skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This blog post is actually a good indicator of how ephemeral web applications are. The blog post contains a reference to some "Snipshot" webapp. But the domain is dead now, and it's impossible to get the software. It's even hard to see how the software ever looked like.

In contrast, we can all install Lotus 1-2-3 on today's machines, via emulation.

Writing webapps is writing something that will never exist in the future. At some point in time the server will be turned off, and nobody will see your work.
Image Self Supervised Learning on a Shoestring
I'm trying to train a variable resolution ViT using IJEPA. I'm currently topping out at about 30% on imagenet1k after training for 20 epochs (6 hours)

It'd be cool to have some help and feedback. I'm on the right track to getting really killer setup that is super fast to train it needs more evaluations and more tuning. Anyone interested?
> other than typescript

Don't forget GitHub, NPM, and VSCode. Microsoft has entrenched themselves deeper than it first appears.
You are completely right. I think many people still think of Microsoft as Windows and Office.
That is because Azure, XBox, Microsoft 365, Github are pumping money.

Money that lands on Rust Foundation, Python, Go, Linux, FreeBSD, Java, VSCode.
But I don't think it is? IBM is, in essence, irrelevant. It keeps milking legacy customers, but it has no competitive edge otherwise.

Microsoft was never this far gone. PG was proclaiming their death because startups no longer feared them. But they no longer fear Google either, not the way they used to. Google's last truly disruptive and unexpected projects - Android, Chrome, Maps, Docs, etc - happened 15+ years ago. Now, the company sticks to established niches instead of trying to constantly reinvent themselves (or when they try, they almost always fail).

There's a spectrum between "dead" and "taking on the world".
You’re amazed that someone wrote a bunch of articles about opinions on the future of technology and they didn’t all turn out to be true? An expert’s opinion being wrong one time invalidates the expertise?
It's really hard for a company to die once they reach a certain size because they have the resources to pivot, even if the pivot seems a bit late.

The two most extreme examples of this are RIM (now BlackBerry) of the mid-2010s when it was clear the smartphone market was no longer viable for them, and Apple of the 1990s before the return of Steve Jobs and acquisition of NeXT. When asked what he'd do with Apple in 1997, Michael Dell famously said "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

But both companies are still alive today (Apple more than BlackBerry) because they were large enough before they had to pivot.

Other big tech companies like Microsoft were never close to death at any time. Sure, they had periods of stagnation where they had to pivot (as mentioned in this blog post), but it was more like a cold than a life threatening illness.
Nah, this is a problem going back to the early 90s, when governments got the neo-liberal austerity thing going. Especially the huge mid-90s cuts to federal health and social transfers to the provinces, by the federal Liberal gov't under Jean Chretien. Health care is the biggest portion of every provincial gov't budget, and always a point of contention.
Microsoft in 2007 is where IBM was prior to that. Which, by the way, was once invoked as the prototypical example of the "old guard tech company reinvents itself". Also, the basic thesis of the essay is that new companies don't worry about Microsoft squashing them anymore, the way they once had (and did about IBM before that). That is, I believe, still true.
This article predates the resignation of SawyerX (due to a lot of the abuse and misery heaped on him), who was the Perl release manager (aka "Pumpking") that was in charge of Perl 7.

The short version of it was that there was a bit of a power play by people who felt ignored and wanted a bigger part of what was felt to be an important development.

SawyerX goes into his a bit in a talk from 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1H9yKf8BI0

This has resulted in a new (2024) code of conduct so that leadership can proceed without the previous sorts of verbal assaults effecting things again. https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/new-standaards-of-condu...
With JetBrains IDEs (e.g. Webstorm) it’s posible to point the IDE to a central installation of ESlint (independent from the project you’re working on). I use that for smaller projects where I don’t want to include a full installation of ESLint within the list of dependencies.
Where too? It's crossing my mind more and more lately.
I think it was pretty clear that they meant no utility beyond the original one that they had before the bubble.
Based on this comment, decided to try out gemini.

Total disaster. Doing similar tasks to openai and claude, it just borks. And it is complaining about my desire to use a gender guesser python libary, and tells me that's inappropriate for non-binary people, and it won't do it.

That's fun.

Edit 1: Also it refuses to print the entire script. I've tried many work arounds, it seems to only want to output a very small number of total lines.

Threw it into ChatGPT and immediately it fixed all the issues with Gemini, and worked on first try.

Edit 2: The only thing better about Gemini as far as I can tell, is that the copy code button is on the bottom. ChatGPT's is at the top, and that's dumb.

Edit 3: I'm being downvoted heavily now, to be clear, I didn't intentionally seek out the gender issue, it's just what I was working on.

I'm currently trying to generate infographics based on wrestlers, and I needed to split the men from the female for championship title rankings.

I have no problem with it in general, it just came up, so I communicated it.

Multiple times Gemini removed the code using the gender guesser library because it felt I shouldn't use it. When trying to determine wrestlers, and their Title Chances, it makes a lot of sense...

But Gemini just refused to allow me to use it, which seems like a ridiculous thing. I want to make the choices here.
You'd think with all those billions spent on the software and the hardware it would be a walk in the park to convert a single book on algebraic topology into a formalized Coq, Lean, or Isabelle module. Seems like a very obvious test case for the intelligence capabilities of these systems. I know that it is possible because Kevin Buzzard is going to formalize Fermat's last theorem for less than £934,043 but no commercial AI lab has yet managed to build an AI that can do basic arithmetic. [0] Mira Murati is on the record about their next AI model and that it will have the intelligence of a PhD student so let's see if their next model can actually formalize basic algebraic topology into a logical calculus. [1]

0: https://gow.epsrc.ukri.org/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/Y0...

1: https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/news/openai-cto-mira-murat...
An irrelevance that powers Linux, Java, Red-Hat, GCC, Eclipse, Go,...
By that kind of logic almost any argument can be made masquerading as the truth :)
Windows is in cash-cow mode. It's a mature product that dominates a slowly shrinking market. And in terms of revenue it's not even that great compared to everything else they do. There is no point investing a lot of money.

That money goes elsewhere: pivoting MS Office to the cloud and pushing MS Azure - both by improving Azure and by improving developer tools like VSCode or languages like C# and the rest of the .Net ecosystem. And on the side they have minor projects like Github and LinkedIn.
I got better at math after programming for a few years.

Maybe, we need alternative approaches, to make the topic more interesting.
When IBM bought/merged with Red Hat, it seemed like a big deal. For that matter, IBM was a big reason why Linux became a mainstream technology. IBM doesn't move like this any more, but then we haven't seen Microsoft's investment in OpenAI actually pay any dividends yet, either.
There's no such thing as right or wrong, only fun or boring.

~ the_plague, Hackers

Paul Graham is great at saying non boring things. That's all.
It’s ok to be wrong. I’m having wrong insights all the time. You just have to acknowledge it and move along. As long as you don’t try to make it look like you were actually right given some amount of mental gymnastic.
Or the people fancying themselves as smart aren't actually all that.
I am not sure if he is wrong. Or are you implying PG is wrong just because of the headline and not the content?
You forgot laptops.
This actually sounds like KryoFlux (floppy imaging hardware/software) EULA https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/buyj9f/ti...

Even outcome was the same :) flurry of more reasonable competitors with fully open source GreaseWeazle offering the whole nine yards.
The threat of violence in retaliation for speech.
I see tons or articles with low effort search.

Anyway, allegations like these as extremly common if there is any party with a lot of money. Let’s wait the actual juridical process if that happens.
True! He’s like the exception that makes the rule, and through coincidence, ended up not even really an exception.
Yes. Waited 18 months for a 15 minute cateract surgery that I needed 18 months ago. Should have had my license taken away this past year they were so bad.
Turned out to be fraudulent. Didn’t provide a meaningful education, lied about placement numbers, lied about their financial incentives aligning with the students'—the list went on.

The CFPB, a federal regulatory body, came down on them (and the founder in particular) a few weeks ago [0]

See e.g. the narrative and related discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40729501

[0] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-takes...
Hi StelSci, you've mentioned interns & co-ops but I don't see any matching positions on your website. How would I apply for such positions?
>You have to walk them every day

I never saw this growing up. Dog walking was something people did maby on a weekend if they were “good owners” where I was at (west Michigan). Generally there was a decent sized yard with a fence though. Keeping a dog on a chain society marked you as lower class trash (as it should).

For me personally in the past 10 years there’s been a large and noticeable change in how often people walk dogs both where I currently live (PNW) and when I return to Michigan to visit family. Even my aging parents are in the habit of dog walking now. Though that’s in big part because they have more free time, no kids in the house, and need something to do.
Compared to networking being routed and controlled external to domestic laws, as a starter?

When the patriot act was passed in the US, suddenly some Canadian credit card holders, whos companies which had processing centers in the US, had all of their transaction info shared with US homeland.

If the corporate entity is domestic, foreign powers won't have control over their domestic corps, managing foreign infra.
But then, Copernicus came along with the heliocentric model which, in its simplest initial form, made worse prediction than the tuned-up Ptolemaic model. But the burden of knowledge was dissolved in an instant. Improving the Copernican model meant shifting orbital paths from perfect circles to ellipses. It had nothing to do with the epicycles and perihelions of the Ptolemaic model and none of that burdensome knowledge was necessary to expand the frontier anew.

disagree here. it does not make it easier. to show why a new model is right or superior means having to understand the old models well enough to show it's wrong or suboptimal. hence knowledge.
In a sense Nadella’s Microsoft also bribed their way into popularity with startups, with both free cloud services as well as free software like VS Code.
This is why I've been interested in the Graphene Aluminum batteries from GMG for so long. They are producing graphene in bulk without having to mine it. Aluminum is already extremely abundant as well.

I'm very optimistic because these solve so many battery issues at the same time, heat, rapid charge, sourcing.
Highschool theory might predict that for the price of butter, but everything after that is more complicated.

I feel like you are setting up strawmen positions for economic theory, using more economics to refute them, and then claiming economics is bunk.
The pivot to Linux on Azure, WSL, becoming again a Java vendor, adoption of Rust, FOSS culture on DevDiv, VSCode eating VS licenses...

On the other hand, Balmer would never allowed Windows development experience to be as bad nowadays.
What else then in modern society would not be consider "fundamental right"? Security and safety? No more state provided police or court services... No regulations? Modern state goes quite far on things and I see no reason why basic health care should not be part of those services.
Web 3.0 failed, lets pour the money in the new black hole ;)
>He got it completely wrong.

PG was referencing pre Nadella Era.
time has all answers.

just like yc likes and other accelerators like to bet on founders - they too should look at company structures / incentives etc to evaluate the future of certain companies.

from afar you can tell microsoft environment breeds killers, unlike google and other tech companies besides facebook i.e zuck & oracle.

which is why is you can never count microsoft n the likes of intel or even in terms of other industries ford out.

look at how microsoft came and knocked down the tools in terms of developer tools. look at slack. the rest of the world uses teams - it comes free.

look at how they did in the cloud. look at so called 'AI' satya or not -- microsoft has the industry by the balls and they know it. fear of gvt is what keeps them at bay.
Glaciers have been melting for many thousands of years. If a trend line were drawn from the time they started melting, you'd find that, given no additional earth changing events, eventually, the glaciers would totally melt. So .... the irreversible tipping point has existed for quite some time.
Include a screen recording that shows basic "gameplay", then.
In case anyone here is not already familiar with it, gperf is a perfect hash function generator.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gperf/manual/gperf.html
This was not a bad take at all in 2007. In fact, it's really incredible just how much things have turned around, with Microsoft (via OpenAI) currently far ahead of Google.
You mean search is dead.
And yet at the same time, most US companies are hiring only "Remote within US/Canada" ..
I’m not sure how many people think they can’t publish in some source available fashion. But they want to call it open source and while they can many people, including myself, think that’s at least mildly misleading.
Calculate Your Federal Student Loan Repayment Options with Loan Simulator
Windows XP thru 10, Xbox, Windows Phone and Azure are just a few of the things Ballmer oversaw. I am definitely missing a lot of things. But remember he over saw Microsoft as CEO for 14 years.

He may look and sound like a used car salesman but was anything but.

Yes, Nadella did end up removing Windows Phone but you had to give it to Ballmer for standing behind that thing even when it was, at times, very silly!
I think that "if" extends to pretty much any attempt to do anything, ever.
Tech Debt for Non-Technical Stakeholders
Still is, who do you think puts money on GCC, for example?
I was able to find all 10 Whole Foods in the City of Chicago in 22.6s with DuckDB. It's amazing! (there are tons more Whole Foods in the metro area, but it found the exact 10 in the city)

SELECT
tags['addr:city'][1] city,
tags['addr:state'][1] state,
tags['brand'][1] brand,
*,
FROM st_readosm('us-latest.osm.pbf')
WHERE 1=1
and city = 'Chicago'
and state = 'IL'
and brand = 'Whole Foods Market'

I'm sure there are ways to make this faster (partitioning, indexing, COPY TO native format, etc.) but querying a 9.8GB compressed raw format file with data (in key-value fields stored as strings) for the entire United States at this speed is pretty impressive to me.
The anarchists, communist and marxists don't count. They have absolutely no political relevance or power outside of social media. They're a no-op.

Leftists and progressives, when they vote, tend to vote Democrat, and never vote Republican. Except for that one time when they really wanted Bernie but we don't talk about that.

Antifa's politics would have put them solidly hard left, but like all black activist movements they were commoditized by white liberals, infiltrated by the CIA and rendered impotent and useless. They would either opt out or vote Democrat, simply because that's what black voters and leftists tend to do.

neonazis, trumpists, and religious fundamentalists, when they vote, tend to vote Republican, and never Democrat. Those groups basically form the modern Republican base at the moment.

>the DNC and RNC duopoly, which is an influence pedaling racket that claims to represent the majority of US citizens, as a fig leaf of legitimacy.

They do represent the majority of US citizens. Most US citizens aren't extreme enough not to have their views representable by the mainstream.
Absolute rubbish. There are plenty of facts that it would be quite surprising for an educated person not to know. The date of the American Revolution is not one of those facts, except for Americans.

Just like it would be unusual for an educated person not to know when the Battle of Hastings was... unless they aren't British.

And that's about as close a country to America as you can get. Do you think the educated in Singapore or Kenya learn about the American Revolution? Hell even in the UK we did not spent a single history lesson on it. I'm not exaggerating.
Definitely true, but sinking large amounts of time into learning very technical things in huge detail can often involve long periods in isolation during which one’s social skills are likely to atrophy.

Also, for some, being a ‘social butterfly’ is perfectly possible (with some effort) but is boring. This tends to be true the more into ‘hard things’ you are. Chatting to people about banality isn’t hard, so it isn’t interesting.
Where's the revenue from this? Anybody can do it; there's no "moat". Most of the applications generate very little revenue per transaction. And progress is being made on doing more LLM training with less GPU work.

Solid-state batteries and solar farms seem more promising.
out of all cross platform tools - dart / flutter is probably the easiest one. performant comes with all the widgets you want.

web, mobile etc. react paid my rent but never again.
Anthropic's Dictionary Learning, Stanford Neuroscience and MIT's Future Self [video]
This is what Knuth actually said:

> We should forget about our coworkers, say about 97% of the time: premature coordination is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3% to take credit for their work.
That has zero connection to running the code of your choice on your car. Which you can do.
In order to survive Google zombified their search engine with ads. Microsoft has brought Windows thru the same process.
I'm a native English speaker going on twenty years of acquired Russian, since college. "Russkie" in English doesn't correspond to the plural form in Russian to my intuition. It's the singular, then pluralized in the usual English way.

Transliterations make it easy to confuse the difference between the grammatical endings of русский (singular, masculine adjective used as singular noun) and русские (plural adjective used as plural noun). The end of English "Russkie" is pronounced more like the end of "русский", while the plural "русские" would be something like RUSS-key-yay in English, ROOS-key-yay in Russian.

The general rule for making singulars plural in English is adding -s. The general rule for Russian nominative-case adjectives is adding -ые or -ие. Granted, native Russian speakers often speed through and slur unstressed grammatical endings, so the difference isn't always discernible in speech.
Borderless hiring? When did the word Remote not cover that?
The shift is really taken as being 'it breaks all current ad blockers', which is taken to be an intentional decision that shifts power away from the user.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/business/montana-meat-old...

Archive: https://archive.is/20240613074737/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
Like a few weeks ago there was an article about eden abhez. Most people would have never heard of him.

Always great to heard about those that were two steps ahead of the world.
Anything that Google does apart from make money selling ads and turning the internet into an ad cesspool functions as a smoke screen to fool the public (and their employees) into thinking they do anything of real value or that serves the community. All of it https://killedbygoogle.com/ serves as a (relatively) inexpensive marketing tool.
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/

Not much to say that Julius doesn't... open course materials for (almost) everything you might need in audio processing.
I just got my local government to drastically ratchet back surveillance powers they already had, through patient organizing and advocacy. It wasn't even all that difficult. This "governments will always seek more surveillance" thing isn't axiomatic; in a lot of cases, it's probably just lazy cynicism.
Don't forget all the @sama/@a16z apologists working overtime to sweep Worldcoin under the proverbial rug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin
The Ballmer peak is a theory of coding productivity as a function of alcohol consumption.

https://xkcd.com/323/
Yeah? Care to provide some links? Keep in mind we're talking about the mainstream media, not blogs.
Fixing poverty doesn't fix the free market. Customers will be price-sensitive no matter how rich they are because tires are a utility we don't benefit from splurging on. In other market segments, it's convenience or proprietary lock-in that separates them from positive alternatives.

The only way to "fix" it in America is to legislate the tire manufacturers into compliance. And when you do that people will kick and scream and say you've ruined their free market, so you've got to pick your poison and stand by it.
a major problem with writing or any creative endeavor is the reception is out of the creator's control. you can check all the boxes on clarity of thought and it still fails to resonate with renders for whatever reason
Surprising findings from our 2024 Global DevSecOps Survey
I guess it's time for someone to start selling token tokens.
I use Windows 11 Professional at work, and I haven't seen a single ad.

There might be sponsored apps installed or something, but I don't care. I open the start menu, search for the application I want and run that. They're not getting in my way, if they are there.

That said, I prefer late-Windows 10 to current-Windows 11. But I hated Windows 10 when it launched and they fixed the key annoyances, so there's a chance they'll do it with Windows 11 as well. They've already fixed some, like the centered task bar.
I think it's more damaging to force children to be psychiatrists. Why can't they just be children?