skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. But people now teaching at higher education institutions need their classes to fill. That means we need to treat our students as if they are our customers. We must please the customer. In years past the attitude was that society at large was our client. Today the student is our client.
I'm less an OOP fan and more an extreme late-binding fan. It is a really nice lever to use when you need it. You don't necessarily need a language built for it if you have sufficient infrastructure in place (such as dependency injection).

That said, FP is a great default for most code, and I try not to write any new code in languages that don't support algebraic data types. You can express things much more precisely with them.

Languages that let you use both styles (Kotlin/Swift) are probably my favorite, despite using Haskell in production at work. Haskell punishes needing to use mutability too harshly IMO.
How in the world did they come up with the obfuscated code for this? Surely they must be using a tool?
Good point. :) I definitely overanalyze to the point where I program a lot less extracurricular stuff. I admire people with the ability to just do it.
> It looks like Wayno really understood the problem.

All they needed was one systems safety engineering student
A hammer to insert a screw into the wall could be a shrewd way to bore a hole with a bigger gauge if you're missing a drill.
I am surprised we don't see more "Dr. Doolittle" projects like this. I assumed rats or corvids would be good candidates for animal language translation projects since you can keep them in a confined space and record video of them. I am sure that body language plays a huge role in animal communication.

I recently read a paper[0] that claimed to have decoded the basic building blocks of Sperm whale language. I went and took a look at the github for the project CETI and found that most of the code was for the whale trackers and hydrophones. It seems like there are a lot of pre-requisite problems that you have to solve to even get good whale recordings.

On the other hand though, whales probably don't rely on body language since they are communicating way out of line of sight. So it may be easier in that regard.

Anyways, I am convinced that we will figure out how to teach some basic human concepts (like self) to animals and the intelligence of even "stupid" animals like chickens will make people more reluctant to eat meat.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8#:~:text=S....
Overcast lost me after months of waiting for its disastrous redesign to be fixed. Castro is, in my opinion, the best replacement for feature equivalence.

However, I actually chose standard Apple Podcasts. The transcriptions are a game changer.
Earlier Hacker News discussion, after the announcement that a (then secret) number was a probable prime, yet to be verified prime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858024
you're missing one big detail. Humans are liable, AI isn't. And AI providers do all they can to deny liability. The businesses using AI sure aren't doing better either.

If you're not confident enough in your tech to be held liable, we're going to have issues. We figured out (sort of) human liability eons ago. So it doesn't matter if it's less safe. It matters that we can make sure to prune out and punish unsafe things. Like firing or jailing a human.
Headless CMS Built for Startups
We’re founders of OneCal and, during the past two years, have written over 400 articles for our blog (check our blog: https://www.onecal.io/blog).

We noticed that the CMS we used could have been better for writing articles for a startup like ours, as the editor was far from ideal. I’d always write the articles in Notion, then copy them to the CMS and continue adding the assets and the final touches there.

Besides that, I felt that the editor should do more to help me optimize for SEO, as oftentimes, I’d forget to compress an Image or write a description that was far too long for SEO purposes.

Another pain point was the price. For a small startup like ours, paying upwards of $500 monthly was a lot. We were trying to experiment with multi-language content, but most CMS caps at 3 locales. You have to jump to the more expensive tiers (up to $1000 per month) to add more locales.

Considering our experience, we thought that we could do better, and here we are, introducing VaporCMS.

Main Features:

- Multi-Locale Support By Default: Adding a locale for your blog articles is as easy as clicking a button. You can localize your content, authors, assets, and more.

- Editor with Built-in Commands: Our editor supports commands and keyboard shortcuts out of the box. You can type ‘/’ to quickly add blocks like headings, images, tables, etc.

- SEO Recommendations and Warnings: Our editor will warn you when you upload an image that’s too large, doesn’t have an Alt attribute, or enters a title that’s too long.

- Automatic Table Of Contents Generation: When you fetch the articles via our API, we also generate the article Table Of Contents out of the box. You can then render the Table Of Contents, improving the user experience and boosting your page in Google.

- Affordable Pricing: We’re in private beta right now, so we don’t have official pricing yet, but one thing is for sure: We’ll be the most affordable Headless CMS in the market, friendly to small startups and businesses that want to get started with their SEO journey and experiment with multiple languages.
That's right. And if users want push notifications or search and you say "that's not possible, because every podcast is an RSS feed"... You have not explained anything, you have not satisfied them with an explanation, and you are ultimately wrong about it being impossible.

It's an implementation detail not a feature, and if it started getting in the way of what users need podcasts to do, we would change it not hide behind it. Just like there's no reason for one account per domain other than "that's what we went with for now".
> On a positive note, you're alive at what will likely be one of the greatest inflection points in human history! How lucky is that?!

That remains to be seen. Not all inflection points are good things. If we're at a major inflection point with generative AI (and I doubt that we are), it's possible that will end up being a bad thing, not a good one.

I'm not saying that this tech will end up being good or bad on the whole, I'm saying that it's far too soon to be able to predict that.

I do agree, though, that it's not the technology itself that presents risk, it's people developing and using it that could go very very wrong.
Can you beat the Blunderwall? You have 4 attempts
"quite obvious but are hard to prove" ... "people love to poke holes in obvious truths, especially in well educated spaces like HN"

yes they're bad. It's not confusing, you're just overthinking it.
Duplicate of

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41902873

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41902808
Ancient equivalent of clickbait?
Don't bother telling me you're rewriting something for performance if you haven't profiled the existing solution and optimized based on that.
It’s not even that “cushy” anymore. There’s still (at Google) free lunch, but the truly critical (and expensive) stuff such as medical insurance has been enshittified considerably to the point where exchange-bought insurance I had as a business owner was better. They do pay well though, that’s true. Ironically they could probably pay less if they weren’t so dead inside.
I tried that one and it seems fixed. I know the new owner tackled longstanding, annoying little bugs right after buying it.

I almost left when the server outages happened, but the quality seems to have ticked up after hitting a low with Tiny.
I'm definitely handwaving away the difficulty, but I did explicitly speak to these concerns.

We really can skip the need for fuel, for example. Sails (with or without lasers) are a technology we have proven in the field. Lasers do lose collimation over distance, but you can reach relativistic speeds before then (I'd argue that .02c from 1wk of 1G is relativistic). That won't get you to the center of the galaxy (or solve the deceleration issue), but there are proposals being reviewed today to use lasers to send probes for a flyby of Proxima Centauri.

https://www.nasa.gov/general/swarming-proxima-centauri/

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

But we don't need science fiction tech for this to work, we just need impractical amounts of fuel. Starship only has enough fuel to last 10m? Just send 50k starships and you can burn for a year. Tyranny of the rocket equation requires additional fuel to push all that fuel? Just send another billion Starships or whatever. Going too fast and now the interstellar medium hits like high-energy cosmic rays? Just send more shielding and fuel. This assumes we can build and fuel billions of Starships, which is certainly infeasible, but I'm calling this an economics issue as we have these technologies today.

If we want to get really sci-fi, I'd point you towards stellar engines. The thought process here is that the Earth already provides radiation shielding, and the Sun already burns fuel to provide massive amounts of energy, so we might as well just make use of what we got! Add mirrors to concentrate the Sun's light in one direction, and our entire solar system becomes an interstellar spaceship. It might take millions or even billions of years, but the Sun has enough fuel to accelerate the whole system to about .27c.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
I wish they used AI. It'd feel less artificial than the scripts investors give them to keep the boom booming.

It's a gold rush and they are inspectors. They have an incentive to keep the rush flowing.
State of Learning to Code 2024 Report
Taking an AxROM to Wizards and Warriors
Passed 'as' A, not passed 'to' A.
The grip these tax companies have on the market is insane and needs to be put in check 20 years ago. The lobbying these companies do to keep their only business model alive is outrageous, the tax system right now is unbelievably broken and it's the fault of these tax companies, and the behavior that they allegedly committed that's discussed in this article should put them out of business.
Actually deliberately introducing confidently delivered and reasonable sounding bullshit sounds like a fantastic way to suss out who knows their topic.
Love as Mutual Education (2019)
And you get no privacy if /64 prefix is a stable identifier of one customer.
It's not _great_, but it's not the end of your career, either. Try to start establishing longer tenures going forward. You're going to be doing this for decades, so build your resume now while you can. I job-hopped four times in four years toward the beginning of my career (late 90's), and although I've been at every job since for much longer, I've had recruiters ask for good explanations for it even as recently as my last job search in 2017.
I looked it up out of curiosity. In Buzan's "The Mind Map Book" (and other books by him), he suggests mind maps can significantly enhance learning, memory, and creative thinking, and that labeling lines/branches:

• Creates meaningful connections between concepts

• Allows more fluid and associative thinking

• Allow for greater creativity and recall compared to spider diagrams

He suggests using curved lines, colors and images, and to develop your own personal style of mind mapping
> The desire for stronger duck typing is confusing to me, but to each their own

I really like duck typing when I'm working on small programs - under 10,000 lines of code. Don't make me worry about stupid details like that, you know what I mean so just do the $%^#@ thing I want and get out of my way.

When I work with large programs (more than 50k lines of code - I work with some programs with more than 10 million lines and I know of several other projects that are much larger - and there is reason to believe many other large programs exist where those who work on them are not allowed to talk about them) I'm glad for the discipline that strong typing forces on me. You quickly reach a point in code where types save you from far more problems than their annoyance costs.
Got it, I'd missed that. Thank you
You're completely correct. Learning how to write taught me how to think, and researching and writing essays taught me what I believe about nearly everything on which I have strong opinions.

However, +90% of students will not now do any of that work. I got out of teaching (coincidentally) before LLMs appeared, and even then +80% of students did not experience that benefit of the essay process even with a grade (and plagiarism consequences) to motivate them. Now that decent-ish prose is a few keystrokes or Siri-led "chats" away, that's what they're going to do. That's what they're going to do.

I know of - I think it's up to four, now - former colleagues taking early retirement, or changing careers, rather than continue teaching Humanities in a world of LLMs.
> The middle road is simply a better engineering option, use a practical language that supports both paradigms.

Agreed - I would get more specific with this too. Which arrangement makes more sense:

1. A solution that has an OOP outer shell hosting an FP inner core

2. A solution that has an FP outer shell hosting an OOP inner core

I argue that 1 makes way more sense - I look at the OOP/procedural code as the foundation layer upon which the FP code can be executed. This firewalls the messy outside world from the pure maths. For me this would be entry points like BusinessLogic.ExecuteRules() after having externally prepared all of the data contexts for execution. The results of this are then processed again by the external OOP code for downstream handling (writing to database, responding to web client, etc).

The other way around feels nonsensical to me.
Same here, and the more "the science" is used as a cudgel, the more people will resent it, whether or not they know a lot of it isn't even replicable.
> You can distribute less popular websites with more used ones to avoid losing it?

So long as this distributed protocol has the concept of individual files, there _will_ be clients out there that allow the user to select `popular-site.archive.tar.gz` and not `less-popular.tar.gz` for download.

And what one person doesn't download... they can't seed back.
Distributed stuff is really good for low cost, high scale distribution of in-demand content. It's _terrible_ for long term reliability/availability, though.
https://www.digitspace.com/lora-433mhz-esp32-oled-0-96inch-b...
I've told this story before here but it's relevant.

A few years ago, I filed my taxes and forgot to report some stock sales and therefore some short-term capital gains tax. More than a year after I filed, the IRS sent me a bill for about $8000, $7000 for the unreported capital gains, and a $1000 fine. I wasn't really upset about having to pay the $7000; if I owe the money then I owe the money, fair enough, it was my dumb fault, and I wasn't even that upset about the fine, because again it was my dumb fault.

What annoyed me is that if the IRS knows I owe the money better than I do, then why am I involved with this at all? I don't have enough money for the IRS to put a team together or anything elaborate like that, so it was almost certainly an automated program that determined I underpaid. Why not instead just send me a refund and/or bill at the end of the year and have me pay it, instead of having me write down the numbers that they already have, and then they can check to make sure I wrote those numbers down correctly by verifying it against their records.

I understand having the option to use complicated tax software for cases where the taxes are complicated, but my taxes really aren't; I have a typical W2 job, a typical mortgage, and very occasionally selling stock, I think in my case the "default" would be fine.
Looosely speaking.
Be careful with this default position.

If we start from first principles:
- Any one individual is not trained or experienced in the vast majority of scientific disciplines, regardless of his/her expertise in any one field
- Even if half the studies published have flaws (where did you get that stat? was that study flawed?), their body of references is filtered by decades of replication and paper ranking of importance
- The people doing the studies have decades of study in the particular field they're publishing about

Concluding from first principles: Its more likely that a random individual's opinion about a random niche of scientific study will be wrong than that of an individual trained on that niche

And then also starting from "received wisdom": Joe Schmuck on the street doesn't know more than scientists about their thing
> The only solution is to require face-to-face proctored exams and not allow students to use technology of any kind while taking the test.

In Germany, all exams are like this. Homework assignments are either just a prerequisite for taking exam but the grade is solely from the exam, or you may get some small point bonus for assignments/projects.

> But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class.

The main courses are mandatory in order to obtain the degree. You can't "not sign up" for linear algebra if it's in your curriculum. Fail 3 times and you're exmatriculated.

This is because universities are paid from tax money in Germany and most of Europe.

The US will continue down on the path you describe because it's in the interest of colleges to keep well-paying students around. It's a service. You buy a degree, you are a customer.
Good comment. From Apple's point of view, AI could be a disruptive innovation: they've spent billions making extremely user-friendly interfaces, but that could become irrelevant if I can just ask my device questions.

But I think there will be a long period when people want both the traditional UI with buttons and sliders, and the AI that can do what you ask. (Analogy with phone keyboards where you can either speech-to-text, or slide to type, or type individual letters, or mix all three.)
It says "values of type B", as in "instance of type B", can be passed as if they are "instance of type A" (which they are actually).

But yes, values inside B specific to type B will not be able to be accessed when manipulating the type A.
When talking about tooling: around five years ago, I introduced parallelism to a Node.js-based build system, in a section that was embarrassingly parallel. It was really painful to implement, made it noticeably harder to maintain, and my vague memory is that on an 4-core/8-thread machine I only got something like a 3–4× speedup. I think workers are mature enough now that it wouldn’t be quite so bad, but it would still be fairly painful.

In Rust, I’d have added Rayon as a dependency to my Cargo.toml, inserted `use rayon::prelude::;` (or a more specific import, if I preferred) into my file, changed one `.iter()` to `.par_iter()`, and voilà, it’d have compiled (all the types would have satisfied Send) and given probably at least a 6–7× speedup.

Seriously, when you get to talking about a lot of performance tricks and such (I’m thinking things like the bit maps referred to at the end), even when they’re possible* in JavaScript, they’re frequently—I suspect even normally—way easier to implement in Rust.
I think its important to be aware of functional style and the weaknesses of OOP, so you can write OOP code that avoids the worst pitfalls. Classes still remain a nice way to organize code, but you should try to make them immutable if you can.
If AI could generate better documentation for my domain tools, I'd take back maybe 75% of my criticisms for it.

But alas, this rush means they want to pitch to replace people like me, not actually make me more productive.
> the new get-rich-quick scheme for "creators"

I wonder if the person executing the scheme would still be referred to as a "creator" in this case: they're creating a creator, and it's not so useful to have the same label for multiple layers (factory factories all the way down?). I could see possibly "engineer" (taken from "prompt engineer") or other technical terms being used instead of art terms.
Incorrect.

The protocols for downloading from example.com are assymettrical client server architectures, not symmetrical decentralized peer to peer.
Nobody claimed browsers were changing drastically, they're talking about front end frameworks.

There are a lot of green screen terminal apps that still work today, and haven't been touched in more than 5 years. As long as you leave the same code on the same machine once it's working, and keep the moths off the vacuum tubes and the power flow steady, there shouldn't be a problem.

But try to change that CP/M parts terminal so it can interface with your new EPR and see how well it "just works".
Haven't read the book. I feel like this is effectively "Rust: The Hard Parts" as a topic. Mostly in that from my admittedly limited understanding of rust, lifetimes and shared memory, Redis in rust semantics is almost an anti pattern.

I intend to look into this book as I find the topic interesting. But do feel that it's tackling some of the more cumbersome areas of rust. I'm also curious if there will be an effort to be binary file compatible.

With the Redis licensing kerfuffle and since fork of valkey I wonder about some of the other redis alike databases there are and will be. I think that rust is just a hard fit for this use case. But who knows.
HN and the tech community as a whole need to realize that education will actually still be one of the most hands-on jobs well into the future.

Students already have the entire internet at their disposal, the wealth of all human knowledge right in their hands, it's been over an entire internet generation at this point. I'd go as far as to argue many courses on YouTube are much higher quality than what they recieve in a classroom. Are students learning more than ever?

No, they are not, in fact many argue it's worse than ever, English comprehension and writing have regressed significantly.

Students often need support from their teachers, teachers often are more present than their parents. It simply isn't the case that most people will be a self-taught learner with an AI.

I do agree educators should pivot to more hands on, non-writing lessons such as debates, instead of written papers, but we're not going to improve writing skills without having written papers..
The Embedded Muse – final issue
> After 500 issues and 27 years it's time to wrap up the Embedded Muse. It's said there's some wisdom in knowing when it is time to move on, and for me that time is now. I mostly retired a year or two ago, and will now change that "mostly" to "completely". To misquote Douglas MacArthur, who gave his farewell address to Congress at the same age I am now, like an old soldier, it's time for me to pack up my oscilloscope and fade away.
React alone is just a bad template library.
https://archive.is/2024.10.21-044852/https://www.nytimes.com...
> For an English writing assignment, that's cheating

It's still not cheating. English assignments aren't about the practice of writing English, you stop doing that in primary school. It's analysis of English texts in which people have been using spelling and grammar checkers since their inception. It's not even cheating to have someone proofread and edit your paper, it's usually encouraged, and Grammarly is just a worse-than-human editor.
Running a blank .js file in node took 66 milliseconds. An optimized binary I wrote in rust takes 2 milliseconds to execute. So, I think there's a cap there on how fast JavaScript tools can be