skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> we're the only ones that understand our own mortality

Do we really though? Yes, we understand it on some level - but I think if we really understood that we will die things would look very different. Basically every religion has some cope around this topic.

A lot of Buddhists train for many years to 'understand' mortality, and even then I don't think all or even most of them truly grasp the impermanence of all things. The ones that do often find it a hard job to share their knowledge, even to the dedicated.

*** Going slightly tangential:

How much do some of us understand, that most people will never get? And what can we do about it?

A few people have a real understanding of how con artists, sociopathic CEOs, serial killers, war-mongering and corrupt politicians, etc, think and operate - but they can never really explain it to most people, even in books.

A lot of scams/lies work because most people would never think to be such an arsehole.

And there are good reasons for that - it can be damaging to your well-being, your wallet, and your social sphere to be the type of 'paranoid' that sees those things as they are. And even experts get scammed; we all have blind spots, bad days, brain farts etc.

Other examples: While nearly all people can 'feel' music, only a few can consistently bang out hit songs. Many people struggle with big numbers, and are therefore susceptible to all kinds of thinking errors. Others struggle with things like recognizing faces and remembering names, regardless of their kindness and empathy.

For all the work done in psychology about things like blind spots, the Dunning-Kruger effect, disorders etc, we are still in a position where openly attacking education is a valid political strategy.

So... I'm saying, we all have a lot to understand, and most of it will never be understood. I hope we can start organizing our culture to better accommodate this fact, but the resistance to any such change will be/is extreme.
From the report, it seems the problem is that they added a feature that could use 21 arguments, but there was only enough space for 20. Until now, no configuration used all 21 (the last one was a wildcard regex, which apparently didn't count), but when they finally did, it caused a buffer overflow and crashed.
> Universities used to be expensive schools for rich people's failsons to "find themselves". That's why there's a lot of focus on "well-rounded" educations even today. Then western governments started offering taxpayer-funded tuition

Replace western by "US" for "well-rounded". AFAIK, all European university degrees are focused on a single topic, and its requirement (so, lots of math if you're studying physics). No literature classes required (or even available in some cases) if you're, e.g., getting a computer science degree.
a 0x return would be them getting back what they invested, right? (otherwise pretend i said 1-2x)

everything above that is a pointless perversion when capitalism is killing our planet and the majority population has to suffer, just because someone somewhere wanted bigger numbers...
Many states do operate tuition-free programs for residents at their public colleges. But students with good grades often prefer to take a large amount of debt rather than go to the local state school, and it's not clear how you would go about changing that.
i am required to be there. otherwise i can't talk to teachers, arrange meetings for my kids and their friends, talk to my landlord, etc. sure, for some of these there are alternative ways, but usually they tell me if i want to be able to get a quick response (or a response at all) then i have to use their communication tool of choice.

for example my current landlord lives in a different country, that means i use his chat app or expensive international SMS or phonecalls, which would result in much more difficult communication.

teachers share photos from their activities only on whatsapp/wechat. they will reach me in other ways for important stuff, and in fact the directors of one school told me that they hate it too, but many parents are only reachable that way, so the parents force the school which would end up forcing me, at least if i want to get the photos and casual information, and not just communicate for emergencies. by insisting on a different way i would be the only one that everyone else has to make an exception for. and for many that means they would rather not bother.

also in many cases people do care about me but do not have the technical capacity to understand different communication tools. they barely can use wechat or whatsapp. and on top of that in china all good alternatives are blocked anyways. many matrix servers, for example. the only workable alternative would be deltachat because it works with email. but only if i get them to install the deltachat client, because most people read their regular emails only once a day or even less frequently.

in any group the choice is usually forced by the majority. and it would take a lot of energy to explain and convince everyone to change their preference. i do have more important things to worry about.
> The people agreeing to these debts, by definition, do not have an education in complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged.

I guarantee you that law/med school students have an education in "complex debt instruments that cannot be discharged."

Because before the current law was passed, they were the ones abusing the old "complex debt instruments" to discharge debt they knew they'd be able to pay back once they started making bank. The law was passed because they were doing this in large numbers. For these serious med/law students, the old system was free money. The new system is a reasonable risk.

Did you know this? If so, why did you write "by definition?" And why go off on a tangent about English literature students?
I still think OP has a point. The LLMs evolved after public use to be positioned as oracles which know so much knowledge. They were always probabilistic content generators, but people use them the way they use search engines, to retrieve info they know exists but don't exactly know.

Since LLMs aren't designed for this there's a whole post process to try to make them amenable to this use case, but it will never plug that gap
Yeah, inter alia, this includes commentary/interview with the lawyers
The o1 model is really remarkable. I was able to get very significant speedups to my already highly optimized Rust code in my fast vector similarity project, all verified with careful benchmarking and validation of correctness.

Not only that, it also helped me reimagine and conceptualize a new measure of statistical dependency based on Jensen-Shannon divergence that works very well. And it came up with a super fast implementation of normalized mutual information, something I tried to include in the library originally but struggled to find something fast enough when dealing with large vectors (say, 15,000 dimensions and up).

While it wasn’t able to give perfect Rust code that compiled on the very first try, it was able to fix all the bugs in one more try after pasting in all the compiler warning problems from VScode. In contrast, gpt-4o usually would take dozens of tries to fix all the many rust type errors, lifetime/borrowing errors, and so on that it would inevitably introduce. And Claude3.5 sonnet is just plain stupid when it comes to Rust for some reason.

I really have to say, this feels like a true game changer, especially when you have really challenging tasks that you would be hard pressed to find many humans capable of helping with (at least without shelling out $500k+/year in compensation for).

And it’s not just the performance optimization and relatively bug free code— it’s the creative problem solving and synthesis of huge amounts of core mathematical and algorithmic knowledge plus contemporary research results, combined with a strong ability to understand what you’re trying to accomplish and making it happen.

Here is the diff to the code file showing the changes:

https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/fast_vector_similarity/...
Hmm, this policy may backfire and not work as intended leading to a number of unintended consequences (a.k.a "Cobra effect").

If I'm a poor male it'll be great to pay get a loan of 5K-10K USD, be shipped to Sweden and then collect my reward of 34000 USD (350K Krona), return my loan and live off the rest for several months, before repeating the trip and getting some of the Sweden taxpayer's money.

Or if I'm especially evil warloard/criminal in Congo or a comparable place, to kidnap one part of the family (the wife, the kids, the parents) and force the other part (the husband, the wife) to go to Sweden to collect the reward.

From the article these are not discussed there, but may be they'd have though about these consequences. It looks like "we'd rather pay, than use force" scenario with taxpayer's money.

P.S. The Cobra effect:

The term comes from a story during British colonial rule in India. The British government, aiming to reduce the number of dangerous cobras, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. In response, enterprising individuals began breeding cobras to kill them and collect the bounty. When the government realized this, they canceled the program, leading the cobra breeders to release the now-worthless snakes, resulting in an even larger cobra population than before.
I had no idea Billiards had no pockets and no objective to sink balls into pockets. I had no idea a game like that existed, although, I certainly heard of Billiards but always thought it was, I now know is the game known as Snooker.
If done right the time of awareness is brief when slaughtering with a knife. A bolt gun is better for sure but not guaranteed by any measure. The truth is it is more about the person than the tool - their experience, thoughtfulness, and compassion.

But the suffering doesn’t start with the fatal injury and suffering is often less about pain and more about the torment of what’s about to happen. That’s true for people and for animals. IMO that’s the point
That rumor floated around Twitter but the company quickly disavowed it. The problem was that they added an extra parameter to a common function but never tested it with a non-wildcard value, revealing a gap in their code coverage review:

https://www.crowdstrike.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Chann...
I think it's perfectly ok to be critical of technology as long as one is thoughtful rather than dismissive. There is a lot of hype right now and pushing back against it is the right thing to do.

I'm more reacting against simplistic and categorical pronouncements of straight up "uselessness," which to me seems un-curious and deeply cynical, especially since it is evidentially untrue in many domains (though it is true for some domains). I just find this kind of emotional cynicism (not a healthy skepticism, but cynicism) to be contrary to the spirit of innovation and openness, and indeed contrary to evidence. It's also an overgeneralization -- "I don't find it useful, so it's useless" -- rather than "Why don't I find it useful, and why do others do? Let me learn more."

As future-looking HNers, I'd expect we would understand the world through a lens of "trajectories" rather than "current state". Just because LLMs hallucinate and make mistakes with a tone of confidence today -- a deep weakness -- doesn't mean they are altogether useless. We've witnessed that despite their weaknesses, we are getting a lot of value from them in many domains today and they are getting better over time.

Take neural networks themselves for instance. For most of the 90s-2000s, people thought they were a dead end. My own professor had great vitriol against Neural Networks. Most of the initial promises in the 80s truly didn't pan out. Turns out what was missing was (lots of) data, which the Internet provided. And look where we are today.

Another area of cynicism is self-driving cars (Level 5). Lots of hype and overpromise, and lots of people saying it will never happen because it requires a cognitive model of the world, which is too complicated, and there are too many exceptional cases for there to ever be Level 5 autonomy. Possibly true, but I think "never" is a very strong sentiment that is unworthy of a curious person.
1. A SYN will receive a SYN-ACK or a RST
2. A host from my machine is the same as from your machine
3. An IP from my machine is the same as from your machine
Former QA engineer here, and can confirm quality is seen as an annoying roadblock in the way of self-interested workers, disguised as in the way of having fun on the customers dime.

My favorite repeated reorg strategy over the years is “that we will train everyone in engineering to be hot swappable in their domains”. Talk about spinning wheels.
Unlike mustangs, he never had any command.

Whether this was general policy[0] or specifically due to his Achilles' Heel[1] (the dutch say "now the ape['s arm] comes out of the cuffs") is difficult to discern from a single article, however.

Lagniappe: https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_eastwest.htm

> And thou must make a trooper tough and hack thy way to power /
Belike they will raise thee to Ressaldar when I am hanged in Peshawur!

[0] compare COL Benjamin Davis'[2] command of the 51 FIW (as it was then) in 1950.

[1] I'd thought the unorthodox baton grasp was what you'd meant to convey with that pic...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_O._Davis_Jr.#Creator_...
Show HN: I build Figma plugin for unlimited themes/modes
Hi everyone,

I’ve created a new Token Swapper plugin for Figma to address limitations I encountered while working on a multi-brand mobile app UI. The Figma’s Pro plan’s 4 Modes (or even the Enterprise plan’s 40 Modes) weren’t sufficient for my needs.

I made Token Swapper to quickly switch between themes (based on variables and styles) without relying on Modes. The only requirement is that you organize your themes in top-level folders within both the variables and styles sections.

I’d love for you to try it out and share your thoughts. Your feedback is appreciated!
That's the truest sounding heresy I've ever heard.
Yes for allies, no for adversaries.
Hallucinations in LLM will severely affect its usage in scenarios where such hallucinations are completely unacceptable - and there are many such scenarios. This is a good thing because it will mean that human intelligence and oversight will continue to be needed.
It's about your abstraction level and the kinds of problem you are ignoring. It's true at the same time that you can't ignore the problems of stream communication nor the problems of package-based communication.
Is it really so bad? A bit more verbose but also more readable, can be plenty short and sweet for me. I probably wouldn't even choose Python here myself and it's the kind of thing shell scripting is tailor-made for, but I'd at least be more comfortable maintaining or extending this version over that:

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

CMD = ("printf", "x:hello:67:ugly!\nyy$:bye:5:ugly.\n")
OUT = "something.report"
ERR = "err.log"

def beautify(str_bytes):
return str_bytes.decode().replace("ugly", "beautiful")

def filter(str, \*index):
parts = str.split(":")
return " ".join([parts[i-1] for i in index])

with open(OUT, "w") as out, open(ERR, "w") as err:
proc = Popen(CMD, stdout=PIPE, stderr=err)
for line_bytes in proc.stdout:
out.write(filter(beautify(line_bytes), 2, 4))

I would agree though if this is a one-off need where you have a specific dataset to chop up and aren't concerned with recreating or tweaking the process bash can likely get it done faster.

Edit: this is proving very difficult to format on mobile, sorry if it's not perfect.
aren't all "antifeatures" disabled by default on most linux distro packaged firefox?
I've been saying this to anyone who would listen for years. All the problems with higher education in the US are the direct result of student loans being unable to be discharged in bankruptcy. Usually complex problems have complex causes, usually if someone says "simple, just do this" it means they probably don't understand the problem. Not this one. This is one of those rare problems with a singular cause and a "simple" solution: allow student debt to be discharged in bankruptcy. I put quotes on simple because, while the solution is simple, it's easier said than done as the author points out, the regulation of the industry is captured and making it actually happen is very difficult due to incumbent institutions benefitting from the status quo. But we have to set the bone, it's going to hurt but there's no way around it. We are very fortunate that the solution is so simple.
But a lot of what you pay humans $500k a year for is to work with enormous existing systems that an LLM cannot understand just yet. Optimizing small libraries and implementing fast functions though is a huge improvement in any programmer's toolbox.
How the EU's landmark Apple tax ruling gave Ireland €13B it didn't want
Part of move fast / break things culture. It also doesn’t help that Zuckerberg is trying hard to nit tightly integrate with native stack.
I'm not a biologist or a zoologist, these were just my observations and assumptions but I get it that animals "only" forage and reproduce. Mourning is primarily ephemeral/short act but humans and to some extent animal mammals still do it.
See, if you work in AI, say, as an AI researcher, asking them not to be allowed to use AI models in the interview is basically not an option.

Also, often folks in this space are better at cheating than you will be at detecting them. Don't believe me? https://bigvu.tv/captions-video-maker/ai-eye-contact-fix
If I had to guess, it would be an assumption that TCP was edge to edge with no translation in the middle.

My guess is that this is talking about systems in the middle of the network, changing (for example) their sizes by combining and splitting packets to fit through various transits.
These aging stories are like a Rorschach test for whatever “science” a person already believes in.
I've often thought about building something like this into HN itself and having a 'meet' tab at the top. There are so many people, me included, whose lives have been changed by HN. I would love to find a way to encourage more positive effects in the real world. Not sure exactly how this would work, but it's encouraging to see the community taking up the cause again, and I'll be interested to hear about how this goes. If people start having real meetups maybe we can sponsor a semi-official thread about them or something.
Because a technical person would immediately find all of the glaring flaws and issues with their app and fix it promptly. Unless they’re incompetent. Which might be worse than non-technical.
> but how do you gain on the appreciation?

With a reverse mortgage.
> Much Much more productive world by just knuckling down and learning how to do the work.

The fact everyone that say they've become more productive with LLMs won't say how exactly. I can talk about how VIM have make it more enjoyable to edit code (keybinding and motions), how Emacs is a good environment around text tooling (lisp machine), how I use technical books to further my learning (so many great books out here). But no one really show how they're actually solving problems with LLMs and how the alternatives were worse for them. It's all claims that it's great with no further elaboration on the workflows.

> I haven't written a line of code in weeks. Just paragraphs of text that specify what I want and then guidance through and around pitfalls in a simple iterative loop of useful working code.

Code is intent described in terms of machinery actions. Those actions can be masked by abstracting them in more understandable units, so we don't have to write opcodes, but we can use python instead. Programming is basically make the intent clear enough so that we know what units we can use. Software engineering is mostly selecting the units in a way to do minimal work once the intent changes or the foundational actions do.

Chatting with a LLM look to me like your intent is either vague or you don't know the units to use. If it's the former, then I guess you're assuming it is the expert and will guide you to the solution you seek, which means you believe it understands the problem more than you do. The second is more strange as it looks like playing around with car parts, while ignoring the manuals it comes with.

What about boilerplate and common scenarios? I agree that LLMs helps a great deal with that, but the fact is that there are perfectly good tools that helped with that like snippets, templates, and code generators.
Thank you. I saw that there's a wealth of other docs from Symbolics at archive.org. I will spend some time exploring.

https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Symbolics%22
> In order to have a happy life, you have to have a vocation and an avocation that are separate from each other.

This reads to me as your career shouldn't involve doing something you enjoy. I think this mostly happens in situations where people are doing exactly at work what they'd do at home, and they don't like their job for any vast number of reasons. Usually that's only a problem if you don't have the security to find another job.

My personal experience is that it really helps to be able to be passionate about your work. It's fulfilling. You will perform better at your job, because you will be multiplying your experience from work with your experience at home. Sometimes my hobbies and my work have been literally exactly the same, e.g. I've been able to open source projects from work (which I then work on as a hobby).

The advice I'd give people instead:

Like your job. Get a degree in a field that you both enjoy and that pays well. That sounds glib, but so many people don't think about this at all (part of the focus of the article). You probably won't be able to align your career and the exact activity you enjoy the most, but you should shoot for them being in the same ballpark. Where they don't align? Sure, that's opportunity for a hobby.
> a lot of millennials are really into their parents. Many boomers retooled the family structure to something more emotionally enmeshed.

Historically speaking the nuclear family is a very new and very western thing. Is the author trying to say parents love their kids too much?
IOW, a price increase, aka inflation.
ChatGPT voice interface plugged into the audio stream, with the prompt:

- I need you to assist me during a programming interview, you will be listening to two people, the interviewer and me. When the interviewer asks a question, I'd like you to feed me lines that seem realistic for an interview where I'm nervous, don't give me a full blown answer right away. Be very succinct. If I think you misunderstood something, I will mention the key phrase "I'm nervous today and had too much coffee". In this situation, remember I'm the one that will say the phrase, and it might be because you've mistaken me by the interviewer and I want you to "reset". If I want you to dig deeper than what you've provided me with, I'll say the key phrase "Let's dig deeper now". If I think you've hallucinated and want you to try again, I'll say "This might be wrong, let me think for just a minute please". Remember, other than these key phrases, I'll only be talking to the interviewer, not you.

On a second screen of some sort. Other than that, interviewers will just have to accept that nobody will be doing the job without these sort of assistants from now on anyway. As an interviewer I let candidates consult online docs for specific things already because they'll have access to Google during the job, this is just an extension of that.