skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
AI is a very strange thing where 2 seemingly smart coders use it and one comes out thinking it's obviously revolutionary and the other one thinking it's a waste of time and where 2 seemingly smart journalists use it and one thinks AGI and the end of the world is nigh and the other one thinks the market will crash when the hype dies over.

I think part of it is due to the politically and internet-induced death of nuance. But part of it I can't fully understand.

Personally I think it's rather useful. I don't consider myself a heavy user and still use it almost every day to help code, I ask it a lot of questions about specific and general stuff. It's partially or totally substituted for me: Stack Overflow, Google Search, Google Translate, most tech references. In the office I see people using it all the time, there's almost always a chatgpt window open in some of the displays.

I think it's very difficult to say this is 100% hype and/or a "phase". It's almost a proven fact it's useful and people will want it in their lives. Even if it never improves again, ever. It's a new tool in the toolbox and there will be businesses providing it as a service, or perhaps we will get to open source general availability.

On the other extreme, all the AI doomerism and AGI stuff to me seems almost as unfounded as before generative AI. Sure, it's likely we'll get to AGI one day. But if you thought we were 100 years away, I don't think chatgpt put us any closer to it and I just don't get people who now say 5. I'd rather they worried about the impact of image gen AI in deepfakes and misinformation. That's _already_ happening.
A Comparison of LLM and Human Performance on Random Number Generation Tasks[pdf]
well, i mixed up which sandwich chain it was. but yeah.
The gain isn't "modest".

At a cloverleaf, the weaving between people entering a highway from one leaf and people trying to get onto the next leaf is an utter destroyer of traffic flow, especially when you add in some human behavior, where some people are assholes and won't let people merge in front of them, even when they're trying to merge to the other lane themselves.
Eh, this has literally no upside for humanity. It's just a straight negative for everyone. Even compared to wage-fixing—at least wage-fixing results in lower wages for corporations! This implies no such effect.
You're doing a bit of a logical fallacy here where you're framing the idea of "learned helplessness" as a bad thing intrinsic to the use of LLMs, but then backpedaling to suggest that writing itself is also learned helplessness. And the latter I'm fine to agree with, but it changes the terms under which you made your comment in the first place to poo poo them. If your point is that technological advances cede some part of humanity to technology, sure, but by nature of that point this isn't relevant commentary on LLMs outside the fact they too participate in that lineage, which, okay, but that isn't really saying anything besides "LLMs are technology".
they already do this.

we may as well force companies to pay up or shut up when it comes to noncompetes.
But it suggests that construction simply being split across multiple entities does not explain the quality difference. Maybe they're not under cost pressure though.
Hot take, but if a turn signal is too complicated for someone, said person should NOT be driving a 2-ton land torpedo.
Thanks for the report, this should be fixed now!
On the flipside, I've spent an hour with a candidate who seemed great, but could hardly _actually program_. It was a bizarre dichotomy. Dude was clearly smart as hell but was so caught up in building perfect abstractions in parts of our software that _didn't matter all that much_ using languages that nobody else knew or wanted to use.

I get it, your fun language is fun. But if the dev shop is 60% one language and 39% another, I don't really care about the small improvements. You need a strong reason that it actually _helps the business_
I'm all for this arrangement:

As long as you keep paying me my full salary, and I keep accepting it, I won't work for anyone else. If you stop paying me, or I stop accepting the money, I can go work for anyone else I choose to.

If that happens to look like me sipping a pina colada on a beach in Bali while you're paying me to do nothing, so be it. You're paying my salary for me not to work for another company.

I think that's the only fair non-compete.
If you spend time reading docs – I mean really reading them, you’ll probably find out why something locked. For example, MySQL 8.? can extend metadata locks to cover foreign key relationships. This seemingly innocuous line in docs can cause the entire DB to grind to a halt under load.

I’m not saying this is good, only that RDBMS management is very much still in the land of arcane incantations, and anyone saying otherwise is selling something. It’s also why I have a job, so from my perspective it isn’t all bad.
I avoided stating what the full compensation should be. In my world, if your skills become more valuable or a competitor were willing to pay more than your current compensation, the current company should be given the option of either matching that compensation or releasing you from the noncompete.
Who is making money off of fission these days?
> Someone living in Truro, for example, in the south of Britain, would on average experience about 25% more solar shortwave radiation (a measure that includes UV, visible and some infrared light) in a year than someone living in Glasgow or Edinburgh, which are much further north.

I'm surprised that the difference is that big, given that the latitude difference between these is actually relatively small. If this difference is correct, is it really just due to the north/south distance, or is this more about weather differences, or is there some other non-obvious factor?
> They choose the journals because if they don't, their career doesn't advance.

Is this basically saying that publishing in non-big-journals (e.g. ArXiV) doesn't really "count" as citations? If so, then that's probably the right language to use here - that citations are a currency that only big (expensive, monopolistic) publishers can actually pay for papers in.
The design looks pretty terrible. If the same UI can do very different things based on checkboxes and controls can be spread out over multiple stations non-obviously, that's about recipe for causing the problems above.

It sounds like they had a button for reverting all controls to a single station, if that wasn't used to recover obvious control that's on the sailors, imo. The fact that such a button is necessary to recover from a run of the mill situation is however a serious design failure.
Probably, but they don't block google so I'll continue to use that. Path of least resistance.
I started migrating from OneNote to BookStack wiki. Loving it so far, but am not sure how backups and data exports work.

It's nice to be able to have it publicly available and accessible from any internet connection.
That biases heavily to candidates with good people skills and the skill to take over a conversation. Yes, you are not in fact immune to this even if you think you are, that’s why it’s so dangerous.
>We are basically out of new, non-synthetic text to train models

this is not even remotely true.

There is an astronomical amount of data siloed by publishers, professional journals etc. that is yet to be tapped.

OpenAI is making inroads by making deals with these content owners for access to all that juicy data.
I was implying that AI can be useful in software engineering because hallucinations are expected and actively addressed by engineers. It's less of an issue in comparison to automating strategic business decisions by what is essentially a "black box" and not knowing if it hallucinated data in order to arrive at its decision.
I live in the Middle East, here I wouldn't call the nightly meals excessive. I've never seen the morning meal.

So it might be a local issue.
thanks, I ended up reading the whole thing. If you watched a movie about this you'd think the writers went too far.
I'm far more worried about pedestrians with these larger cars than most vehicle/vehicle interactions. I'd much rather move away from cars than lean into them.
I think you’re misunderstanding the original FTC Noncompete Rule Ban. It would currently apply to employers other than senior executives to prevent trade secrets to be hired away. Additionally, they provide alternatives that won’t allow for trade secrets to leave a company such as NDA’s, which is what most non-competes have to prevent dissemination of trade secrets.
Adventures of Scrum Dad
So true. A test will only measure its set of criteria. What is a test for drive — desire to understand and learn? What is a test for how a person will respond to challenging and overwhelming prod scenarios? What is a test for if they will burn out in a month because they want to prove how rockstar of a programmer they are?

My most successful hiring has always been based on a conversation with 3-4 practical questions. I even worked in a company that had testing down to a science with all the psychometric nonsense and in the end, it just hired many sociopath-adjacents.
Gauntlet by Donald R. Lebeau, 1984
A forum thread about an obscure Atari 800 shareware game and the search for the registered version that was presumed lost. The developer appears and gives a lesson on 6502 game engine programming techniques - and the harsh realities of the shareware market in 1985.
What if you had a life that you wanted to enjoy
Base salary isn't as much as I would be vesting while building skills at a new employer.
Like:

Texans view Americans the same way Americans view the rest of the world - derisively, but it is those viewers who should be derided, and often are, by the groups that they deride.
IMO negative of negative is a less efficient comm strategy. For example, I'd word this as US Judge allows workers to compete with ex-employers or something similar.
I've been using foam instead of obsidian for my personal knowledge base. It works rather well. And it's completely free and ultimately just markdown. While I might wish it was djot, I don't wish hard enough to make that so myself

https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
Sure, but their dominance in culture compared to dogs certainly has.
Great, I would love to get some of the prompts you have in mind and try them with my library and see the results.

Do you have recommendations on more effective alternatives to prevent prompt attacks?

I don't believe we should just throw up our hands and do nothing. No solution will be perfect, but we should strive to a solution that's better than doing nothing.
Counterpoint: toasts offer a great pressure release valve, are easy to have a single standard implementation of for a system, and avoid having to tackle high-level design questions when the feature in question doesn't really ask it.

Youtube has a lot of people on payroll to naval-gaze the problem described. Most systems don't. Having the GUI-equivalent to logging be easily available is a win for system usability.
Ask them to explain what 4-5 different bits of code do. When they do, ask them to explain it like they would to a junior and to a senior/principal/fellow.

It works very well and takes only an extra 10 minutes on top of the conversation.
At least in my industry non-competes seem to be a tool to reduce worker mobility and a way for competitors to collude and keep costs down.

It's a highly-paid industry FWIW.

I think it makes sense to ban them.
Food service workers can easily fight this with their significant resources, right?

NDAs already cover trade secrets.
It's an odd argument to suggest that employment decisions are less constrained in Europe than in the US, isn't it?
What solution would you recommend then?
I'm not saying they shouldn't be compensated, just that justifying the SSO tax due to the support burden is pearl clutching.
Dead reckoning isn't really the right term- there are broadcast and published ephemera (ephemeris-es) for the satellites of various qualities. (Both predicted and observed and then even levels of correction days or weeks later, for high precision/accuracy or strictly static obvs. stuff.)

The doppler mostly comes into play with the small delta-t errors, but again, more math magic cancels most of it out in most cases, or what remains is negligible.

It's more of a signals/sync thing that gets into antenna design and (to simplify) getting all signal cycles from the various satellites working within a single aligned synced cycle, if that makes sense.

One reason the old gps units needed a long time to get an initial fix was waiting to download the broadcast, in ~bits/sec. This can now be downloaded much quicker via internet or other methods.

And there are dozens of other similar shortcuts possible depending on receiver capabilities/ connectivity/ observervation methods.

Which is to say that there's no one 'right' way to get a fix- and the 'most' correct original design was the ~hour long broadcast download. And no one does that anymore.

But just about every method (I'm aware of) is derived one way or another from the general eqns I gave above.

(But my exposure is almost entirely geodesy, engineering, and surveying, and my military (encrypted) knowledge comes from my PLS instructor being ex army intelligence, not hands on. But which is also why I am at least aware of so much of the missile tie-in issues.)

And there are signals processing and CS tricks also, which I only barely grasp.

But if something says it starts with baseline (propagating signal path) lengths to get position, it's skipping the step of how it measures/ estimates those initial baseline lengths.
As a hiring manager as a remote first company, it really helps fill the talent pipeline.
It's a very good point to keep in mind. I think that non-compete agreements should be illegal, but that doesn't mean the FTC's ban was the right way to accomplish it. Unfortunately I don't have the legal knowledge to evaluate whether the judge ruled well on this case.
Non-scalar data violates 1NF [0]. You _can_ have composite types, arrays, JSON, etc. as others have said, but you are likely giving up relational integrity in doing so, which is the raison d'être of RDBMS. The reason they're so strict is to protect you from yourself (and others). When you get a foreign key violation, that should be cause for alarm, not an annoyance to figure out how to overcome.

> Solving every problem with tables might seem clever from a technical perspective, but its just not how humans think.

Not without practice, no. You can in fact learn to do data modeling.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_normal_form
Congress should pass a law. Easy win.
Sorry, are we speaking about the same language?

https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/?#code/MYewdgzgLgBCA2ATA...
It was nice back then but the one thing that completely boggles my mind, after decades of keeping and backup'ing .jpg files around (family pictures), is that I can now compress these very same files to JPEG XL and deterministically get, bit for bit, the original jpg if I want. "Lossless" 20% to 30% gain (I know jpg is lossy: but JPEG XL doesn't lose additional details).

Having files around which, for twenty years, couldn't be compressed losslessly and that now suddenly can is just wild.

And even though I didn't look that much into it JPEG XL is, basically... More DCT!?
i resent the default cynicism that is trendy when discussing highway infra. A clear bias against cars as ugly, dirty , polluting, etc.

This interchange provides food and prosperity to millions of people. And it's an incredible feat.

The cynical attitude is just cliche and tacky give it up.
Unless they lived in Montana, they lived in an at-will state; it's reasonable shorthand to simply say the US is on the whole at-will.
That’s fair. Hard to balance participating in open source community with standing up for our rights.
This man is the reason I want to study electrical engineering.

Is that appropriate? Would another discipline give me a better grounding in not just these techniques, but the mental foundations that made their discovery possible?
The drive down the path of authoritarian dystopia continues... as everyone is so focused on "safety" that they lose sight of what it means to live.
This phenomenon is called "bus bunching". My friends, two profs from Georgia Tech and UChicago, came up with one solution for it. They wrote a paper about their solution[1], and then built a startup that has successfully implemented it at a bunch of places[2].

[1]: [A self-coördinating bus route to resist bus bunching](https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.trb.2011.11.001)

[2]: [NAU’s new bus system makes for shorter wait times for riders](https://news.nau.edu/nau-bus-schedules/)
I ran the nuclear power plant on the USS La Jolla (SSN-701) for five years. Per the Engineering Department Organization Manual, you're not allowed to do any operations in the power plant if you haven't gotten a certain number of hours of sleep in the past however many hours. This is the most laughably ignored rule on the ship. It's very normal to have people operating the power plant after being awake for 40 hours straight. (I still remember getting yelled at for falling asleep during training because I'd been awake for >24 hours, and the training was about the importance of being well rested and how the Department of Transportation developed its sleep requirements by studying railroad operations. Maximum irony.) Naval Reactors, the organization that supervises the whole navy nuclear program, knows this is the norm and helps hide it. I remember, during the briefing prior to every reactor startup, the engineering officer would say loud and proud "If you don't think you can perform your duties for whatever reason, any reason at all, if you're too tired, raise your hand." One time I had been awake for more than a day straight and I was suicidal, I had been scheduled for 12 hours on watch, 6 hours off watch for several days, so I said fuck it, and I raised my hand. "Per the EDOM, I am not allowed to stand watch because I've been awake for far too long." The engineer recommended me for Non-Judicial Punishment for 1) not being ready to stand watch and 2) having stood watch previously already too sleep deprived to stand watch. I wasn't actually punished because I threatened to call the DoD Inspector General. The whole system is rotten as fuck.
Teamsters lost 8-1 in the Supreme Court just a year ago[0], for example.

What are you even arguing here? That a judge is appointed by a Democrat means they rule in favor of unions at all times? That wouldn't be virtuous, that would be corruption.

I'm personally glad the world is not as black and white as you seem to see it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacier_Northwest,_Inc._v._Tea...
> Making things about trump even when they aren’t is getting tired.

Plus incredibly toxic for the community and blatantly against the HN guidelines. These are the comments that the flag button is built for - use it! Politics is, generally, not on-topic for HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
BBEdit Doesn’t Suck!
Federal judge blocks FTC noncompete ban
> That's why faster speeds are harder. 900Mhz and slower needs an antenna over 30cm long, so staying below this means every PCB trace is too short to be an effective antenna.

Oh I forgot to mention, the issue is the 5th or 7th harmonic of your digital signals.

So... a 20Mhz digital circuit will realistically have 10ns rise/fall times or aka have ACTUALLY 100Mhz information in your electricity.

Similarly, a 100MHz clock digital circuit will need rise/fall times of 2ns. That's 500Mhz information inside of your signals (2ns == 500MHz).

Following the pattern: 500Mhz digital clock will easily have 2.5Ghz+ information in them to keep those digital signals square. Aka rise / fall times of 0.4ns.

-----------

If you've accidentally built a 2.5 Ghz antenna twice in your circuit, guess what? That 0.4ns rise time square wave is going to start teleporting between your PCB antennas.

Electricity at high frequencies moves in very complex fashions. In ways that beginners cannot comprehend.

We call it crosstalk, EMC and other ways they move around. But it's all antenna theory, EMI fields and the like. I can't say I'm a high wizard of this magic but... Hopefully I've got it close enough for you to understand the issues at play here.

It's best to just slow down to 20MHz where electricity still makes sense.
Show HN: Open-Source macOS App for AI-Summarized Web Change Alerts
Hey Hacker News!

Just released v1.2 of Glanceables, an open-source macOS app that’s all about keeping you in the loop with minimal fuss. We’re cutting through the tangled web to deliver only the updates that matter to you—straight to your desktop.

What is it?

Think of the tool as your personal update scout. Instead of you digging through pages and pages, it keeps an eye on specific parts of websites and lets you know the moment anything changes.

New Stuff in v1.2:

- Change Detection: It's like having a watchtower on your favorite web spots. Whenever there’s a change, you’re the first to know.

- Desktop Notifications: Get real-time notifications right where you are. No need to switch tabs or refresh browsers; we bring the updates to you.

- Powered by Ollama:
We've integrated with Ollama to make sure Glanceables can AI to interpret changes in text detected and smarter.

Why Check It Out?

- It’s open source (GPL-3.0) Jump into the code, tweak it, and help me make it better for you!

- Say goodbye to browser bloat and distraction. Focus on what changes, when it changes.

- Stay updated without the effort. Set it and forget it—let Glanceables handle the rest.

How To Use:

1. Pick a spot on a webpage you want updates on.

2. Glanceables watches refreshes it once a minute.

3. You get a notification the moment anything changes

Hoping Glanceables helps anyone looking to streamline their web interactions and I'm excited to hear what you think. Try it out, let me know your thoughts, and let's get back to what matters!
> allowing the company to do more with fewer resources

The "Do more with less" thing is usually an indicator a company is on track to become Nothing.
Usually they do in fact pay, they want you to sign in exchange for severance pay. You don't want to sign, then don't. They can't force you.

Or you sign in advance, in exchange for what you feel is good enough compensation, so again, they are paying you.
Yea there's a huge element of randomness to these kinds of interviews. I wasn't a big fan of them at Stripe. You can get some signal like:

- do they methodically approach the problem?
- do they understand the bug?
- do they know how to use debugging tools?
- do they know advanced debugging tools?
- do they work well in an unfamiliar codebase?

But in practice I'd say most candidates check those boxes, at which point it becomes an arbitrary evaluation unless you pass/fail them based on whether they solved the bug.
As a general note, the code there is an initial more exploratory api. It definitely could be simplified (solid bits of extra noise in it).

That said, it does have the fundamental issue of the query is just a string and the code author has to fundamentally deal with correctly specifying what the return type is. Technically a fancier query builder could be defined that removes the sql and instead defines both the query and return type at once to avoid the double specification.

Otherwise, something like squirrel would 100% be doable in roc. [Something similar](https://github.com/isaacvando/rtl) already exists for templating in roc via code gen.
It’s not about rural places.
It’s about how cities are centered around car.

Cities in the us are basically highway with warehouse around it.

It’s hard to navigate without a car, and public transportation are a afterthought.