skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is somewhat concerning to me, a software engineer in the games industry.

It's true that the schooling system has failed in many parts of the world to the point that it might harm kids in many ways, even stunting them academically. And it's great that the author's kid likes to program games and is great at Photoshop and 3D. But the usual curriculum at schools provides a breadth of general knowledge that I don't think parents or online tutorials would ever substitute for.

While this kid may be the next John Carmack, are they now robbed of the opportunity to gain enough knowledge in other disciplines to ever succeed in being a doctor, a lawyer, a mathematician or a historian? I believe so. Kids are really good at learning from anything they have access to, but online content is heavily skewed to entertainment (such as video games), and almost totally non-existent in other areas.

Before I ended up in games, I tried a few different disciplines. I went to med-school and learned things I would have never learned on YouTube because they would have simply been demonetized. Simple biology is often a controversial topic on ad-supported platforms, let alone any kind of injury or most illnesses. Health topics are very muddied by grifters to the point that patients self-diagnosing by YouTube are often very confused. So this kid would have a serious disadvantage if they ever wanted to be a doctor if this is where they learned about it. And this is assuming they would be capable of reconciling the misleading knowledge with real knowledge to be good enough at the discipline, anyways.

So all in all, I can see the benefits, but it is also very concerning to me that a kid is seriously using online content for unsupervised learning. We have all recently got a taste of how unsupervised learning on online content goes. And it's not just detrimental in learning, the world view itself online is very skewed. I am not necessarily very good at education though, so take this with a pinch of salt. It is not impossible that someone's parents, with the help of the internet, could indeed provide better education than traditional schools. I think there are such parents, although probably few and far in between.
Sounds nice until you put yourself in the employees shoes. All your mistakes become public case studies, you’re cut off from proper mentoring, and you can no longer say anything in private to your boss without the whole team hearing it
On the contrary, functional programming is mainstream. Even C++ and Java have had lambdas for many years now, higher-order functions are a common API pattern in all mainstream languages, C# and Python have pattern matching these days. Rust has ADTs even.

Pure functional programming didn't catch on, but most FP was never pure.
nice compliment to other REST api test data endpoint https://catfact.ninja/fact
>So while nobody needs a truck, that statistic might reflect the relatively lower disposable incomes in the EU

Nah, people with higher disposable incomes don't buy trucks either. Not to mention in the US tons of regular working class people buy tracks, when people with 2x to 10x their income in Europe don't.

>Trucks could plausibly be the better mode of human transport but the EU doesn't quite have the finances to make it happen.

LOL, what people would believe!
with women the entire person is ai generated
I think one of the most valuable lessons I have learned in software engineering is that you can write entire projects with the express plan of rewriting them if they actually gain traction. If I want to prototype something these days, I will often write code that, while not quite spaghetti, would definitely not pass a proper code review. It's actually kind of fun. Almost like a cheat day on a diet or something.
Well, somehow housing in NYC is up 3% this year. I’m the biggest urbanist shill you’ll meet and even I don’t live there, cus it’s too damn expensive. We build only suburbs, only suburbs are affordable, and that’s where people live. Shocking.

I would love to see an experiment where we make a 1200 sq-ft apartment in a dense, walkable neighborhood, the same price as a 3000 sq-ft McMansion outside Dallas, by actually building the former. I predict… unexpected migration, but who knows. That’s a hard experiment to run.
That's very true. Although it is feasible if you are well-resourced and make the investment to own the toolchain end-to-end. Serving costs can be quite low (relatively speaking) if you control everything. And you have to pick the correct problem where the cost is worthwhile.
Rumor has it they don’t like black or brown people to deliver their food
In unschooling circles, that "detox" period is called "deschooling," and is estimated to take about a month per year of formal schooling.

If you've ever taken a break from work, you've probably experienced something like it. At first, you drive yourself crazy, because you don't know what to do with yourself now that you're outside the routine you've "always" had and "everybody" else seems to have.

Then there's a period of mental stagnation. To me, it feels kind of like defragging my brain. It needs not to be doing much else as it processes all the stuff it's just knuckled down and gotten through over the years, trying to craft some sort of self narrative about it that integrates it and makes it into a (semi-)coherent set of desires and character traits.

Eventually you come out of it and start wanting to do stuff again. It might be the same kinds of projects. It might not. It might change pretty frequently, because you're still testing your new ideas against this new self narrative, and iterating on both.

I think not doing this periodically ruins people's lives. That's how you end up with death bed regrets about never becoming the person you wanted to be.

The first few times I did it, I really got worried about the early stages, but now I'm realizing there's a pattern. It comes together in the end, and I'm always better off for having done it!

If you can teach this to your kids early on, their lives will be so much better for it.
Give it a go sometime. OSS contribution is rife with amazing free mentorship, you have a really high chance of getting out more than you put in. Especially with .Net.
The loss of numeracy also reflects the vast majority of adults never using high school math or greater… like, ever, at all.

I used to be Ok at math. I would now fail any math test past 10th grade (forget college), and I’m not so confident about 8th or 9th either.

I also used to be pretty good at French. I’ve lost most of it. Rarely having a reason to use a skill means you lose it.
Isn't a memory-safe language subset one of their long term goals?
> It’s enough

Surrender consistency only in the gravest of necessity.

No one likes their data corrupted.
Haxor-news was the first terminal client I used for HN. Since then, I have tried a few of the others but haxor is the one I used the most. When I worked in the office and people see you fiddling around in the terminal, they usually leave you alone assuming you are on the HPC or doing other work. Now that I work from home have not used a terminal client even once. Maybe check this one out just for fun.

PS – thanks for the reminder of this one, was searching to post the exact same comment….
Yup! It’s a pretty well known part of it. There’s running lists of military acronyms out there.
I don't think Guido is "an average programmer". But Python is a distant descendant of the ABC programming language (https://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/abc/programmers/handbook.ht...), which, as the name implies, was meant as a better alternative to BASIC and Pascal for teaching.
As a percentage of the population? Or does total population growth account for this?

(Genuinely asking; I know very little about this and would like to become more familiar with what people know about it.)
I will probably get downvoted for pointing this out, but the reality is that the geometric algebra approach to E&M, while interesting for its own reasons, will not replace the formalism based on Gibbs's vector calculus. One reason is simply that vector calculus is pretty intuitive and easy to learn. The major reason, however, is that the vector calculus approach is totally entrenched in the worlds of engineering and physics. After 100 years, nobody actually practicing those disciplines will make the notation change just so they can replace the 4 Maxwell's equations with one geometric algebra equation.

Also, Gibbs's vector calculus is used in fluid dynamics and other engineering disciplines, and as far as I know, nobody it touting the advantages of geometric algebra to folks working in fluid dynamics. I can be pretty sure that some HN reader will show me I am wrong about this by pointing out one lonely researcher who has found a way to express the Navier-Stokes equations using the geometric product ... but so what? ... My main point is that traditional vector calculus is a language everybody knows how to speak, geometric algebra is just another way to say the same things, so why would anybody change?
Some of my own experience: Meetup.com is an awful platform that now has a value-extraction owner who will just make it even worse, as bad as it is now. Don't use Meetup.com. Second, being a meetup organizer is a thankless task. People have no idea how much work goes into the operation, and this article helps show all of that. But after all the work is done, there's no glory for the organizer. There's no loyalty or appreciation, so if you disappear tomorrow, people will just go somewhere else, and few months later forget you even existed.

After running meetups for many years, even big ones, I realized it's not worth it, and I'll never do it again. The same goes for big events, such as conferences, etc. It takes even more work to run and organize those, not to mention the cost, and there's simply very little juice to squeeze.
It’s a classic example of the either/or fallacy. You either buy for status or you’re an emotionless robot min/maxing through life. As if that’s a problem when you’re buying a tool like a light truck or minivan.

The piece just reminds me of stuff I would have said as a teenager, before I had life experience and opinions about how I wanted to live.
i don't disagree, but will register a bit of counter argument. i think it's great that the software engineering discipline is maturing. i think it's great that we study formal semantics and work towards making it easier to create correct programs and harder to create incorrect ones. new-thing-better, gotcha.

but old-thing-bad-shouldn't-they-have-ism i do not like at all.

i think it is a misrepresentation of what "C" was, and is, to falsely compare it with a modern "safe" language (we saw this before with java. oops i mean pascal. oops i mean ada, oops lisp, etc.). it was never meant to be a "safe" language. it was, and is, basically a portable high-level assembler. it allows, but does not enforce, "structured programming" and user defined types, and was portable. that was at the absolute forefront in the 1970s and 1980s. and the productivity was "off-the-chart". sure, your UNIX might crash now and then, but you "just yell down the hall and reboot it" instead of waiting on a multi-decade project to "do it right" to materialize.

so what now? 50 years hence? is it an appropriate language for string parsing in a security sensitive application? probably not. is it a "bad" language, or inappropriate for some other task? and why aren't we wailing and screeching about the lack of memory safety in assembler, for example?

the problem to me is not the language, but the application of it. say you have an application A where language X is a better fit than language Y, but they used X. you don't call out the designers of language X for not anticipating A, you should instead build A' using language Y and let it prove itself.
A. hopefully your meetings (1:1) included are no longer than necessary.

B. discuss your work, your projects, progress, possible threats
1. Seeing my boss just completely side step an issue, where his switch was sending vlan tags to his carrier causing the carrier to shut down the port, by purchasing a switch that didnt support vlan tagging. I died on the inside but lesson about end user troubleshooting learned.

2. Being able to break into a 24 hour data centre because the data centres building management just didnt give a shit. Turns out they had fired all their staff and were leaving the DC empty until they liquidated. We managed to get our kit and bail. But like physical security provided by a third party is ephemeral.

3. I used to lock my bike to my tool shelf. A thief came along and used my hacksaw from my toolshelf to break my bike lock and steal my bike. Thieves will use anything available, not just what I want them to use.

4. Had 2 console windows open. First to a Junos device on my desk. Second to a Junos core router. I reloaded one, and didnt realise I had reloaded the wrong one until we lost an entire state. Multitasking invites risk.

5. Customer had a huge failure. Kept insisting they would rebuild completely, but would routinely beg for just one more dodgy workaround just to keep them going. They never rebuilt. That network is perma fucked. Customer promises are worthless.

6. Much like 5. Customer got bought out by a larger firm. Began to raise new deployments by escalating to the after hours noc, pretending that new deployments were actually failed existing sites. We asked them to stop and they never did. If theres a large enough financial interest customers will just ignore contract and good practice to make the payday.
I'm purple team pentester, I can't say if that URL gives me more PTSD or giggles.
I've played a lot of computer games. But in no way will I ever be an esports star.
Playing computer games is simply another "skill" in the toolbox of a jack of all trades.

And I'm fine with that.
I don't even for a second believe that most authors care to the degree that they feign for the purpose of keeping up their popularity. Book signings are about keeping up brand loyalty and ego stroking.
Not really - the NY Tech Meetup / DC Tech Meetups would regularly have hundreds of attendees, and a few others like the Data Community DC ones had quite a few. Even in those larger numbers, sponsors are flighty and often unappreciative.
People aren't idiots and can do the math for themselves. They're not calling you out on it because you grew up poor and think you still are.
So why do we spend enormous amounts of time and money teaching people things we know most will quickly lose?
Based on a very quick skim: It seems that she blew up more than she intended. Many people on Tiktok hate her books -- they're said to be lowbrow, and to normalize domestic abuse. She feels an obligation to continue for the sake of her fans and employees, so she's trying not to let the criticism bother her as much.
I never heard about it but foot is a terminal emulator with some server mode [1].

—

1: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Foot#Server_mode_configuration
You might want to choose a different name to prevent confusion with Blissymbols, a constructed writing system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols

https://www.blissymbolics.org/

http://www.wnycstudios.org/story/bliss-2302/ (5 minutes after start)
Again, these are not binary. I may decide I need a more feature-full (more "OS-like") task switcher for what I'm trying to do, without going to a full OS (by some definition). I may decide that I need some aspects of SoC in my microcontroller. (Youi can get pretty much any set of features with any core; it's more the number of desktop-like features that makes it a SoC.)

To your specific question: I'm not sure it goes that direction, because a full OS depends on the presence of certain features on the chip. I can think of some examples of it going the other way, though - of an SoC where you don't need or want a full OS.
> The only reason we hesitate to take them out of school is the socialization aspect.

You really hit the nail on the head for me here. I see that kids need to work with large, consistent, groups of their peers for years to learn all of the skills needed to be socially competent (work and play). Many don’t get this and it can really show when they move into adulthood.
> if the same circumstances are repeated across a large number of industries I have to be worried when a large number of people are made effectively unemployed and unemployable in a short period of time.

You were just complaining that you didn't want to think about what would happen if this "problem" occurred at a systemwide level. What would happen is not compatible with your worries.

If you're then going to insist that the cobbler's problem matters because it happens simultaneously to everyone else, you need to consider the systemic effects. At the system level, this problem cannot exist.
Why the content warning for a hackernews website though?
Ecstasy's path to approval for PTSD treatment faces doubts from FDA staff
https://archive.ph/EE4Hm
> If powerful drives can be encoded in to a sapient organism

The article says nothing about this. Is anyone demonstrating sentient synthetic life? This idea has nothing to do with the technology at hand.

But my point is definitional regarding the word "intelligence".

I'd accept a counter argument that humanity is already wrecking global ecosystems by making too many "paperclips," and given that the only measure we have for AI is the imitation game, then doom QED.

But this amounts to a diagnosis of physician heal thyself. "Dr. it hurts when I do this!"
That is a bit of a reach. You are defining the categories very narrowly.

If instead of saying “knows your family” it would be more natural to compare how well you know your family with how well they know their own family. Similarly about their own coworkers and their own house.

But of course you can define the categories that narrowly. In which case you are simply not talking about the same thing others are, and you are willfull missunderstanding their point.

Also, good luck being the best in your own private game. I hope it makes you happy.
You forgot to add "I have spoken" at the end.
Good point, I hadn’t read Lomont’s paper and should have. I read the section in the Wikipedia article talking about it, and did try the constant that it suggests, however it depends on doing extra Newton iterations and I looked at the relative error of the initial guess without Newton. I can see in the paper he found something within 1 bit of what I found. I’m not certain mine’s better, but my python script claims it is.
It looks like Tock is also being used by Google for their security chips/dongles OpenTitan and OpenSK.
Ask the folks who set the math curriculum. If it were up to me nearly all math in school would be application-first and exceptions would be carved off into separate classes, presented very differently, and mostly not required.
Do you know of any alternative we can do to escape the meetup ecosystem? I would have hoped by now we got at least a federated alternative like mastodon.
You don't get to be Musk level without reaching your hands deep into the pockets of other people and taking it for yourself. All you have to do is look at the propaganda surrounding "PPP loans" versus the money given out to stretch people's paychecks during the pandemic. Most businesses weren't affected in any substantial way, but governments still gave away trillions, and the companies got to keep the money. Meanwhile, we're supposed to hate ole Jimbob because he's poor, his hours were cut, and he received a $1200 check.
The biggest of all: childcare
The standup and the sprint goal only make sense if the team is working towards a common objective, like 'this week we make the auth system of this new api'. That means everybody working together. If the sprint is a bunch of unrelated tickets from the backlog that each dev does on its own, then it is indeed unnecessary, and in theory you would be better with a simple Kanban.
> 3. I used to lock my bike to my tool shelf. A thief came along and used my hacksaw from my toolshelf

You locked your bike to a toolshelf that contained the tool they used to steal the bike? That would be like putting jewelry behind a glass cabinet and putting a hammer next to it.
To nitpick the article a bit:

> It's important to note that this algorithm is very much of its time. Back when Quake 3 was released in 1999, computing an inverse square root was a slow, expensive process. The game had to compute hundreds or thousands of them per second in order to solve lighting equations, and other 3D vector calculations that rely on normalization. These days, on modern hardware, not only would a calculation like this not take place on the CPU, even if it did, it would be fast due to much more advanced dedicated floating point hardware.

Calculations like this definitely take place on the CPU all the time. It's a common misconception that games and other FLOP-heavy apps want to offload all floating-point operations to the GPU. In fact, it really only makes sense to offload large uniform workloads to the GPU. If you're doing one-off vector normalization--say, as part of the rotation matrix construction needed to make one object face another--then you're going to want to stay on the CPU, because the CPU is faster at that. In fact, the CPU would remain faster at single floating point operations even if you didn't take the GPU transfer time into account--the GPU typically runs at a slower clock rate and relies on parallelism to achieve its high FLOP count.
> Would a superintelligence reach the conclusion that humans are a cancer on earth that must be destroyed?

Does that seem intelligent? According to the imitation game?
If a new friend sends an email that has been polished by artificial intelligence, I don't mind as long as the content of the email is clear. It's possible that they might need to do multi-language translation, or maybe they are unsure about how to write some email formats properly. Of course, the AI-assisted emails I'm referring to are those that they have reviewed themselves, rather than irresponsibly sending them directly to me.

However, if it's an old friend, since I've known him for a long time, receiving an AI-generated email from him would be disconcerting. The AI might erase the characteristics of him that I recognize, such as certain tone words he commonly uses, making me feel like I no longer know the person who sent the email.
This might be a different response, but I think about this a lot. From my earliest memories, I have loved technology and especially software development. I got involved in a very large low-tech industry early on and I now have the golden handcuffs on. I've kept up with development, even finished my CS degree. I held on to the idea that I would hold the title of a real "software engineer" one day, instead of solo-ing internal tools.

Until I actually had the chance to. I have somehow gotten to a spot where I make what a senior dev does, and realized my responsibility as a father and putting "food on the table" trumps my "legacy," or at least for now. It's a boring, large-org gig without a solid definition of what I actually do. But when forced to reflect, I have it really good. Maybe one day I may go for it again.
Genuine question — do you think synthetic images pose less of a problem than synthetic text? If yes, why?
Have you tried watching Only Connect inside?

Some televised "quizzes" are picked through for the dumbest possible answers (eg: Australian late night comedy shows doing VoxPop quizzes asking 'random' US citizens to name a country starting with the letter 'U'), other quiz shows audition contestents to select a pool of bright people.

Public schools or home schools should ideally teach about innate bias in sample selections.
Perhaps the main reason I use the Edge browser is because the built in copilot is pretty good at this kind of thing… I can summarize any webpage with a single click (or two…).
What's Eating B2B SaaS