skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Saying that you won’t accept “garbage” is a pretty toxic way of phrasing things. If you say that around the people you work with (especially junior people), they have a habit of interpreting any negative feedback on code as you calling it garbage. Then they start avoiding feedback from you when possible and then everyone suffers.

I’ve seen this pattern play out over and over. It makes what could be a great lead senior engineer just a lone wolf only a few people want to work with.

> feel that I do really good work. I've been doing this for a long time (like, 40 years),

Never substitute tenure for competence, particularly when you are convincing yourself that you do good work.

One of the biggest red flags in hiring is when people defer to tenure as a reason for anything technical. It is very easy to do things wrong or poorly for a long time without even knowing it. So falling into the trap of “I’ve been doing this 40 years and people have paid me for it, so it must be good” is a death sentence.
OpenEMR is an OSS practice management system and is certified for medical use by ONC in the USA. It has been deployed in the medical context in many jurisdictions in the USA. There are some government agencies / larger organizations that require 'sole-sourcing' which I think is what you are referring to, it varies by jurisdiction, but I've never heard of anything at the federal level and widespread state level that 'requires' this. If this was the case I doubt we'd have made it through the many times we've been certified.

I will mention that the certification process is expensive. It ranges in the 100K-250K range each time we go through it in fundraising and to go through the certification process.
I didn’t say engineers are dismissive of other engineers’ practices. The general pattern is “that makes sense for your field, but we can’t use it because…” followed by silly reasons.

I was guilty of this myself back when I was an indie dev. It took me an embarrassingly long time, for example, to admit that git wasn’t just something teams needed to coordinate, and that I should be using it as the sole developer of a project.
Jevons Paradox will take care of any surplus created.
'Tesla Is Not a Family Business': New York Official Blasts Musk's Pay Package
> until the industry develops sexbots which look and feel like a real human.. at that point the natural birth rate will probably drop to zero

Why? We have a good comparison to sex bots - normalized prostitution.

In societies where prostitution and Sex Work is normalized (eg. Thailand and Japan by infidelity rates), sex work was not the cause of a TFR drop - it was government mandated family planning drives along with rising incomes.

People will be horny, but blaming the tools is the same as yelling at trees while ignoring the forest.
You can pretty much extrapolate this to billionaire's understanding of sci-fi. They're deliberately missing its cautionary-tale essence and are instead thrilled by the dystopic scenery. There's this spot-on meme-saying:

The billionaires investing in space travel don't want Star Trek. They want Dune
I don't know whether it's true in Altman's case, but the Torment Nexus is a frequent theme in tech companies:

> Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
This gives them what they are looking for though (public praise). It quickly ends the interaction but doesn’t prevent future ones.
Steps 3 and 4 are usually the difficult ones.
I am a nutcase on personal freedom and would never vote for limitations on reproductive rights. But this may be a case where my ideology is in conflict with the thriving of our species. A big fraction of our nosedive in fertility is due to reproductive control. Accidental births are more feature than bug for those of us who believe that human action is a net positive and that improved living standards and economic growth are good.

I don't really know how to reconcile this with support for individual rights. Except where authoritarianism is even worse, and I'm not sure that's a given.
In the version I tested you can adjust the backlight brightness or turn it off completely at any time, it's a bit like the reMarkable but about half as reflective (the whites are more like gray). If you turn on the backlight then it's effectively just a normal backlit tablet but with a monochrome display and night color mode.

If you're indoors without the sun shining directly at the tablet or without good lighting, in my experience you need to use the backlight for it to be usable, whereas the reMarkable is much more reflective and as easy to read as normal paper in any lighting conditions.
People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)
I’ve written tests to do exactly that, by adding carefully placed locks that allow the test to control the pace at which each thread advances. It’s not fun but you can do it.
Google's market share was suffering because they have been using their dominance to force everyone to participate in the "game the search engine" scam that Google was selling, which exists only to cheat the Google search engine.

Once enough of us realized that Google search results are usually just paid ads, what's the point anymore?

It's insane, and "AI" isn't going to fix any of it.

The rot in our tech economy is astonishing.
Not what you asked, but you thought about selling your projects? That would at least be a few million: ETFs would then make you quite a bit more than you make now.
Bring on the new post and more details, this stuff is interesting.
Enjoy the nonsense, this is the “egg freckles”[0] stage of the technology.
Why have hobbies when someone else can do it better?
Matt Stoller’s theory is that Google at this point is like Boeing was maybe a decade ago — an incredible product company that has already been taken over by finance types, and on the way to irreversible crash.
I think the link was intended to point here: https://world.hey.com/dhh/linux-as-the-new-developer-default...
Answers, sure. Bit you'll never know if those are answers, bullshit, trolling, or straight up hallucinations. So no, it's not an option at all.
> Any new entrant sort-of has to prove itself also as crawling sites can be hard

It's very hard, getting harder as websites grow more hostile to crawlers. (With more and more putting up login walls to keep poorly written AI crawlers out.)

But the real problem is that tech is culturally unused to dealing with monopolists "on even ground". The wider tech community operates on the implied worldview that they can take on anyone by just asking daddy A16Z for a duovigintillion dollars. For 25 nearly-continuous years, you could just outspend to get into even the most hostile markets.

That economic climate is just ... gone now. No more free money. You can't just buy your way to the top anymore, the business has to financially work.

And most importantly: You can't outspend the incumbents anymore, but they still can outspend you.
I agree, and a lot of this applies to large companies as well.

Of course larger orgs will have higher tolerance for a wider set of technologies, but this tolerance is not infinite, and choosing tech because that one team was a fan creates staffing problems over time, especially as the original devs move on. Eventually you get “estate sprawl” that’s difficult to manage.

Choosing to minimise dependencies is definitely a (good) choice. The key is the right tech for the task at hand. Equally org-wide “use Oracle for everything” mandates aren’t helpful.

Balancing these at a large org definitely needs good engineering leadership!
> I recently need to find some details of hardware implementations for a feature. I used Google to find specs for this hardware. The specs were hard to read or didn't explain things as I needed. So I asked ChatGPT and it gave me what I needed. It first regurgitated info from the specs but I was able to ask it to explain pieces in more detail and it was great! At what point do I just stop using Google search to find an answer?

But was it accurate ? Chat GPT just provided you with the statistically most likely specs. If the actual doc for this hardware is lacking, this is 100% hallucinations.

My experience is that ChatGPT is simply bullshitting you (sometime accurately), Google is drowning the info in 20 links (where they try to make you buy "Hardware you're searching for"), and you have to go to DuckDuckGo to find the thing you're actually searching for.
If you value paying money for a good product I’d say kagi is the answer. It is definitely worth its cost if you can afford it.
Damn I wish I thought about that title.
Would open sourcing the core IP of a company “typically” require board approval?

If a company goes under, the investors will want to sell off the IP, open sourcing everything would make that IP less valueable. There must be some blanket clause in the term sheet to cover that, right? Ie: founders won’t do anything which will materially hurt the company without board approval (or something, I am no where close to a lawyer, this is all conjecture)
Most people have a singular image of the world.

Google, WhatsApp, Facebook, Tinder.

As if those services are the only options. No they are not.

The world isn't one dimensional nor binary. Everything is a multidimensional spectrum.

I don't use Google search and I don't have to. There are reasonable alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Brave Search. They aren't as good as Google was in the past, but there is also Wikipedia, Reddit, GitHub, Phind, StackExchange, Discord, IRC, forums, newsgroups, Claude, ChatGPT, LLama, and what not.

Sure, it would be awesome to get all the answers from a single input field, but honestly, even though Google was better in the past, this has never been the case for any sufficiently complex question.
> There's no "going back to how things were before" for me - there was no "before"! (...) Life will go on, but the demise of search engines is quite a terrifying prospect for me.

Speaking as someone who was born long before the public Internet: you can never go back to how things were before. Similarly, you can never really stay with the way things are now. The world changes. Even if you stick to the ways of your lifetime, or go back to the ways prior to your lifetime, the ways have change simply because the context has changed.

I'm not saying that we should jump the AI bandwagon. I'm just saying that we need to recognize the world is in constant flux.
I use a tool called TheGodFather
This is so interesting. I have learned more from a years’s use of chatGPT than from two decades of googling. Yeah, AI has drawbacks. But AI has never displayed an ad to me and only once displayed a cookie banner, and that’s worth quite a bit to me
you supply to the LLM the subset of data that you need for a specific prompt. That's RAG.
The Cognitive Design of Tools of Thought (2014) [pdf]
The list is missing "Retargetable C Compiler, A: Design and Implementation", which is one of my favorite programming books. It's a literate program of a full c compiler.
Any friendly OSS Android app?
It's cheaper to buy a house than to rent. Story at 6.
Weird, because they make one of the best small language models (phi series) which is great for finetuning.
Are you a marketer for DDG? No need to get so paranoid. People just share their experiences.
> The trust Google has built with users over the last 25 years is the most valuable asset the company owns.

That gave me a laugh. I don't trust Google. Their entire purpose for many years now has been simply to enable SEO trash in such a way that users see as many ads as possible while providing a minimum amount of useful information so that users are not totally frustrated.

If Google could legally sell your organs, they would. They are that nefarious, and deserve all the hate they get. AI is just the next step. Frankly, if Google went bankrupt today, I think civilization would benefit immensely.
Google results are tailored on a number of factors such as location, your past searches and whatnot.

The same deal with the ads. Advertiser wouldn't pay for advertising of their product in a region or to a demograph they don't care for.

I'd be more surprised if you did get the same result as parent.
> men have many of the same feelings toward other men

This is absolutely true.

But it overlooks her premise, which is summarized in:

> And usually, what men in these situations actually want is closeness. They’re trying to get closer to me, physically or emotionally, in the only way they know how. That combination of poor emotional skillsets and a desire to get closer is exactly what puts me in danger.

As a male on the trail, you do have to watch out for the rare aggressive evildoer.

But you generally do not have to watch out for ordinary maladjusted humans (most of them) who just want closeness, and react to disinterest with escalating hostility.

You see this on the street too, in public. A woman who does not respond with brightness and cheer to a man's (perhaps gentle, but unwelcome) attention will often get yelled at or called names. On the street. In public.

Men almost never have to deal with demands placed upon them by strangers that are anything like this.
I wrote a sibling comment pointing out something similar, but I also realize the situations are still different.

If you take any woman/man combo meeting alone in the woods, chances that the man will feel compelled to get closer even if not encouraged (physically or even just emotionally, as the author points out) is, I think, greater than the other way around.

As I wrote, if I meet that man alone in the woods, I will still be wary and feel uncomfortable at first. But I can probably get to the point of letting my guard down more easily and faster, because the chances of me having anything the other side desires or that desire developing is just lower.

So yeah, I think sex/gender are a factor in terms of when it's possible to decide to take the risk and relax. Keep in mind I am talking about perceived risk, the man in the hypothetical doesn't have to be an actual predator.
> Service workers, which require a completely different mode of thinking from the rest of front-end development and have more in common with web server programming than DOM manipulation.

This is spoken like a true front end developer who's never used a thread before.
One thing that bothers me about Kagi: I have a large landscape-oriented screen. Why does Kagi only use the left part of it, and leave the rest blank?
Really often that's because they license it from a third party and they are not allowed to.
Tegmark isn’t a “top scientist”, but just a scientist. He’s definitely not an expert in AI, and is a cosmologist. What he’s known for is being president and founder of the Future of life institute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Life_Institute), an organization that seems focused on pushing restrictions on technologies at the US, EU, and UN.

For example they collaborate with Encode Justice, the organization that helped push CA’s SB1047, a misguided bill the CA Senate passed, and will limit open source and startup AI development and help large players in the name of “safety” (https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2024/05/225395-california-t...). Together the two organizations have been pushing a federal licensing scheme for AI (https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/ai-policy-for-a-better-...).

It’s also funny that these articles pushing a safetyism viewpoint never quote Yann LeCun, the other “godfather of AI”, who has repeatedly criticized AI doomerism (https://wired.me/business/how-not-to-be-stupid-about-ai-with...).
We'll still be fine for a century or two, and then we'll figure out how to grow ready-made, superhuman, sexless adults in pods, which is the new meta anyway. Our biology is reaching EOL.
Find a few good tools, understand why they're good, use them extensively and pick up others when needed (i.e. when you switch jobs or face a new problem).

It's really not that hard...
Dump the schema, create a document for each table, use LLM with rag?
Concertmaster is available as a paid companion app to Spotify. (For others interested in classical.)
This article reviews some of the most advanced RAG methods: https://medium.com/@krtarunsingh/advanced-rag-techniques-unl...

(not mine)
Production of next Nissan Leaf could begin as soon as March
I agree, but I miss static types. Has anyone here ever used Nelua[0]?

[0] https://nelua.io/
See the bar chart in the article, third image (don't know if hotlinking works): https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1024xn/p0j04fnt.jpg.webp

Probably besides the ones gaining more traftic, you're probably right the overall click-through rate will be vastly lower than it was before quote answers appeared, and now probably ever lower with the generated text answers
Hard to sympathise. Generalizes like mad. Stop being a full stack. Have something you do well and you should have little problems in this industry. There's so much work an opportunities.
I feel like the deskilling of web dev is that the web dev in this article doesn't feel competent enough to learn HTML, CSS _and_ Javascript at the same time.
I'd like to recommend that you start using libraries. You'll find that they often contain vastly more information than you'll find through web search, and you're already paying for them.
Some more data from https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/147u5c1/is_it_goo...

As for why I believe OpenSUSE is great for daily driving:

Tumbleweed always receives the latest packages from upstream development. This means that the distribution is guaranteed to work on the latest hardware and benefit from patches for optimal performance. As an example, Tumbleweed gained the optional x86-64-v3 packages while Arch, Fedora still lack these optimizations. On top of that, it also outperformed other distributions including Arch in various benchmarks.

Btrfs with Snapper can be utilized so the system can be rolled back to a working snapshot in case an update breaks anything. Which leads on the further point...

Packages are tested through OpenQA before they are distributed, ensuring that updates are stable, and if they pass the extensive QA, it ships automatically. So in most cases, OpenSUSE often gets the latest versions of software hours to days after upstream publishes those changes. On Arch, it took over a month for the maintainer to update GNOME 44.

OBS - The Open Build System which is similar to the AUR allows anyone to create and publish packages not found in the official repositories or packman. IMO this is a better approach to COPR or the AUR as they still go through openQA to detect problems with compilation.

OpenSUSE is desktop environment agnostic. GNOME, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon etc are all a priority and receive the same level of development. Other distros have been known to have weird quirky behaviors on certain DEs that doesn't seem to be an issue here.

Zypper is probably the most cohesive feature packed package manager out there. It can seamlessly change vendors to a different package source to avoid dependency/system breakages, provides solutions on conflicting packages and much more.

OpenSUSE combats software problems in smarter ways than other distributions. They have extensive backports for almost everything from the kernel,X11,firmware,KDE etc all of which is provided officially and not from third party developers like Ubuntu PPAs. This way, the software installed from SUSE directly can be trusted.

YaST is an amazing system configuration tool that allows you to administer the installation with a breeze. IMO this is one of the greatest selling points to this distro, and it never disappoints.

Security - OpenSUSE is more hardened by default than Arch/Fedora/Ubuntu, meaning it can be trusted and dependent on. If you value security highly, it remains of the best options for security conscious individuals.

All in all, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed/MicroOS are the best distributions available in my biased opinion. Combine this with the long track record of SUSE making solid distros, it simply cannot be beaten for desktop use.
It’s also not unreasonable to expect that an entity you want to take assets out of will, to the first order of approximatiom, be incentivized to make any process involved in that as protracted and difficult to navigate as possible. (This is also, I expect, why the asset transfer process described in TFA is initiated from the receiving side, why mobile number portability is requested via your new mobile network, etc.) So if the recipient doesn’t want to take on the verification burden because they just met you, falling back to a third party rather than the sender makes sense.
That’s a good point. I suppose they could make people co-dependent on the chatbot and even have them do unethical things.
That sounds overkill. It's usually enough to just tell the LLM to output valid SQL and it will adhere to the schema.
To an extent it tracks. No one wants their children to have fewer opportunities than they did, so a ‘rich’ person will probably have to plan on expensive tuitions and other activities. Obviously once you hit the ultra rich this is a rounding error, but for the middle class I see this dynamic at play.

I can afford one private school tuition, I can’t afford 3. Obviously that’s not a requirement for life, but I went to an expensive private school, do I not want my kids to have similar opportunities? Etc.
Agreed; I just wrote a reply elsewhere in the discussion where this also occured to me.
so which society is one where humans thrived?

looking back i do not see any period where humanity as a whole and each individual were better off and thriving more than today. sure, there were always some individuals who did well, but the majority was toiling away trying to bring food on the table.

to me, the whole point is developing society to improve. learning how to cooperate to achieve greater things than any individual or small group could.

modern society is not the pinnacle but a mere stepping stone to build an even better society in the future.

stories like this one are a reminder that we still have work to do.

we need to learn how to be supportive of each other but also teach and guide people to develop sensible goals and ways to achieve them. we also need to learn how to ask for help. without knowing any more about this person, merely speculating just based on the newest post, it looks like this person did not have access to any of that.
I like to say "single source of truth".
Hmm... really? They don't do their own crawling and indexing? How does one simply repurpose google's index... just technically or business speaking?
There's literally a saying that explicitly spells out "great artists steal." Art is imitation plus adaptation, and everybody used to know this, artists included, until they all spontaneously forgot about a year ago, around the time when the artificial imitation machines started becoming commercial threats.
The overall vibe I got was reading Jonny Truant’s passages in House of Leaves where he dives deeper into the work of the late Zampano and essentially forms a bond with him through that. Add in the occasional segue into fairly cringe sexual pieces for good measure.

Just replace the frequent mentions of Gargano with ‘the Navidson house’ and imagine the rest of it as an excursion into the weird.
This went from CSS framework bad to capitalism is bad really quick
Google already tries to infer whether a user is shopping or seeking information and serve results accordingly. If I search for "managed vs unmanaged switch" or "massage ball usage", I do not see any ads.

All I'm saying is that Google should consider allowing users to explicitly state their intent, since some queries ("massage ball" and "managed switch") are ambiguous and so the intent cannot always be reliably inferred. Analogy: while type inference works well in many cases, there are situations where explicit typing is required because the type is ambiguous based on usage alone.