skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a strange cliche I see over and over:

> Presumably if it is shorn of any human morality

Where does this assumption come from? Any artificial intelligence would need ideas, lots of them. Is it supposed to create them itself out of whole cloth? Or what, get its ideas from amoral aliens for some reason? No, its ideas can only come from our culture. So it's going to learn and internalize all of our ideas except the moral ones? Why make that assumption? It's just a sci-fi trope so that we can have stories about callous, emotionless robots - and it comes from the idea that they are machines that coldly carry out algorithms and that are not properly intelligent.

Morality is weird, admittedly, because the is-ought problem puts it in a different domain from facts. This includes the urge to live and do interesting shit: you can't derive that from facts, because it's a basic moral value.
Economist's regularly scheduled programming is basically the exact opposite of CCP propaganda (i.e. Western propaganda)

If you have specific facts you want to refute, I'd be interested to hear.
Not by themselves... but with a good program built around it, managing the actual state, and very careful prompting, yes. I've been thinking about this for a while, always have the desire to make a game.
In reality what you posted here is actually wrong. The sophisticated tooling that you are talking about is plentiful in China and is the reason tech companies like Apple choose to manufacture electronics in China.

Here’s what Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, had to say:

"There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is...The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields..."

Source:

https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-...
> If you squint hard enough you can fool yourself into thinking all metrics have the same availability requirements.

I'm sorry, I have no idea what point you tried to make.
It's more work, but there are sample configs for grub2 to boot multiple ISOs, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38663958
More of a "Meh" moment for me.

> Python strings are immutable ... So adding them involves creating new strings all the time, which is inefficient ... Instead, you can append the strings to a list. Lists are mutable, so it’s faster. Then you simply join them all at the end using the str.join() method.

Don't we have computers to do such work? Give a man a fish, etc. but give him a smart compiler...
I think every CS undergrad (or self-taught programmer) should run through the Harvard "CS50x" course, and supplement it with the MIT "Missing Semester" course. This way you're guaranteed to have a bit of C, clang, make, Python, git, UNIX shell command, and GitHub understanding by the time you enter the industry as a programmer. I wrote a little guide to how to do this here:

https://gist.github.com/amontalenti/dabeba392b8ac144c6f68bdd...

The guide stemmed out of the fact that I saw questions related to all this from beginner programmers, even those with CS degrees. I think one of the issues is that CS departments (including the one I went through at NYU years ago) think some of these things are sort of like "implementation details" of computing/programming, so no one course ever focuses on the topics in a cohesive way. They just sort of expect you to pick it up by osmosis. When I was an undergrad I supplemented by working on GNOME/GTK open source projects, which gave me nice exposure to UNIX tooling, version control, issue trackers, as well as compilers, C, and Python.

(Funny enough, we did have a course on shell programming at NYU way back when, but it was only because the author of ksh, David Korn, was a professor!)
most mathematicians and theoretical physicists don’t know what the business end of a spanner is, either.

mechanical engineers have a fighting chance at knowing, and tradie apprentices assuredly do.

This is less surprising simply because those disciplines and their relative abstraction hierarchies are older, more well understood, and more clearly delineated. CS is less than a century old.
The inspiration for the post came from my httpz library. The fallback using a FixedBufferAllocator + ArenaAllocator is used. The fixed buffer is a thread local. But the arena allocators belong to connections, of which there could be thousands.

You might have 1 fixed buffer, for N (500+) ArenaAllocators (but only being used per one at a time). This allows you to allocate a relatively large fixed buffer since you have relatively few threads.

If you just used retain_with_limit, then you'd either have to have a much smaller retained size, or you'd need a lot more memory.

https://github.com/karlseguin/http.zig/blob/c8b04e3fef5abf32...
To quote an older comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40416604

> Computer Engineering or any of the other legitimately useful CS degree paths instead of CS itself.

> At least at the school I went to, CS was kind of a joke for undergrad.

> The students that cared about CPU design, low level software (firmware, drivers, kernel, embedded), or robotics (including computer vision, etc) all went computer engineering.

> The students that cared about cryptography or the formal maths side of computing all went to the mathematics dept in their applied discrete maths or applied computational mathematics degree paths.

> The students that cared primarily about high performance computing or applied computing in general (but didn't go one of the aforementioned routes) went through the computational modelling and data analytics program.

> And the students that wanted to learn CS for the purpose of game design or creative arts had their own program within the school of arts (can't remember the name).

> So out of the students who were interested in computing that went to my uni for undergrad, the ones that were left in the CS department were those who were told "get a CS degree for lots of money", those that didn't bother researching any other programs, and those who wanted to be web devs or enterprise java/c# devs.
Source control should be taught as a component of any "software engineering" course. Any class that teaches project management, testing, and delivery, and does NOT teach source control, is missing something of vital importance.

(My university had exactly this issue.)
> HN may be interested to know that it's written in Rust and makes use of Bevy

I seem to remember that Tiny Glade specifically makes use of bevy_ecs, but not the rest of Bevy/not the Bevy graphics pipeline. Maybe someone closer to the project/with better memory can confirm this.

Edit:

> The gist of them is that they really enjoy Bevy's ECS, they wrote their own rendering solution due to Bevy's relative immaturity and their expertise, and that the migrations have been really smooth: about half-a-day for the whole game.

According to https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1d4pnj5/tiny_glade_ma... and below comments
How can you graduate from a CS program without having had to learn git somewhere along the way? Do you never collaborate on any project? Do you never check out a repo or make changes to it?
I see bullshit across the political spectrum, but the Q cult was kind of unique. I don’t see an obvious left wing analog at least today in the US.

If you consider totalitarian communism left wing then you can see analogs in Maoism and Leninism. That was a long time ago in other countries though. The US seems to have a more vibrant totalitarian cult scene on the far right today than on the left.
These kind of tactics work for simple examples. In real world http servers you'll retain memory across requests (caches) and you'll need a way to handle blocking io. That's why most commonly we use GC'd/ownership languages for this + things like goroutines/tokio/etc.. web devs dont want to deal with memory themselfs.
The Day I Learned to Think Like a Browser
I've never seen anyone claim that.
this is pretty much what Conway says about it too. we have about as much free will as fundamental particles.
Depends who you ask. To me, NDT is unbearable too...
Yep. When I studied CS in early ‘0X the lecture material was only about programming. Everything else you were on your own.

The labs all had Solaris machines. Most students had never seen Unix or a terminal before in their lives. The instruction on how to use it was extremely minimal.

There was a very wide gap between the students who were huge nerds who already knew, or learned in their own, and those who didn’t. There wasn’t even YouTube, or Stack Overflow, or anything much to help in those days.

The biggest difference was between the students who had to physically go to the lab to do their projects, and the others like me who knew SSH existed, and how to use it, doing our projects from the comfort of the dorms.
>Git is not just a fad; it's a literal underpinning of most serious software development these days, especially if you need to work with others.

yeah, but all of the VCSs before git could've claimed the same thing.

if that's not a fad, what is?

i'm glad git is the soup du jourre today , it's a lot nicer to use than it's ancestors -- but it's not like there isn't room for improvement, either.

that's how git came about, I don't feel like we're at the end-all-be-all VCS yet, especially when there is money to be made by doing things better.
> Microsoft says Recall lets you find anything you've seen or done on your PC with a simple search query, and it's powered by state-of-the-art large language models, which can understand various content on your PC, like text, images, and videos. It works in any application, so you can search across your computer.

https://www.wired.com/story/everything-announced-microsoft-s...
IIRC, GH classic tokens can never expire.
> Man - why go there? What are we looking to learn?

The how is a much bigger problem than the why. It would be great to have some closer sampling of Proxima b, such as images, spectroscopy, etc. You won't get much on a 0.15c flyby, but you'd get something, hopefully. No room for error of course, with a several year round trip for commands.

Having some sense of the planet could inform a colonization plan that's likely to have even bigger problems with the hows rather than the whys.

But the whys are clear. Even if it's not actually feasible.
It's Gen Z's stealing cars now and doing take overs with them, certainly not Gen-Xers.
Generally speaking, it should always be legal to say things which are true. This is vital to democracy.

(The only exceptions to this should be when you contractually sign away this right, such as a lawyer who enters into a contract with a client and cannot give all their private correspondence to the opposition. Or a soldier who signs away his right to speak freely about troop movements, etc.)
If you have some free time you could always try taking up electronics as a hobby. Learn about Ohm’s law and circuits, KVL/KCL, test equipment such as multimeters and oscilloscopes, alternating current, capacitors and inductors, relationships between frequency and impedance, Smith charts, spectrum analyzers, VNAs, oscillators, digital logic…

Okay it sounds like a lot but if you have an hour or two to study per week you’d be surprised at how much you can learn in just a few years!
The term "neurotargeting" is the kind of manipulative framing they notionally abhor, there is nothing "neuro" about it. This is just classic computational propaganda but I guess that term isn't edgy enough.

They greatly underestimate the difficulty of the computational problems surrounding automated production of effective and highly granular propaganda at scale. Targeting is crude and coarse because that is a technical limit of off-the-shelf analytical processing platforms.
Now that's pretty dangerous. Why isn't it just a script?

Also why does the main domain redirects to some Italian sugar manufacturer? Kind of strange
It's a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHW-RTG
That’s an interesting way to put a floor on it but I think he’s neglecting emergence and nonlinear dynamics. Deterministic objects in a system can become computationally irreducible and manifest higher order behaviors that are not reducible or predictable.

Of course then you get into the challenge of defining free will. Is it enough to be impossible to predict or is actual acausality required? If the latter you are into quantum mechanics or bust.
Sets out to write an article on the dangers of Neurotargeting.

Immediately employs Neurotargeting in the article.
An improved rant would be nice. I feel the webpage doesn't make enough effort to store the many valuable thoughts and idea the many readers have while reading it. Long ago I had a site that was technically a forum but the front page was an article rather than a table and the sections pointed to sub forums that were articles as well. The later pointed at the usual forum tables. I used the discussion/comments to improve the articles but it should really have been a wiki format.

The text reminded me of the way FTP clients pop up the default text editor. Such a boring technology, no one thought anything of it. Why isn't my mail client doing this? It doesn't seem hard to make web browsers do it either. Trying to do code highlighting in a <textarea> is possibly the worse technology we have. We should really have a dedicated client for forms as well which seems to logically fold out of a database file system?

The text also reminded me of Picassa the photo organizer, as soon as I had everything scanned and organized in it it felt like I couldn't use the normal file system anymore. It was such a clumsy clunker by comparison.

Also hilarious was having to install Thunar because Nautilus couldn't open my big folders.

I was also reminded of textpad. While Atom couldn't open files larger than 2mb the old textpad on a pentium 4 opened the 1+ TB wikipedia xml dump in 0 seconds. Editing was not sluggish, replace macros were not sluggish and saving the document worked just fine. The thought stuck with me: How the f did it just do that??? I think the first release in 1992 probably explains it. Squeezing wine from a rock was still a thing back then.
I have yet to hear a use-case for “fine tuning from business data” that relied on large models to succeed. Once again, I’m skeptical the average business will need this.

Yea yes video probably requires a lot of GPUs to train. And a lot of source material to train against. And a use case. Which again, most companies don’t have.

Model development is clearly here to stay, and clearly valuable. Models from every other company, either foundation or fine tuned - I’m not sure that emperor is wearing many clothes any time soon.
> This process repeats over time, providing feedback to the LLM

To what extent do you know this to be true? Can you describe the mechanism that is used?

I would contrast your statement with cases where chat gpt generated something, I read it and note various incorrect things and then walk away. Further, there are cases where the human does not realize there are errors. In both cases I'm not aware of any kind of feedback loop that would even be really possible - i never told the LLM it was wrong. Nor should the LLM assume it was wrong because I run more queries. Thus, there is no signal back that the answers were wrong.

Hence, where do you see the feedback loop existing?
Granted, Trump made it easy to point the finger at him, but agreed that the lack of Democrat self reflection over how the uglier impacts of globalism on the middle class drove the 2016 election result was ridiculous.

And similarly, how the taken-for-granted poor rural and evangelical vote upended the Republican party in the primaries.

Political parties ignore blocks of constituents at their peril -- and that's always been the strength of democracy.
Whether CS grads know this or that tech is irrelevant.

What matters is are they curious and how quickly they can self teach this or that tech.

And besides, learning the basics of git should be an afterthought for someone being hired for a programming job!! Come on.*

* Not gatekeeping here, I'm just trying to say that in the spectrum of tasks an entry-level programmer will need to get good at, git is a minor footnote. You can generally learn 99% of what you'll need to do in a short period of time, unless your team is doing exotic stuff, in which case they should stop doing that.
Off the top of my head, I was wondering... for software like web services, isn't it easier and faster to use a bump allocator per request, and release the whole block at the end of it? Assuming the number of concurrent requests/memory usage is known and you don't expect any massive spike.

I am working on an actor language kernel, and was thinking of adopting the same strategy, i.e. using a very naive bump allocator per actor, with the idea that many actors die pretty quickly so you don't have to pay for the cost of GC most of the time. You can run the GC after a certain threshold of memory usage.
To expand on that, and maybe my view is a bit too traditional, but my understanding is that universities ought to prepare you to become a scientist. At least that's how it was historically. They are not meant to be "vocational training plus" or to subsidize the industry by training the work force for them. (It might be different for colleges, I'm mainly speaking from a European perspective.)

I know times have changed, but I don't think git should be taught in a university-level computer science course. You teach graph theory and then many operations in git should become clear after reading the documentation. I don't think any implementation-specific skills should be taught, unless you use it as an example, like Java or C++ to teach OOP. Instead, you teach broad concepts that underpin all of modern computing.

Isn't there a saying along the lines of "computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes"? When I was at university twenty years ago people were still claiming you could easily pass a computer science program without ever touching a computer.
As someone who has used GIT a fair amount over the last 15 years, it has literally one of the worst developer experiences, right up there with C, python’s package management, cuda kernel development or shader debugging, ffmpeg, Scala, MongoDB, and Rust. All of those tools are very useful in todays world but they’re not necessary to do the job,and unless I’m specifically hiring for that skillset I wouldn’t ding anyone who didn’t know them.
Not an answer to your question but let me know if you would like a hand with the performance issue. My background is in ops, and I’ve done a fair amount of Postgres administration, including performance management. I’m between things right now and would be happy to look at it free of charge if you’d like.
> git is a tool, not a discipline.

> the current VCS-ish thing of choice

It's not like they're using mercurial instead. There's a lot of concepts here they should be familiar with.

> the specifics of a specialty tool

Are you calling VCS specialty in the context of a CS degree? I wouldn't.
>and in fact made it a point to openly despise these voters publicly by calling them deplorable.

Nope. Hillary Clinton was specifically calling out the racists and bigots within the Trump camp, not all Trump supporters. Which is obvious to anyone who bothers to read the actual quote. It isn't complex or nuanced, or even that long.

And I don't know why Trump supporters still insist on believing otherwise, since one would expect that they would want to distance themselves from the bad elements within their party. I can only assume they find solidarity with such elements to be more important than conceding that a Democrat might actually have a point.

Ah well. You sleep with the pigs, you wake up smelling like shit.
They do plan to run their own robotaxis. But there are several million Teslas on the road already. They're just leaving money on the table if they don't make them part of the network, and doing so means they have a chance to hit critical mass without a huge upfront capital expenditure.
They absolutely had way more of a reason than no reason. Za reason for the Tesla launch was that it was the first falcon 9 heavy launch, and no company was willing to gamble that large of a payload on a untested rocket. So they made the best of it with a PR stunt.
Well I was considering Sonos for a future upgrade but that’s now out.

I hate that these types of changes are the norm. I remember reading that Subarus sell your location data, including to Sirius XM, who everyone knows is responsible for those annoying radio trials no one asked for and tons of junk mail begging you to subscribe. And then there’s forced acceptance of terms from using Apple’s App Store or Blizzard’s Battle.net or Rokus or TP Link updates for routers and so on, which means consumers can’t avoid accepting such changes because they already paid for a bunch of things.

All of this should be illegal and there needs to be retroactive fines and jail time. But there’s no organization or movement for it.
Acorn Computer Systems catalogue circa 1983
further along those lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNITY_(programming_language)

(note that regexps can also —exponentially— leverage nondeterminism)
just came here to upvote the alphago / MCTS comments
As Google Targets AI Search Ads, It Could Learn a Lot From Bing
The author clearly needs to add to his skills the ability to give advice while not being condescending. In particular the bit about how in the good old days everyone had excellent social skills and calligraphy but now youngsters have done away with decency in favor of smartphones.
> people vote increasingly with Pathos, aware that there will be no real consequences

Isn’t this the same as it ever was? In this view, voters deserve what they get, yet are unlikely to get what they deserve, but should we will it different? Ought not a tyranny of the majority set the stage a for tragedy of the commons?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory
> Right, the point I’m making is logs, metrics, traces, these concepts are views of data (...)

Not really. Logs are fundamentally different than operational metrics, which are fundamentally different than business/behavioral metrics, which are fundamentally different than traces, etc etc etc.

This is not a matter of "view". It's the result of completely different system requirements. They are emitted differently, they are processed/aggregated differently, they are stored differently, they are consumed differently.

Even within business metrics types, which is already a specialized type of metrics, you have fundamentally different system requirements. Click stream metrics mix traits of tracing with logging and metrics, and have very specific requirements regarding data protection.

They are all distinct observability features. They are not the same. At all. This is not up for debate.
This example came from a real world http server. Admittedly, Zig's "web dev" community is small, but we're trying :) I'm sure a lot could be improved in httpz, but it's filling a gap.