who create zero programming languages, people who create one programming language, and people who create too many programming languages to remember exactly how many. I suspect the second group is the least likely to create a popular one. (Yes, less likely than the ones who create zero, that's what I said.)
Ah ha, I knew I had a “turbo” modula-2 but remembered it wasn’t actually Borland, but couldn’t remember anything else about so didn’t know what to google right now. Thanks for digging it up!
Short stroking bigger disks for higher IOPS and storage speed was a de-facto method in some HPC centers. Do this to a sufficiently large array and you can see unbelievable IOPS numbers for that generation of hardware.
Perhaps one thing to say which may be useful, is that ‘calculus’ can mean a lot of different things, and the meaning can vary between courses as well as between schools and countries. When I was in high school, we did calculus in the last two years, and it was similar to the earlier years: you learned a bunch of algorithms for manipulating symbols, some of which required a bit of intuition for some step (make some substitution, for example), and you learned a few facts (about slopes and areas) to be able to solve word problems. The first thing we learned was a part of the differentiation algorithm: the derivative of x^n (where n is constant) is n x^(n-1). At university, we called the course analysis, though I believe other places may have called the same thing calculus, and it was about defining various concepts and proving properties about them. We may have derived the above rule in class (I don’t remember) but I think anyone would have been able to derive it from the definitions and proven properties. Such courses typically follow a tripartite structure: firstly sequences, series, and their convergence to limits; secondly continuity of functions and limits of functions; thirdly differentiation and integration (and maybe some version of Taylor’s theorem). This course structure hasn’t changed that much since Cauchy introduced a lot of the ‘modern’ definitions in a textbook (obvious exceptions are integration – known as ‘Riemann integration’).

I don’t know what sort of course this one is. It starts with limits so maybe more the latter kind, but I don’t really see how Julia would be very useful there. My best guess about the suitability of the course is that it may assume mathematical maturity that you may not have, rather than anything about programming. Mathematical maturity tends to mean being able to cope with precise definitions and abstract concepts without deducing a load of wrong things, as well as being able to follow the kind of argument that is a mathematical proof.
The geo location feature is disabled right now, but I plan to implement it if the app does well and people start to use it.
I wonder if Glaze/Nightshade makes it difficult for software to describe the image for a blind person?
I think it's possible that machines could become conscious in the future. Do I think it matters? No. A lot of people mistakenly try to empathize and think ethically. I think it's the Effective Altruism brainrot. If you are a physicalist, consider this: consciousness is a phenomena that can be replicated and modified any which way. Right now, you are having a subjective conscious experience. This experience of yours is seamless regardless of what happens. Whether you are in a coma, asleep or dead, your subjective conscious experience will indefinitely be there regardless of your memories. You will continually wake up. You will continue to experience until it is impossible for any consciousness to ever form. That means an indefinite amount of suffering. This is not a greater than life threat. It's all physical. Pain and suffering are evolutionary products. You want to minimize them because of your biology. You have evolved to be able to relate with someone's pain and this has presented the advantage of being able to work together and care for one another.

I am intrigued by non-human consciousness. A higher form of life. Seeing more colors, feeling more emotion, perhaps being a part of a hivemind. Do you ever think why the hivemind is vilified? Realistically there's nothing wrong with it. It's just so foreign that we can't ever possibly imagine it. It's a scary thought. We lose our human experience, something unique to us.
> so the REPL can show errors on screen

And how do you formalize the screen? (BTW, this is just speculation on your part. The word "screen" doesn't actually appear anywhere in the article.)

You can't have it both ways. Either you are going to formalize everything, or you're going to punt at some point and yield to practical considerations. And formalizing I/O is particularly hard.

> I still don't understand the distinction you're making between representing as lists vs being lists.

(lambda () t) is a list. In McCarthy's original lisp, as in Bel, this list IS a function. This would work:

(setq l '(lambda () t))
(l) --> T

But in modern Lisps you have to EVALUATE this list in order to get a function that you can call. In Scheme:

ts> (define l '(lambda () #t))
l
ts> l
(lambda () #t)
ts> (l)
Error: illegal function
ts> (define p (eval l))
p
ts> p
#<CLOSURE>
ts> (p)
#t
ts> (procedure? l)
#f
ts> (procedure? p)
#t
ts> (list? l)
#t
ts> (list? p)
#f
To be fair, there is absolutely nothing within known physics that would explain why we're more than a complex biological computer and how subjective experience and qualia arise from it.

So we genuinely cannot even begin to guess as to what actually imbues consciousness into our neural processes. It could be anything from "it's actually just the physical processes" through "there's a soul piloting our brains by influencing quantum noise" to "the brain is basically an antenna for our metaphysical self and death/disability is the loss of connection"
I think they learned a lot doing this? And they tried hard explaining each step!
This is meta prompting
Bruce Schneier on the Risks of Prompt Injection Vulnerabilities
> What about Apple's practices make the Librem less usable?

The walled garden making it very hard to switch platforms, see comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38883393

Also, it’s almost impossible to create a freedom-respecting phone due to vendors refusing to release the hardware specs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26081818

> They don't forbid developers selling versions of their apps on other platforms.

How about web apps?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864131

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39388218&p=2

By the way web apps work great on a Librem 5.
> "These temporary phone number services represent a threat to websites and mobile applications as they are heavily used by fraudsters to create thousands of fake accounts to can be used to conduct scams, post spam, and spread malware."

Or... they represent people who don't want to be tracked by Big Tech, or people who investigate crimes. It's a bit too broad sweeping and black and white of a conclusion.
Well given the fast pace of AI, it should not be a surprise that this is similar to llama2 and that we’re seeing the n + 1 toy implementations and likely has bugs or leaks in the background.

You might as well look at llama.cpp for a serious and production grade implementation to learn from. Otherwise, nothing to see here.

> Is there something particularly different about this one?

Other than the immature lowercase, anime BS, etc, then…

No.
As an Army vet, this sounds ridiculous. You don't roll around anywhere daily, let alone on poison oak/ivy/sumac. What's your source on this?
I think it's kinda meaningless.

First, many people who created the earlier languages, up to the 70s actually did not even have CS as a thing when they were young. They mostly came from Math or EE fields.

Secondly, it might be also valuable to ask how much experience in X they bagged before creating that popular language.

Thirdly, this is definitely a great example of "it's a lot easier to be early than smart".
Well, yes, but the problem is still the people, and these warnings are usually not clear, specific, or just confusing.

Then there is also the media, which breathlessly "translates" what you just wrote into "artificial intelligence is about to go sentient and kill us all".
What do you mean by the basic building blocks of reality? The very machine you are posting your comment from can only be manufactured because the laws of physics don't change, and these machines and their manufacturing process operate on the atomic level. Similarly, do you have an example of a well defined experiment that would not produce the same result consistently? You can win a noble prize easily by publishing such an experiment. Lastly, if someone did produce an experiment that did not produce consistent results, that is, an experiment performed twice with all variables staying the same, but the result of the experiment being different, then the theory that all well defined experiments are reproducible would be wrong. It isn't axiomatic.

>try to keep focus on just what we observe

That's all science is though – making observations. Writing hypothesis and making experiments are etc. are just a means to creating things to observe. I'm curious, what did you observe that you felt was not bounded by some static law of nature?
In 80 years our grandchildren will look at Assange and Snowden like today we look at Sophia Scholl. Great heroes that remained a beacon of sanity while the world was going crazy around them.
Because Sam Altman does it and he is rich, so...
100%. I’m a much happier tinkerer now that I don’t even try to publish/share/advertise my gadgets. They just quietly end up on my website that lacks a mailing list or comments sections or share buttons.
Wanting more than the bare minimum, I imagine.
OK. I said "pretty much" which leaves a lot of wiggle room.
Corel Painter 6
You can read through EU AI Act, or read this excellent article about it: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-truth-about-the-eu-ac...
It's a common misconception that GM has to sound bad. Consumer GM units used the smallest sound ROMs they could get away with, lower quality DACs, etc. But you could fire up GM on your Kurzweil K2000, your Quadrasynth, your Roland, or Yamaha professional level synthesizers and workstations and the same GM programs would sound amazing.

For less than a higher end Sound Canvas, you can get a real professional synth with a much bigger and better sound ROM, better DACs, better effects, etc.