skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dark Side has such powerful allure, such temptation; they are strong emotions that leave such indelible marks.

And I feel like code culture is one place in need of some checks, on it's checking. There's so many wide-ranging beers out there, prejudices. Some have fought those battles & have real experience, speak from the heart. But I feel like over time the tribalisms that form, of passed down old biases, are usually more successful & better magnets when they are anti- a thing than pro a thing.

JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, rust. Systemd, PipeWire, Wayland. Kubernetes. OOP, CORBA, SOAP. These are examples topics are all magnets for very strong disdain, that in various circles are accepted as bad.

It's usually pretty easy to identify the darksiders. Theres almost never any principle of charity; they rarely see in greys, rarely even substantiate or enumerate their complaints at all. I've been struggling to find words, good words, for the disdain which doesn't justify itself, which accepts it's own premise, but the callous disregard & trampling over a topic is something I would like very much to be a faux pas. Say what you mean, clearly, with arguments. Manage your emotional reactions. Don't try to stir up antagonism. If you can, cultivate within yourself a sense of possibility & appreciation, even if only for what might be. Principles of Charity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

I'm forgetting what else to link, but around the aughts this anti- anti-social behavior has a bit of a boom. Two examples, https://marco.org/2008/05/21/jeff-atwood-who-knows-nothing-a... https://steveklabnik.com/writing/matz-is-nice-so-we-are-nice...

(And those on the pro side need to also have charity too.)

The idea of the Speaker For The Dead, someone who tries to paint clearly both upsides and downsides of a thing, is one I respect a lot & want to see. A thing I wish we saw more of.

(I feel like I have a decent ability to see up and down sides to a lot of the techs I listed. One I'd like better illumination on, a speaker for the dead on: CORBA.)
Plaintiffs' proposed remedy framework (to split Google) [pdf]
Haven't found any previous discussion, but it's certainly an interesting read.
Rtk already is 'relative' error- it requires one or more base stations (with either known absolute location or assumed one for relative positioning).

But survey grade gnss is a web of rabbit holes, if you want to get into it.

And there are ways to get sub mm accuracy both relative and absolute, but idk of one that would be quick enough for the required reaction time of dynamic landing via 'catching'.

But multi-centimeter (4-5) that's really easily doable is probably good enough for other systems to take over from.
Comparing a company’s market cap to the US GDP makes no sense to me. The former is the product of shares and stock price. The latter is total financial output of a country. What intuition is that supposed to provide?
> Coupling behaviors to types is not a problem. Class inheritance and multi-inheritance with their weird taxonomical trees are the problem.

I didn’t mention coupling behaviors to types. I said coupling behaviors to state is the problem. When I couple method a to state it’s a big problem. I want method banana but method banana lives in the jungle and has all the other methods related to jungle.

So all I wanted was a banana now I have a jungle. Why not think of the banana as modular from the jungle? Why even use oop?

I agree with you on the inheritance thing. Thats a different issue.
Mozilla is still the better company producing the better browser, in general, but as The Register says, it is now an ad company too.

And the uBO Lite flagging caused more developers to confirm the difficulty of the review process and the minimal value of publishing to the Firefox store. Phrases like "useless time sink expensive", "a real nightmare to work with" and "we just decided to give up" (from three different devs) stand out to me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710183
I’m concerned things like this will just be gone forever in the digital era. Paper and film are great storage mediums. I know this was on a screen but would it have still existed if it wasn’t on paper first?
An interesting example of someone who managed to produce two unrelated "sleeping beauties" in different fields is the German mathematician Grete Hermann. Her Ph.D. thesis in the 20s gave effective algorithms for many questions in abstract algebra. I think her motivation was philosophical, that an effective algorithm is better than an abstract existence result, but it wasn't considered that interesting of a question until computers were invented and computer algebra developed, and then immediately several of her algorithms became the state-of-the-art at the time.

Unrelatedly, she wrote on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and showed that a "theorem" of John von Neumann, which would have ruled out later research by Bohm and Bell if it were correct, was false three years after he published it. Bohm and Bell had to independently rediscover that the result was false years later.
Way back in the 1990s when you could write directly to screen memory in Windows I wrote an Excel macro that made an animated dog run all over the screen -useless but fun.
I think the interview itself is fine, their PR person messed up by sending that email and becoming the news story itself, which otherwise was a nothingburger, insert b-player-hire-c-player/founder-mode meme
You jest, but this actually happened during the era of alcohol prohibition: hard liquor went from around 40% of US alcohol sales to 75%. Bootleggers preferred liquor because the profit margin was higher and because it was easier to conceal. After prohibition ended, the proportion of hard liquor dropped, as people returned to wine and beer.

In current times, drinking rates among young people are dropping now that they have access to legal marijuana, which is a good thing from a public-health perspective.
For some reason his name is in the page's <head> but not in the article's title.
After a few years working in Haskell as a hobby, I came to the conclusion that complicated pattern matching is an antipattern.

I didn't think of it this way at the time, but my current belief is that complicated pattern matching is an extremely tight coupling to what is being matched, and that's not a good thing.

I'm not convinced super powerful pattern matching is even a good idea. I think a lot of the love people have for it is precisely their joy at being about to introduce tight coupling with such syntactical convenience. Syntax affording tight coupling is not a good thing.

(Simple pattern matching, especially on branches of a sum type, is fine and useful, especially when you are doing it precisely because the code will need to be changed if the sum type adds or subtracts other branches, and this need comes from something "real" and not merely false coupling. But the deeper in you go with the pattern match the more whatever it is you are reaching in for should be abstracted out into a function.)
Nice to know, thank you
Stripe acquires stablecoin startup Bridge
I grew up with an Apple II, then switched to Windows from 3.11 for Workgroups all the way up to Vista, at which point I switched to desktop Linux (variety of distros, but mostly ended up on Kubuntu in my house and Mint for family). Then it was 8 years of ChromeOS. The past couple of years I've been on MacBooks and, although there are quirks I don't really like, I can't argue with the fact that it mostly "just works", which is really the primary requirement of any operating system.
why bother learning to bike when you can walk? why bother learning to drive when you can bike? How's COBOL and Fortran doing these days?
It does here!
Do you know whether that capacity is regularly reinvestigated?
Because if not you could get the certification, wait a couple of years, and then dismantle all infrastructure while still reaping the, if ephemeral, benefits.
What Makes Good Historical Fiction?
Honestly, yikes. And it's not going to be better. Producing AI content is so cheap (and apparently so effective) SEOs are going to milk it forever.
I wouldn't want my kid browsing TikTok or anything with addictive recommendation system either, but I was mainly talking about explicitly taking effort to keep teenagers away from questionable content. But actually I'm not sure exactly how much policing the OP intended.

It seems to me like a way to get your kid to not tell you anything in fear of censorship.
My kids still have cursive in the curriculum (charter school but I believe the public schools in my district teach it too). Once my oldest hit 4th grade, all assignments had to be completed in cursive.
I don’t, but there are quite a few techniques aside from nasty insecticides:

Fish. Many species of fish think that mosquito larvae are delicious and will eat them. Some of these species will also thrive even in small bodies of water with little assistance.

Sterile insects. Male mosquitos don’t bite, and females only mate once, so releasing large numbers of sterile males will reduce the population.

Wolbachia. There are bacteria that live in mosquitoes, are quite effective at infecting the next generation, will not infect humans, and prevent malaria from living in the mosquito.

Bti. There’s a species of bacteria that produces a bunch of toxins that are very specific to mosquito larvae. I have no idea why it evolved to do this, but you can buy “mosquito dunks” and commercial preparations that will effectively kill mosquito larvae in water. They’re apparently entirely nontoxic to basically anything else. I expect that they’re too expensive for country-scale control, but they’re great for a backyard puddle.

You can kill mosquito pupae in water by spraying with an oil that makes a surface film for a few days. The pupae suffocate.
Never pay for future promises. Looking at Tesla, the games industry, RougeDB.

Every single time it ends in failure and disaster.
so how do we play the OvO unblocked game online
Proposed Addendum to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development
There aren't enough smart people in biology doing something boring
I think they were simply speaking of the final pads the rocket rests on top of the chopsticks have 5cm of error either direction.

But judging from the bouncing the rocket did when in the chopsticks the error for positioning into the initial catch position is much larger in all directions. The chopsticks coming closed around the rocket do the heavy lifting for final alignment to that 5cm I imagine.
I have 0 pixels in between. There is 1 pixel on top, yes - but it's not exclusive to the snapping feature. I can't move or resize a window in a way that covers that pixel, no matter what I do.
this difference is that none of that was mainstream, less than one percent of my high school ever read 4chan or even knew what it was. almost literally every kid today has a smart phone, the vast majority of them are on youtube, and an absolute ton of them are on tiktok.

when older millennials were young, it was mostly television, movies, maybe some radio, and maybe some CDs/tapes. and as the previous person said, this was all extremely moderated and you didn't have unlimited access to most anything
A blogging platform?
Yes. Metabolism is rate limited by countless chemical reactions. Energy sources need to be broken down and moved around the body. Waste products need to be removed. Mitochondria only work at a certain rate. You can increase the number of mitochondria but that hits a practical ceiling as well.

You can start with the Wikipedia article for Metabolism or search for "metabolic scope" and "metabolic efficiency".
The content that his group puts out on YouTube is great. Been a little while since I caught up, but I was extremely impressed.
Homelessness is not happening. If you have the skills to even attempt a startup, you can for sure get a job.
> Fil-C has a concurrent GC. It doesn’t stop your program, ever.

what about performance/throughput compared to when you allocate stuff on stack?
"site:" namespace still works on Google... for now.
I'd be very interested in the systems advertising that! I have not seen that even for stationary surveying equipment. I think it's also important to distinguish between RMS error which is often the better topline spec that companies give you, vs the 95% confidence error which is the more relevant one for flight reliability.
I’ve never heard of any of those.
Writing a Rust clone was one of the first projects I did when trying to learn Rust ~4-5 years ago. On top of that I opted for an async version with a database-per-core design.

Throughout the whole project I never once ran into lifetimes, and I gave up once I had to think about cross thread transactions, which had nothing to do with Rust the language.
One of the math teachers I hated most nevertheless had a very good homework policy: homework is optional, it's entirely for you to learn the material and pass the exams. I did it freestyle, no formatting, just doing the math.(I hated him because he made us memorize mathematical proofs verbatim for a third of our exam scores. A study in contrast, shall we say.)
This book is an amazing read!
Formerly futurecrunch. It’s my only paid newsletter. I love it.
> I would rather go to the university physically, than install spyware on my computer

Well yes, in-person proctored is the gold standard. For those who can’t or won’t go in person, something invasive is really the only alternative to entirely exam-based scoring.
The thing is I know of Kurtzweil from the time he worked on synthesizers. His AI stuff and singularity stuff always felt like gimmicks to me even back then.
Have you ever heard of "weed-out courses" ?

Admittedly, they are about teaching things. For example, teaching Laplace transforms to mechanical engineers. It certainly isn't true to say the "courses are not about teaching anything".

But if 20% of the class should decide to change majors to business? Well, there's been some filtering out of students too.
> On-location tests/leet code are a crapshoot

They aren't 'fair' in avoiding every false negative, but they at least tell me that the passing candidates know and can do something.

If I ask someone who claims to know Python or Java whether or not you can have a memory leak in them, and their answer is 'no' or 'Maybe, but I don't know how', I get a pretty good idea of whether or not they know anything about this topic.

If you can't do fizzbuzz, you probably aren't a good fit for a SWE position either, you should be aiming for something more director-level. Given how much people struggle with coding, I sometimes feel like I may as well ditch my regular question, and just ask them to write that.
Transparent AI Development
I think we're largely in agreement then, actually. I'm seeing "world models" as a spectrum. World models aren't even consistent among adult humans. I claim LLMs are moving up that ladder, and whether or not they've crosses a threshold into "real" world models I do not actually claim to know. Of course I also agree that it's very possible, maybe even likely, that LLMs aren't able to cross that threshold.

> this claim ... is hard to evaluate without a well-formed definition of what it means to have a world model

Absolutely yes, but that only makes it more imperative that we're analyzing things critically, rigorously, and honestly. Again you and I may be on the same side here. Mainly my point was that asserting the intrinsic non-intelligence of LLMs is a very bad take, as it's not supported by evidence and, if anything, it contradicts some (admittedly very difficult to parse) evidence we do have that LLMs might be able to develop a general capability for constructing mental models of the world.
It’s spectacularly failing at his goal of under 3 hours. It’s not an objective, absolute measure. It’s a subjective, relative one. I’m guessing he’d consider finishing with a time of 3:15 a spectacular failure.
Who uses previous titles to determine capability or compensation? Just look at their job history, call references, and make good hiring decisions. Perhaps the issue is that people are bad at hiring?
I think Tesla and SpaceX are successful despite his involvement. It seems the competent folks at Tesla / SpaceX know how to manage him.

He's a good marketer and created a cult of personality.

If he's so great at building businesses then just look at Twitter where there was no one who managed him.
This is fun. The UI and concept are well-executed.

I wish it did farnsworth timing, though. The idea is that the individualy characters play at full 30 words per minute speed, but the characters are spaced to be at your target listening rate.

You want to hear each letter as a distinct sound rather than hearing individual dits and dahs. The added time between each character with farnsworth timing gives your audio/memory system time to make the connection rather than slowing the whole character down so you have to remember that dit-dit-dah is U.

I can typically hear at about 30 wpm with farnsworth timing. It is, for me, much harder to hear when slowed down to 10 wpm with the dits and dahs slowed way down.

It has taken a few months of practice. I'm still too nervous to use it on the ham bands aside from scheduled chats with friendly operators. My favorite way to learn has been guided courses with experienced CW (morse code) operators from cwops.
I don’t analyze the papers, I analyze the policies.

Take the climate. Assuming the science is correct (storms worse, oceans rising, etc), let’s do a cost benefit analysis of the proposed policies.

The proposed policies in the US all dramatically increase the cost of energy (and therefore of everything), but only slightly slow the progression of warming, AND the bigger contributing countries in the developing world, esp China and India, will continue or increase their CO2 output.

We already know how to build dikes, and people who buy oceanfront property already know the risks, and over the last century we as a species have gotten really good as reducing deaths due to weather, so I don’t support the draconian carbon reduction proposals, and instead we can just deal with the side effects as they arise.
Ironically, the fact that LSP is complicated and to a first approximation nobody understands it is a major part of my point.

(Or, if you prefer, LSP itself isn't that complicated conceptually, but if you try to manifest it in reality it turns out to be very complicated in practice. Code makes a lot more guarantees than we think it does. See also https://hyrumslaw.com/ , which a very different view on the same phenomenon.)
In most of the industrialized world you can't pay taxes if you're not there legally. And there is no need to be a permanent resident for single payer healthcare in most countries, just to be there working legally for some time.

I wrote "taxpaying foreigner" as opposed to "permanent resident" because most industrialized countries do indeed offer their healthcare to non-permanent residents on work visas. For example in Ontario after 90 days you have access to single payer healthcare. In France you get it after 3 months, in Spain after 2-6 months depending on the locality, etc...
> 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. But any teacher doing this will end up with no students signing up for their class.

When I was in college, this was every math class. You could cheat all you want on the 20% of your grade that came from homework, but the remaining 80% was from 3-4 in-class, proctored exams.
So what's to prevent a student from using the ChatGPT non-homework mode to do homework?
I guess I’m not alone thinking about UV ballooning my living phytoplankton meal to six times the size for a voluminous meal.
Yeah, but OP was talking about vetting and policing content. I fully agree that addictive algorithms are bad though.
>you're close enough to get positioning down to centimeters on consumer grade hardware

But in realtime? (single-digit second latency, at least)
I think a lot of it has to do with how little software -- even enterprise software -- is actually written from the ground up. Reliance on both external libraries and modules owned by unrelated internal teams has made a lot of both the programming and debugging almost black box, where effective testing isn't really tractable.
Does your startup do as much nothing as you?
> As a student, the only thing the next institution will see is GPA, school, major. Roughly in that order.

And every non-educational institution after that will see school, degree as a checkbox.
^^^ Exactly this for me as well. ^^^

It's all those little convenience features that make KDE Connect a great tool for my needs. It's only the file transfer features of it that don't live up to my needs, but for that we've got SyncThing (and probably tons of other perfectly valid options that I've never tried, too). For continuous file sync / transfer, SyncThing has been just "set it and forget it" simple for me. It just "does the thing" and keeps on doin' it reliably. :)
> would massively simplify iteration

I seriously doubt it.

It’s far easier and more effective (and economical) to have a bunch of jelly bean components around in stock.

You’re going to have a hard time 3D printing anything that can be solderable (either the 3D printer needs to work at high temperatures for DIY, or you need exotic solder that melts at low temperatures).

If you have the need to fabricate quick PCBs for prototyping, you’ll be better served by a cheap CNC machine and some copper foil blanks.

The only real promise I see is that you might, in the very long future, be able to print custom multi-purpose devices, that integrate the characteristics of non critical electronics with mechanical elements, i.e. integrating NTCs on cases or fan supports,..
A number of institutions promote both stances.
It really depends on what you are doing and what tech you are using. I use it to teach me or build out ideas quickly or solve for complex issues. Mostly these days I use it as a memory aid or to bounce ideas off it. In my job I have to move quickly and stay focused as I'm driving improvements to a tech stack that reaches across four verticals, each having their own quirks and tech stacks. It's great for jogging my memory and helping to flush out ideas and approaches that I then bounce off the dev teams. Super helpful.
I use a calibre add-in https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=259221

It sort of works ie some stories just work others just get the first page.
Yeah, the hand they taught us (in the early '90s) was some common one that I gather most places have taught in the US for decades. It never made any sense to me. Ugly, hard to read, and not even notably faster to write, even if you got good at it.

Later I found out it was developed for use with a fountain pen, designed with the idea that a correctly-faced nib would make some strokes bolder and others very faint, and to keep the nib always moving in a kind of flow to avoid spots, and to make it natural to keep the nib faced the correct way(s), plus with even more attention to avoiding raising the pen than most cursives, for similar reasons of avoiding spotting. That made all the downsides make sense—it's far less ugly and easier to read when written with a fountain pen, and may well be faster than many other similarly-clean methods of writing with one.

Why the hell we were still learning that hand decades into the dominance of the ballpoint, remains a question.
I suppose, but the 3D printer requires consumable inputs. So without active shipping that printer is going to have a very limited lifetime. There’s always a corner case, like having to 3D print on Mars or something, but thats a niche of a niche.