skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A: "Heresy"??? Sorry, I don't get it. (Hopefully a bit of an in-joke.)

B: There's also taking everything as a joke, which is at least as annoying as taking everything too seriously. What I got from the piece is that that's how people, either intentionally or by just being forever thirteen-year-olds, are trying to dismiss "This satire of fascism has turned into straight-up propaganda for it". Sure, that's kind of hilarious... But also serious enough not to be just laughed off.
Some people cheer for the progress of humanity, while some others spread hate for political reasons. Even cleanliness and tidiness are slandered by them. China's aerospace development is because the United States did not allow their scientists to join the "International" Space Station project.
Some uses I have, e.g. a notepad in Cursor with a predefined set of files and a prompt e.g. to implement storybook stories and documentation out of components I use. I give it the current file I'm working on, and it will generate new files and update documentation files. Similarly for E2E or unit tests, it often suggests cases I would've not thought about.

The people that are negative about these things, because they need to review it, seem to be missing the massive amount of time saved imho.

Many users point to the fact that they spend most of the time thinking, I'm glad for them, most of the time I spend is glueing APIs, boilerplates, refactoring, and on those aspects Cursor helps tremendously.

The biggest killer feature that I get from similar tools (I ditched Copilot recently in favor of it) is that they allow me to stay focused and in the flow longer.

I have a tendency to phase out when tasks get too boring, repetitive or stressed out when I can't come up with a solution. Similarly going on a search engine to find an answer would often put me in a long loop of looking for answers deeply buried in a very long article (you need to help SEO after all, don't you?) and then it would be more likely that I would get distracted by messages on my company chat or social media.

I can easily say that Cursor has made me more productive than I was one year ago.

I feel like the criticism many have comes from the wrong expectations of these tools doing the work for you, whereas they are more into easing out the boring and sometimes the hard parts.
> I haven't seen any other tool ever have so many pitfalls.

I haven't seen any other tool with so much general utility and availability.

> to loop over a string array and print its contents

Is incredibly easy in bash and bash like shells. As highlighted the issue is that tools like 'ls' don't create "a string array." They create one giant string that has to be parsed. The rules in the shell are different than in other languages but it /will/ do most of the parsing for you, or all of it, if you do it carefully.

This is a fine tradeoff. As evidenced by it's wide usage and lack of convincing replacements.
> Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more than its competitors and far more than before he took the helm.

Yeah, that's the thing - he was a good CFO. He was able to maximize profit and stuff. But people remember CEOs by their achievements - "a founder", "made MSFT into top three world companies"...With Ballmer people remember the lost decade and that's it.
... with the name of the perpetrator attached. Companies are not something you can register anonymously.

Do you have bars on your windows? No? The potential cost is a breakin?

You you expect restaurants and stores to pat you down before you are allowed to enter? No? The potential cost is an attack on the staff.

Should we ban cars because they can be used as lethal weapons? No? The potential cost is a terrorist attack.

Deterrence through consequence is a thing and generally less costly for society than to make crime 100% impossible.
> I can't even come up with a fictional scenario in which Google does something nefarious with piles of handwritten documents they've somehow acquired.

I never said it would necessarily be nefarious, but it's the same behaviour of data collection from users of free services to benefit themselves financially. While not always being particularly careful with collected user data.

A slightly related topic is around Google's training on YouTube subtitles. They're able to do this because they host all the content, but they dont allow owners of that content to opt out of that. Again, a free resource that Google get to play with as they feel like.
This is nowhere near canon, but the Planet from "The Invincible" could easily be Fulgora from "Factorio: Space Age", some tenths of thousand years later. The oily oceans have decomposed into water and methane, the construction robots have evolved, the planets resources and ruins eaten up. The "rust layer" in the sediments was the planet-spanning factory. The engineer has its origin in the Lyra civilisation, which went extinct before the Invincible showed up.
A lot of people here are comparing Flutter with programming languages like Python, PHP, etc. It shows how under appreciated UI development is and the amount of complexity UI developers need to handle. Also UI framework developers are always at the mercy of someone else when it comes to their destiny, unlike programming language creators which "almost" control it fully. Apple, Google, MS all keep changing their OS and browser behaviours all the time and cross platform devs need to adapt to those things continuously.
Without knowing much about my standards and work you’ve just assumed it’s half baked slop. You’re wrong.
> OpenAI prefers to fine tune their existing models rather than train new ones.

This "preference" is solely based on the cost, not convenience, unlike in the GPL definition. The cost is going to change fast and should not be a part of the definition.
> Why are you so protective of your goings-on and the names of everyone you call? Are you calling terrorists or engaging in illicit activity at the places you visit? What is it that you have to hide?

Basic political associations can become problematic when people get riled up. See “the red scare”.

We’re not far from that again with people cutting out major relationships based on support or disdain of Trump.
You're keeping the system in place by contributing to it. I don't see how people don't understand that. You should act how you want everyone to act.
These people are the minority now. Everybody wants to hire them and they’re usually happily employed. Good luck.
All I got from growing up on Futurama and Archer was that alcohol was something grade a assholes loved.
100%. Useful cases include

* figuring out how to X in an API - eg "write method dl_file(url, file) to download file from url using requests in a streaming manner"

* Brainstorming which libraries / tools / approaches exist to do a given task. Google can miss some. AI is a nice complement for Google.
Fun thing with payphones - at least in Australia -- Telstra is investing in upgrading them (at least the ones in the cities). They aren't very useful as phones - but they are incredibly well situated billboards that you can plaster ads on top of.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/first-came-the-giant-adv...
Thank you for this extensive answer. Eager to see what kind of inventions and improvements you come up with in the future.
> Microsoft under Ballmer was insanely profitable, more than its competitors and far more than before he took the helm.

Being profitable means nothing if your marketshare in low 10%. You are leaning too much on "profit". Ballmer was a good CFO (finance guy), but not CEO.
It was disappointing to get unreliable hardware from a supposedly premium vendor, but it happens. It was the attitude and service that turned me off Apple though, not the hardware (which really should be more reliable than cheaper alternatives).
Are you familiar with the concept of "pricing ladders"? The point of the entry level product is not to simply be "the economy model", it's to be feature deficient in just the right way to make you take a "step up" the ladder to the next model.

What I've observed is that Apple does this by targeting the base model with a storage option that's just below what's probably the sweet spot for price / usefulness in the current market. You'll likely be just frustrated enough to take the step up that ladder.

MKBHD has a very fast explainer on this effect in iPad pricing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiNYOZZLOyg
I called it a build tool for Java and Scala because that's what its good at right now. The software industry is hugely varied, so I can't target everything at once. In particular, this tool started off targeting 100% Scala, but branches out to Java since they share a lot of concepts (classfiles, jars, assemblies, maven central, etc.)

But you are right that it is not JVM specific! In the docs there is an example of adding Typescript module support, and an initial strawman implementation takes about 100 lines of code. I'm hoping others can extend Mill to places where I do not have the time and expertise

I also opened up a 500USD bounty to add a strawman Python example, so if anyone wants to try their hand at writing the 100 or so lines necessary, here's the link :) https://github.com/com-lihaoyi/mill/issues/3862
> AFAIK, humans who do simultaneous interpretation are provided with at least an outline, if not full script

They are usually provided with one, but it is by no means necessary. SI is never truly simultaneous and will have a delay, and the interpretor will also predict based on the context. Which makes certain languages a bit more difficult to work with, e.g. Japanese, sentences of which I believe often have the predicate after the object, rather than the usual subject-predicate-object order, making the "prediction" part harder.
First off, for what purpose?

If it’s for money, side projects aren’t worth it. I went down this road for years, and DID make money, but ultimately it’s not worth it.

If it’s to learn, great! Start by solving problems you have. Doesn’t matter if it’s reinventing the wheel, solve it in a way you come up with yourself.

Here’s an example: I do our household budgeting on a spreadsheet, it’s okay but not very user friendly. So I can make a web-tool I can share over local IP so my partner who can’t spreadsheet can contribute. That’s a side project.

Also, do something different to your main job role. I work in web development all day, so my side projects are low level programming graphics projects, or game mods.
Even the AI's don't read the content before up/down voting.
Ruby has plenty of other applications written in it, it definitely doesn't belong to the "one app" language list.
Entering this sort of data correctly should be on the doctor. McDonald’s digital order style giant pancake buttons with huge touch targets with wide margins and large type on a huge touchscreen should solve the boomer objections.

Alternately, make it an app for the huge iPad Pro to solve the same problems. Make it as hard to fuck up as a fast food order. Disambiguation of input commands is a solved problem.

There isn’t really the will. Stupid windows apps with standard windows UI dropdowns that confuse and frustrate people not well versed with computer UI, running on standard low contrast small type displays with standard keyboard and mouse input, running on laggy RDP thin clients to underprovisioned workstation VMs in a data center is sadly the industry norm, and it still kills people.
I think I understand, but let's check by rephrasing:

"Alignment" is only possible up to a vague approximation, and an entirely perfectly aligned with another entity would essentially be a shadow rather than a useful assistant because by being perfectly aligned the agent would act tired exactly when the person was tired, go shopping exactly when the human would, forget their keys exactly when the human would, respond exactly like the human to all ads and slogans, etc.?

I agree, though:

(1) this has already been observed, last year's OpenAI dev day had (IIRC) a story about a writer who fine tuned a model on their slack (?) messages, they asked it to write something for them, the response was ~"sure, I'll get on it tomorrow".

(2) for many of those concerned with "solving alignment", it's sufficient for the agent to never try to kill everyone just to make more paperclips etc.
Python is excellent as long as you run it on your own computer.

Having to distribute a Python application with all of its dependencies and libraries is a pain I don't want to experience.
> I know this isn't a popular thing to say, but when you're 18 it's time to take responsibility for your choices

I don’t think that’s unpopular or the least bit controversial. Obvious, no?

But ending the story there isn’t productive. So perhaps it is not a popular reason to not consider other factors & improvements.

Individual lack of conscientiousness isn’t the only factor.

Students being handed loans, for whatever ill thought out career plan, with no immediate need for payback, facilitated by market warping government encouragement, schools whose incentive is obvious (they get most of that money), and banks who see students as easy marketing targets, is a systematic upfront incentive/road to the original ill thought out career plan, but now saddled with overwhelming debt.

Such a colossal amount of economically mismatched careers and debt that the topic is a regular subject of national politics.

There is an entire system of active influence, causality, conflicts of interest & responsibility there too.
The main problem is using text as a common format between different applications.

First: text is not well defined. Is it ASCII? Is it UTF-8? Some programs can spew UTF-32 with proper locale configured, it's a mess.

Second: encoding and decoding of objects to text is not defined at all. Those problems with filenames is just one example. Using newline as a separator is a natural thing that is easy to implement, yet it is wrong.

In my opinion two things should be done:

1. Standardise on UTF-8. No other encodings allowed.

2. Standardise on JSON. It is good enough to serve as universal exchange format, tools like `jq` exist for some time now.

So any utility must read and write JSON objects with some standard env set. And shells can be developed with better syntax to deal with JSON. This way you can write something like

`ps aux | while read row; do echo ${row.user} ${row.pid}; done`
Do you also ban Google?

Working with AI is like working with Google. You shouldn’t be banning AI, you should be banning copy pasting AI slop.
Neither of those are London car taxes. I think the number refers to the congestion charge. ULEZ raises a similar amount though.
Almost no medical school or hospital in the United States use paper or handwriting anymore. All orders are electronic.
600g of fruit sounds like wayyy too much sugar per day.
Not really the question always is that when will see see the advancement in actual products and this article seems to answer here it is.
This. It’s taken the universe (at least locally) several billion years to achieve human-level intelligence through trial and error. Somehow switching over to silicon is going to get us to superhuman intelligence and beyond within a decade? Why should the intelligence of a system surpass its complexity (if you’ll excuse my playing fast and loose with units)? For all we know we’ll achieve barely-superhuman AI and when we ask it why it doesn’t just make itself exponentially smarter, it will say, “Do you have any idea how complex I am?”
Why are you responding to imaginary comments? If you want to make that argument, make that argument in the first place.
If your todo list is, or needs to be long lived, I think you might have more problems :D

I make notes on paper as the act of writing makes it stick about in my head longer than it would if I typed typing them out; though similar to you there's better penmanship from a spider that fell in ink.
Check out the Jetyak: https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/the-jetyak/ (The main content here is the video player on the right.)
Macros were an early Swift goal, but were not the highest priority or a small amount of work that could be tackled as part of meeting higher priority goals.

As an example - one could argue property wrappers exist because they were needed before macros could get done, and their syntax was chosen to align with where the Swift core team thought macros would land in the future.
I went to a banh mi place in Berlin. The proprietor put my card in the reader and then I saw him click thru the tip screen before he handed it to me. Much appreciated!
Some of the "non-standard characters" is a combination of incorrect encoding applied to the page, and web browsers apparently not handling certain Latin1 characters properly that should have been decoded right despite charset declaration being wrong (for example code 0xA0, aka non-breaking space).

Namely, the page contains text in Windows-1252 encoding, but declares it's in ISO-8859-1. Most of the characters are the same between the two, but few aren't, like em-dashes (code 0x97) in second paragraph of the preface.

This probably involved whatever pipeline was originally and over time used to maintain the pages from RTF masters that Baen used.
Joke != formal logic
The bigger issue is the sheer momentum of Unix shell. Even if you come up with an alternative that is better by every objectively measurable metric, it's still going to be a monumental task to have it packages with commonly used distros. Kinda like the "why can't the US switch to the metric system" problem.
All of the examples given in the article are contrived, textbook-style examples. Real world projects are far more messy. I want someone to talk about their flow with Cursor on a mature codebase in production with lots of interlaced components and abstractions.

I have a feeling that blindly building things with AI will actually lead to incomprehensible monstrous codebases that are impossible to maintain over the long run.

Read “Programming as Theory Building” by Peter Naur. Programming is 80% theory-in-the-mind and only about 20% actual code.

Here's an actual example of a task I have at work right now that AI is almost useless in helping me solve. "I'm working with 4 different bank APIs, and I need to simplify the current request and data model so that data stored in disparate sources are unified into one SQL table called 'transactions'". AI can't even begin to understand this request, let alone refactor the codebase to solve it. The end result should have fewer lines of code, not more, and it requires a careful understanding of multiple APIs and careful data modelling design and mapping where a single mistake could result in real financial damage.
Sorta like what they did to one another prior to Europeans arriving.
Still doesn't look like it, this is the kind of interactivity I expect.

https://react.dev/learn/tutorial-tic-tac-toe

Where editing the code, immediately shows the GUI related changes on the neighbouring frame.

While what I see on https://leptos.dev/ is just screenshots, and there is nothing on that documentation you linked that provides the same interactive experience, one has to explicitly start a developer sandbox to host the whole machinery, and even requires a codebox account for editing.
I would love to see the world where you didn't use AI and instead invested the time to make yourself a stronger programmer. A react wordle clone isn't something most developers would need 2 hours to make (sure maybe the styling / hosting AROUND the wordle clone might take longer) - I'm not saying you're a bad programmer or a bad person but what is the opportunity cost of using AI here? Are you optimising yourself into a local-minima?
If you liked The Martian and Project Hail Mary, two books I cannot recommend enough are Daniel Suarez' Delta-V and Critical Mass. Highly technical focused hard-sci-fi about asteroid mining and human dynamics in high-risk envrionments. I can't vouch for the absolute factual correctness, but it has an appendix listing the papers the author indirectly references for the book.

https://daniel-suarez.com/index.html
I really honestly don't get the hype. VSCode with some copilot plugins seems to do effectively 100% of this fork and last time I scrolled through cursor's 1000+ open github issues, they didn't seem responsive or know how to fix things.
Since this has been reposted by the same poster several times, I don't feel bad about reposting my review calling it a "glorious failure": https://mssv.net/2023/12/26/the-invincible/

tl,dr: It looks incredible, like no other game you'll see today, and it grapples with deeply interesting themes – but it's extremely annoying to play and suffers from a serious lack of editing. There's just too much friction to become truly immersed. Still, other games can only wish their failures were this daring.

(Last time I made this comment it was immediately downvoted to oblivion. Shortly thereafter, the post itself disappeared from the HN front page, perhaps due to some kind of brigade-detection?)
Millions joined a livestream selling tickets to space on a Chinese rocket
That happened once or twice for me, too. I wonder if an interpreting-specific system prompt would prevent that problem….
In my case there is another reason - if it looks cross platform it is probably taking up more resources than a native app.
"From my German point of view, our nation has plenty of energy to protest what's going on in Haiti or Syria etc"

That's because your politicians can't really be blamed for Haiti / Syria etc. And it's not directly their job to fix it. So they're happy to speak passionately about it all day, and hopefully direct the populations attention away from what they ARE responsible for, and might be held accountable for. (This is the case in many Western countries, of course - not just Germany).
We can’t. Paperwork exists to be able to transfer knowledge and liability. It isn’t meant for you and it is mostly cost for your company. It’s for lawyers, insurers, investigators, auditors, your future replacement, etc.
Same, but I accidentally bought Mindustry instead, so I guess I saved $20.
> If the social program was designed to keep a roof over people’s head, then it would simply give people cash, or a roof.

Except it wouldn't happen, because it would get killed by even louder whining about giving free money to the lazy do-littles. Every social program has to have a layer of appeasing the people who only feel they're part of a society when it benefits them.
Oh look who is the boss!

Tell us: when you bought hacker news where there a lot of negotiations or did you just tell them that you have it now and that was that?

Personally i could’t care less about spoilers even when they are actual spoilers. If the work is any good it will work with or without knowing details just the same. In this case there is so little information shared that we can’t even talk about it being a spoiler. Not worth wrapping ones mind about it.
oh wow, that could be cool! I love seeing more sci-fi come to the screen. I really liked The Expanse and wish they had kept that going...