skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> while a guy whose only contribution is to complain about imagined grievances and sabotage his coworkers gets promoted to CEO.

This post has a rather keen personal edge to it, as if this fail-up template was inspired by firsthand witness to the toxic behavior and consequent unmerited success of someone... very specific?
There's a certain type of people that considers emoji unserious and distracting and thinks they are detrimental to nuanced and intelligent conversation.

Of course it doesn't follow that a lack of emojis is sufficient to create nuanced and intelligent conversation but said type of people also believes HN is tangibly different from Reddit.
Does it stop you from writing code like this?

Vector<int> v {1, 2, 3};
int *p = &v[0];
v.push_back(4);
printf("%d\n", *p); // this is UB
A couple of years from now, Faceborg will try to sell you a digital replica of yourself. An auxiliary "You" that can converse... and seek... and do other interesting behaviors... for a price.
What to know about the 'space weapon' the U.S. says Russia recently launched
He posts c code and says that it computes the inverse square root, but the code he posted is undefined c, so while it could compute the inverse square root of it's input it could also do a long list of other stuff.

One of the many reasons you should stay away from real world languages when talking about algorithms unless you are an expert in the language.
This kind of “political citation” happens even without intentional fraud.

When I was in grad school it was common knowledge that if you wanted to get papers accepted you needed to cite the people on the program committee and the likely reviewers - even if you didn’t think their work was particularly relevant to what you were doing.

Not as extreme as an explicit clique telling people they have to do it, but some of the distortions are similar - senior people are senior because they are widely cited, but you have to cite them because they are senior people.
Tesla's Full Self-Driving to get new driving modes
"Just showing up" can mean dealing with all the daily annoyances.

https://www.inc.com/danny-iny/woody-allen-said-show-up-to-su...

If it's not hard, why can't everyone seem to do it?

I have a friend who's a defense lawyer. He tells me that prison must be the happiest place on earth, given the lengths that people go to just to get a chance of getting in. It's funny and illustrative, just like the Woody Allen quote about showing up.
Think of holding down the power key for some seconds as a Secure Attention Key that forces control of the device away from the exploit. Automatic reboot might catch some exploits, but the SAK and trusted boot after it gets (practically) all of them.
Yeah, I was thinking this too. The benefit of making the STM32 look like a real RTC to the kernel would mean that userspace would Just Work when it came to saving and restoring the time. The kernel would restore it on boot using its normal mechanism, and the 'hwclock' command would actually work properly, like someone unfamiliar with this particular quirk of the hardware would expect.

Likely this was a bit easier and faster to implement from the perspective of the Chumby folks who were building the system. But I've seen enough weird non-standard things done on embedded Linux systems (and have unfortunately been involved in maintaining one or two of them) to believe that this sort of crap is annoying, and wish developers at the manufacturer would do things in ways that the platform expects.
An intuitive guide to Maxwell's equations (2020)
there's an unrecognized genius out there that realized you can just apply a bit flip to get that out there. That John Carmack hasn't claimed it as his invention when he could have, speaks volumes about his character.
Recent and related:

Trial results for new lung cancer drug are 'off the charts' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40537026 - May 2024 (49 comments)
This happens when an article is revived from the second-chance pool. From what I understand the only way they currently have to resurrect a thread involves changing timestamps, which is extremely disorienting for people who actually did see the previous thread.

See dang's explanation to the same question here (and his link to an algolia search of other previous explanations): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36472976
I’ve rarely seen people bring up racism when talking about the lab leak idea in general.

Distrust of the CCP doesn’t link to racism in most western eyes because they don’t differentiate between different Asian groups as distinct races. Race is basically just White, Hispanic, Black, Asian, Native American, and maybe Pacific Islanders.
> What evidence do you have they could do any of those things?

Every bit of interaction I’ve ever had with an LLM.
I would suggest a second hand laptop or mini pc, is a better alternative for many people

But is good to see the ecosystem of projects that rpi generated
If your codebase is written in F#, OCaml or Haskell then it would be surprising if there were no use of monads as it is a pretty common design pattern in a functional language.
Oh, that's really great ! Is that in the US ?
Which for many professional (and other jobs) probably would require a bunch of tap-dancing around your strict schedule if you were hiding the actual reason.
.ong is intended for “organisations non gouvernementale” and the main difference from .org is that proof of actual NGO status is required.
Zardoz predicted this ~50 years ago
People cant do that because of cost. If every single query involved taking everything even remotely related to the query, and passing it to OpenAI, it would get expensive very very fast.

Its not a technical issue, its a practicality issue imo.
Except he couldn't have even if he wanted to. There's always the risk some former 3dfx or SGI graybeard comes out with some paper binder with the original implementation, and calls you out on your bullshit if you do. When you're such a famous public figure no way you ever risk lying in public. Even if he were to getaway with it there was nothing for him to gain: he already has all the fame and money from honest work, there's no point risking it all to claim some piece of code.
I'm not saying young people don't fall for scams. But dealing with a 91 year old mother now, I know how vulnerable old people are. And some people start having signs of dementia in their 70s like the man in this WSJ article.
"Disappointment is a fact of life. But maybe we can get better at managing it."

Great quote, and even greater write up.
I see. Yes, deliberately ignoring the result and error might be a problem. Of course the same novice programmers could write:

try {
failableCall();
} catch (Throwable t) {
/* Ignore. Stupid Java, always forcing me to handle checked exceptions that won't happen in practice. */
}

In general, I'd say the choice between exceptions and a result-or-error return type should be driven by how likely the user of the method is interested in the return value. In the specific context of this discussion, there is no reason to call a future's get method unless you're really very interested in what it returns. So in this case I'd think the result type would be a good choice. For other APIs the trade-off is different.
it is called a legal code after all
Why not make non-strict parsers that will handle unicodes, longs, binary, ignore comments and allow trailing commas? If you set bend_over_backwards=true, it will do strict parsing for the poor souls who need that.

edit: I didn't mention integer keys, because object members canonically start with a letter.
Well I mean Einsteins equations[1] of General Relativity are in some sense "simple".

I imagine they mean "simple" in a similar sense, given that at least one of the previous "too simple" models[2] involves repeatedly solving a Laplace equation numerically to search for a valid solution.

But yeah, certainly would be nice to include it when you got a title like that.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_field_equations#Mathe...

[2]: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/114887
I remember having built a PC for Windows NT 4. It was fast. However, it had good hardware for that time. Adaptec UW SCSI hard disk, Matrox video card and 128MB of RAM.
I think the "unknowable" lifetimes are C++'s own making.

It's like types in statically vs dynamically typed languages. Types are unknowable at compile time when the compiler doesn't force them to be static.

And similarly ownership and lifetimes are "dynamically typed" in C++, because the compiler doesn't force them to be rigidly declared like in Rust.
Financial independence calculator through SP500
>it breaks ability for non-speakers to infer meanings

Not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that it's less convenient for people that don't speak / read Chinese? Why would that be a relevant metric?

You may be missing that character standards have changed over time and that different writing styles (草书，行书) are implicitly simplifications. You can think of latin or Russian cursive as a simplification of the printed letters.

In practice, the phonetic component has been mangled / evolved over time, so simplification doesn't make things more or less difficult for students (be it 5 year old native speakers or 50 year old non native speakers).
Related: "A Critique of Snapshot Isolation" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40516582
A Burrito Is a Monad (2024):

https://www.williamcotton.com/articles/a-burrito-is-a-monad

let burrito =
tortilla
>>= addMeat Chicken
>>= addMissionBurritoIngredients
>>= holdThe Cheese
>>= addIngredient PicoDeGallo
>>= addIngredient Salsa
>>= addIngredient Guacamole
>>= addIngredient SourCream
I think the issue is more a lack of alternatives.
There’s three servers I know and like 10 clients.

Not sure when you last looked at the landscape.

Servers:
Synapse, dendrite, conduit

Clients: (just off the top of my head)

Element, fluffychat, cinny, neochat, cyphon, nheko, schildichat
I’ve dabbled with using LLMs, but in my experience they’re not even as good as using an annotated bibliography to help guide your study of a new domain. A bibliography, even a mediocre one, will give you an entry point into a literature, which can greatly speed up your exploration of the space. You still have to put in the work to synthesize and understand the literature and how it applies to your problem. Until LLMs can stop fabricating sources and concepts, they are not even as useful to research as an annotated bibliography. I suppose if no such bibliography exists, an LLM is better than nothing, but it must be used with extreme caution, and I’m not really sure how much time they would save than simply spending a week or two working through the literature for a domain using library search engines.
Have seen this approach before.

It's the yes we hallucinate but don't worry because we provide the sources for users to check.

Even though everyone knows that users will never check unless the hallucination is egregious.

It's such a disingenuous way of handling this.
But we're not comparing a bus with an on demand service, we're comparing it with no buses...?
There are some benefits of CBOR (having a separate integer type is good, and a byte string type is good, and they have typed numeric arrays which is good also, etc), but also some problems. For example, I might have preferred that Unicode is a tag rather than a type (other tags can be used for other character sets), and base64-encoded strings also seems unnecessary (since it is a binary format anyways, you should just use the binary data directly instead), and I think it would be better for a MIME message to be treated as a byte string instead of Unicode (fortuantely the specification allows that, but it seems to just be "added on" afterward due to a lack of consideration), and possibly maybe it might be better to disallow the types of keys to be arrays and maps.

However, some of the things I mentioned above, do have benefits for interoperability with JSON, although they aren't good for a general-purpose use; I think that it would generally be better to make a good format rather than trying to work only with the bad ideas of other specifications. (Fortunately, I think what I described above could be implemented using a subset of CBOR.)

However, using these formats (whether CBOR or JSON) is often more complicated than should be needed for a specific use anyways.
Something interesting is I've seen this mythologized as evidenced of the "cracked engineer" theory, wherein random engineers will accidentally stumble upon incredibly complex discoveries in the course of their day to day work and expect no fanfare for this, besting the scientists and researchers who take the traditional route but aren't spurred by necessity. People, like xkcd, purported this was either Carmack or some random employee who figured it out in a few hours when stuck on a problem then waltzed onto the next one. In truth, as noted in the document, it has a history that goes back decades in academia, this was simply the most notable time it was implemented.

I think it speaks to an issue I see in the software engineering world where people assume that collaboration is for low-IQ people and all great innovation comes from some super-genius working on their own for long enough, and isn't required to share how they arrived at their findings. I'm sure the mythology of this algorithm is propelled somewhat by the enigmatic character of writing "what the fuck" next to adding the constant, implying a mystical element to its utility that was arrived at without needing to clarify it in some long boring research paper.
I'm not sure that makes much of a difference. So long as they are able to make decent journalism?
Thanks. It does help with the crushing, though, that apparently somebody got it to work--thereby proving, at the very least, I wasn't crazy.
This, along with several other "meta" objections, is a significant portion of the discussion in the paper.

They basically say two things. First, although the measurement is repeatable at face value, there are several factors that make it less impressive than assumed, and the model performs fairly poorly compared to likely prospective lawyers. Second, there is a number of reasons why the percentile on the test doesn't measure lawyering skills.

One of the other interesting points they bring up is that there is no incentive for humans to seek scores much above passing on the test, because your career outlook doesn't depend on it in any way. This is different from many other placement exams.
They engineered a real mandala effect!
CPUs do have undefined behavior.
To distinguish a false from a real god one at first has to know the features of a real god. The article is not really explaining the ladder so I think it cannot conclude that AI is a false god.
It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I see large fossils being hauled out by individuals who have no interest in them, when I approach to chat, other than to sell or illegally export. They remind me of gollum, seeing everyone around them as a threat to their riches.

But a lot of fossils wouldn’t see the light of day unless there was a commercial market. I have heard stories on fossil forums about countries where there are restrictions and quarries will just crush them along with all the other rock.

In my country the vast majority of palaeontology is done by amateurs. There is only so much public funding but loads of amateurs. If private ownership was banned then academic research would go to near zero.
I went from hacky hobbyist programmer to working on core business logic for a startup that eventually the whole company would rely on. I was mostly a one-person team at the company, and I kept a lot of my bad unscalable tendencies from making small fun projects. No formal testing, very little documentation, hundreds of “TODOs”, breaking API changes without really telling anyone, no QA process, no monitoring/reporting, etc.

It all came to a head when my employer was demoing some software that used my API and none of what they were trying to show worked because of multiple unrelated bugs in my code, causing us to lose this very large client. I somehow kept my position, worked with other departments to formalize QA processes, and started regularly communicating with the API users.

Before I was just making software for nobody with 0 stakes, the reality of having actual people, entire revenue streams dependent on my code being reliable didn’t fully register. At my previous (and only other at the time) employer I was basically a paid seat filler. I spent a lot of work hours making personal projects, it felt like going to work and getting paid to make hobby code.

I’m glad I was able to learn from the experience and it didn’t put me out of work or anything
As an entrepreneur, if you invest your savings in SP500, then how many years do you need to generate your monthly fixed costs?
No, this is done because you want to make money off of loneliness. Lonely people need humans and nature, not your chat bot.
Russia-China gas pipeline deal stalls over Beijing's price demands
The code he posted is straight from the Quake 3 source release, a program which has certainly been installed and used on hundreds on millions of real computers. UB pedantry makes no difference to the actual behavior of the program as demonstrated.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this style of loose connected thoughts.
A formative experience for me was learning to program and asking a peer “how I do lots of variables but I don’t know which one I need” - I had none of the terms to even ask for what I needed.
I tried to explain that it's nothing more than a rumor. I wrapped that in poor recollection as much as I could. Three absolving statements for the one!

Did you, somehow, feel I was trying to convince? I'm fishing for education.

I'm making my money doing 'SRE', which really, amounts to doing housekeeping for the AI people.

Anyone can apply. What are you insinuating? Say it. My situation (other than comp) isn't special, they generally need help.

I don't really need to know about what they're running to keep the systems online and running well. Another day, different workload.

I may bother to learn a thing or two about it... but it's not a requirement. At all. Same toys all the way down. It's shiny old news at this level.

I don't mean to belittle it. It's jazzy stuff. I just build the boring parts - OS, VLANs, etc.

My 'ire'/elbowing is that 'they' (the AI folks), almost pathologically, refuse to engage with the basics like Python packaging. It's with love, honestly.
I’m not sure anyone should be impressed by someone not stealing even if they had a chance to. That’s just a basic human expectation.
> Furthermore, unlike its documentation for the other exams it tested (OpenAI 2023b, p. 25), OpenAI’s technical report provides no direct citation for how the UBE percentile was computed, creating further uncertainty over both the original source and validity of the 90th percentile claim.

This is the part that bothered me (licensed attorney) from the start. If it scores this high, where are the receipts? I’m sure OpenAI has the social capital to coordinate with the National Conference of Bar Examiners to have a GPT “sit” for a simulated bar exam.
This is my experience with Hackernews. If the comment doesn't specify the country, it's an American talking about the USA
Sadly this doesn't seem to work anymore.
That is not an issue with the safety of the Vector, it is an issue with the safety of 'int' and raw pointers. If the Vector grows, that pointer points to freed memory.

But yes, in my implementation I have a safe version of int called 'i32' which overrides the & operator and doesn't allow it to return raw pointers.
Learning that the world doesn't revolve around me, and that other people (and other animals) have rich and complex inner lives worthy of curiosity, dignity, and love (I can't be sure, but it feels like a healthy perspective). I'm in my 40s and this lesson, started in youth, is still sinking in. Having a child, and the commensurate second childhood, is a major impetus.
Not only that, but the tldr basically only talks about that, so it's not much of a summary at all. I read the tldr and I have no idea what the article is about.
How does Tock compare to Oxide’s Hubris?
Always something new... this week its some *nix commands

cat backwards (tac) will display the file in reverse order :)

chown username: with the colon and the group name blank will set the permission to the user's default group.. very useful when you blend windows groups with spaces into an environment and it becomes a pain in the ass to put return characters in
> The quality of code relying on reflection varies wildly (even within the standard library) so I don't think anything about the reflection system itself is the problem. I've written reflection-based solutions to problems sparingly but with an eye to giving good output on errors so debugging is easy. You can write some awful and hard-to-debug macros in Rust too.

Maybe? I am yet to see easy-to-read/easy-to-debug Go reflection. I have not encountered hard-to-debug macros in Rust (probably because I have almost never needed to use a debugger in Rust in the first place). Doesn't mean that these don't exist, of course.
I think it may be seen as a feature not a bug when there is cost plus contracts and regulatory capture limits competition.
If the would get Cloudflare's DDoS protection, would CF just implode? :)
What are practical applications that I can build for home use on Tock, using either ESP32-C3 or NRF52840 dongle?
That was my point. Austerity measures tangibly affect most people in easy to understand ways: cuts to healthcare, cuts to education, delayed retirement, etc. Police violence and overreach are a significant concern especially among certain minorities because they (allegedly) experience forms of it every day.

But the Internet is largely a magic box and at this point the common understanding seems to be that it is both private and also under massive corporate and state surveillance at the same time. And that's not even mostly wrong.
Today was June 2, 2024. Unicode watch still works.
There is a de-facto limit on the total length of an URL [0] which significantly exceeds 255, and the path portion of an URL can be arbitrarily long within that limit, so using only subdomains would be unnecessarily limiting, and using them in addition would provide no further benefit.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/417142/what-is-the-maxim...
I quote this all the time to people. There’s too much, we’re spread too thin. Ignorance shouldn’t be considered a big deal or a huge embarrassment. Not being ready to learn is a problem, but ignorance is sort of the default state now.
Wow! I didn’t even realize heroku was still around. Made my first web apps there back before the big cloud providers became ubiquitous.
(I actually scanned the comment thread to look for this comic, I was going to add it but you beat me to it.)
So many interesting projects, I just wish AI hardware was readily available.
Amazon Redshift very recently has made this the default choice.
The repercussions of what the author summarizes as "could you colour-grade a book?" still feel wildly unknown to me, even after a couple years of thinking about it (see Photoshop for text [1][2]).

Partially it's because we're still wrapping our heads around what kind of experience this might enable. The tools still feel ahead of the medium. I think we're closer to Niépce than Muybridge.

In photography terms, we've just figured out how to capture photons on paper — and artists haven't figured out how to use that to make something interesting.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33253606

[2] https://stephango.com/photoshop-for-text
I definitely agree with a lot of the comments here especially the ones in the vein of “don’t do dangerous things with json. “ if you have control of the sender and the receiver, it makes sense to have fields that add a bit of extra type information e.g. this is an integer or this is a float with this much precision