skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Labor GPT does is being seriously under-appreciated by programmers because it
Yes, so somewhat of a provocative title, but I've been programming professionally now for 24 years, and I really think there's a quirk of human nature that's preventing the bulk of us from seeing something basic.

So if I'm wrong, please help educate me:

The bulk of what programmers do is search on Google as an entry-point into a string of S.O. posts, Github issues, and tech documents.

The programmer's job is then to synthesize that information into a solution.

The better the programmer is at searching, and the more experience they have integrating solutions, the better they are at programming.

Edit: The sentence above is important. I'm not saying programmers are worthless! But for some reason (probably cognitive biases) some commenters aren't seeing this.

If anything, I'm saying programmers are more valuable than ever.

--

That's the way I see it.

Another way of saying it is all us programmers _used_ to do is copy and paste from Stack Overflow, and while that's extremely simplistic and untrue, it's enough to capture the essence of my argument.

And now, ChatGPT does all that in seconds. That's the automation. Not the coding.

If you're going to comment, please drop an upvote to help get the conversation rolling. Thanks
Question for the Big Data folks: where do sampling and statistics fit into this, if at all? Unless you're summing to the penny, why would you ever need to aggregate a large volume of data (the population) rather than a small volume of data (a sample)? I'm not saying there isn't a reason. I just don't know what it is. Any thoughts from people who have genuine experience in this realm?
This meeting could have been a post it note.
I was kind of wondering that too. Perhaps for sandboxing, but then i wonder why not something like webassembly or even eBPF. I kind of wish the author went more into the why of it.
One of the things I wish people had realized about me back then was that just because I had the verbal fluency and reasoning ability of a much older child, it didn't mean I had the maturity and life experience of one. I still had such an incredibly limited knowledge pool to draw from, having only been on the planet for 3 years and only able to move myself around in it (and even then, not through basic things like doors due to handles I couldn't reach) for an even shorter time.

It's so tempting to treat kids who are precocious on one front as though they're older than they are, and expect them to do things like recognize dangers, or navigate social situations, or even know how to manage their own limits, but they're still also really little kids who need the adults in their lives to love them and care for them!
I think these examples still loosely fits the author's argument:

> There are some cases where big data is very useful. The number of situations where it is useful is limited

Even though there are some great use-cases, the overwhelming majority organisations, institutions, and projects will never have a "let's query ten petabytes" scenario that forces them away from platforms like Postgres.

Most datasets, even at very large companies, fit comfortably into RAM on a server - which is now cost-effective, even in the dozens of terabytes.
Exactly this. Not only would they not know the tech challenges, they also wouldn’t know the business/domain challenges.
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Little Bobby Tables
BigQuery has a generous 1TB/month free tier, and $6/tb afterwards. If you have small data, it's a pragmatic option, just make sure to use partitioning and sensible query patterns to limit the number of full-data scans, as you approach 'medium data' region.

There are some larger data-sizes, and query patterns, where either BigQuery Capacity compute pricing, or another vendor like Snowflake, becomes more economical.

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/pricing

BigQuery offers a choice of two compute pricing models for running queries:

On-demand pricing (per TiB). With this pricing model, you are charged for the number of bytes processed by each query. The first 1 TiB of query data processed per month is free.

Queries (on-demand) - $6.25 per TiB - The first 1 TiB per month is free.
The success planners almost always seem to be the same ones pushing everyone to "not overengineer". Uhhhh..
One case of mad chicken disease coming up, although chickens don't really need their head.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/running-ponies/meet-...
Big data was always a buzzword that was weirdly coopted by database people in a way which makes 0 sense. Of course there are vanishingly small number of use cases where we need fast random access to any possible record to look up.

However what ML systems and in particular LLMs rely on having access to millions (if not billions or trillions) of examples. The underlying infra of which is based on some of these tools.

Big Data isn't dead, just this weird idea that the tools and usecases around querying databases has been finally recognised as being mostly useless to most people. It is and always has been about training ML models.
Lol. Sounds like YouTube.
Just because 100% of information being true, doesn't make something fine.

To quote some senator "I have never owned a private jet". Which is 100% true. His wife did.

Something needs to be 100% true and 100% complete - the definition of the latter is very difficult, and probably subjective too.
The Proba missions are technology demonstrators. The main goal of Proba-3 is to demonstrate precision formation flying [1], which would enable large instruments in space without the need for large mechanical structures and complicated deployment mechanisms. Even in the age of Starship this could be useful.

The coronagraph is one example of an instrument that benefits from formation flying, but its actually considered a guest payload on Proba-3. Benefits of formation flying include being able to adjust the distance between the two spacecraft to block more or less of the Sun disk. Also in traditional coronagraphs the occluding disk is held in place with struts that obscure parts of the corona.

Other applications that could benefit are telescopes (radio, optical, X-ray), interferometric SAR, in-space inspection and servicing of existing satellites, to name a few.

[1] https://www.eoportal.org/satellite-missions/proba-3
"Better yet, we should give it to me and my friends.

I promise we are just morally superior and better people in my unbiased opinion."
I am not excusing any use of nuclear weapons, simply asking wether it would have been better if it was a private company instead of the US government. Also note that I didn't use the word "responsible". At least, the lunatics in the government are supposed to be elected lunatics.
> Because you can't do that and still call the resulting language C

You could if you introduced a new type of "safe array".

e.g.

int[] is a traditional C array which decays to int*

int[@] is a "safe C array" which is syntactic sugar for struct { size_t __count; int* __items; }, and as such can't decay

int[] and int[@] would not be directly interoperable, except by converting both to int* – maybe casting an int[@] to int* would automatically extract the __items member.

(The [@] syntax was chosen at random, if you don't like it, pick something else.)
Its keys or the token which gets the key from the TPM will probably be memory resident. I don't see encryption as a barrier to get relevant information.

In the future, if I know Microsoft, this trove will be mined for "consumer oriented optimization and improvement of Windows Experience". This means at least a DLL or more probably an API will be present to tap into that data, which can be (ab)used by third parties.

So, even if it's stored locally and be encrypted at rest, it doesn't mean it'll be completely unavailable to Microsoft or third parties.

Oh, lastly, I'm sure that there'll be at least one forensics company which will build a tool to dump this data, making governments do a little happy dance.
Related, I was struck by a comment made by the respiratory specialist doctor Martin Tobin, during the George Floyd murder court case. He said less than 10% of smokers actually go on to get 'issues'. He was pushing back on the line that as a smoker, George Floyd was more prone to react badly to 'having a knee on his windpipe...' you know the rest.

I did rewind and listen again then look up what he was saying and indeed, my assumed knowledge of smoking was altered.

Apologies for my vagueness with 'issues', I don't want to under or over state what he said and right now I can't locate the exact sentence within the days of testimony.

This man... https://archive.is/x5MRY
The CL Cookbook: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/
Expend4bles: 3k Canadians Targeted in Federal Court Piracy Sweep
Roman oyster 'processing site' discovered on banks of English river
I don't like "good fist issues". The real good first issues are so small that it's easier to fix them than labeling them as "good first issues".

If you find something that is labeled with "good first issue", it's probably a weekend project, where you have to make a few modifications and add test and tweeks.

Start with something smaller.

(If you are use to github actions, you can try to transform the manual test in the repos to automatictests. my guess is that react and node.js already have them, but there may be some related side projects that still have manual tests.)
Show HN: next-flag ∙ Feature flags by GitHub Issues and NextJS
I built a package that provides a feature-flag service powered entirely by GitHub issues and NextJS.

Define a list of app features and environments in an issue description, then simply toggle a feature on/off by ticking a checkbox - without having to redeploy your app.

It can be used directly inside a NextJS app or be deployed as a standalone service and consumed by any client over HTTP. Plus it supports react server-side components right out of the box.

The architecture leverages GitHub Webhooks to invalidate the NextJS cache whenever there is a change. The next time a user reloads a page in their NextJS app the cache is repopulated with the latest enabled features by sending a request to GitHub.

Features:

- Define feature flags across multiple environments or branches.

- Supports React Server Side and Client Side Components. Powered by the NextJS Cache.

- Define custom conditions that are evaluated at runtime to enable or disable features.

- Can be deployed as a stand-alone service to manage feature flags for multiple NextJS apps.

- Totally free. Unlimited projects, features and environments.

How does it work?

1. Define a list of features using Markdown in a Github Issue.

2. Configure a Github Webhook that hits your self-hosted `/api/next-flag` route when a feature is toggled and invalidates the NextJS cache.

3. Consume the `next-flag` package anywhere in your code. Features are fetched once and cached. Supports React Server Side Components, React Hooks, or simply send an HTTP GET request to `/api/next-flag`.
Foundational at Paypal and OpenAI? I've heard different. Also leaving out Twitter which has at least halved (if not more) it's valuation. I would say he's batting less than .500, so while still good, not a sure thing in the slightest and the trajectory seems to be on the down.
> You can't trust the LLMs, so you can't use them for anything where you aren't going to go through the output meticulously afterwards.

People keep saying things like this, and I’m confused because I go to Google for facts, and chatgpt is still super useful. Things I’ve used chatgpt for recently:

- Here’s some text I’m writing for a paper. Help me reword it to make it sound more natural.

- I want to put coconut crème into a stew. When should I add it? What else would go well?

- I’m making a Makefile which has some unusual requirements. How do I do that? Here’s the actual commands I want it to run. Write the makefile. (The makefile wasn’t great, but it was a good start and let me hit the ground running.)

- Generate 100 quirky characteristics for an npc in D&D

And so on. It’s a tool for creativity. I absolutely can’t wait for my HomePods to be replaced with chatgpt.
Are the crocs not posioned by mineral leftover at the site?
They need to. Honestly we need a way to completely segregate Chinese and Russian networks off, as well as anyone who peers with them. They are using our open networks to brazenly attack us in broad daylight… it’s time to fight back.
Yes op should use formula ast and excel model via formulas/excel/plot to translate syntactically to make sure its correctness, justifying the effort.
not op, but I think they mean the data is complex, heterogeneous and noisy. You won't be able to extract meaning trivially from it, you need something to find the (hidden) meaning in the data.

So AI currently, probably ;)
You asked HN if it’s worth it. My personal take: To me, no, it wouldn’t be worth it. I have a hard time seeing myself trying such an arrangement. I would rather try consulting instead. But your mileage may vary. If you feel that you have good reasons to try it, just do it. Then evaluate after 6-12 months.
The only good thing about Recall is that it has been the definitive decider of moving away from Microsoft permanently because for them to create such a ‘feature’ shows a complete lack of care about people’s private data - they’ll be leaving a huge jackpot prize for anyone who breaks into a system.

Just the kind of thing this NSA Prism-participating company would think was a top notch idea.

Not saying the real motive is surveillance… I’m sure a feature update or two away will also turn the data into a real money maker of advertising which instead of just being able to advertise to you, can kill two birds with one stone in being able to increase tenfold the ad revenue by watching who you’re talking with in your emails, your PM’s on Facebook (or wherever else) and then selling marketing data on you AND them.

If I was a purely profit driven individual - I’d be doing exactly that. But I have too much of a heart.

Even if they say that they’ll be abandoning this idea as they have ‘listened to user feedback’ or some other bull, the complete damage has already been done here.

Thank the lord there are an abundance of excellent OS alternatives.
I just disable Siri. Other than driving I can't imagine talking to Siri, it feels inefficient compared to just pushing a button.
> And you get a minimum of 16GB per stick unless you buy modules with dead ranks.

16 Gb per stick means you need 4 sticks to have a reasonably future proof 64 G...
Thanks for your review :)
> The second also seems randomised but from people you follow.

That’s not true.

The following tab is only showing you who do you follow with posts in chronological order
I don't think GPT4 did. It's really good at helping programmers. But left alone to complete a more complicated task, it's going to fail spectacularly.

However, I do think that another generation of models such as GPT5 + more mature programming agents will truly begin the transition of fully replacing entry level programmers. If not GPT5, then GPT6. It's inevitable.
Also visual narrowing, such as adding trees and light curves. People drive what they feel the road should be and mostly ignore speed limits.
So... if you want a reasonable amount of ram for real work (64 G+) you're better off with ddr4?
You literally do.
> Obsessed with this "you must use PostgreSQL for every use case" nonsense.

Pg fans are certainly here asking "why not PG?". Yet so are fans of other DBs; like DuckDB, CouchDB, SQLite, etc.
> just timesorted posts by who you follow

The same as Twitter, following tab is literally this.
Power of Attorney
My jaw just hit the floor. What a fascinating fact!
I ask a similar question on screens. Almost no one gives a good answer. They describe elaborate architectures for data that fits in memory, handily.
> In properly run networks, BGP hijacks shouldn't have a noticeable impact

Bullshirt. Even AWS Route53 has fallen victim to BGP hijacking. It takes 1 mistake for SHTF
Many of the really bad ones get quietly backed out after a while, and people tend to forget about them (I expect this will happen with Twitter, should it survive).

Personally, I enjoy Consignia: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/humbled-con...

I'm not sure there's ever really been a particularly successful name-based rebrand of a consumer product.
Sampling is almost always heavily used here, because it's Ace. However, if you need to produce row level predictions then you can't sample as you by definition need the role level data.

However you can aggregate user level info into just the features you need which will get you a looooonnnnggggg way.
Seriously, I think this is way off-base; the job of a software engineer (not a "programmer") is to distill problems that are both technical (bits) AND psychological (Bobs and Barbaras) into a reasonable, reproducible solution that can be subsequently improved upon and maintained. Most days, it's the latter that's the real work.

ChatGPT is, on one level, a fancy form of Google search: you still need to know how to leverage the prompts in order to make decent progress, and it's based on knowledge (correct OR incorrect) that was originally generated by a human, one of whom must still evaluate as to whether or not the outputs are relevant to the task at hand.

There's a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to this, by the way, that deals with the knowledge lifecycle: how concepts come to be, how they are reinforced socially, and then discarded when no longer relevant. The same lifecycle applies to the data pools used for training "old" models.
Interesting! You seem take "language" really far / different.

How about something like editing an image in Photoshop? There's a vocabulary (the commands) they get applied to the image. There are also rules (constraints). One could argue using photoshop is communicating with a computer, what to do with an image.

So while I say language is a misnomer for PL, you say it's a misnomer for natural languages. ;-)
I didn't mean support in a fanboy sense but a business sense and you know it which is why you clipped away the "potentially worth it" part.

Was the DTK rented below cost? Have proof of that? $500 to rent a screenless 2018 iPad Pro in 2020 (that would have been about what $1000 retail for that config?) seems like a shit deal.
Yep fully agree. I live in a small village near a country estate and lots of the people here kill and pluck their own foul, including myself. The ones that dont, have no issue with it.

When there is a shoot on the estate we request some of the birds and then through the season we regularly come home from work to find braces of dead pheasants hanging on our front door. We pluck them and then roast or make stews out of them and they are delicious.

It is common to walk through the village after a shoot and see dead birds hanging from most of the doors. Nobody complains or thinks it is strange, in fact everybody looks forward to the free meat!
We're actually "releasing" this new Braid-Text library today in 8 hours at Braid Meeting 86!

https://braid.org/meeting-86

The meeting is open. You're all welcome to join. :)
The funny thing about "big data" was that it came with a perverse incentive to avoid even the most basic and obvious optimizations on the software level, because the hardware requirement was how you proved how badass you were.

Like: "Look, boss, I can compute all those averages for that report on just my laptop, by ingesting a SAMPLE of the data, rather than making those computations across the WHOLE dataset".

Boss: "What do you mean 'sample'? I just don't know what you're trying to imply with your mathmo engineeringy gobbledigook! Me having spent those millions on nothing can clearly not be it, right?"
No mention of HiFive1 and FE-310, the first commercially available RISC-V ASIC and board, released in December 2016. I have one of the first batch, with signatures of all the SiFive people on the back. Still a pretty decent MCU ... Cortex M3 class, RV32IMAC, runs at 320 MHz on TSMC 180nm.
You should think that Satoshi didn't prevent you to mine, it was just a new project that nobody cared about.

If somebody launches a new blockchain today and put it in "Show HN" it is very probable that almost nobody will put their efforts in that project even if it will succeed years later.
Won't make an useful engine? Maybe for some Star Trek fanboys. It'd be the most useful engine ever to anyone grounded in reality if it doesn't need reaction mass
I see. Many thanks for this! Sounds a bit like a mixture of coroutines and dynamic scoping. Very interesting!
Yes. You could try endless ways to limit usage of your phone (change screen colours, launchers, deleting apps) but in the end of day you only will be hating using your phone. And I think bringing negative context in your daily life is not okay.

In this case, by limiting your phone usage, you need to try to fill the open void with something more interesting. If you do so, then returning to using phone will feel like just using another tool.
This is a great technique and more sun observing satellites are always welcomed.
I always think it is like reading Latin
When you do custom enterprise agreements you can get a lot more than that.
In many of the companies I worked for, security did come cheap — enabling 2FA on SSO, not collecting data they didn't need, invalidating employee session tokens every 24 hours instead of 90 days, and so on. I am talking about cheap as changing a setting is. But they just ignored all those good practices anyways.
Longeron++: C++17 library for simple memory-efficient / data-oriented structures
I was a researcher at the Large Hadron Collider around the time “Big Data” became a thing. We had one of the use cases where analyzing all the data made sense, since it boiled down to frequentist statistics, the more data, the better.
Yet even with a global network of supercomputers at our disposal, we funnily figured out that fast local storage was better than waiting for huge jobs to finish. So, surprise, surprise, every single grad student managed somehow to boil the relevant data for her analysis down to exactly 1-5 TB, without much loss in analysis flexibility. There must be like a law of convenience here, that rivals Amdahl’s scaling law.
OK, so I'm not saying correctly. Thank you.

Here's what I need to convey:

People want it to be an agent, but it's not an agent and if you expect it to be one you get a false negative. The risk is you then assume its immature or not yet up to the task.

But the bulk of what employers pay programmers for: searching google and integrating solutions -- that was automated away the second GPT 4 came out. You can leverage that to think like an employer and get these glorious chunks of labor that used to cost thousands of dollars and take days.

Do you see what I'm saying or am I still saying something wrong?
There was no blackout in my country past 30 years. The last one was before the revolution, that was before we had enough nuclear.

It's a shock that they have been investing incredible amounts of money into it for decades and still couldn't match the few nuclear reactors they turned off, indeed. At least they have the social/political argument - they turned the nukes off because they didn't like it. It's dumb but respectable. Lying about it being cheaper than nuclear is not respectable.
I'm autistic – here's why I stopped masking [video]
There is that, yes.
BaaS is terribly ambiguous; "reseller" & "aggregator" are already used and well known in other industries. VCs with more money than brains just getting schooled trying to be hip.
Mallorca sees 10,000 demonstrators against Tourism