skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can appreciate some of the other replies here. I didn't finish school and I disagree with respondents to this poll (at least from the perspective of a SWE).

In my experience if you want to work in the kind of software fields and companies that enable you to retire then you should go to school. These places often gate your acceptance behind algorithm problems. Those problems you will only know the tricks to solving if you have a decent background in math, unless you want to spend a lot of time memorizing answers. A lot of SWEs have a pretty intuitive understanding of math that they don't even realize when compared to average people. This was something I noticed immediately about myself when working with degreed peers. That's to say, I spent a lot of time early in my career reading books on math primers and algorithms. I understand people who have degrees do this at times as well, but believe me when I say my primer and your primer were different in their thickness.

What I wish is that software application (as opposed to theory) were taught in more in the way that we teach and level up trades. You could even split this out among some high level fields. On top of that, I'd really enjoy watching us ditch LeetCode interviews and base them on this certification and work history. I think we'd retain people in software longer, it'd counter ageism, and it'd attract a lot more diverse talent.

Tertiary to that, college is an experience. It's where a lot of people grow up, make mistakes, learn to grow quite a bit, etc... not that it's entirely worth the price of admission, but it is an important place for young people imo.
Amazing work! Have you thought about doing a tutorial on how to do reverse engineering?
> If a conflict with China ever comes to pass, it is not at all predestined that the US will repeat its WW2 feat rather than its WW1 experience.

Exactly, I see it pretty hard to pull the same feat again unless there is a very big alignment with the companies that have installed capacity in the country.
And dunno about AIM, but MSN took a looooong time to implement things like offline messaging. ICQ didn’t (ever?) need the double coincidence of being online. Even iMessage and its fallback SMS today are bad for this.

Fun MSN story: I read you could put curse words in your name subtitle if you used 0x ascii hex codes for one of the characters.

So I pulled up the list of ascii codes and hoped that “beep” would work, but it did not make anyone beep. Then I tried null, and it made all my contacts go offline, and offline again as soon as they logged back in. Again and again. Except myself (can’t remember if that was because I used a 3rd party client aMSN) Hehe. Had people apologize to me for suddenly dropping mid convo.
I think everything you said was true, but I would point out that I think of this as a practical rather than ideological position. I'm not saying it never makes sense to build inside of a walled garden, I'm saying there is a costly tradeoff. I would speculate that it might be more important going forward, but time will tell.
> “The thing with Search — we handle billions of queries,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told The Verge on Monday when asked about the AI overview rollout. “You can absolutely find a query and hand it to me and say, ‘Could we have done better on that query?’ Yes, for sure. But in many cases, part of what is making people respond positively to AI Overviews is that the summary we are providing clearly adds value and helps them look at things they may not have otherwise thought about.”

That's a really weird and risky way of putting it.

There is a huge difference between being a search engine that finds (external) pages, and coming up with answers in your own name. If some page on the Internet says Obama is a Muslim, who cares, it's not important. But if Google says that Obama is in fact a Muslim, suddenly it's a very big deal. And that's true for every query, on every topic imaginable.

Every answer they get wrong attacks their image a little, and out of billions of queries it's inevitable they will get many wrong.

This forced, radical change motivated only by fear feels like Google+ all over again. Or New Coke.
It's funny (as in not funny) google is blaming the users for uncommon or unusual queries.
It was way ahead of its time even in the 90s. I remember being swooned by the real-time typing windows, amazing sound effects, Just Works™ file transfer, and the wonderful contact list with people decorating their names with ASCII art. I made some wonderful friends in real life.
It went from search to making up utterly unusable dreck. It's not helpful, it's machine-generated nonsense that's more expensive to operate than search.
> But I would argue for most businesses a sociopath is what you need to operate in a market environment predicated on preying on the pocketbooks of the populace.

Allowing such a market to arise is a societal problem. Thankfully the future can still be changed, if we want to badly enough
I certainly ran into scammers on ICQ.
Correct, but "carcinogen" is still a percentage of a chance of mutation developing. For example, there are heavy-alcohol users who don't develop cancer.
AltaVista was great until they quit running the crawler for a few months - I gave up when I searched something and the first 10 results were dead links. I'm told they got it running again just after I left, but I never looked back to see. (there is a lesson here)
Despite some evidence to the contrary I believe most people aren't that stupid and the "average person" isn't actually typing in these queries, these are marginal cases played out for meme value.
10902983 sez bye, too. I lost the account cos this genius right here chose a male first name as the password.
Show HN: CBK.ai
Looks like content marketing to me. Both in purpose and motivation.
I do neither of those things!
I would replace "perceived" with "significant" but yeah, pretty much.
> The League of Nations existed, but was an abject failure for a number of reasons and failed to prevent WWII.

UN did not prevent WWIII. It is the mere fact that nuclear weapons and MAD made the global superpowers realize that there is no winning in such war. And that a security competition and proxy wars are acceptable. But direct confrontation to be be avoided at all costs. It is not like US, Russia (probably china and others too) do respect the UN that much anyway.

If nuclear weapons existed before WWII, There is a slim chance that it would happen.

UN did not protect iraq and Ukraine from illegal invasions such that League of nations did not protect Ethiopia in the past. The mere fact that in all cases no body wanted to confront a major power invading another country far away.
> Do you know of any (hand-wavy is ok) intuitive explanation for why this machine will halt, beyond the inductive proof's given in your article?

If the Halting problem could be solved by intuition, it wouldn't be much of a problem.
I signed up for it to complete my config of Trillian, which I thought was totally amazing at the time. Too much sad computing nostalgia :(
Can you point me to the Google Operating Manual?
I think one of the techniques underexplored in all the hype is guiding the evaluation process depending on the context. I.e. if you're generating code, it has to satisfy the parser for the given language. If the token is unsatisfactory, throw it out and try another one. Thought chains could be generated in a similar way (you can do so with special tokens, see "Recursion of Thought").

But yeah overall GenAI tends to remain hype-over-substance.
2FA also pushed me out, and Copilot locked the door ... to be fair, unless a client comes with bucket full of money with a key on top.
Hubbard is an example that proves the point, not a good dude.

I wasn't comparing "people in power" to the parent commenter.

I was comparing the study authors to the parent commenter.

My point was, more globally, should we halt scientific progress because things could be used with bad intent to do bad? Where, and how, do we draw the line?
AI will create more successful founders
Yeah the other day I was browing the NYC central park website - https://www.centralpark.com/

And I noticed my 2021 Macbook was unable to scroll to the bottom of the page. It was just chugging like crazy, and I couldn't see the content I wanted because of it.

Then I remembered I didn't install AdBlock on this browser. I installed it and went back to the page, and OK now I can actually use the website.

---

What concerns me is not so much that there are lots of low quality sites looking to scrape pennies from Google or whatever.

It's that this kind of software development culture is normalized -- where government agencies and hospitals are sending data to Google and Facebook.

I would be interested to hear from somebody who works in those areas what the incentives are.

If you are working on the central park website, why are you adding ads to it?
Isn't it funded by the government?

Specifically I opened up dev tools and I see like 297 blocked requests to

https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net

I see ads for Lowe's Hardware Memorial Day sales and such. OK fine, but why are they locking up my computer and making the site unusable?

(Also does anyone remember the days when Google was "morally" against invasive image ads and irrelevant ads? They preached non-invasive and relevant, helpful ads. Those days seem SO far away now ...)
Yup, to anyone reading this, I want to second-recommend Kagi. Also super-customizable.
Passed away due to complications from Cancer.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/morgan-spurlock-documen...
I hope that the artists creating the image knew that whatever they submitted would be the most displayed image worldwide, for a couple of years.
> "Shift left" is a relatively hot, relatively new catchall bizterm that typically makes one visualize pushing a workload "upstream" from its current place in the flow.

I've been shifting left (and using those words) for over two decades. Nothing new here.

> In this context, I think TDD is close to what it means.

Nope. It's only close in that both have to do with testing.

TDD is you writing unit tests. Shifting left is about parallelizing someone else's work in the rest of the test pyramid. If QA can write their integration/system/contract/other tests as you're writing your code, you can have working tests for new features ideally as soon as the feature is runnable/testable instead of QA waiting to "see what the dev code does" to write against it.
Can't wait for the robot plumber to come by and unclog my toilet.
I think you can credit a win to IRC recently, too, when someone tried to buy control of Freenode and it seems (as least as an onlooker) that everyone successfully coordinated upping stakes and moving to a new network. I don't use IRC, but I find that impressive.
Currently at least text properties and size is on the main screen in the current defaults for Impress and, just like PowerPoint, only made visible and editable when you click something which has a text size. Maybe it was different in the timeframe you were talking about (barring any actual information on the request) but this combined with how abrasive your comment is leaves little reasoning for why it's horrible and casts serious doubts the ban was actually related to asking about interface enhancements even if that's when you were banned.

FWIW I prefer PowerPoint over Impress as well (particularly when it comes to the browser side of things on the go), using one or the other is just not a vendetta of mine.
Ouch, I hadn't really considered it before but that quote deeply resonates with me. The experience of trying to debug windows wifi system is day and night compared to wpa_supplicant/mac80211.
Would love to read a blog post about that.
Yikes. I'm not that familiar with Sundar but is he typically this bad at defending his products? Also this seems like a huge risk to even take this interview, any background on why he's there?
This is why I pretend to not be good at Excel. Once word gets out, it becomes your job.
I've noticed the same with Facebook. It's why I've stopped even bothering to log into the website.
> to a right wing slanted site's angst against how Biden's program is going

Politico is NOT right wing.

I used to be a staffer with the DNC and we'd prefer them over The Hill (the GOP version) though we both would talk with both.

> for who knows exactly what

Confidential Computing.

Basically how to process data in use without knowing the underlying data itself.

So, if I need to train a model on PII, I can encrypt that PII dataset yet still get an equally functional model.

Furthermore, it's used to minimize hardware stack attacks after Supermicro (yes it did happen).
Looks like they had the voice actress already and only later asked Johansson if she wanted the part, which she declined.

https://x.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/1793788636946743705
It is highly unlikely it will say that, there's 10000x more articles on the fact that he isn't, and more specifically, the LLM would be "aware" (aware in this sense in that it would have possible next words with high rank) that there is a specific controversy over this.

It's the long tail and new stuff that it will get wrong.
I understand, at the same time the api shouldn't be too different to what is used by other devices (otherwise they would be just shooting themselves in the foot)
I hope the last message sent on ICQ will be as poetic as the last message on AIM (according to https://justanman.org/posts/the-last-message-sent-on-aim/)
mIRC has the same chance of dying as Irssi. As in none.
Russia's removal of border markers 'unacceptable' – EU
Judging by that table (month numbers being the same for Feb + March in 2024), you have to adjust -1 for dates before March in leap years?
Yes, OP is talking about the ease of migration from cloud providers vs a PaaS. My point is most companies these days either build their own or operate a PaaS so "migrating cloud providers" would be daunting to them due to lack of exposure to core services (network, compute, etc).
How to win at Enterprise AI – A playbook
And this is why I subscribe to Kagi. They also have AI based summary, but you have to invoke it manually on a specific search result (in which case you know where the info is coming from).

I feel like we're on a race to the bottom. All of Silicon Valley and beyond have big FOMO on the AI hype train and any and all use of AI pleases investors. I guess we'll see how it all pans out in a few years.

One thing is for sure, generative AI and LLMs open up a whole can of worms in terms of disinformation and information noise on the Internet. The signal to noise ratio will greatly shift with these new initiatives.
Instant messengers were great — better than texting and better than posting on FB/Twitter IMO. I loved away messages, which were ephemeral and not spammed to your network. We're getting a little of that functionality with iOS's DND status, but it's not customizable.

My theory is that FB didn't want to enable away messages because then people would just set it once and not log in for a long time. It's a shame that a feature that was common 20 years ago is now only starting to make a comeback.
I don't remember file transfer being very reliable, it used direct connections between clients so if you had a router it wouldn't work.
Can't remember my driver's license number but will never forget 13658022.
RIP
Yes, that's what people typically use a calendar for. So you agree that this trick isn't useful for anything?
That's very fuzzy. What about e-mail? Or the phone network? Or the internet in general? Yes, there can be some social aspects to it. But that by itself does not make it into a social network.

Networks have topologies and paths. The social graph matters on facebook because you get connected to your friend's friends which is a core feature of the platform. This is not the case with chat platforms.
How to handle change management for dimensional data models
Saw this post on reddit today where google recommended jumping off the golden gate bridge

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1czif9o/willing_to...
> “We conducted extensive testing before launching this new experience and will use these isolated examples as we continue to refine our systems overall,” the spokesperson added.

Isolated? From what, exactly?
There is a deep regulatory involvement in developing vaccines and there is a long supply chain from manufacturing a dose to delivering it into the body of a patient.

The regulators exist because we can’t trust the private companies. Who regulates the regulators?

The whole thing depends on the integrity of our institutions. If those institutions fail to uphold their trustworthiness, then we won’t be able to trust the process.
The hack was to scan ICQ numbers for their associated email addresses, filter by big providers like Hotmail and Yahoo and try to sign up for the same address. Some were abandoned and you could use the username again. Then password-reset in ICQ and voila, there’s your 6-digit ICQ number.

But yeah, I bought a 6 digit number on eBay for 5-10 bucks too ;)
> 2FA pushed me out of github

I don't understand why would something like that be a reason to avoid github (or any service) in itself?

In this era, 2FA is important security measurement and it is not like they enforce only SMS as the only 2FA form.
Self-hosting is just responsible computing now. The big companies are just too big to care about small businesses, and will use your data in any way that they please - take it or leave it. And it's cheaper to boot. A synology NAS or a raspberry pi 3 could cover 90% of what most internet services offer the average consumer/small business right now.
I think the unspoken assumption here is that China is already producing at near-maximum capacity, while the United States is barely trying and has lots of headroom.

Is the assumption correct?

I haven't been able to find a study on America's plan for local naval production capacity given such a conflict, which is kind of stunning to me. Perhaps there are classified studies.

This conflict (assuming it lasts multiple years) would play out across the Pacific, possibly offering replays of old Pacific battles from WW2. Large numbers of naval assets and expeditionary forces squaring off across millions of square miles of blue-water ocean. Lots of naval tonnage attrition.

America is either guarding it's planned production capabilities close to the chest, or they anticipate winning such a conflict quickly without the tonnage attrition I just referenced.

Or my searching skills are weak.
Why are these kinds of products being released when the underlying technology just doesn't work?
ICQ later.
The guy is an arrogant, out of touch douchebag.

https://gizmodo.com/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-dont-equate-fun...
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22jridhxjiej%22

gives no matches for me, what does it show for you?
While this is true, we’re talking about integer overflow. That’s part of safe Rust. So it’s not really germane to this conversation.
There are already edge databases.

Also, not everything requires a database.
Sundar Pichai Tells Employees They Don't Need Money to Have Fun Amid Cost Cuts
Building a Robot Roller Coaster [video]
I had 2589620 ... I have the password, somewhere. :)
Like the joke of the guy returning to Boston after being away for years; asks his cab driver "Do you know where I can get scrod" and the driver says "Sure, but I've never heard that in the past perfect before!"
I don't think he's coming back next year
Most of these are owned by some megacorp, which IMO renders them untrustable, the same may have been true for git at a time (I can't remember if Linus still "worked for" redhat at the time of git's creation), but it's sufficiently insulated from that now - even if MS is viewed as holding github's reins too closely. But I'm not trustly a VCS from facebook, or even google.

The real issue is though, that each time someone writes a new VCS they seem to want to make it centralised again, often with silly ideas like auto-uploading changes. I do dislike the git stash and the "mess" of untracked files in git status, but I'm not sure what the true answer is.
54443480
KDE Plasma 6.1 Lands Dynamic Triple Buffering Support
To conflate Slack's T&C faux pas with "self host your own LLM" seems like a stretch.

IT Sec and Compliance must read the T&Cs and make better vendor selection choices.
Yes, that's what i meant.

"With an Android if you have a shitty "feature" usually you can just change it"

I have a samsung and everything is custom, nothing but the setting menu is Samsung at this point on my phone.

And my choice was dictated only by the hardware in the Android ecosystem (i wanted the S pen)

On an iPhone you can customize very little, the homepage alone would make me furious.
I've worked in teams that had testers who used commercial tools to run regression tests against real UIs and found that to be helpful.

As you point out there are certain things that are easy to test. The other day I wrote a paginator using a TDD approach because I knew roughly what behavior I wanted but wasn't sure how to implement it. I wrote a simple function that took a few arguments and returned an array like

[0, 1, 2, -1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, -1, 26, 27, 28]

which made it really easy to test the inputs and outputs. I didn't think the code that generated the HTML from that was really worth testing because it was so superficial.
The impression I get, broadly, is that she's smart enough to consistently star in well regarded movies, know her worth, power, and how to control a narrative. Disney, a notoriously hard-assed company, for all intents and purposes caved to her in a few months.

Similar things could be said about Taylor Swift.
I am not as worried about these sorts of ludicrous results as I am the ones that are close enough to correct to be believable. That is where you will get in trouble.

I have a similar experience using GitHub Copilot… it usually gets it right, which is great, and sometimes gets it really wrong, in which case I don’t use the suggestion and move on with my work.

However, every now and then it will give me a result that really looks correct, but is wrong in some minor way, and I end up getting burned because it takes me way too long to realize where the error is.
383105.

I can remember an unused IM account from a lifetime ago but not a single ffmpeg flag.
Would love to see non-stem on there, especially history where there is so much exciting stuff going on as many historians are stepping one foot into Archaeology. We are discovering so many amazing things right now.
All characteristic that can make a great CEO...as long as he is competent...
I think we may need a tool to generate classless CSS frameworks like this, so that everyone can fine-tune color palette, paddings, font sizes an so on
Really? ChatGPT 3.5 and beyond models are fairly capable of understanding PoS and doing text analysis. I have never seen that issue yet with the more advanced models, although smaller/older ones tend to imagine fmthings about the text.

Last year I wrote a paper about using LLMs for definition generation for unknown words based on context, and the models did a fairly good job. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10346136/ if someone is curious.

I would like to read prompts where the models are failing in such way. The field is moving quite fast.
Fun fact: Linus Torvalds originally named his fledgling OS as “Freax”, but it was an FTP site admin who came up with “Linux” and the rest is history. So perhaps the opportunity is not completely missed…