skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OK, now I'm really glad that Visual Studio Code was one of those "eh, pass" things for me (like GNOME) and I stuck it out with Emacs all this time.

Microsoft's play appears to be soup-to-nuts control over every aspect of web developers' work -- from finding a job (linkedin) to source control (github) to libraries and dependency management (npm). Visual Studio Code fits neatly within this play. Windows may have lost web devs' hearts and minds in the 2000s-2010s, but Microsoft has pivoted to where they don't need Windows in order to capture the developers.

Wait till Pluton takes hold in a few years, and you need a Microsoft account just to get to the bootloader.
I also love the built-in history diffing that this gives you on those files.
The bigger secret is just to self host. Super easy and Plex/Unraid is the way for everyone upset at the changing content landscape

Personally, with family who earns living from entertainment industry, I try to subscribe to some services… but I also download it and just stream locally. People get paid, but in 20 years I still have taken care of my needs.
I stopped by the Oil Chemistry Building when I was in town a while back, and the day I visited they were tearing down the Fishbowl. I’ve gone places and found things still there. I’ve gone places and found them long gone. I’ve never come back to find a demolition crew working during a holiday week to tear one of my landmarks down.

That was a very complicated day.
Of course it’s deliberate. Streaming high quality content is expensive and there is very little incentive for them to allow that given their main draw isn’t the streaming service, but the unique content library they have.
its the fraternal twin to "with all due respect"
NCSA tools were a huge thing for those of us who used DOS. In the summer of 1995, I was still using Windows 3.1, and I was the only one who brought a computer to the research program I was enrolled in (not CS). When I told people that they could use telnet to go read their home email, my computer spent an hour a day being the check-in point (it was a long walk to the computer labs on campus, and we didn't have local logins) for those who wanted to read email.

The next summer, I was at the University of Florida, but off-campus. However, the Alachua [County] Freenet offered free dialup with PPP. Since etherppp emulated an Ethernet packet driver, the NCSA apps worked fine there, though obviously much slower.

Better, more complete DOS-compatible suites have arisen since then (e.g., mTCP), but the NCSA suite was fantastic. Security? Nah, none of that. But useful? OMG yes.
Yup, ASCII was a multi-byte character set, using overstrike with BS (backspace). Little-known fact, that. There's still a holdover of this in terminal apps, which use this for underscoring and bolding.
But who needs to know what happens behind the facade of the services? It does everything for us!

I miss the days of having an expert sys admin and DBA to help with tough issues. Now we're all on our own with no training. Most of the good people got axed or thrown into other roles. Becoming good at something only to have it thrown away and undervalued pisses me off.
And if AGI eventually comes from OpenAI. I'm starting to doubt that.
Aren't the two basically synonymous? Cost is a proxy for the amount of effort put into it.
One of the top 10 supercomputer NERSC use SUSE enterprise Linux which corresponds to OpenSUSE Leap.
Starscape, city scape…
Maybe they are thinking about embedding a program generator and execution environment into their LLM inferencing loop in a tighter way. The model invents a program that guides the output in a specific/algorithmic way, tailored to the prompt.
Er, do you have any sources for Sartre and de Beauvoir raping young girls? I can't seem to find one.
some comments like this make me waant to subscribe to you for all your future comments. thanks for doing the hard work of summarizing and taking the bold step of sharing your thoughts in public. i wish more HNers were like you.
The XAES-256-GCM extended-nonce AEAD
It's not just their TV software either:

They offer their service for free on Delta flights, but when I tried it on a US-domestic flight I had to restart a single episode of Star Trek about 5 times because it would cut out with an error saying I was in Canada and couldn't watch the show there.

If you're going to use airplanes as a marketing technique, you probably should be relatively confident that your geolocation system isn't going to go haywire when someone is using airplane wifi and trample all over those prospective customers.
Are those rules necessary? Do those rules have to be implemented at the federal level? Can the states take responsibility for some of the items instead?
As a parent with kids who play junior tennis, I remind them after every loss (and win) that this is just a hobby.

But the number of parents who take this so seriously would surprise anyone not part of this culture.

The travelling, the hotel rooms, the large number of tournaments played every week -- all these things start early (7-8 years old). School? Forget about it. They're superficially home-schooled. Tennis is all they do, and if they're lucky (at least by the standards of the article), they don't get good enough to be a low-level "pro" and get a chance to go to school for a proper education and get a regular job that pays well.

If they're unlucky, they get a D1 school, on a full-ride scholarship, and then waste a few years of their lives continuuing to damage their bodies in pursuit of "making it" as a pro tennis player.
Before we get too upset... can we verify this is MSFT's official position? I suspect this may be hyperbole. It could be Sulyman was constructing a hypothetical point that didn't survive translation into click-bait. That being said... MSFT has a history of chicanery. I'm off to try to find original sources. If anyone else has any, please provide a link.

FWIW... I found a few videos related to Endicott's story:

* This is a quick 5 minute video where Suleyman talks about how indeterminacy is good. So... you know... it's a good think that Co-Pilot can't tell you why it thinks it needs to dump 800 line of java code into your hello world program. At around 3:44, he confuses LLMs (with a surface understanding of syntax married with a markov chain on steroids) with people (who as best we can tell have a different understanding of the thing represented.) Corporate management confusing the the map with the territory? Who could have forseen such a thing: https://youtu.be/GsGFYoIx1YM

* This one seems to be the longer version, but I'm still looking for where Endicott's quote comes from, but around the 14minute mark is where the conversation turns towards "who owns the ip" used to train LLMs and the terms "Fair Use" and "Freeware" are used around the 14m50s mark: https://youtu.be/lPvqvt55l3A

[EDIT: So... yes... get out the pitch-forks... Microsoft is saying anything on the web is inherently freeware or subject to fair use even if you think you remember putting a copyright notice on it (or, as is mentioned in US copyright law, the creator automatically receives copyright protections upon creation of the work.)]
Well, for example, the SEC has used a law from 80 years ago about retaining memos as justification for billions in fines against companies whose employees used whatsapp to say "the market is crazy" (or similarly benign things). All they did was "fill in a gap" to make this totally new law.
The public display of affection is amusing. The standard framed photograph on the office desk, the customary banner on social media landing page announcing the magnitude of love for one's family, etc, etc.
The usual gotcha is you can keep the plan if you want, but slowly the plan becomes unusable. Imagine having a very cheap unlimited 2G-only plan in a world where even 3G networks have been shut down.

I have a $23.49/month unlimited AT&T hotspot plan that will die once the device it is locked to dies.
Can we preserve the first footprint on the moon?
a gui
If the application was critical enough, then I could see the effort in making a cycle-accurate, bug-accurate clone.
then maybe dont name it "LLM Compiler", just "Compiler Guidance with LLMs" or "LLM-aided Compiler optimization" or something - will get much more to the point without overpromising
Temperature is at ~1.2 in this thread, here's some 0.0:

- Yes, temperature 0.0 is less creative.

- Injecting pseudo-random noise to get deterministic creative outputs is "not even wrong", in the Wolfgang Pauli sense. It's fixing something that isn't broken, with something that can't fix it, that if it could, would be replicating the original behavior - more simply, it's proposing non-deterministic determinism.

- Temperature 0.0, in practice, is an LLM. There aren't emergent phenomena, in the sense "emergent phenomena" is used with LLMs, missing. Many, many, many, applications use this.

- In simplistic scenarios, on very small models, 0.0 could get stuck literally repeating the same token.

- There's a whole other layer of ex. repeat penalties/frequency penalties and such that are used during inference to limit this. Only OpenAI and llama.cpp expose repeat/frequency.

- Temperature 0.0 is still non-deterministic on ex. OpenAI, though substantially the same, and even the same most of the time. It's hard to notice differences. (Reproducible builds require extra engineering effort, the same way ensuring temperature = 0.0 is truly deterministic requires engineering effort.)

- Pedantically, only temperature 0.0 at the same seed (initial state) is deterministic.
Maybe if this was a Michael Bay movie, but real scientists know that an Earth ending level event would just laugh at your nukes as it just flew on by. In the grand scheme of the cosmos, man made nukes are but a mere gnat at the picnic nuisance.
I use OpenSUSE Leap with transactional server, which is another immutable distribution by SUSE. I run it on my storage node primarily serving a ZFS pool over the network. This means the server is more like an appliance (NAS) and this immutable setup is a perfect fit IMO.

I suppose I could have use Aeon instead? But I like having OpenSUSE Leap across the fleet too which others doing more heavy lifting.
> There isn’t. This is the most common _conclusion_, based on the math. It’s not a starting assumption.

How? Time doesn't work inside black holes, we have no clue how that even works or if things are frozen or if it happens instantly. Math can't answer what happens when time doesn't work.

This isn't just the time paradox of near light travel, the math says that inside black holes you have an entire different dimension of time instead of our regular one, nothing can be said at all about what it looks like from our point of view since there is no concept of shared time between us and what is inside of black holes.

So either the formulas are wrong, or we can't say anything about what is inside.
A Blogroll Lab
I dispute this. It seems to me that if Congress was vague, it knew it was ceding power to the agency to decide; and that the court in Chevron considered it normal that the fallout from poor decisions should land upon those seeking legislative or executive re-election.

I can see both good and bad outcomes from today's decision (though I think in the short term it will multiply litigative and executive brinksmanship without elevating legislative standards), but I really don't agree with the idea that the justices who originally decided it were just clueless about the implications.
It’s a pro-AI position but not really controversial?

My reading is he is saying content that is not under an explicit license for usage, that is made available publicly and freely, is fair game for training.

> In his remarks, Suleyman claimed that all content shared on the web is available to be used for AI training unless a content producer says otherwise specifically.

> "With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding," said Suleyman.

> "There's a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, 'do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.' That's a gray area and I think that's going to work its way through the courts."
I don’t think the dumbest thing Mozilla did was take money from Google.

It was spending the fucking money.

Foundations like some cancer groups and the arts have an endowment. Each year they build up their war chest by seeking new funding, but a lot of the money they spend each year is the interest payments on their giant piles of cash. Mozilla could have run in perpetuity on the money Google gave them, but instead they decided to branch out into boondoggles and dipping their hands into the cookie jar.
>pronouncing "Ethernet" with a short e, as though it were to rhyme with "meth"

Well it's a network across the ether (æther) right? :-D
Maybe, if you could pin point where that would be, but that's much more difficult than people give it credit. Margin of errors means thinking it will hit the east coast of the US, but wind up hitting the west coast. So you've evacuated for nothing, and didn't evacuate where it counts.
"And operations was on-call, and ... had absolutely zero fucking idea what to do, the manuals were fake, and they had no expertise, and the whole handover was just burning money, etc."

This is what is we with DevOps now. The short lived dev teams had it over to the next dev team with basically no documentation. DevOps was just another stop on the shitty process parade that Agile contributed to - all about speed, forget docs, who has time for real tests, and for requirements we'll just use JIRA tickets the devs work on.

Surprise, surprise... Our bug and rework stories take about 25% of our capacity now.
https://harris-sliwoski.com/blog/trademarking-foreign-words-...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/index....

> Even though we do not pass the telemetry build flags (and go out of our way to cripple the baked-in telemetry), Microsoft will still track usage by default.
Most streaming services through web browsers do not allow streaming greater than 720p unless you install a separate desktop app with heavy DRM protection. They do not want people ripping the 4K feed for piracy. I wish there was a way to emulate the hardware decryption on streaming devices
Just copy the url and paste it into a new tab.
Yes. I simply meant a relative comparison between the two. Agreed otherwise
Tokamaks will look to them as pyramids and mummies look to ourselves today.
I’m curious how they assign percentage to geographic location. For me it fails the sniff tests. Like how far back do you pick your line of ancestry (which has migrated all over the world) when you say stop and determine, this is the place 20% of my bloodline is from?

I imagine they do some sort of cluster analysis to find correlation along with self-identification. If so, then this is undeniably junk science based on junk-in junk-out statistical models (which is often the case with cluster-analysis).

I’m simply curious here, cluster analysis is the only method I can think of (other than guessing/categorizing arbitrarily).
Yes, in that they're complimentary methodologies. But the second you have a DevOps team (or, shutter, a "microservice team"), you've gone sideways.
This is such a good description. Very much appreciated.
I can vouch for it. It's the main reason I quit: none of the "hard" skills necessary to code at Google were transferrable anywhere outside of Google. It would have been easy enough to skate and use "soft" skills to move up the management ladder and cash big checks, but I wasn't interested in that.

The reason it's not transferrable is that Google has its own version of EVERYTHING: version control, an IDE, build tools, JavaScript libraries, templating libraries, etc, etc. The only thing I can think of that we used that wasn't invented at Google was SCSS, and that was a very recent addition. Google didn't even use its own open-source libraries like Angular. None of the technologies were remotely usable outside Google.

It might sound cool to use only in-house stuff, and I understand the arguments about licensing. But it meant that everything was poorly-documented, had bugs and missing features that lingered for years, and it was impossible to find a SME because whoever initially built a technology had moved on to other things and left a mess behind them.

Some people may be able to deal with the excruciating slowness and scattered-ness, and may be OK with working on a teeny slice of the pie in the expectation that years later they'll get to own a bigger slice. But that ain't me so I noped out as soon as my shares vested.
Suleyman is MSFT's AI CEO. If this is his opinion, that's how the division is operating.

Obviously Microsoft is a huge company so he doesn't represent everyone, that would be impossible. But it's a massive red flag.
One of the issues that led to this decision is regulatory overreach. Standard example is the clean air act which regulated air pollution. Years later the EPA decided that green house gases were air pollutants that could be regulated under the act. Then they tried to say that CO2 was a pollutant, and businesses started to fight back hard.
the science of finding ways to observe it is still science. we couldn't observe many phenomena before we developed the science to do so.
This doesn't deprive the original owner, so they should use "share" or "pirate" instead.
Specially when your juggling is getting out of practice.
Sure. But this is not what US copyright law says.
I guess you have to add some plugin? I mean in Rmarkdown in Rstudio I just go ```{ruby} and I have a ruby block with nothing special installed. That doesn't work by default with Quarto.
It's ironic that Microsoft used copyright protection and IP law for years to secure a dominant market position, and now they don't need to play by the same rules because "something something AI".
I think the methodology contributed to the culture shift, or vice versa. Things like documentation and requirement capture have gone to absolute shit over the last decade at my company. You couldnhave good documentation under either model, but I feel like the shift to microservices was about speed for many companies, so they cut docs along with the shift.
The successor, the platform team, is also really only accessible to enterprise companies.

Hiring an entire team to build great dev-tooling and deployments, monitoring, application templates, org level dependency management etc is just too much to swallow for any medium sized or smaller business, so in that reality you wind up with a few heavily overworked devops folks who take up unhealthy habits to cope with the associated stress and risk.

In my 10 year career thus far none of the startups I worked for, even well capitalized ones had what this article, and myself, would consider to be a platform team. I only saw my first platform team when I stepped into a role at 6000+ person company.

It's effectively an underserved (and under-appreciated imo) area and responsible for a lot of pain and land-mine decisions companies make around their software product.
I'm one of those old sysadmins/DBA's, and having worked in devops for a year or two a few years back, I was able to take the best parts of it that I found useful, and leave the rest for the internet widget crowd to bicker about on here and in the workplace.

I brought CI/CD, automated deployments, and infra tests with me to what was a very "retro" non-cloud UNIX style environment. I left all the horseshit (kanban, retrospectives, scrum) for the others that are not really all that interested in actually getting shit done. While those guys had a bunch of shiny tools to play with all day long, they lacked basic UNIX skills that us old guys have, and you had to continually had to show them how it was done.

The results speak for themselves. Couldn't be happier (or more securely employed) at this stage of my life.
Just now I am realizing that Slack is a lot more like a Usenet client than it is like an IRC client.

I mean. It’s still very far from actually being NNTP, and it’s not decentralized like Usenet or anything like that.

But all this time I’ve been thinking of Slack as “better IRC, with images and links and threads”.

When really Slack is more like “fancy Usenet service with client that renders images and other attachments”. (Although on the protocol and server and client implementation level it is very different from NNTP.)

Well. At least we don’t have to inefficiently yEnc encode attachments nor to split attachments into a bunch of pieces with par2 files. So there’s that.
People talk the same shit about Woz and Paul Allen too.

I could have gotten in on the third big round of hiring at Amazon, but I told my friend I’d rather work until retirement than get rich writing Perl code. People are allowed to have standards, and those standards are allowed to keep you from taking money you don’t feel good about.

If it wasn’t then we would all be sex workers. Most pay for the least work.
> I think calling people who oppose your policy ideas “obstructionists” is a neat ad hominem

It would be, except that I never actually said that. Plenty of people can disagree with me and not be an obstructionist. A person in congress can even vote against something I'm in favor of and not be an obstructionist. Obstructionists are something very different from just being "people I don't like"

> What you’re lamenting is that you can’t force an agenda without people agreeing

No, it's certainly not about "forcing an agenda" it's about functional governance which by necessity involves compromise and a willingness to give and take. It's not even always about "agreeing". An obstructionist will vote against their own policy ideas to prevent letting their opponent get their way.

> While you say “most Americans”,

I mean most Americans. Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans want congress to work and they don't like the government shutdowns obstructionists cause.

> but factually, you lack a majority for your agenda

That's incorrect too. While obstructionists can stand in the way of policies that divide the American public there are also situations where a policy has majority support but is still held up or prevented by obstructionists. If we lived in a country where the approval rating of senators indicated their likelihood of getting elected you might have a point, as obstructionists being elected and re-elected would indicate that the majority of the people support them and their tactics. That's not the country we live in however. For just one example, notable obstructionist Mitch McConnell is the least popular senator in the entire country. He has no reason to stop being an obstructionist though, because how the people feel about him doesn't impact his ability to keep his job.

That's not democracy, it's just what happens after many decades of efforts to weaken democracy and erode the ability of the American people to have a meaningful influence on policy and who gets into office.
That’s not easy for everyone
Google isn't a word; it is a misspelling of “googol” [1], itself hardly a common word.

Or more technically correct: google wasn't a word when Google was founded, but today google is listed in dictionaries [2] as a verb that means searching for something on Google.

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/googol

2. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google
Not that hard if he's just trying to create something smarter than himself. I'd say we're there.
A recursive division benchmark among different systems programming languages