skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, Midjourney's work looks visually impressive, but have you seen evidence that it really is displacing professional 3D artists?

Are legitimate companies genuinely switching to Midjourney over hiring artists now, or is Midjourney usage still mostly happening in places that previously wouldn't have commissioned custom illustrations at all (instead using things like stock photography)?
> What wins big is to remove useless stuff entirely.

This. And there's even a project (targeting mainly RasPi) that does just that: https://gokrazy.org

(And yes, you can also deploy code that wasn't written in Go, although it's quite clunky.)
The projects I do are mostly frontend in React and backend with TypeScript/Node.js.

I have around 10+ years of professional experience although I did on/off hobby coding before that since 15 years ago.

It's mostly API endpoints, calling a database, third party APIs, data transformation, aggregation type of things.

Then either UI according to what designers provide or whatever I want to do for my side projects.

I think it's of course wildly more productive multiplier for side projects, since then it's mostly about typing things out since you know exactly what you want to do and being a little off doesn't matter.

I don't want to share any of my actual code right now, but I think one example for example is a React component that needs to fetch some sort of data, e.g. using @tanstack/react-query, then it does loading handling, error handling boilerplate things for me, which some of I change to what I specifically need for that situation, but I need very few keystrokes myself to get the initial boilerplate out that I then edit, and during edits it of course also gives me decent suggestions. And it will create the component prop types based on the args I pass to the component etc.

Then with backend, it's really good at data transformations. E.g. combining different datasets, reducing etc.

How well it picks the correct libraries and patterns depends on the project and I think how much I've navigated around, I'm not fully sure how the context is exactly passed, so usually I will feel it out and adapt code where necessary.
A lot of puzzles (e.g. sudoku) are things you could solve with a SAT/SMT solver
> the unification is an illusion or an appearance

Julian Baggini - The Duality of Non-duality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAiE_ZQhiDs

Bundle theories of the self, inspired by David Hume, view the self as a collection of experiences, memories, and thoughts rather than a fixed entity. This perspective sees the self as dynamic and changing, without strict borders, yet maintaining a high degree of order and stability over time. While rejecting the idea of a core self, it doesn't advocate for "no self" or "many selves," but rather a gradualist approach that acknowledges the fuzzy distinction between self and other. The speaker emphasizes that this view doesn't negate the practical existence of individuals or invalidate logical thinking. Instead, it suggests that different levels of description are valid for understanding reality, and that metaphysical views about the self don't necessarily dictate how one should live their life.
For bootstrappers, the philosophy here is sound. Don't make a fancy restaurant, just build a better burger joint. There are endless burger places. Why? Because people love burgers. Innovation is great once you have money to burn. Until then, be the corner roast beef place that everybody loves and is an institution. The business model is sound, no great innovation is necessary, just hard work, persistence, cleverness yes but not genius. Startup this way is still challenging but not impossible, and initially no major pivots are needed. Customer acquisition is still the most difficult part, and that takes time no matter how well you are funded.
>As added support for this view, I can contrast with the relatively uncommon experience of having some experiences unified: when listening to an audio book, my brain often (but not always!) ties the experience of the book with my physical location at the time. When I return to that location, the experience of being there is inextricably tied to the portions of the book I heard in that place. I can't really remember one without the other.

I've noticed something similar with podcasts. It's usually when I first listen to it while driving. When I listen to that segment again I have this intrusive, prolonged, real-time replay of what was going on at the time I first heard it.

It doesn't feel like memory because while I'm watching this replay I can remember portions of it with typical poor fidelity from the usual memory of my brain. It's very odd, and as someone with a generally terrible memory it's something I wish I could figure out how to channel. It clearly is what people talk about when they describe photographic memory, it's incredibly detailed.
Neither of these things are true. You don't have to update firmware, firstly.
Secondly, the fact the drone and the controller "use wifi" doesn't mean that they're connecting to arbitrary wifi access points. The drone controller (at least for the two drones i had) is a WAP, itself, a real strong one, and the drone connects to the controller. You don't need a phone to fly a DJI - the phone connected to the controller via USB cable provides telemetry and real time video. If you just want to fly the drone around and maybe capture some cool video, that doesn't require a connected phone.

Source: owned a dji mini and own a DJI mini 2, very close friends with people who own the mini 3 and other, more expensive ones (with the video screen built in to the controller). I fly mine and use an old oled android phone as the video/telemetry screen - no sim card or cellular connectivity. I can take the whole setup to the middle of a forest with no connectivity at all and it will connect, fly, and record telemetry and video on the phone and on the SD card in the drone.
The worry I have is that the net value will become great enough that we’ll simply ignore the flaws, and probabilistic good-enough tools will become the new normal. Consider how many ads the average person wades through to scroll an Insta feed for hours - “we’ve” accepted a degraded experience in order to access some new technology that benefits us in some way.
To paraphrase comedian Mark Normand: “Capitalism!”
“The man from Box 500 [UK MI5] proudly announced that the thermal-imaging camera at the rear had detected a pattern of movement. Every morning, he reported, at exactly 08:00, the hostages gathered in the commercial section on the ground floor. An SAS officer tartly pointed out the central heating was timed to go on every morning at that hour: the “hostages” detected by MI5’s machine were radiators warming up."

Excerpt From: The Siege by Ben Macintyre

Very good read.
"We should regulate it because I dislike it" is such a European take. And I say this as a European. No wonder our economies are stagnating.

I like F2P games. I know it's hard for someone born rich to understand this, but not everyone could afford something like World of Warcraft's $60 buy-in price with a $15 monthly subscription fee.
I like to think I'm more of a "challenging and novel problems" developer than a "copy and paste from Stack Overflow" developer, and I've been finding LLMs extremely useful for over two years at this point.

Notes: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/
The btc has been in the wallet since the puzzle was created
In about 1998, I was driving down the highway in Mississippi and saw a tag: "UID ZRO". I had a passenger at the time and said hey, I'm going to pass this guy, but tell me if he looks like a Unix admin. Passenger was familiar with the type and said yes, he did.
3D printed glock switches allow firing of an entire magazine with a single pull
Scott/SSC is an interesting example. In my dichotomy of “known people” vs “plebs”, even behind a pseudonym Scott is far closer to the “known people” end.

He writes about (sometimes) controversial stuff for a large(ish) and influential audience. He wants to be known and influential. I think he deserves the right to do so pseudonymously, but that’s tangential to my actual point.

Most of us plebs do not want to be famous or influential, and therefore it doesn’t make a ton of sense to leave a trail of possibly regrettable or easily misinterpreted bits of data attached to our real names.
The advantage of SQLite is being able to perform queries like “logs for service X and Y yesterday between 15hs and 16hs”.
>There's somewhat of a internal forum question - nobody wakes up saying "today I want to be a septic engineer"

about 20+ years ago I was working at a place that made concrete walls or other concrete fixtures, these walls were then taken and shipped around mainly the Western United States but theoretically all over.

Hated the job and I wasn't very good at it, although I got good reports from the supervisors because I was one of the guys who only called in sick once a month, most people, even the illegals were calling in sick at least once per week because it was a really miserable job starting at 5 in the morning in a cold windy area with lots of injuries and sometimes fatalities.

Anyway we got a new guy joining the team, Rory, he was 19 or 20 I think.

And one day we were standing out in the middle of the yard waiting for a big concrete wall to be picked up and brought to us, and I looked over at Rory and he had this big smile on his face and he was almost dancing with excitement and he announced, because evidently he thought I wanted to share, that this was his dream job that he had been dreaming of since he was a little kid.

I probably looked stunned and disgusted as I said something like "really?!?"

Yep, he explained, when he was a kid he would watch the guys working the big construction sites and he thought I want to do that when I grow up!

So what I'm saying is - maybe somebody does grow up thinking "I want to be a septic engineer".

Thinking about it I wanted to design ecologically sound waste disposal systems some years back, so I guess I could have talked about that too.
This is really great resource for someone getting started to understand what's going on. I see many have issues and try out different git commands without understanding the outcome.
> might make a hybrid gas vehicle still cheaper per mile

I agree. What is unconscionable is deploying 10s of thousands of vehicles that spend every day of operation accelerating rather quickly then coming to a full stop within a few seconds without using regenerative braking.
Do they have a buyer for that $400k? If not, it's not worth $400K.
To add to this analogy: you also spend that time learning how to run a burger joint. That’s not wasted time. Walk then run and all that.

If you can’t make a burger joint work, you can’t make a fancy restaurant work. Don’t fool yourself by thinking the problem was the menu and atmosphere.

I experienced a startup where a bunch of mechatronics grads built a product line of simple robots for research use. Simple hamburgers of robotics. Only after years of that did they dive into far more complicated markets. From my rank and file vantage, this felt simple and genius.
I would expect a top performer with LLM access to be able to produce even more of a multiple of the work of a mediocre developer with LLM access.

If a top performer can produce 5x or more of the value, I would expect companies to continue to value top performers.
> not creating new laws harming freedom of speech

Tests are helpful, when writing rules. US freedom of speech has been influenced by law on asymmetry of economic resources in groups vs. individuals [2010], allowing state propaganda in domestic media [2012], and gov-corp coordination of social media moderation [2024].

[2010]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_(organization) [2012]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act [2024]https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/justices-side-with-biden-...
For those curious, the reason why a public key lets you find a private key more efficiently is Pollard's rho algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollard%27s_rho_algorithm_for_...
A bullet hell game written in bash
Americans keep saying this and it makes me laugh every time, because you didn't learn anything from Vietnam.

Just like in Vietnam, the stated goal was to replace the government - in this case, to remove the Taliban - that's why you created the Afghan National Army and their flimsy democracy. All told, the US has spent $8 trillion and several thousand young men on the GWOT. Once the US pulled out, the Taliban strolled back into Kabul.

$8 trillion will reduce the US debt by 25%, or pay off all student debt, or build 80 million $100k homes. Wasted, and the only thing you have to show for it is nothing tangible, except more vibrant terror groups, and immigrants flooding Europe. Meanwhile, 8k US veterans die by suicide yearly.

You had the firepower but failed to achieve your political goals. Just like in Vietnam, Iran, Syria, Laos, Cambodia, and more countries than I care to mention. While ruining the lives of innocent millions, of course.

So, you failed. Admitting it might be hard, but it will bring the US to a place of humility and help you avoid adventures like this going forward.

And to be pedantic, no you can't raze every sq. km of 652,860 km². Assuming, even just 1000 tons of explosives per km2, that's nearly 700 million tons of explosives. At $30k a ton, you'd be spending $21 trillion on enough explosives.
I've heard that experience is initially a mess. A babble of sensations.

Then I tell myself a story about the babble. Map the babble in terms of time, space, things, money, etc.

And then that story. That's "reality".

(But the real magic show comes when I am guided by the story, in what I pay attention to and what I ignore)
"cache:" search syntax still works:

https://google.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycomb...
24h Volume: $9,800,480,342

Liquidity of less than a million worth of BTC hasn't been a problem for a long time
The forever-sprinting approach indeed is unmanageable long term.

In my prev job we used to have a cycle of 2-3 sprints followed by 1-2 weeks of rest (to handle tech debt etc.)

In other companies it could be named "innovation week" or something similar.

I still didn't love this, precisely due to always wanting tangible deliverables within 1-2 weeks, while sometimes you just need more time to think clearly about some problem.

We partially mitigated it though by explicitly stating whether a giving story is "delivery" or "discovery", the latter being used to better understand the scope of the problem, current status quo, validate assumptions etc.
The market is liquid enough to absorb a sale for $400K.
Running on a PC, under NT4.0
DJI drones[0] don't require any network connectivity at all to function, much less "cloud"

they do have a "video platform" where you can upload videos to from their drones, but i've never used it and doubt i even have an account on it.

[0] none of the ones i've used or seen, anyhow
Hm, turns out Apple's site had this wrong for a short while on the comparison page. Shame.
Bitcoin is more than liquid enough to offload a half dozen without issue.
If is so bad, just show me the research, or at least any proof showing that the ecosystem is collapsing.

You know, as me, that the blogspam is the only part what the public will read. And then you have a lot of people with lots of silly and wrong ideas about how nature works.
One of the most profoundly dumb comments I have read here.

It takes 3 seconds to look up the 24h volume for BTC and it is $9.6 Billion
Yeah for sure.

Here’s how I view it. When we get hurt, emotions rise and sometimes people want to see others suffer. There’s just this human instinct that wants to beat the crap out of those who we feel have wronged us.

But logic tells us that if we stop and think about it, there’s a better way. War is expensive and unnecessary. Especially when people make mistakes, we don’t need to beat the crap out of them forever.

Instead, when dealing with a financial crime, logic says that the correct way to handle it is to have the person pay back the money with interest. If they can’t pay it back, at least they can work the rest of their life trying.

Humans may feel if it can’t be paid back, then we need to pay the person back with suffering. But I don’t think that has any place in the modern world. There’s enough money to go around, and while it sucks to lose it, times like this can teach us the importance of investing in the things that really matter, the things that money can’t buy.

If I had lost money in this, I would be very upset. But I should hope I wouldn’t try to take revenge.

I think revenge is not a good choice because first, you don’t actually get anything from it. It doesn’t even feel better. But secondly, he can’t work on repaying the debt. Honestly, it’s unlikely that anyone could make the money back. But what can’t be made, I should hope we could forgive.

Ultimately, the guy has something to give society. He was trying to do something that we all agree is good - run a good crypto business to help us all. But we all make mistakes and do things we shouldn’t do. So I think when failure happens we have to help him do his best to pay back what he can. What he can’t, I think it’s best to forgive, because we can’t fix the world by hurting people.

Ultimately, I see him as human. So we need to accept that we all fail. So we need to either work on preventive measures, or alternatively accept that it was a risk that didn’t pan out.

But unless he’s a danger to society, I don’t see how we can feel like we are growing as a society if we stoop to wanton destruction of his life.

So yeah I think he should have the chance to try to give back as much as he can.

Hope you have a great day!
Am I correct in assuming that beyond a certain point, this is basically an existence proof for somebody having a quantum-supreme solution to Shor's Algorithm?

"Here's $400,000 sitting on the table, hope nobody takes it" which triggers an alarm telling us to replace all our old prequantum cryptography.
if china can do it cheaper or better (as in, <32nm chips, for example), then is the market really free? or is it only "free" for companies in the US with large amounts of money to spend on lobbying?

capitalism for me and not for thee (or vice versa)
The current market easily eats up 6.6 BTC without much movement. Are you looking at a smaller pool like Canada exclusively. Look at the Euro or USD markets. They are much much deeper.
After Shark Tank, Mark Cuban Just Wants to Break the Drug Industry
This is an important piece. In the last decade a lot of what was considered valuable has been thrown out. I saw them on streets on monthly furniture disposal. Encyclopedias, books, tapes, magazines, devices of all kinds. None of it seemed to matter anymore. Yet I don't feel there's something equivalent that replaced it. Wikipedia maybe but .. not really.

And the trend of "replace in-depth well paid work by cheap short term attention catching hooks" keeps spreading.

It's very very strange to witness that kind of social waves.
Yep, and I think most reasonable people would agree with this.
while beef produces like 5% of global methane emmissions the oil and gas industry produce much much more... and beef can be solved by adding algae to their feed.

I can just talk about my own story. When I swapped everything I ate for meat, the depression went away, I've been collecting since 2018 or so, recently started adding everything I've learned into a github. https://github.com/cutestuff/FoodDepressionConundrum/blob/ma...

If you compare bio-availability of nutrients in plants and meat you'll end up with deficiencies that will have to be supplemented, this stuff is complex and probably a lot of us ruined their guts through fast food. The food industry cannot be trusted to get it right in fake meats...

On top of it all, the nutrient content of plants is going down for 30 years or so...
Can't we come up with puzzles where at least something of value is created when the puzzle is solved (and a tremendous amount of resources is not wasted)?
> Sport: an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.

A few observations:

1. Exertion is an unavoidable part of the human condition. Golf is a sport. Axe throwing, sport. Nascar/f1, sports.
2. Competition. Competing to some feels like fighting and has negative connotations. I don’t compete much, but having competed countless times in my life. 99.9%, it’s been in the spirit of entertainment and not judgment
3. Entertainment.

Do i despise sports? I could rephrase to: do i despise competition based entertainment? Answer, no, i cherish it. My guess OP is that you—like me—don’t like conventional sports in your country? Baseball football … snoozefest! Surely there is SOME sporting you cherish. I’m into cycling, the disc/frisbee games. Replace sport with “hobby” and ask “is there a competitive hobby im into?” Maybe on ESPN “The Ocho”? eSports? …competitive puzzles?
Really sounds more like Walter to me, but they’d probably make a pretty good founding team! I’d like to see them do a pitch.
I wasn't a big fan as a kid because I never felt like I had talent at it, and my poor performance would make me feel like a failure, especially when I could see disappointment on the faces of my pickup game teammates.

In college I did sports medicine as an extracurricular activity and spent lots of time preparing and rehabbing athletes, talking with them, and also watching the sports right from the sideline, and I developed an understanding of the stakes and passion and decisions involved.

I've developed a board gaming obsession over the past few years, so I notice strategy in a lot of areas now, and I can firmly say that I can respect and enjoy the strategy in a game now. I also have become a huge fan of youth sports as a parent, seeing how desperately they need activity and time with their peers for their development, even more so than when I was their age.

The only thing I just don't really get about sports is the fervor. I don't have it in me to commit to a team or player and track entire careers, have arguments, refer to the home team's performance in the second person ("we", "us"). I will gladly watch a sports movie or documentary, though, and occasionally a game (preferably as close to the field as possible)
I actually like that analogy. It's somewhere in between. Enough that LLMs can help in many ways, but the current models are still far away from doing everything.
Conspiracy theories can sometimes be correct. This always treats them as incorrect. It should know when to hold an agnostic stance.
This exists to an extent today. If you apply your profession to an area that the government deems a societal good (e.g. you work at a public university), it can be discharged after 10 years. This was status quo for decades.
I’m glad I saw your comment!! I’ve experienced this exact phenomenon when playing Minecraft while listening to an audiobook or podcast. Returning to that area will immediately remind me of the topic or narrative that I heard. Presumably it’s related to the “memory palace” technique, but otherwise, I can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s immediate, as if the location is a hash key mapping to the information. Or as if they’re stored in literally the same place, and fetching one implies fetching the other.

Similarly to you and the article’s author, this doesn’t happen with whatever thoughts I may think while at a location. But in that situation the brain is engaged in generating those thoughts, and not with the task of learning new information. So I don’t find it surprising that it works differently.

I haven’t thought about it in relation to “consciousness” yet. Will have to chew on this article a bit.
What is Haitian food like in the United States?