skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
mid 2020s: outsource development to AI rather than pay your people

I've always been amazed at the kind of money companies will throw at not having to hire a developer. Salesforce is a quarter of a trillion dollar company because they tell management that they won't need to hire any developers and then charge outrageous rates to accomplish simple tasks in the most complicated way possible.
I would need to dig up blog posts I read several years ago to get specific. I recall reading a blog post of yours where you describe hardcoding particular constants to play nice with some loaders and/or dynamic linkers. My impression having worked in this area was "this person is playing with fire, the whole mental framework of operating here is high risk, they will break in a Windows or macOS release and they will deserve to be broken." I know when I played similar tricks with my binaries in the Windows world, they were broken with new OS releases. Emergent behavior from a loader is not an ABI contract, and in that old blog post, which I know I am being vague here, you were definitely treating it as such..

The HN audience at large doesn't know the C world very well and they might mistake your thing for something useful in prod. That's kind of unfortunate.
It is exhausting, but so is the misconception that the output of an LLM can be cleanly divided into two categories.
Customers often do not know exactly what they want.
In the small, yes, but I believe there are innovations still undiscovered that will allow retailers to replace the areas roughly approximated by multiple price points with a model which captures the entire consumer surplus. Think about the advantages a retailer would have over competitors if they could capture the entire consumer surplus. It would be incredible.
The original comment is 100% correct.
The best time to build that infrastructure was a long time ago. The next best time is now.
Seamless Screenshot Testing for Compose with Screenshotbot
The article's tone is much more biased than the title suggests, starting right from the subtitle. Anyway, YC is probably right in that so-called safety checks (which is often just censorship in practice) could kill open source AI development and only allow big tech giants to control AI, which is the opposite of what many people want to happen. Say goodbye to open source AI and say hello to paying endlessly for APIs to cloud AI that can nevertheless deny your request on the slightest hint of impropriety.
The Swedish company Pricer has done this since 1991.
No it is a _component_ of AI. The ability to react to optical stimuli does not make a plant intelligent, but it is a component of intelligence.
Taken to the extreme, this says nothing because humans are ultimately behind every decision. If a cosmic ray caused a bit to flip and trigger an error, you could call it a people problem because humans failed to account for it.
The more the merrier, yes. I’m an amateur road cyclist and most of my training is spent in the lower heart-rate “zones” trying to train my mitochondria. The theory is that for endurance sports the key variable is your mitochondria’s capacity to use oxygen and fuel to produce ATP.

Further, if the mitochondria is being asked to make more ATP than it can aerobically, then it will skip the final respiratory step and respire without oxygen (anaerobically). This causes a build up of lactate in the cells that is not tolerated above a certain level, I believe due to it raising acidity levels in the cell.

You’ll often hear athletes and coaches talk about lactate threshold and Functional Threshold Power (FTP). This is all to do with mitochondria function.
Because being able to do basic order-of-magnitude arithmetic in one's head is a critical thinking tool essential to detecting nonsense claims in real time.
A business that's all MBAs and no one who actually knows how to do the work has a serious people problem.
Is there a european country that doesn't do that?
If you had an efficient market, wouldn't a competitor charge just a little less than others who are using surge pricing? Isn't the whole efficient market thing about how eventually prices should reach the cost of production, which would not be affected by surge demand?
except politic pressure, for better or worse, is the only way we have to scrutinize anything.

otherwise you get a stalinist party. there's no in between. no matter how specialized or elitist and gate keeping your argument is.
kani certainly could be extended to have better async / await support. But, I think this is a larger engineering problem. The value of code that has been verified using an existing model checking tool is greater than the value of code using a particular framework and hoping that Some Day there will exist a tool that will work with that framework.

I'd wrap libraries that were problematic to build function contracts around before I punted on model checking. Hell, I'd fork and refactor these APIs to work with lightweight fibers before I gave up on model checking. The utility of something like async / await is small potatoes compared to the utility of having code that has even light formal verification in place.
i built a social media for coders. it summarizes changes in your github repo automatically and makes it into a post. you can follow each other there. it's free to use. any feedback welcome:). https://pacepeek.com
Sure they are haha, they feel blood in the water and potential to make huge amounts of money.
What is going on with your tape measures? Confused european over here.
The personal automobile is an abomination.
I comment every line of my neovim configuration no matter how obvious it seems to be at the time. I assume when documenting that I won't remember what that config name does. Would that work for emacs?
These exist and have been saving lives for at least 6 years:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/lifegua...
Obvious solution is obvious: restore the fucking scrollbar.

I suspect a strong driver of scrollbar deprecation is the overwhelming dominance of small-screen touch-based mobile devices. An active scrollbar, that is, one which not only shows page scroll depth, but controls it via touch, is one more UI element to generate annoying behaviours given the already perilous state of touch-based UIs. (The inability to correctly distinguish tap vs. drag or scroll actions is one that's driven me to distraction for well over a decade.)

Unfortunately, what's at least arguable on mobile becomes the trendy fashion on desktop, which is just fucking stupid.
Some of you may drown, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make!
Cynically I think the intent of this push is to stimy the lefts push for Solar / Wind without evoking 'climate change denialism.' I.e. the liberals are acquiescing on the point of need for green energy and proposing this as an alternative solution. That nuclear is unpopular with the left helps stake the ground for the boarder culture war.

The problem is that it's likely that tariffs will be raised on cheap solar imports from China so either way, nuclear or solar, there will be no cheap electricity for Australians.

In my view, either a corrupt nuclear firm syphons off a bunch of public money, or another bunch of money will be wasted trying to get Australian solar manufacturing competitive with China. Sadly not wasting a bunch of money is not an option. That's the problem with the government funded ventures, trying and failing makes more money than trying and succeeding.

At least they're not pushing clean coal anymore.
Those graphs of animation tweens - in the terminal no less - are beautiful.
Taking the downvotes....

It seems like a micro-agression (not sure what word to use) that Safeway, Lucky's, Vons, etc are "grocery stores" but 99 Ranch, K-Mart, Pacific Supermarket are "Asian Grocery stores". Effectively, you're "normal" if you go to a "grocery store" but you're abnormal if you go to an "asian grocery store".

I think they should rename/reclassify the "mostly based on European culture groceries stores" as something a little less "this is the norm".

This is especially true in majority Asian areas since going to Safeway, Lucky's, Vons, etc is probably not the norm.

https://bestneighborhood.org/race-in-san-francisco-ca/

And, even though I know there will be lots of downvotes, it sure would be nice to hear some argument for why this doesn't matter. It's effectively telling people they're foreigners. If you weren't a foreigner you'd go to the "grocery store" but because you're not really part of here you go to an "asian grocery store". It's pretty clear, at least to me, the one of those is considered the "norm" and other the exception and it follows there's a judgement there.
Here's my two hot takes on that topic.

First, you are on HN, a website full of entrepreneurs betting their savings on AI companies. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" [1]. Remember that the CEO of OpenAI used to be the president of HN.

Second, remember NFTs? Bitcoin? Perhaps even MongoDB [2]? Tech lives and dies on hype and AI is the newest one. This too shall pass.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
Galileo also couldn't explain the lack of an observed parallax effect between opposite seasons given the ideas about optics at the time.

When Kepler's model arrived, it was so much better at predicting the positions of all planets except Mercury than any previous model that it was clearly superior. Galileo's was bad at predicting and just contradicted the accepted observations of the day.

IMO Galileo should be better remembered for objects of different masses falling at the same rate and the original idea that all motion is relative (when observing from an internal frame).
The best argument I've seen against the bill so far is this one from Jeremy Howard: https://www.answer.ai/posts/2024-04-29-sb1047.html
Maybe we should just fine any company 100% of revenue if they breach a law, since that's just as arbitrary of a number and makes our region more money.
I was contemplating whether to write this for quite a while and in general I wouldn't, because it contributes to a bad signal/noise ratio. And I'm not immune to making some semi-snarky remarks that might not contribute too much, myself. But there's a certain... shall we say _behavior_ I recognise from reddit that made me feel it was warranted.
> Why do things that are meant for safety always have to be insanely priced?

When your product fails you may be liable for an injury or death.
There's an infrastructure engineer, or engineers that support DevOps operations. But DevOps by definition was about Devs doing more Ops, having an engineer 'do it for you' never made sense. 'DevOps engineer' was an unfortunate rebranding of infra engineers to maintain the status quo.
Even so, the difference between some tests and no tests is vast. It's worth keeping CI/CD "propped up" just to detect syntax/compilation errors if nothing else.

(And then those of us who care at least have the option of writing some tests. I'll take the heat for being "slower" if I have to, because a bare minimum of tests provides extremely high value and advocating for baseline CI/CD is a great way to contribute to any organization.)
The Jonestown massacre was actually grape flavor-aid:

https://www.vox.com/2015/5/23/8647095/kool-aid-jonestown-fla...

They really do appear to be all in on avoiding memory leaks from C/CPP:

> Over the next few years we plan to continue replacing C or C++ software with memory safe alternatives in the Let’s Encrypt infrastructure: OpenSSL and its derivatives with Rustls, our DNS software with Hickory, Nginx with River, and sudo with sudo-rs. Memory safety is just part of the overall security equation, but it’s an important part and we’re glad to be able to make these improvements.

It seems like a really challenging endeavor, but I appreciate their desire to maintain uptime and a public service like they do.
Schools Will Have to Start Closing Again
You could also put the operator on a jetski directly
I think this is basically true in moderation.

I certainly agree that a lot of problems (including a lot of very difficult problems!) are not amenable to purely technical solutions.

But sometimes you have a difficult, technical bug to fix, and the "people problem" is making sure that someone has the knowledge, context, time, and incentive to fix it. This is not necessarily easy!

... especially if enough people have bought into "everything is a people problem", because then the technical work of fixing the bugs isn't valued or incentivized. Why would it be? It's not solving a people problem.

I think the viewpoint "everything is a people problem" can create a feedback loop that leads to poor incentives - which, ironically, is a people problem.
> Dude was a math grad student. I narrowly restrained myself from saying ...

Do not show restraint, and neither will I. For I am a mathematician, not a fucking calculator.

But once, early in undergrad, I was capable of multiplying 4-digit numbers rather quickly. But tallying never seemed useful except while grading exams -- during which my brain populates a lookup table over the course of an hour, and then I can tally small sums without hesitation. But after that day of grading, the lookup table is flushed for more important uses of short term memory.
There is a valley of death between something that works in a research lab and something that world in the real world.

A research reactor does not have to produce electricity at anything close to an economic price, just as the fusion reactors.

A Thorium reactor might work, and might be built in some future, and it might even not come super over budget or over time like more or less every fission reactor we've built. In the meantime, wind/solar/batteries are being continuously delivered on time, on budget, are getting continuously cheaper, and are available today.
The only time I said "why don't we just use a calculator" in school was during the oddly specific focus on integration techniques in calculus (trig substitution etc). Seems like the problems were carefully set up to be solvable that way, but IRL you'd actually need a computer.
The EU would rapidly collapse if US big tech pulled out. It actively prevents the development of a flourishing tech industry.
Have you read many articles from sleep deprived mothers about AI? I appreciated her delirious candor, personally.
> Many advanced large US Navy vessels have reactors.

They are not built to be cost-efficient. The Navy doesn't really care about cost per MWh, they're after other metrics.

The civilian energy sector is the opposite: we can afford to cut a few clients once in a while, but we can't afford to overspend.
Ticketek issues 'sincere apology' to customers after data breach
PS. Part of the Snowflake snowball ...
They tend to concentrate in muscle cells, so fat cells themselves will not help much
I use Doom[1], which is put together by people who know a heck of a lot more about Emacs than I do. Almost all my configuration is just turning on the features I want. Maybe once every year or two I check that my configuration is using stuff that has be superseded. This is super easy to use, gives me a great Emacs experience, and takes almost no work to maintain.

[1]: https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs
I think I'm misunderstanding what this does, since a naive reading suggests it's doing something which is pretty easy to prove impossible.

EDIT: Oh. I guess OP isn't including the symbol counts as part of the message when calculating the message length? I guess I can see why this could be useful, but I think this should be made much more explicit.
>> Nothing is going to get better until we start trying to get out of the hole and improve the average person's ability to swim and make decisions in open water.

Couldn't agree more.

I remember growing up and my parents required myself and my brothers to take swim lessons all the way through junior lifesaving course which was the last course the city offered and you had to pass all the lower classes in order to get into the lifeguard class. These classes were always taught over the Summer and every class had 2-30 kids in it. The lifeguard class was slightly less around 10-15 kids, but still a large class.

I remember wanting to teach my daughter how to swim. The local pool didn't have lessons and neither did the YMCA, so we had to do one of these "mall-type" lessons where some company had a pool in some strip mall and you had one instructor and like 3 kids in the class. In an hour, then had maybe seven or eight reps of learning different techniques. I was just stunned it had changed so drastically. I remember being in the pool for almost two hours every day, every morning for my Summers, getting ten to fifteen minutes on each technique day after day. I remember riding on some rickety old school bus at 7am with a bunch of other kids I didn't know.

I don't know if its because there is no value for cities or the Y to take swimming lessons on any more, or the money and liability is too much. Either way, kids are not prepared to deal with being out in the open water, either in a pool or out in more dangerous areas like the ocean.
> No need to be rude.

It was appropriate criticism.

The comment above just said "like, people really value binary compatibility and stuff" -- as if it's OK to code against a very specific moment in time with internal dynamic linker constants and such. No. "It works with how ld.so is written right now" says nothing about standards conformance. Not everything that happens to work is conformant to an ABI. Not every emergent behavior is a feature of an ABI. You would have to not understand what is going on at process load time to think that. Even the highly regarded Microsoft binary compatibility does not work against the model that someone is creating an ELF and PE executable in the same file, they would rightly call that crazy town and mark any bugs as "won't fix".
Surge pricing does not increase supply, and by design it does not decrease demand to the point where demand is less than supply. The end result is that exactly the same number of people can buy exactly the same products.

The only difference is that companies make more money from selling the same products, and that products in short supply are distributed more towards the people with deeper pockets.
Source this is actually done? It's non-trivial to turn a phone number into a phone model, unless you're conspiring with the carrier. If you're doing BYOD or are using a MVNO, it's even harder.
He is making a really long winded point I'm not sure I completely understand, so feel free to correct me if I am off here, but I could not really disagree more.

While there is value in emphasizing things like defining/abstracting a problem rather than calculating the result of it, things like the "algorithm" typically taught to elementary schoolers to do long division is pretty much how you would naively/algorithmically program a division operator that can give a remainder. The multiplication "algorithm" given to me at a young age was what first gave me the insight into the connection between addition and multiplication. Abstracting this away in education could not possibly be doing society, math, or computation any service whatsoever, at least not in the way (I think?) he is imagining.

I do think there is value to asking whether a problem needs to be solved or redefined or abstracted in a different manner. I had a calculus teacher in college a long time ago that had a really hilarious way of emphasizing this - he'd often bury "trap" questions into his tests that looked really simple but would test your knowledge of a simple algebraic or trigonometric trick he'd only covered during lecture, and lack of knowledge of this trick would lead one down a hopeless 20+ page response to the problem, to the point where if you found yourself going off the rails with a complex solution, you knew you messed up somewhere. This forced me to look at the problem from a variety angles to see if I could solve it in a more clever, general, or simpler way, or if it could be rewritten (this was usually the correct way to solve it). I really valued that, even years and years later, but maybe that's not the kind of thing Wolfram is getting after in this interview.
uBlock Origin's element blocker is ideal for removing those. You can define global rules for anything from Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent, etc., and never see them again.

"Sharedaddy" is another element to nuke (social link litter crap).
People make bad decisions too --- but they rarely do so alone. Try hiring someone in an established company without multiple levels of review.

The problem with AI is that we know these models are flawed but they are being implemented anyway in an effort to save money.

If you have to manually review all AI results, the cost savings start to evaporate. Particularly if it leads to lawsuits.

Imagine trying to explain in court how/why AI decided to fire someone.

The real culprit here is greed.
It requires you to recompile your application a third time if you want to load x64 plugins, and then it becomes incompatible with arm plugins.
Berkley bowl in Berkley carries it. It is I think one of the best grocery stores out there.
While I agree that we shouldn't be logging in Washington, is the answer really that we should just pay someone else to log in their watershed instead?

We need to not be logging, period. There's a huge difference in selectively felling trees locally and commercial logging. The problem is that we have collectively grown so accustomed to immediate gratification and the appearance of unlimited resources that we've completely disconnected from how the world really works.

If we really want to fix anything meaningful it's going to take people realizing that cheap energy from coal and oil, combined with paying someone else to deal with the immediate ecological damages caused, aren't sustainable approaches to living here.
I'm from the UK and I'm curious what you would expect chilli powder to be?

Over here it's always just chillis.
How it started: let’s get some ingredients for bi-bim-bop

How it ended: (a basket full of Korean snacks, random side dishes, drinks, ingredients for other dishes that I can’t make well)
Rosetta allows loading x86 plugins into arm apps.
It is not beyond the wit of man to dig a hole.

(Of course you can build pumped hydroelectric storage anywhere, it's just cheaper in some places.)
Yeah, this is take is easy for the brain to start down. I blame the word "people". A more accurate term that maps to the examples in the previous post is perhaps something like "inter-team coordination problem".
> about as popular as "prepend the contents of file A to file B"

I've never understood why filesystems don't easily support prepending data, or to truncate the start of a file.

It should be, as far as I can see, about as trivial to support as appending and truncating the end, and is something that comes up quite often in application code. Even if it is a bit more tricky, I think the benefits would be great in the cases where it's needed.

Instead applications are left having to rewrite the contents.
California really does seem to be getting harder to build a tech business in
May you share some more knowledge or source regarding their environmental awareness ? Thanks
The fact that these devices are getting more "secure" imho also removes a great opportunity for learning. It used to be possible to tinker with these devices: now even vacuum cleaner's firmware is locked in and unreadable. What is so precious about a handheld vacuum's firmware anyway? It seems like their only goal here was to make the device nearly impossible to fix. I really have a hard time understanding the rationale.
I have both H Mart and Patel Brothers near me. While Patel Brothers is newer in my area and has only been around a few years, H Mart has been a staple for over a decade of shopping. Some items are cheaper, and some items are not sold at the trading US supermarkets.