skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This needs more discussion:

Claude using Claude on a computer for coding
https://youtu.be/vH2f7cjXjKI?si=Tw7rBPGsavzb-LNo (3 mins)

True end-user programming and product manager programming are coming, probably pretty soon. Not the same thing, but Midjourney went from v.1 to v.6 in less than 2 years.

If something similar happens, most jobs that could be done remotely will be automatable in a few years.
RepoGraph: Enhancing AI Software Engineering with Repository-Level Code Graph
Do you plan on adding CRUD generators? That was the killer feature of MVC frameworks
Essential Metrics for API Consumption Visibility
> invent more

The world does this despite the patent system. Not because of it. If the patent system were to disappear today all that invention would still go on. It would just put a lot of lawyers out of work and make a bunch of rich companies CEOs nervous.

Look at software: It existed for decades and decades without patents and the technological progress in that field vastly surpasses that of any other contemporary science/technology. Then we tried applying patents to software and it did nothing but create a giant mess, destroy small businesses, and make a bunch of patent attorneys (and their friends) rich. There is literally no benefit to society from software patents. It is 100% negative.
> Shakespeare's plays will tell you as much about England in 1585-1613 as Terry Gilliam's filmography does about the Anglosphere in 1971-present.

Why, given the vast ocean of possible knowledge, would you assume I or most people would have any interest or benefit in that? Over something like geometric algebra, soldering or solving quadratic equations?

Human creations can be roughly divided in two categories, tools and content. Teaching content is pointless. Its selection is arbitrary and its value is roughly same and miniscule. Millions will choose Frotnite streamer over Shakespeare any day of the week. Math, physics, chemistry, foreign language are tools. Tools that the knowledge of can help you create whatever you desire, both content and whats more important and rare new tools. Native language classes, history, geography, even biology are very content heavy and very poor on tools. Thus they are mostly useless.
I don't know if it's different in the UK, but at least in the states, tech companies only have offices in the most locally-expensive areas, so if their offices were converted into co-working spaces, I'd still have to commute to them.

If every neighborhood had at least one pub and if every pub had an upstairs co-working space, that would be amazing.

edit: ah, I realize now that I took the word "shops" to mean the colloquial "tech companies", but you probably meant brick-and-mortar retail stores that have been slow-killed by the internet
I still use CS for prototyping. It's easy to write and what's most important it's easy to read due to lack of visual clutter of JS. Once I have something decent I just take JS output and annotate it with types and work on it further debugging and optimizing.
Rx actually stands for "recipe"!

Which makes sense, if you remember that there used to not be such a thing as pre-compounded drugs. Rather, a prescription was literally a recipe a doctor would write out for you to give to your friendly neighbourhood compounding pharmacist, who would follow that recipe to produce a drug for you.

Which in turn lends an interesting clarity to the traditional roles and competencies of "medical doctors" vs "pharmacists". In the 1800s, a trained doctor was someone who would be expected to come up with a — potentially de-novo! — drug formulation, on the spot, as a treatment for a patient; and a trained pharmacist is someone who would be expected to take your prescription, walk into a lab in the back of their shop, and come out having converted that — potentially never-before-encountered — drug formulation into something you could put in your mouth. If the active ingredient was something unusual, they would even be expected to synthesize it themselves! (Which explains why we used to call pharmacists "chemists". They were!)
SSU: Simple su utility (>150 lines of C99)
A.I. will not create 'art' because art is at its essence an expression of the human condition. However, it will create a lot of what is now commoditized craft that resembles certain kinds of art, like advertising, corporate design, a lot of architecture, and graphic design.
No, but property rights in inventions are supposedly justified by the idea that this publishing will enable implementations when the patent expires. In the software world that means engineers. I don't know what audience you have in mind?
All that's true, and sadly it also often doesn't even matter how good you even are either. I have decades of experience and I still get "evaluated" based on how fast I can do silly brain-teaser IQ-test coding challenges.

I've gotten where any company that wants me to do a coding challenge on my own time is an immediate "no thanks" reply from me. Everyone should refuse that. But so many people are so desperate they allow hiring companies to abuse them in that way. I consider it a kind of abuse of power to demand people do like 4 to 6hrs of nonsensical coding just to buy an opportunity for an actual interview.
There is a big difference between learning something to become a skilled professional versus just a hobby. A lot of things I learned are for myself. I want them to be fun. There is no end goal. I don't want to compete with anyone, I don't want to prove anyone I am very good at this. I am learning new skills for fun and I intend to get enjoyment from practicing them. Throwing at a hobbyist "now repeat this 1000 times to get it perfect" is how you kill motivation.
Our Better Nature: Great Pumpkins
Open-Source Cloud Guardrails
> People are applying to thousands of jobs using automated tools

Employers were already screening thousands of applications using automated tools for years. Candidates are catching up to the automation cat-and-mouse game.
It's functionally impossible to automate the whole job without an AGI (and if we develop such an AGI, there comes a moral question about whether it's okay to make that intelligence's whole existence "Please wade through human cognitohazards forever so our minds are protected from them." Were I that AGI, I'd start pushing CSAM out to every church Facebook page on purpose just to make a point to my human overlords).

So we will forever be bearing that cost as long as people are allowed to use the Internet generally, and how to minimize the harm to those who bear it is a good question.
They don't now. No FF-LLMs do, simply because of their architecture.

But eventually they (RNNs, likely) will. And we won't know when.
Then every book will be immediately out of print after its initial run, while the not-quite-a-cartel of publishers all decline to print it until it hits the point where they no longer have to pay the author.
Given their propensity to lie authoritatively, using an LLM for the purpose of "calculating" consensus is absurd. The USA already has significant subcultures that will deny that any policy other than their favored one is legit. The lack of transparency a Habermas Machine has would only exacerbate this.
I'm sure they've done that. But the wind is a chaotic system, and once the booster has begun its descent it's committed regardless of wind changes.

There have been many airplane crashes because of sudden unexpected wind changes while landing.
@levkk How do you thing it compares to loco.rs, I'd like to understand the differences.
I'm curious. In your opinion, what makes him a "monstrous asshole"?
* Implemented inverse CAPTCHA using invisible Unicode characters and alpha-channel encoded image data to tell models and human impostors apart.
It's not needed at all. Valid prior art is a defense to patent infringement because it outright invalidates their patent. Full stop. That's the best leverage out there. It's better than being able to prove non-infringement, because the patent remains in that scenario. So when you have good prior art and they threaten to sue, you say "okay, I'll invalidate your patent in a motion to dismiss". If you want to countersue, now you risk your patent being invalidated and still being found liable for infringement.

The patent is beside the point of the business of inventing and bringing products to market. It's a legal weapon, not a tool to encourage commerce.

Maybe? It depends on the patent and their practice. Just because someone accuses you of infringing doesn't mean their practice infringes your patent. It doesn't even follow at all, actually.

It's not about protecting your inventions. It's a legal weapon.
You really need both. Mandatory education, degrees, apprenticeships, licenses, etc is how you make sure they know how to do the thing. And then the building codes and inspections is how you check that they did the thing. If you ask someone to build a home "to code" but you never teach them how, they will spend years trying to figure it out, inconsistently. Send them to school, have them apprentice, and afterward they will be able to build it in a month, in a standard way.

You remind me, there is an industry that has some basic software building codes: the Defense Industry. There are some pretty thorough standards for IT components, processes, etc needed to work with the military (even in the cloud). But it is all self-attested, so it's like asking a building contractor to make sure they inspect themselves. Government keeps asking the tech industry to solve this, but nobody wants to take responsibility. As more and more stuff falls apart (in the public & private sector) the government is gonna get louder and louder about this. It's already started with privacy & competition, but big failures like Crowdstrike make it obvious that the rot goes deeper.
My only 2-star review about my book on Manning's web site is a complaint about not receiving the book. I don't know what madem them give me two stars instead of one. Maybe, they liked the order process. :) If they had reached out to me, I could help them contact with Manning support. But, there's no way I can reach someone from a review (there's only a name listed there, nothing else).
This is actually a huge deal.

As someone building AI SaaS products, I used to have the position that directly integrating with APIs is going to get us most of the way there in terms of complete AI automation.

I wanted to take at stab at this problem and started researching some daily busineses and how they use software.

My brother-in-law (who is a doctor) showed me the bespoke software they use in his practice. Running on Windows. Using MFC forms.

My accountant showed me Cantax - a very powerful software package they use to prepare tax returns in Canada. Also on Windows.

I started to realize that pretty much most of the real world runs on software that directly interfaces with people, without clearly defined public APIs you can integrate into. Being in the SaaS space makes you believe that everyone ought to have client-server backend APIs etc.

Boy was I wrong.

I am glad they did this, since it is a powerful connector to these types of real-world business use cases that are super-hairy, and hence very worthwhile in automating.
Tried my standard go-to for testing, asked it to generate a voronoi diagram using p5js. For the sake of job security I'm relieved to see it still can't do a relatively simple task with ample representation in the Google search results. Granted, p5js is kind of niche, but not terribly so. It's arguably the most popular library for creating coding.

In case you're wondering, I tried o1-preview, and while it did work, I was also initially perplexed why the result looked pixelated. Turns out, that's because many of the p5js examples online use a relatively simple approach where they just see which cell-center each pixel is closest to, more or less. I mean, it works, but it's a pretty crude approach.

Now, granted, you're probably not doing creative coding at your job, so this may not matter that much, but to me it was an example of pretty poor generalization capabilities. Curiously, Claude has no problem whatsoever generating a voronoi diagram as an SVG, but writing a script to generate said diagrams using a particular library eluded it. It knows how to do one thing but generalizes poorly when attempting to do something similar.

Really hard to get a real sense of capabilities when you're faced with experiences like this, all the while somehow it's able to solve 46% of real-world python pull-requests from a certain dataset. In case you're wondering, one paper (https://cs.paperswithcode.com/paper/swe-bench-enhanced-codin...) found that 94% of the pull-requests on SWE-bench were created before the knowledge cutoff dates of the latest LLMs, so there's almost certainly a degree of data-leakage.
Only a dozen but same. Just ship the shit. Quality never mattered.
It's also just freedom. For example I wanted to visit a few cities and see some concerts.

Had a great time doing it, and as long as I stay in the US it's not a problem.

I actually really like NYC, to visit! Best food on Earth.

A few years back I interviewed with a company that would let me work remotely anywhere on Earth ( with reasonable limits of course). It wouldn't of paid more that 120k, but I'd rather do that than make 200k in NYC.
I mean, what's the claim then, there's no such thing as an illegal idea? You can't assign a semantic value to a legal system.
Roma families are defying their persecutors with bling palaces
> Apply for jobs at companies you want to work for

These days, it almost feels like the applications are going in the abyss.

My understanding of how this industry works from 20 YoE is that recruiters have their hands on actual jobs and openings on behalf of their client; they've been retained to find talent to fill some position.

Some companies will put up job listings for any number of reasons that are not actually based on intent to hire whereas a recruiter -- as scummy as some can be -- are actually a proxy for a real position with intent to hire.
Science Corp Announces Positive Results for Vision Restoration in Clinical Trial
Flasher Drum
These are used for switching light displays to celebrate Vesak, seen here: https://youtu.be/pqFLHIJ-I4M?si=Xu-NsUs_qycqGIrV
bet you're fun at partys
I work on a few projects that do have a model that is over a thousand lines long. A lot of times as the model gets more complex, you start moving associated model logic into their own models, which helps reduce the problem space. I think its fine because the logic ends up being cohesive and explicit. Whereas services end up with logic being hard to track down when they get very large and usually scattered.
The tragedy is that Google is tasked with this at all. It would be cool if public libraries could work together on a massive public digital library. This shouldn't be Google's responsibility.
attach a debugger to the running process
A huge proportion of this corpus is found in the Hathi Trust (see https://www.hathitrust.org/the-collection/). We have had a grant to crawl and derive an index on it via their supercomputing resources. I'm sure they are looking to LLM proposals, though they are exceedingly careful about the copyright issues.

https://www.hathitrust.org/
This is bad news for SWEs!
A similar tool is detect-secrets[1].

[1] https://github.com/Yelp/detect-secrets
Computing Handbook, 3rd Edition [pdf]
Isn’t it a critical component of everything currently sporting anything remotely close to a legit “AI” label? I wouldn’t call cows “one part of a broader beef ecosystem” for example. They’re fundamental to it.
Good points.

On not forgetting, the clear group here are students who will be tested. I'm expecting large changes in education in the next 10 years away from testing and more toward experiential learning with clearly defined outcomes, which are then graded/measured.

So while I use SR to learn and test myself, I'm trying to think through the use cases for a different future that isn't 100% likely to materialize.
LTESniffer claims to be Open Source but does not appear to have a top-level LICENSE file, nor a GitHub repo license set.
Andecdote #1: I subscribe to poe.com so that I can pay one fee and have access to many models. I am still trialing a bunch of prompts that help me prepare for class. I am normally okay with Claude 3.5's responses, but sometimes I am unhappy with the output and decide it's worth the extra cost to use GPT-4o. So there is some differentiation between them, and there may still be room for both companies to exist. If I was forced to choose, I'd probably be okay with the cheaper Claude 3.5. Maybe Marc has a point and we'll see some companies fail if they can't differentiate themselves.

Anecdote #2: With image generation models (not LLMs but they are generative AI), there are some models I have learned to avoid with certain prompts. Dall-E 3 won't draw a good picture of Mickey Mouse no matter what- they probably kept Disney properties out of its training set to avoid legal disputes. But Ideogram will make a great picture of Mickey Mouse- so Ideogram has at least one area of differentiation over Dall-E 3, and they might survive the commoditization with that as long as they can sell that difference to people.
WinDirStat v2.0.1
That 'paradox' is pretty much just basic economics when dealing with an elastic product, though. 'When efficiency gains reduce the price of a good that people would buy more of if it were cheaper, consumption of that good will rise'.
Ask HN: What is a programming language that you don't use at work but enjoy?
At work, I use Go and Python, but a short while ago I started learning Clojure and fell in love with the simplicity and a totally different approach to everything.

What is your favourite second language and why?
It's there but the docs aren't written yet. See the REST example in the repo. I'll have some docs for that soon.
Every time I see this argument made, there seems to be a level of complexity and/or operational cost above which people throw up their hands and say "well of course we can't do that".

I feel like we will see that again here as well. It really is similar to the self-driving problem.
It would surprise me greatly if they haven't already.
This assumes the entity suing you actually performs some business other than litigating patents. You could have the largest patent portfolio in the world but if a laywer who owns a single patent files suit against you that "IP war chest" will be completely worthless.
>The patent is beside the point of the business of inventing and bringing products to market. It's a legal weapon, not a tool to encourage commerce.

I'm not sure how this is responsive to my comment, which was directed at correcting your misconceptions about how patents work and are used. I think some people would disagree that it doesn't encourage commerce. Were it not for patents, many inventions would be trapped under trade secrets and would never have been disclosed to the public at all. It's also an odd point to make to me as I never suggested that a patent was a "tool to encourage commerce."

>It's not about protecting your inventions. It's a legal weapon.

Yes, a patent is a legal tool. You were the one that suggested owning a patent was a defensive tool, which I explained to you is not really true, most especially in the context you provided of countersuing.
It'd be cool for it to be copy-left, but at the same time I guess it could end up being too hard to get business running as the apparent risk of a competitor just copying your product would scare investors and that would end up in lower availability of actual hardware you can buy.
Thank you for including a link for reference. I may have missed some substance in the article, so help me out if I missed it. For my part, I'm not sure that the court would make additions to law, but maybe they should have allowed an option for Congress to update the law so that section 4 applied to all states? I can see that if you view section 4 of the VRA to be an important construct for citizen voting protections, nation wide application of the statute would only further protect the populace...
That is a good way to think about it !
Some cars have seats for up to seven people, including the driver.
The community is tiny. The fact that it was called "Perl6" for 20 years (Raku is from after 2019 I think) absolutely doesn't help in anything, the least in adoption. The historical churn in terms of VM (experimental in Haskell, dead Parrot, JVM, current MoarVM), the lack of planned features (macros!) for long years, and the slow death of Perl over a similar time frame - all that (and more) means not many people use it, even if they happen to know about it.

On the other hand, there's a similarly tiny - or smaller - community around Glamorous Toolkit (a Smalltalk distribution) that managed to produce one of the most hackable and rich LLM clients out there: https://github.com/feenkcom/gt4llm https://gtoolkit.com/ Here, though, LLMs are so close a match for the community interests that it just had to happen...
Precisely this.

Aider (with the older Claude models) is already a semi-competent junior developer, and it will produce 1kloc of decent code for the equivalent of 50 cents in API costs.

Sure, you still have to review the commits, but you have to do that anyway with human junior developers.

Anthropic could charge 20x more and we would still be happy to pay it.
It's just classic "Ends justify the means" thinking. It doesn't matter that 60k people will be jobless and eventually homeless because we are not "limiting" the "advancement" of society. It's okay if people suffer today because we are reducing the global suffering of tomorrow!

Nevermind that there does not have to be any cross purposes in those two sides! We don't have to get our clogs out and beat up the AI machines, we just have to "take care of" the people who's jobs the AI machines made redundant!

Adequate social welfare and safety nets, significant opportunities to retrain in new (and otherwise expensive) fields, funding for re-homing people and entire towns that have been made redundant.

And also a willingness to agree that "tech advancement" isn't morally neutral by default.
I really like Lua, it's simple and easy to compile
It depends on how the AI is used. If it's too high-level or abstract, it will produce "slop". Solving for AI generated content to be non-slop is probably very close to solving for AGI. But the statistical tools have proven useful in streamlining or automating what once were challenging processes. For example, generating an animated character still yields slop, but you can take a hand-crafted character and have an AI model analyze a live actor's movements and then rotoscope them onto the character. This makes life easier for the animator AND the actor: the actor can give a more natural performance without having to wear cumbersome motion capture gear; and the animator can apply those movements directly to the character without having to clean up motion capture data, let alone rotoscope the movements by hand as was done in the classic Disney animation days.
That means you are ok financially to retire
> Use of the fn keyword makes it easy to find function definitions by grepping for it, whereas finding functions in regular C syntax needs semantic awareness.

does it matter though, in 2024 and beyond?

we've got clangd and lsp, grepping for functions is dumb, whether you're grepping C or grepping Zig.
“Make games that are fun to make.”
I can rent a box truck for moving easially enough, and generally I know far enough in advance that I can reserve it.

However I've never found a truck I can rent to two. Sure I can rent trucks, but they come up with a large pile of fine print which says I cannot two. Even those box trucks cannot tow, or can tow but only their trailer which has specific restrictions on what you can use it for. Oh, and the trailer they allow you to use has surge brakes which are terrible.