skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: If LLMs are so useful, why haven't we seen any spike in productivity?
If LLM do actually help engineers become significantly more productive what could explain that, for instance, in the open source community:

- We are not fixing bugs faster

- We are not developing features faster

- We haven't seen an explosion of new projects

- We haven't seen an explosion of vulnerabilities being discovered

Maybe I am missing something but to me everything looks the same (except for an increasing amount of useless customer service chatbots and garbage LLM generated books on Amazon)

Edit: Unfortunately this submission was demoted for some reason but thanks for all the comments.
People worry about food being stuck in their teeth, saying the “wrong” thing by mistake, and a million other faux pas.

If I confused 50% and 1/3rd in public I’d be mortified.
Springfield. There are hundreds of them.
Of course for many the parents were present! They were being told the same thing by the education system. They were told that unless their kid got a college education their kid would not be successful. And while I wasn’t parent then but am now, I’m positive their peer group was pressuring them into helping kiddo out by co-signing on crazy large loans for degrees that their kid might never really use. I’ve seen it happen.

I get that there is a lot of societal bias toward blaming the person who got the loan for being a pile of shit deadbeat who was stupid enough to get a $70,000 “art history” degree… but dude. These people are basically kids. Or at best adults with very, very little life experience being given strong thumbs up by “the elders” who are supposed to know better…

The student does take some responsibility but society at large should take most of it.

I mean for Christ sake you had 18 year olds getting into huge amounts of debt that you cannot discharge in bankruptcy. There are very few financial tools in life that are so “iron clad” as a student loan and we handed them out like candy to the least experienced adults out there. What a shit thing to hand to somebody who just started out in the real world. Feed them lies and convince them to saddle up with a lifetime of debt that has absolutely no undo button besides death. We let total deadbeats rack up tons of unsecured debt and let them discharge it but somehow an 18 year old is allowed to basically take on perma-debt. It’s complete bullshit that makes the rich richer and the poor worse off.
To your specific example, there are a lot of jobs that involve content marketing and other types of writing that aren't exactly hitting the pavement journalism but probably pay a lot better, are more reliable employment, and may be close enough. As you say, it's about finding the intersection.

If I were looking for a writing job today--which I did a lot of over the past 10 years--I wouldn't be looking to the New York Times or certainly a small city paper, I'd find an opportunity with a company that would doubtless have some guardrails but would also have other opportunities.
More like a research paper if you go by the references [0].

[0] https://sites.google.com/view/sources-workoutparadox
Turns out the bottleneck of engineering isn't related to what goes on in the editor.
Generic Freelist Allocator for Go
That is an interesting Safari feature for private tabs, when I start needing to have more than two levels of isolation past the non-private universe and the private universe I start using profiles. My intuition that my private tabs are logged in and I can open more tabs with the same credentials is a big part of my workflow so I never thought of needing that further isolation.
The following list contains only falsehoods:

1. You're wrong

2. Okay, you're right

3. Okay maybe you're right or wrong but certainly not both
> But, since good programs don’t panic, and neither do good programmers, it’s very rare that using unwrap or expect is actually the right thing to do.

I respectfully disagree.

The assert!() macro is a way to document invariants. It's a bug if a variant is violated. It shouldn't have happened, but if it happens, then there's nothing the user can do except reporting the crash.

The unwrap() and expect() method document the invariant that the None and Err() variants shouldn't occur.

It's fail fast.

You should use error handling only if users would be able to handle the errors.

Tell the end user that the file they wanted to open is not readable, for example. Tell the users of your library that an error happened, like a parse error of a config file. And so on. Tell the users what they can fix themselves.

A bug in your library or program, that's something different. Fail fast! And Rust panics are perfect for that.
Reminds me of J.D. Salinger and how he was always mildly irritated that despite having written many other novels (Franny and Zooey, Bananafish, etc.) he is only ever remembered for Catcher in the Rye.
Jokingly thought it was another one of those “I rewrote it in Rust” moments. Cool post
It depends on how well you know k8s and what your stack is. Rancher is an extra complex version of k8s. Longhorn is pretty fragile in my experience, so is canal. But chillum and eks don't really have the same reliability issues in my experience.
Also try the Mullvad browser which I believe is based on the TOR browser with the TOR bit removed

https://mullvad.net/en/browser
I control-F'ed and didn't find it before I wrote that comment. I searched for KDB and APL, but found nothing.

EDIT: yeah that sentence is new. I think some of the sentences around Influx being the "first" have been adjusted too now saying it is the first "mainstream" and called other db's niche. it's also a little off. KDB+ is more popular in large banks and trading firms than HFT places.
It’s a combination of societal weakness/acceptance, marketing, and access to easier alternatives (eg, stuff that will make you fat) in my view. There’s not one thing that does it, but years and years of… conditioning that’s led us to this point.
Of course it was based on the number of dollars, but based on which figures? It was an assertion conjured out of thin air. If there are five times as many undergrad students as grad students and a similar percentage of grad students had to take out student loans, then this would mean that students are incurring on average five times more debt for graduate school. This is without taking into consideration that a far higher percentage of US graduate students are international students.
Hey, this is awesome - your doing a great job. Anything that exists will not exist perfectly - you had to make this real to have that bug found by that random person - well done!

Also I wouldn't lose much sleep over the English reqs. I've had many people tell me that English is the global language that weren't born in native English speaking countries.

Most recent example, a Mod was going off about how a certain help page was setup for English questions only and she did this whole explanation about it, apologized for the system.

The majority of replies was some variant of just say "International Chat" next time - people from everywhere all in agreement.

If you made this in German, French or Japanese - I'd agree with you. I think English is the expectation these days tho
When will I see AI dialogue in video games? Imagine a RPG where instead of picking from a series of pre recorded dialogues, you could just talk to that villager. If it worked it would be mind blowing. The first studio to really pull it off in the AAA game would rake in the cash.

That seems like the lowest hanging fruit to me, like we would do that long before we have AI going over someone's medical records.

If the major game studios aren't confident enough in the tech to have it write dialogue for a Disney character for fear of it saying the wrong thing, I'm not ready for it to anything in the real world.
That is not a database style workload like the one in the example with millions of elements that all had to be scanned.
Yeah but thats not a Lego. A Lego is something that fits everwhere else. Not just previous work. There's a lot of previous work. There are very few true Legos.
We can't get rid of hallucinations. Hallucinations are a feature not a bug. A recent study by researchers Jim Waldo and Soline Boussard highlights the risks associated with this limitation. In their analysis, they tested several prominent models, including ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, Llama, and Google’s Gemini. The researchers found that while the models performed well on well-known topics with a large body of available data, they often struggled with subjects that had limited or contentious information, resulting in inconsistencies and errors.

This challenge is particularly concerning in fields where accuracy is critical, such as scientific research, politics, or legal matters. For instance, the study noted that LLMs could produce inaccurate citations, misattribute quotes, or provide factually wrong information that might appear convincing but lacks a solid foundation. Such errors can lead to real-world consequences, as seen in cases where professionals have relied on LLM-generated content for tasks like legal research or coding, only to discover later that the information was incorrect.
https://www.lycee.ai/blog/llm-hallucinations-report
Let's do note that on that graph which mapped a variety of increased costs, the only thing that increased faster than college costs was the cost of medical. That's connected to the shortage of doctors. Regulatory capture isn't just an issue with higher ed.
In my view these models produce above average code which is good enough for most jobs. But the hacker news sampling could be biased towards the top tier of coders - so their personal account of it not being good enough can also be true. For me the quality isn't anywhere close to good enough for my purposes, all of my easy code is already done so I'm only left working on gnarly niche stuff which the LLMs are not yet helpful with.

For the effect on the industry, I generally make the point that even if AI only replaces the below average coder it will cause a downward pressure on above average coders compensation expectation.

Personally, humans appear to be getting dumber at the same time that AI is getting smarter and while, for now, the crossover point is at a low threshold that threshold will of course increase over time. I used to try to teach ontologies, stats, SMT solvers to humans before giving up and switching to AI technologies where success is not predicated on human understanding. I used to think that the inability for most humans to understand these topics was a matter of motivation, but have rather recently come to understand that these limitations are generally innate.
just like with crypto and NFTs and the metaverse, they are always focused on what is suppsoedly coming down the pipe in the future and not what is actually possible today
or the modems they found were decoys, and there are better hidden ones deep inside.
My argument is that secondary education is not about education, since standards have dropped with the introduction of common core and other improvement in the name of "education equity".

If you want to send your kid to daycare, please go ahead and send to public school. But more and more parents opt for alternatives to public school: private schools, college prep programs, charter schools, extra-curricular Math and science classes, coaches/tutors and etc.

In the end it doesn't make sense to maintain bloated school system that does not accomplish anything, but being glorified childcare for teens, while all academic achievements are due to self-selection.

You can look at any top-rated high school and realize they are not doing anything much. They just have self-selection mechanism that filters the most motivated kids with strong parent support.
bonds have utility, crypto does not
"Go make self more yellow, using gusle"[0]

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Za%C5%BC%C3%B3%C5%82...
upf is known to be bad for the microbiome and increases gut issues
Why is this even a news? Google scrape all public posts to build search index… Bunch of 3rd party vendors scraped all public post to build the ads price model…
I desperately want this project to succeed. I’ve made several attempts to use it to replace some other tooling, and feel like it is always “nearly there”. As someone with “brain problems” (neurodivergent being a dirty word), I have found that a visual component for my notes really helps with recall, and there are a few commercial products trying to fill this niche like Heptabase, Scrintal, and Muse (which I also hope succeed).

Is anyone using Affine and can share some thoughts?
This was the process I followed:

1. Downloaded EndeavourOS

2. Installed it as easily as Ubuntu

Edit: the arch documentation is second to none
Everyone who ever read that stuff needs the Larry Garfield treatment...
Apparently yeah at least arguably the most prominent boot camp takes a verry broad stance on 'related' occupations for income sharing: https://www.sandofsky.com/lambda-school/
> (often misquoted) phrase

You misquoted it there! It should be: The plural of anecdote is data.
I rather doubt he'll get very far overturning it. Still as someone who had money in FTX it's nice we are probably getting our money back plus some.
Imagine that you know you are the author of that, but also you just woke up with amnesia and are now trying to figure out why you wrote that book and what did you mean there.

Which explanation would you lean on?
I see a problem here. Why are English majors in Management positions? With LLMs, I don't see a value on an English degree anymore. So I personally believe it's just a money sink at this point. I don't believe art can be taught in universities as a degree program. Universities should only be for domains that have tangible value.
Is cuma liom sa foc faoi aon gharda
Hmm, never mind, that may have been other AI companies.
I wonder how animals understand death, because to understand death they'd need to understand consciousness and the lack of it, and I feel like that's human level complex thinking. Animals have logic, of course, IF predator is coming at me THEN I have to run for my life BECAUSE ... because they run on instinct? Because their herd does the same? Because they've learnt about what death is?

Mountain goats have probably slipped and fallen off cliffs, but I doubt they have fear of heights. Interestingly they probably are able to calculate whether a jump is doable or not, but do they doubt themselves? I guess cats and dogs show doubt..
Wow, you sure like to write essays...

Your whole essay utterly misses the point in multiple ways:

- Freeloading is not a feature or a bug, it's just something that happens when the expected value of exchange is unbalanced. If it is too unbalanced it makes the system unstable (i.e. causes war, violence, unfriending, etc. at different scales). The cry for more altruism of the OP almost always leads to a too unbalanced system, thus the problem.

- Yes we are wired to be altruistic to our in group (as I mentioned already). The outgroup we will routinely do horrible atrocities to with little thought or care. How in the in group one is will determine how unbalanced someone is willing to allow exchange to get. I.e. one will generally be fine with personally dumping large amounts of resources into a disabled immediate family member but will not be ok with personally dumping the same resources into a stranger across the globe (or across the city, or perhaps even into an acquaintance down the street).

- It's not that relevant what you think authoritarianism is classified as, it's only relevant that it's bad for freedoms many enjoy and that benefit society. Same deal with your take on nationalism. You should have edited these points out after rereading my comment because they don't matter. It's a missing the forest through all the trees situation.

- Yah, you chose the examples of innovators getting wealthy that is least relevant to societal improvement (and has huge problems I disagree with like excessive terms for copyright among many other problems). It's much more basic than that. Through much of history you lacked basic rights that ensured you could operate a business around your idea. A subset of the population had the right to just take it and that killed any motivation of the individual to act on their good ideas. Copyrights and patents came much later than the actual freedom that really matters for this. Your following paragraph is also a swing and a miss because of the above. It's not what I was talking about.
> No, if I ask a human about something he doesn't know, the first thing he will think about is not a made up answer, it is "I don't know".

You've just made this up, through. It's not what happens. How would somebody even know that they didn't know without trying to come up with an answer?

But maybe more convincingly, people who have brain injuries that cause them to neglect a side (i.e. not see the left or right side of things) often don't realize (without a lot of convincing) the extent to which this is happening. If you ask them to explain their unexplainable behaviors, they'll spontaneously concoct the most convincing explanation that they can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispatial_neglect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia

People try to make things make sense. LLMs try to minimize a loss function.
>Why did humans 100 years ago consume fewer calories?

Because they couldn't afford to eat more. In 1900, the average American household spent 43% of their income on food.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...
I think I mistyped what I mean. I meant people who were raised without parents in orphanages not foster care. Excuse my mistake and sorry if anyone felt anything negative from my comment.
You self-funded a philosophy PhD with loans at age 21?
Well... yes. Rust is kinda like nicer C. You can augment the data structures with behaviours. Which kyren notes in her keynote. I just feel the problem of the author of Comfy is not so much with rust-the-language but with the existing SDKs he was trying to build on which were moving targets. Not unsurprising for new stuff.
> 6. There is no such thing as a TCP packet

Because the software abstraction is a stream of bytes; and it's up to the application to decide where the "packets" begin and end.

For example, I might write to a TCP socket: 100 bytes, 50 bytes, and then 125 bytes.

BUT, the receiver could get: A single event with 275 bytes. Or it could get an event with 75 bytes and then an event with 200 bytes. Or it could get 11 events of 25 bytes.

> 5. There is a such thing as a TCP packet

This one I struggle with. I think the author is talking about connection set up, acking, and connection teardown.
It may cause a reputation or legal issue, so it is not in their interest to admit it. In the real world, is there PhD students or researchers using ChatGPT to move forward and help them think their ideas ?

Obviously yes, but admitting it may not be the right move.
there is a difference in prospects of payback/ROI between Harvard MBA and University of South Podunk MBA.

they are the same though for the federal student loan program.

same with law degrees
I get email alerts from ebay for anything related to LTO-5, and I only buy the cheap used tapes. They are still fine, most of them are very low use, the tapes actually have a chip in them that stores usage data like a car's odometer, so you can know how much a tape has been used. So far I trust tapes more than I'd trust a refurb hard drive for backups. And I also really like that the tapes have a write-protect notch on them, so once I write my backup data, there's no risk of having a tape accidentally get erased, unlike if I plugged in a hard drive and maybe there's some ransomware virus that automatically fucks with any hard drive drive that gets plugged in. It's just one less thing to worry about.
Hey I'm the creator of the website, lmk if you have any feature suggestions! We're focused on building a research prototype, so the UX can be un-polished at times. Thanks mate!
Spacy documentation webpages are top notch!
I agree with your comment to certain degree, specially in a commercial enterprise environment, but programming is still very time consuming and if a new invention made us faster it would be something noticeable, no?
It looks like graduate debt was approaching the majority and could in fact be a majority in 2024: "If these trends continue, graduate loan disbursements may exceed undergraduate disbursements in the next few years." https://sites.ed.gov/ous/files/2023/08/OCE_GraduateDebtRepor...
> I find these new pimps scarier than the old sort in that they pretend to have clean hands
The old one does. And I disagree this is worse, as it’s probably just you never encounter the old model yourself or not knowing the history enough to do the comparison. From the book I read, across cultures and societies, old model of pimping is very brutal, on both the client and the server sides.
no this is a hacker website we have your IP now we gonna hack your ass
It's a tough problem that reenforces itself. The high availability of loans allows colleges to charge exorbitant rates, and for most, the exorbitant tuition rates necessitate the use of loans, which allows the tuition rates to go even higher.

Fresh High School grads are a terrible demographic where good credit is concerned, there aren't many 18 year olds you could loan 6 figures to and expect to see that money again.

But now we're so deep in this rabbit hole that neither side has incentive to back down. Nothing shy of government intervention, or mass protest of the system, is likely to change it in my opinion.
i.e.: transfer the wealth from the taxpayer to the creditors anyways, just in a different way
I agree that it's not ideal, but using something like anyhow/l and thiserror honestly doesn't feel _that_ bad.

> Something that should be supported directly.

Rust has "adapted" some crates into stdlib in the past. Are there any efforts to that for error handling?
> I have an engineering master's from a world famous university where the lab work was pretty pointless. It didn't count for much if at all, and was more or less just entertainment.

For me personally, having a maker space and access to expensive equipment was how I learned to do useful things as an electrical engineer. Was it entertaining? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. In fact, the things I’ve had the easiest time learning were things I’ve done because they were inherently enjoyable.
I'm talking about deciding at age 21 to go to grad school, like deciding at age 17 to go to undergrad.
> I wonder if their setup achieves the same degree of transparency, because afaiui, that's just not possible involving a 802.1Q-compliant (Linux) bridge.

Can you elaborate on what is not transparent about 802.1q bridge in Linux?

I hear you on the system tuning. Whenever I change sysctl variables I always include a comment with what the default was and why the new setting is better. I don't trust sysctl copy pasta w/o decent explanations.
You’re doing it wrong.

“Falsehoods programmers believe…” articles are designed to make you THINK about problematic assumptions. They are not like the 10 commandments and they are not decrees of absolute truth.
Now do wages and taxes.
The word temporary is only used to placate people who don't understand nuclear / nuclear waste (waste is a bad term) and who have been badly influenced by 70 years of misinformation from The Sierra Club and others.

None of this spent fuel is really that spent, has plenty of other use cases, and should be used. Also, storing it in concrete casks for 40 years is perfectly safe and has caused 0 harm.

The cost is largely due to regulatory hurdles that are slowly being eroded.