skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
8 bits in a byte exist in the first place because "obviously" a byte is a 7 bit char + parity.

(*) For some value of "obviously".
Burnout is awful, but this post seems preachy and out of touch.

>It’s hard to explain to people who aren’t programmers just how soul-destroying it is to work for someone else in this industry. Maddeningly hard, in fact. Your profession involves hard mental work. You work at the limit of your creative, analytical and problem-solving abilities. You think and read outside of sessions to improve your craft. You bring your entire self to the task of healing someone’s trauma, figuring out what’s holding them back, or whatever. Now imagine it was all completely pointless.

What part of this doesn't apply to every other discipline? Plenty of people feel that everything they do is pointless. Plenty of people spend their entire mental effort at work.

The Hacker News crowd has a higher than average fraction of people who think they have to never turn off and always be doing computer science work even when not at work. That correlates strongly with burnout, but that's not a programming thing, that's a personality type. Go outside and get some fresh air. Every day. Stop staring at screens 24/7. That can't entirely prevent burnout but it helps a lot.
Does burn out exist in other professions? I recall seeing something about doctors/lawyers.

I know (distantly) some folks in the medical profession and it sounds way worse than what we go through. Not trying to diminish the real stress that we go through in this industry. Wondering if we can learn something from other industries in a similar (or indeed more difficult) position.
I feel this very deeply. At the same time, I feel shame for feeling this way. I have a very high paying job, excellent flexibility, and I work from home. It doesn't get much better. Except that when I sit down at the computer, the actual work and meetings to talk about the work are unbelievably draining.

The shame is because I know others would love to be in my position and there is an almost endless list of jobs that are worse than this, but it's brutal sometimes. I workout daily and spend the vast majority of my time away from the keyboard, outside.

The worst part is, it's not just a matter of embrace the suck and push on. In a physical labor job, you can just command the body to move and push through it. In this line of work, you don't really have that option. You can't just command the brain to solve difficult problems and design complex systems.
Profit margins for insurers are pretty low on a percentage basis. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) imposed a minimum medical loss ratio on commercial payers. You can read the financial statements for those that are publicly traded. Some of the largest insurers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield Association members are non-profit.

The NHS isn't really a "single-payer system" in any meaningful sense. In the UK, most healthcare providers are employed directly by the government and their wages are fixed below the market rate to control costs. There are internal financial transfers but there aren't really arms-length negotiations and payments between separate payer and provider organizations.

If the USA was to adopt a single-payer system like the various "Medicare for All" proposals that politicians have floated that wouldn't do much to reduce costs. Any meaningful cost reduction for the system as a whole would require driving down provider wages, rationing care, and ending the way that we subsidize drug development costs for the rest of the world. Those measures might be good things to do on balance, but they aren't politically popular.
I love how out there this guy seems and kudos to his courage for sharing his thoughts and feelings and being able to go and do something to the beat of his own drum.
Wait, what is your definition of reason?

It's true, they might not think the way we do.

But reasoning can be formulaic. It doesn't have to be the inspired thinking we attribute to humans.

I'm curious how you define "reason".
Maybe because programming per se isn't my occupation... I think about the problem that I'm trying to solve.
Blaming 'foreign adversaries' for it is also a phenomenon indistinguishable from an attack to destabilize and bring on paranoia.
Where I am at in the call stack. Esp for back end api dev.
Sounds more like you managed to avoid burning out.
It is indeed hard to optimize it; I haven't fully utilized the potential myself. For now I have an object pool which allows me to create only one instance of a canvas element. Kotlin also allows me to use coroutines easily, also (potentially) have access to GPU/CPU since this is a desktop app.

Another thing I tried (still in backlog) is dynamic quality reducer for images and PDFs - sort of like a game engine rendering where zooming out will reduce quality of images.
What are you writing your app on? Electron?
Isn't this essentially the correct horse battery staple method? The only reason I could see anything wrong with it is if the dictionary is somehow limited.
Unfortunately, Tesla requests NHTSA to redact almost all useful information from their crash reports. So it's impossible to get more details.

Here is the public database of all ADAS crashes: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_In...
The proposal of making smaller healthcare groups so that healthy people aren't paying for sick people to make it more fair is exactly the wrong direction to go as a society, IMHO. And I say that as a person who has spent fairly small amounts over my life. We can basically guarantee that with the exception of early, cheap deaths, that everyone is going to need healthcare. Spreading it out among everyone just makes sense to me.
Sam is a scary good guy. But I’ve also learned to never underestimate Microsoft. They’ve been playing the game a long long time.
You should buy a really nice tent now while you have cash flow.
Same question further down the thread, and my reply is that it's about as dangerous as an evil human. We have evil humans at home.
Yeah, it's probably a personality thing in large part. I find that the sense of my creative energy being wasted on something pointless disagrees with me so much that I'd rather do almost anything else (I actually find jobs to be a great source of inspiration in that way - ideas for better things to do keep springing to mind - although not great for productivity on the job).

I do think there are different types of "work" though, and the worse programming jobs have some of the worst combinations of attributes - inherently pointless but require intense mental effort.
When doing architecture work, I'm generally thinking in terms of data flows and state changes.

Programming seems more verbal to me than visual. It feels very akin to writing, I have an idea and I am talking through it. My editing of code tends to be nonlinear for this reason, drilling into areas as I would expound upon them verbally, rather than in the order the compiler will evaluate them.
I think very few software engineering jobs are set up to be enjoyable (or even tolerable) to a large fraction of the people who are drawn to such jobs.

I'm self taught[0]. I was drawn to computers at an early age, and I was hacking little projects together in a couple of different languages by the time I was in middle school. This was a very solitary activity for a very introverted boy, and I loved it. I still love it. Nothing compares to sitting down at a computer and just letting the logic flow through me unimpeded and onto the screen.

My job is not like that. I have 2 - 5 meetings a day. I am constantly coordinating and brainstorming and just plain dealing with other people. That is more draining than the coding. Sometimes I have a decent chunk of time at the end of the day, but I can't even bring myself to code because I am so drained by all of the non-coding stuff I had to do earlier in the day.

I love my job. I do impactful work for an impactful company that I think is doing actual good in the world. I work on an interesting project, and they pay and treat me well. But in my heart of hearts what I really want to be is not a software engineer but instead some kind of self-directed code hermit.

[0] By which I mean I learned from books and examples and experimentation. I did eventually get a computer science degree also, but I had been coding for years before I took my first class in it.
I "see" the code, but I'm not sure that I actually see anything. Maybe some kind of shapes, but they don't correspond to UML diagrams or anything. Maybe vaguely 3D blocks? But I'm not really thinking visually, so I'm not really looking at them as shapes. All I can say is that I think there is some spatial thing going on, but I can't tell you what it is.
> Any normal Rust kernel will either have issues scaling on multi-cores or use tax-heavy synchronisation primitives. The kernel RCU and lock-free algorithm took a long time to be discovered and become mature and optimised aggressively to cater for the complex modern computer architectures of out-of-order execution, pipelining, complex memory hierarchies (especially when it comes to caching) and NUMA.

Why would that be the case at all? What has Rust anything to do with that?
> Is there an argument for why infinitely sophisticated autocomplete is not dangerous?

It's definitely not dangerous in the sense of reaching true intelligence/consciousness that would be a threat to us or force us to face the ethics of whether AI deserves dignity, freedom, etc.

It's very dangerous in the sense in that it will be just "good enough" to replace human labor with so that we all end up with shitter customer service, education, medical care, etc. so that the top 0.1% can get richer.

And you're right, it's also dangerous in the sense that responsibilty for evil acts will be laundered to it.
I used this standard a long time ago to make a simple server -> client reactive state for a card game by combining it with Vue's reactive objects to get something like a poor man's CRDTs. This is a rough diagram of what it looked like: [1]. Although there was a reducer step on the server to hide private state for the other player, it's still probably wildly impractical for actual games.

[1] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/50021387/184360079...
> "You don’t care about the goal to begin with"

This seems key. Are there options in your area for work with goals you do care about?
Exactly. Especially because we don't have any convincing explanation of how the models develop emergent abilities just from predicting the next word.

No one expected that, i.e., we greatly underestimated the power of predicting the next word in the past; and we still don't have an understanding of how it works, so we have no guarantee that we are not still underestimating it.
Thank you for trying.
You are absolutely right.
In my defense i released the very first 20 puzzles without proof reading them. I just wanted to see what the AI can deliver as a starting point and get an idea if crossword players would like or hate the general idea of it. I've just started seriously playing it myself and some clues are indeed strange. The clues were generated by gpt-4o. You can try later puzzles i did some prompt adjustments because i noticed the forced "in games" after 10 puzzles or so. It gets a bit better at later puzzles. Thank you for the feedback
Don't worry, once Google catches wind of "thing they don't like" they will kill the oauth connection.
Okay then that's pretty much a single-generation effect in practice.

A lot of people don't understand that by the early to mid 1930s it was realized that the "propaganda version" of eugenics was not going to work, and if sterilization was going to be your tool, it would have to continue forever, and would need to happen to quite a lot of people.

Many geneticists said something like, "okay, then expand the programs".

Yeah, if everything undesirable was ruled by a limited number of "garbage" recessives that never did anything on their own, and you could more or less track traits with Punnett squares (or even fuzzier multi-gene threshold charts) then maybe it would work, but it doesn't.

Assortive mating of high intelligence people and/or continual, quite large scale sterilization of people with GWAS-rated "bad" genes would work, but it's not what a single-generation-only use of this company does.
Poll: Do you use browser profiles?
Firefox is adding better profile UX (it’s currently behind a flag), but it also supports ‘container tabs,’ which can get you halfway there. Chrome, Safari, and Arc (and other Chromium-based browsers) support profiles natively as ‘first-class citizens.’

As someone who recently switched from Chrome → Arc → Firefox, and literally cannot live without browser profiles, I’m curious about how others use their browsers.
No, I do not
I use Firefox Container Tabs
Other (comment)
security nightmare; sometimes you don't want consumers to execute code arbitrarily
Standard text patches (diffs) are great because they work with all text files but for a specific representation like JSON you can do a lot better. In terms of code volume it's a lot lighter to find a node based on a json path than applying a diff.
This reasoning about the subscription price etc is undermined by the actual prices OpenAI are charging -

The price of a model capable of 4o mini level performance used to be 100x higher.

Yes, literally 100x. The original "davinci model" (and I paid $5 figures for using it throughout 2021-2022) cost $0.06/1k tokens.

So it's not inverting in running costs (which are the thing that will kill a company). Struggling with training costs (which is where you correctly identify OpenAI is spending) will stop growth perhaps, but won't kill you if you have to pull the plug.

I suspect subscription prices are based on market capture and perceived customer value, plus plans for training, not running costs.
Nah, in that case Python would be a better option as it's already installed everywhere.
this was one of the biggest learning curves / adjustments tbh but once I got over that it's surprisingly powerful.

It tackles like 80% of cases
Let me consult my tellingbone.
At this point in time (meaning 2024) bits for computers are a word to indicate a culture rather than the technical merits of a computer.
But OpenAI has to keep releasing new ever-increasing models to justify it all. There is a reason they are talking about nuclear reactors and Sam needing 7 trillion dollars.

One other difference from Bitcoin is that the price of Bitcoin rises to make it all worth it, but we have the opposite expectation with AI where users will eventually need to pay much more than now to use it, but people only use it now because it is free or heavily subsidized. I agree that current models are pretty good and the price of those may go down with time but that should be even more concerning to OpenAI.
Mice employ a bait-and-switch escape mechanism to de-escalate social conflict
What's New in ECMAScript 2024
Thank you for trying! Please see my reply on the other comment it fits here as well. This is a non proof read version and i agree with you consider this a starting point. Also feel free the try out the later puzzles (10+) i changed the prompt at some point because i noticed the same thing.
If you're on Hetzner you can get a load balancer with TLS termination for $5/month. It's hidden in the cloud category but fully supports dedicated servers.

Of course doing SSL on the server itself is more secure, but if that's a performance bottleneck the load balancer can be a cost effective compromise
Nice read. Recognizable.

I hate presents, I hate getting them (they're never what I want, or if they are, I was well aware they bought it at a poor price). I hate buying them even more because I just don't know what people like. If you know, buy it yourself, jeez.

This year I just stopped buying them, said to everyone: I don't want them. The gift I want from you is to not have to give you a gift, ok?

People don't like it, but I feel better. Man do I hate that tradition of gifts (for birthdays, for christmas, for Sinterklaas... always stress about stupid gifts... pffff, hate that process)
Automattic offered employees chance to quit with nine months' severance
> Add the internet and this amplifies x100.

Ye. But I don't think it is the internet in itself, but the algorithmic feeds.

I don't know what 'crack pot' is the new hot thing nowadays, but Alex Jones did not pop up in my feed by him self. Nowadays it seems so much more... dunno. Surreal?
My life got much better when I realized that I actually don't like "programming".

I like solving problems using programming languages, and like designing large systems with computers, but I don't actually enjoy the programming itself. Programming without the designing part just feels like data entry to me. There's nothing clever, or creative, or interesting about it.

For years I've dealt with severe burnout because I had been lying to myself and taking jobs that where I didn't really have to "think", and I had no fun doing it, leading to me feeling like I had really chosen the wrong career path and that I was stuck feeling bored for the rest of my life.

Once I realized that programming for the sake of programming isn't fun, I started putting my attention to jobs where I made it clear that I'm going to be involved in the design and decision-making process, and almost immediately I actually enjoyed working again, after many years of not.

I'm not saying this is universal, if you like writing Java for the sake of writing Java, don't let me take that away from you, it's just not something I enjoy. Figuring out what you actually enjoy doing is deceptively hard, but a worthwhile goal.
The baby boomers lived well, before so many industries and jobs were offshored.
> The newspaper’s CEO said this was part of a plan to be “bold and disruptive.”

Too bad they went ghoulish instead
I've heard this and haven't really experienced it with Go, typescript, elixir yet. I don't doubt the claim, but I wonder if I'm not prompting it correctly or something.
AI could help people find common ground during deliberations
the "pro" argument is that it reinforces him as the most patriotic leader available, primarily with nationalists. i agree with you that he's not that stupid, but i believe that he's counting on his audience to either be that economically illiterate, or to be so rabidly supportive of him that they'll go along with it.

to wit, a few conversations with some red hats that i've had:

"tariffs will put america first and make us be more dependent on american-made goods and services"
"but, at least in the near-term, tariffs will also create shortages AND further price increases, which is a major sticking point for you with 'bidenomics'"
"no they wont"

"i'm happy to see that trump is putting america first and seeking to level the economic playing field with other nations. globalization has been a setback"
... (establish that they're talking about tariffs)
"until the us can get up to speed with the raw materials and manufacturing of things that we've traditionally imported from these companies, there will likely be shortages and price increases"
"that is a small price to pay. sometimes you have to make sacrifices to do what is right."

i'll reserve judgment on these conversations outside of the assessment that trump is hoping that the majority of his supporters fall into a category such as one of the two above.
Levels of Evidence
Yeah this sounds a lot like me. I find it hard to imagine what kind of personality _could_ tolerate a software job. Maybe some people are more amenable to accepting the company's mission as part of their identity, and can therefore find the inherent satisfaction of doing a good job. But yeah, I always found the meetings and coordination aspect to be quite taxing.
It’s awfully convenient that this ambiguity in asset prices leads to a massive an unprecedented tax break to the richest people in the country — many of whom are literal experts in valuation.
How a Musk-Funded Pac Is Microtargeting Muslims and Jews with Opposing Messages
1?Z-2>@.#x3O0_l^,fNO%0o

Your comment was interesting to me, so I was trying to come up with the most "ergonomically unsound" password. How did I do?
In my city of Berlin, we simply had an app called MyTaxi that would hail the cab for you. No need for Uber and its predatory business model.
Another way personal projects are different is the fact that there's not usually someone depending on you- whether that's in the form of timelines, API stability, tech choice, etc.

I'm working on a large breaking change to a personal codebase right now, and its taken almost 3 years of procrastination, lazy research when I feel like it, and the API changing and changing again due to rewrites. I'd like to finish by 2025, but if I don't, nothing happens!

The whole thing has felt fun due to the lack of pressure and just... not working on it when I feel like doing something else.

Very different from work projects, even the interesting ones with great bosses and teammates.
Nice work. I've also experimented with procedurally generated crossword puzzles, though I really wanted to constrain them to symmetric layouts like what you would find in the New York times which made it more difficult.

There's an outstanding issue and that is (from what I can tell) at least 75% of the answers correspond to relatively generic nouns or verbs.

Part of the deep satisfaction in solving a crossword puzzle is the specificity of the answer. It's far more gratifying to answer a question with something like "Hawking" then to answer with "scientist", or answering with "mandelbrot" versus "shape".

It might be worth going back and looking up a compendium of games released in the last couple decades, cross referencing them with their manuals, GameFaqs, etc. and peppering this information into the crossword.
If you ever have to do that again it might be worth considering some hardware assistance. An ESP32 S2 or S3, from what I've read, can act as a USB HID and emulate a keyboard from the computer's point of view. The necessary code is included in the ESP32 libraries for Arduino, with examples [1], so for software all you'd need is the Arduino IDE or command line tools, which run fine on Linux.

With that it would be easy to build a temporary "type my secret key" dongle.

An ESP32 S2 or S3 dev kit board from a reputable source along with the other necessary hardware would probably be under $20.

There are also some models of Arduino that have the necessary USB support such as the Arduino Leonardo [2], but the Leonardo is more than an EPS32 at the non-sketchy sellers I've seen.

Even if you've never played around with microcontrollers this would be a beginner level project.

[1] https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/tree/master/libra...

[2] https://docs.arduino.cc/hardware/leonardo/
Hm, I thought other methods could be used to establish causation, such as longitudinal cohorts, RCTs, and (another randomization I'm forgetting), that wouldn't require infecting humans, but maybe I'm confusing these
This says to me these people are working on projects that are not challenging/interesting enough with people who don't respect their intellect. That's a solvable problem.

Anecdote... I function as a product manager, and I have a lot of fun with the developers I work with (and have a lot of respect for), and they enjoy working with me. I come to them with complex, interesting problems and my framework for potential solutions, and we talk through whether they think it's the right direction and, if so, what I've missed... or they propose alternatives. It's like a chess game where we can both win.

I hope the OP and anyone feeling this way tries working with other projects and people.