skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dunno if you were alive at the time but that's not really what happened. The first iPhone was really expensive but people bought it anyway because it was sooo far ahead of the competition. Until the iPhone most people didn't even bother with smart phones because they were so bad (Blackberry was a partial exception).

The web browsing wasn't slow - part of what made it so compelling was that you could browse the real web without going insane. No WAP nonsense.

Yes, it was rough compared to the later versions, but even the first one was insanely better than anything else. It was pretty clear what the issues were (battery life and lack of 3G as you said).

I don't think the Vision Pro is like that at all. It's big issues aren't missing features or lack of polish. It fundamentally makes no sense as a product even if they improve the resolution, speed, battery life, etc.
Ideally, good working model can be used as tech support - meaning the revenue per license might increase 10x as the value increases. The problem I would say is not that current models are incapable of delivering value as a feature. But that they change not necessarily for better. I liked clickup AI when it was beta. Now it's shit. I have no control over it and the fact that initially I could almost copy paste replies based on docs was really promising to reuse in support
Ye in retroperspective he was right.

It was at first some years ago with the 'indie' studios publishing on Steam I've played nice adventure games again. 'We Were Here'. Quite good but not very polished.

I think the early 3d mix of 2d backgrounds and 3d characters was allright. Like Grim Fandango or Resident Evil. But ye many of the early pure 3d games didn't work out at all.
You are one of a tiny monitory in that regard.
> if you pay $X per month for their software that allows you to earn 100x that amount, then $X is nothing.

Apart from the network effects, are there many exclusive features that you use, or is it more that it's just not worth changing?
You can, but I didn't want to introduce any extra constructs from the original example.

And this is a bit of a weird case, at least where I am. I tend to have a bunch of things to process and have one goroutine sending keys/indices/etc to a channel that multiple workers are processing off of.

We did have an abstraction for that at one point, but there were enough edge cases in our domain that we either had to develop a config system or rip it out and go back to writing each one (we went with the latter after an attempt at the former went really bad).
Uh yeah, that's the point.

Software dev as 'opex' (actually R&D, which had the same treatment as opex) == the old way.
800k in 'income' you've already spent to do what your company exists to do, but have to pay taxes on this year == the new way.
Alphabet X spinoff partners w Arc'teryx to create 'everyday' ($4.5k) exoskeleton
This is something I always say and amazed by. Just imagine; all the knowledge of transistors, radar and nuclear fission…All because of World Wars and, as you mentioned, all those great minds that came to the USA fleeing the war. Amazing
Does proper pizza even exist there today? I've had my fair share in Moscow and Kiev a decade ago or so. It was usually thick, soft, gooey dough with a ton of toppings. For me it was almost inedible.

The last slice I tried was in a pizzeria in Kiev. It looked like a normal pizza place from the outside. I paid for my slice and I guess I was so hungry I didn't even notice there were no pizza ovens. They just straight up took a frozen pizza and microwaved it. I took one bite and immediately tossed it in the bin in front of them. I'm sure they thought I was some crazy American, but the the thought of serving a frozen pizza in a dedicated pizza restaurant just seemed so ridiculous to me.

Interestingly I'm in Shanghai as I'm typing this and the pizza here is very similar to Russian pizza. We ordered from a few places, including Pizza Hut which is popular here, and they're all the thick doughy style. Usually when all else fails my kids will eat pizza. But they even refused the Pizza Hut slices. I wish I could see if they had the classic Pizza Hut I ate as a kid, but nearly all restaurants here require you to have one of the chinese mobile apps just to view the dang menus which is a whole separate topic.
Disagree.

There is a question of what is even a bubble. John Cochrane did a study that showed that the value of Amazon alone justified tech stock index valuation even in 1999.

What is a "bubble" even? For me it would be self-driven cycle of upward valuation whose fundamental value never justifies the market cap in it. An industry that rises in price just a few years later to meet and then far exceed the previous valuation does not need to be a bubble. A bubble is not just a high valuation that decreases in price sometime in the future.
That’s like asking, when electricity is so cheap, where is the money?

The money is in the applications and inventions that build on top of models.
So, context.Cancel?
Having graduated from a Polish university and having done a semester in Germany I can say that at least the people who attended university in Germany had an idea what are they interested in and what do they want to do after graduating, while me and all my peers in Poland just went to college because of societal pressure and kept jumping the hurdles put up by academic staff who knew no better and were taught that academia is just about about bootlicking your way up while pretending to teach.
Slack AI (to ask questions of your chat history) is very much a thing, you just have to talk to your Salesforce rep and buy a license for your whole org.

We bought it, were all very excited about it, but in reality it's complete garbage. Their LLM is slow, hallucinates stuff, and never seems to find the answers you're looking for. It's like they take the top two search results and pipe them with no context into GPT-3.

It's a shame because my home-brew email Q&A bot is extremely useful. I could integrate Slack but unfortunately you can't access DMs through the API which hampers it a bit
Kannada.

It is called "Honge mara" in Kannada.
Yes. Milk was often not available, condensed milk was used instead, and its not something you can make cheese out from.
router to provider network
U.S. Defense Department Currently Has 31 Laser Weapons Programs
It's not about offshore work differences. It's about every location you have workers having a different culture. And they don't always mesh well.

The constantly smiling Americans will seem like idiots to central Europeans.

The Indians who answer yes to every question won't be trusted by the American idiots.

And so on.
As opposed to, say, the "monkey" wrench in MI2?
As one born in the USSR and economist, I can give some brief description.

The economy was like 20-40 ministries, formed like Korean chaebols -- with many in-house services to compensate for their poor public counterparts. Like kindergartens. Or own housing -- to get an apartment (for rent) from the municipal authorities, you'd be in a long queue with some people more equal than others, and corruption, and normally you'd get one by retirement. So enterprises built it for their workers, in some exchange with the construction enterprises (idk which ministry they'd belong, probably dispersed among many entities).

You probably can imagine a huge Google -- where departments can't trade on a free market with each other -- but with a lot looser control and more corruption, which created some black market.

For example, I suppose, restaurants must have belonged to the retail ministry. Under the minister himself, there was the republican department with its manager, the regional, and the municipal one, and only down there was a "Restaurant #5 <<Sunflower>>" (#5 in the retail department of city X), and its director. This made him like CEO, but in reality it was like small group manager in a big hierarchy.

Just as in any big capitalist corporation, such a manager is risk averse, because failures lead to being fired, but sudden big profits go in the corporation pockets, not manager's.

But if you add some corruption, you could be an entrepreneur in a way: make good services (expensive) => be popular among the elites => have some high-profile friends to protect in case of turf wars (e.g. city's Communist party 1st secretary (president) is your friend => city's retail department can't fire you) => exchange some services/goods/commodities beyond the counter (as it was said "from the back door of the shop"). (Black market prices were high, so you could easily sell something elsewhere and put the nominal amount of cash in the box.)

Regarding the shortages issue, they existed for the buyers at the front door of public retail. Retail & restaurants managers exchanged the stuff (they were supposed to sell to the public) between them to fill the gaps.
Ask HN: How to find a non-startup, non-corporate programming job?
Hey all,

I've been a corporate programmer my entire professional life. I'm curious how people find less / non-corporate software jobs. I'm not really looking for a startup, but more something that is stable and yet involves more thoughtful programming / engineering, less sprint-driven. I know these jobs are out there and I see people post about them, but I'm not really sure how to find one.
Problem is, sometimes you want to use a non-standard spelling. Also, the AI may hallucinate a different word than you intended.
I skimmed through the video and it seems 90% of it has nothing to do with the question at hand. So:

* Stealth is expensive and requires a lot of maintenance, also certain weather conditions can make those maintenance challenges even worse

* Stealth requires a lot of design tradeoffs (lower payload capacity, reduced top speed)

* There are plenty of scenarios where stealth is unnecessary or even undesirable, like intercepts over domestic airspace. Hence, all of those tradeoffs are also unnecessary or undesirable.
But if `i` changes over time, then it can't be computed at compile time, because its value is dependent upon at what time it is accessed.
> Rent controls is universally considered a stupid idea, the only reason why it continues to exist for the benfits of the political class that leverage votes out of it. Handing out subsidy checks for the same amount accomplishes the same thing

Fine, if subsidy checks then it’s subsidy checks. But subsidies or handouts will never work in the current political climate because it is “handouts for the poor”. So I don’t necessarily blame them for going this route.

All I am saying is that uncapped rent increases has put me at a major disadvantage, because every time I hope to save and buy for a house my rent jumps substantially and I find myself back to square one. I’m making progress toward that down payment sum, but the cost of moving + paying higher rent has made this a struggle.

Homeowners enjoy(ed) a lot of government perks - the GI bill spurred construction, property taxes are capped, interest can be a tax deduction. Renters get absolutely nothing, and 40% (vs 60% homeowners) is a non-trivial amount. Why can’t I have any protections or programs that help me save a bit more so I can actually be a homeowner?

Even the downvotes to my previous post seem to indicate that nobody really cares about renters - and I’m caught in this weird middle where I make too much to not qualify for subsidized housing and I make too little to save at a cadence where I can catch up with home appreciation and bidding wars. Now, I’ve to deal with bidding wars a renter too - it’s not the norm yet but I have certainly run into it. What the hell am I supposed to do?!?
Emacs: smarter search and replace (2021)
Everyone is relying on the costs of computation to come down by an order of magnitude. Whether that will actually happen – let's see.
I must notice that in the USSR, private companies were allowed only in 1988, 4 years before its end.
There's no moat given that open source models are almost as good already. And it's yet to be proven that LLMs in particular can be reliable enough to actually provide significant return on investment.

Then there's the legal issue. People are not going to accept the idea of "you can't sue me, the AI decided", and so a not perfect model is not going to be deployed in any field of consequence, because the idea that you can offload liability on models is not going to fly, and is ethically reprehensible in my view and in the view of most serious people working in regulated industries. It actually introduces new legal issues, a jury is far less likely to side with an AI than it is with a person who simply made a mistake. There are numerous social reasons why the liability concerns here are legitimate and concerning and actually different for companies than if a human had been making the decisions.

Therefore, the models have to be perfect, or they have to be checked by hand by experts at every step (in which case, there is no return on investment, you haven't really automated anything).

That's the classic conundrum of "I may as well have done it myself given I had to check that code line by line anyway" I see in my own work, and the same is going to apply for non-perfect models in any field of sufficient consequence that there is a hope for profitability (and usually, these fields being consequential enough for potential profitability also implies a potential for liability).

Anybody that works as a programmer in finance/energy/healthcare/government or other parts of the "real economy" could tell you this years ago. The perception that AI could be used to automate significant work was dead pretty shortly after arrival. The only industry that continues on with the charade is the industry with a vested interest in selling and making dubious promises about AI products.

That doesn't mean I don't think LLMs are cool or that they are totally useless. For endeavours that were limited in their profitability anyway, it may very well have some use cases. I just don't see a viable business model for any large companies except Nvidia or AMD or Broadcom and others making money selling data center equipment. Maybe ads and agitprop, but that seems to be a sort of parasitic relationship going on with social media and the internet and one wonders how long it can continue before canabalizing itself.
I have seen this claims several places. Is there a good source for this?
I didn’t know that. I expect it to suck. No one knows how to build great RAG based apps yet. I’m guessing that Slack AI will rapidly improve and that it was more of a prototype.

Small models are really good now. Mistral Large Enough 123 billion parameter model is competitive against GPT4, which is rumored to be 1.7 trillion parameters.

Context sizes are also rapidly improving, as is inference hardware.

There will be a convergence of model intelligence, context size, inference hardware, and developer experience at some point.

One of these days, Slack AI will be good.
If you think the CAP theorem is overrated, you don't understand the CAP theorem.

It is not just correct from a theoretical point of view. Any tradeoff you make in reality is in accordance to the CAP theorem, one way or another.

The only thing that is overrated is the idea of consistency, availability or pratition tolerance to be discrete things, when in reality they are continuous.
What's the relative energy cost of operating LLMs compared with dialup?
On a finite planet, given some level of biological diversity is important to our survival, I find it increasingly difficult to justify development of these novel luxuries.
In Moscow 10 years ago you could get any kind of pizza. Classic Italian thin pizza, american thick, deep dish Chicago style, super thin and crunchy New York style, Roman square pizza.
Your bio shows you have skin in the game, so I wouldn't be surprised to see you try propping up the hype.

But we're talking about different things here. I'm referring to the business value of a company investing in AI features and their return on investment. The end-user is a different story, but anecdotally, I also pay for a few subscriptions to AI services and so far I'm not seeing significant productivity gains after the novelty wore off. For me it's at the point of being just a better search that I need to cross-reference to make sure it didn't go off the rails. I will stop paying soon.
Pgstream – Postgres replication that includes schema definitions
Dave Pl has a video tour of the auction items on his YouTube channel
https://youtu.be/jbi-jo77M5I?si=N1XuiPxQHwoh1C9o
I've found that as far as generational cohorts go, the most adept people are the late Gen-Xers and very early Millenials -- the people who grew up surrounded by C64s and Apple IIs and later had to fiddle with their config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get their game to fit into conventional memory.

People whose first exposure to computing was in the mid-'90s or later seem to have less depth of understanding of the fundamentals and less experiencing tinkering and using process of elimination to solve problems. I started encountering people who didn't understand certain fundamental concepts and had no exposure to the CLI, but still had CS degrees and were applying for developer positions, about 15 years ago.
I think one of the core features of a bubble is that the median market participant loses money. I think that definitely occurred in 1999. I don't think it has occurred in 2024.

I'm not convinced it will happen either. Venture Capital operates on a business model that is really hard for human intuition to deal with. 1/1000 success rates require so few break out successes that, yes -- they can fund an entire sector that will, with extremely high probability, fail and still be profitable.
I love this analogy, it also tells you why index investors usually do better than speculators: even if you invest pretty broadly across the space there's a good chance you missed the one path to the food.
I was tired of feeling slowed down by grepping in large Ruby code, and the artificial boundary gems create requiring a `bundle open` to keep digging. I created my own Ruby LSP to solve these problems: https://github.com/pheen/fuzzy_ruby_server

I think it works well, is stable, and I would still reach for it over Shopify's LSP personally. Feel free to use it! Though as a heads up, I don't work in Ruby much anymore unfortunately so I'm not actively working on it or accepting issues.
Right. Proving a negative in the rhetorical or philosophical sense is not the same as proving a negative in the mathematical sense when the mathematical statement has an exact inverse.

You can't prove God doesn't exist. You can only prove he does given the right evidence, but lack of evidence doesn't prove non-existence. This is why Bayesian reasoning has been in use for a long time in science. It moves past the proof obsession to discussing likelihood.
I think anyone making that claim is going to have to define human nature in a way that has eluded several fields of study for generations.
Thanks for posting. A very interesting read. This is my first time seeing this well written piece. Written in a text file, sign of his distrust for software that mangle your ASCII :)
I was the original publisher of the Merlin assembler (I gave it the name) and didn't know about this. I'm very happy to see it!
no shade at you (i like you and your work and blog) but

> type, known bits, known range

these are all the same thing.

i was thinking about this question in the shower (before responding) and i'm pretty sure type inference (for whatever purpose, like deducing the type, or refining the type, etc) is the only use-case of abstract interpretation. if you look at couset's webpage (i haven't read the original papers) you see lots of cute pics of program trajectory but no one actually uses abstract interpretation for control-flow tracking - the lattice is only ever updated at a type boundary.

prove me wrong (like i could be wrong) but i'm reflecting on implementations in llvm/mlir/pytype ie mature/real use-cases (i have not poked around in pypy's impl).
As long as the puzzles are at least acceptable in quality. No amount of writing could save, say, puzzles of the quality of Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap.
HackRF isn't the only way to go. There are other projects like T41-EP that can give you a really nice software defined platform as well.

Check it out here: https://www.4sqrp.com/T41main.php

(hint: you know it's a group of hams as soon as you see the colored fonts and grey background)
Show HN: A no nonsense calorie calculator
Build this over the weekend in celebration of losing 7kg over the last 3.5 months

Let me know what you think!
http://archive.is/Dx7EG
I can't even understand this. How does the CLI relate to events? Are you saying that all servers secretly have an invisible GUI and handle events there?

This just seems like an odd non sequitur.
I suggest smaller industrial companies in machine control or warehouse management. Some of the most enjoyable projects I’ve worked on were related to non-destructive testing. The smaller companies I’ve worked for have mainly been windows based c#.
I'm not saying every random company is going to manage its own LLMs. I'm saying that the existing software solutions for any given industry are going to adapt and implement LLMs in their existing solutions.

Github with copilot is a good example of what I'm talking about—new companies trying to be the software development LLM company don't really stand a chance of beating out GitHub. The same dynamic is playing out in every industry right now, and companies that are founded to be the AI solution for a given industry will not unseat the established players.
Somehow I missed your comment 4 days ago. Thanks for the counter example. I really didn't think the Democrats would be center right anywhere, but I guess they are in Norway.
Music even more so. It's said that common emotional responses to certain features of music are culturally-mediated, but it's also weird how consistently certain features tend to elicit certain emotions. There could be a physiological basis, but that conflicts with the aforementioned, and anyway, it's not as consistent as, say, a reflex.

If I may succumb to romance for a moment:

"And a song someone sings, once upon a December."

Song as figurative memetic psychopomp, an automatic but not autonomic function to transmit ideas.
I am the author. They are Free.
Sure but Nasdaq is still more than 4x higher now than peak dotcom.

But we’re not peak AI yet in my opinion. Companies aren’t IPOing at dizzying valuations with just an idea and a few html developers.

The vast majority of the AI boom is centered around companies that were successful before the boom. Apple. Nvidia. Microsoft. TSMC. Google.
Do you read the sports page? If you're the elite of the elite, yeah, hiring decisions are often quick. If you're only good enough to get drafted in the 3rd or later rounds, expect to spend a lot of time doing combines and visiting exercises and then be assigned to minor leagues. Even if you get called up, expect to be traded without your input unless you're the best of the best. Don't get injured. Even the best of the best can't always pick their teammates.