skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless energy becomes significantly cheaper we are unlikely to see personal flying cars, and that’s also before you put all the car crashes that happen today and put them above people’s heads.
Manna is such a prescient reading.
> They think - rightly or wrongly - that it's a more effective way to run their company, usually because they don't trust workers [...]

This still seems a lot like RTO being used as a weapon. The only difference is they aren't being cruel for the sake of it (which is undoubtedly rare), but they have cruel intentions nevertheless.
Even then there's a chance a few tardigrades hibernate on some material that shoots up and then comes back a few years later once the earth has cooled a bit.
Then how did we end up with Volkswagen's situation?

Selling 100 cars for 20k each sounds better than selling 2 for 200k.
Fusion is irrelevant as a practical energy source here on earth. The simple reason is that we already have all the "fusion energy" we'll ever need from that big fusion reactor in the sky... modern photovoltaics convert this energy to electricity at close to the same efficiency that you could convert the heat from a controlled fusion reactor to electricity. OK, yeah, photovoltaics still don't work at night, but there's a battery revolution underway that is solving that problem, and the two, photovoltaics + batteries, are already vastly cheaper than fusion can ever hope to be.

Fusion will be important for the future of humanity, especially in deep space, so we should keep researching and developing it. But it's not relevant to the climate crisis... the already existing technologies have that covered, we only need to deploy them faster.
Being honest doesn’t have anything to do with being objectively correct, unless a person is presenting their subjective feelings as objective fact.

Saying to someone “your work is not good enough for me” is a subjective statement; whether or not it is honest depends on whether or not it is reflective of the speaker’s beliefs about the quality of the work.

A leader not speaking up when they receive subpar work is dishonest, and it is fundamentally unfair to the person doing the work.
Dear untech,
1. I am both a Russian and a Russian citizen.
2. I comment a lot on Russia-related topics because I'm a Russian and I know quite a lot about Russia.
3. I'm also a software developer so I enjoy reading most HackerNews content.
4. Talking with people and learning their opinions seems worthwile to me. It's not really a waste of time.
So what would you do in the parents' shoes?
Mercedes is pushing some pretty awful motors, like the new C63 4cyl turbo hybrid thing. Of course, a lot of this is driven by regulation, not Mercedes being cheap.
The point about holidays resonates with me. Our setup you get paid extra for being on-call for a public holiday, but given we do Mon-Mon shifts in practice that means two people can't take advantage of a long weekend and only one of them gets extra compensation for it.

Different people deal with being on-call differently but personally I don't do what I normally would when on-call, whether that's long motorbike rides or hiking etc because it's not practical to guarantee cell coverage and also the threat of a page ruins the experience. A "day off" whilst on-call isn't equal to a day off
That’s why I talk about political action. Public is exactly here to act when the market doesn’t care about something important.
That video is full of widely discredited claims.
The Sun is eldritch horror. The test of being human is being fine with it.
Agreed. Also, note many of these “founders” are mysteriously suddenly sympathetic to blue collar average joes when they never were before.
You don’t.

You hire them for other lower priority roles, but they are inside the firewall. Most large organizations have an immature zero trust environment.

Look at the Microsoft PKI breach. The adversary was able to compromise certificate services in a corporate dev environment and parlay that in accessing US government mailboxes in a supposedly isolated cloud tenant. Microsoft has a world class security practice. The average Fortune 1000 is toast.
Would you accept a datacenter to use your potable water and then release it for you to take a shower? Would you drink any kind of water [1]?

Electricity and water are today’s main issues, but there are many indirect others like noisy neighborhoods, pollutants from diesel generators, etc.

These infrastructures will start to use great portions of earth’s resources, saturating it to the point people will need to be making complex choices coming forward.

[1] https://youtu.be/9H8mbIp01sg
It’s also a result of German unions. It’s practically impossible to fire people in the auto industry, so effectively what we do at VW is we have deadweight organisations where people end up if they are low performers and refuse to leave. The European auto industry is partly a charade to keep people employed.
> Americans surprised when their economic and political system worked exactly in line with historical trends.

But that's not accurate. Post WWII up until the mid 70s saw an explosion of middle class earnings and relative wealth, and a large shrinking of wealth inequality in the US.
Ohhh, it's a snake! It's a badger badger badger badger...
The US doesn’t have nationalized oil companies. The US government doesn’t have skin in the game here. In fact, fusion would make a lot of military stuff cheaper, so if anything they have incentive to adopt it.
> why I talk about political action. Public is exactly here to act when the market doesn’t care about something important

Which is why I mentioned consumers. Voters have made this incredibly clear every time polled: we are not wiling to pay more to reduce emissions.
Super interesting. Thanks for the details! (I don't work there or anything, was just curious about the implementation)
Please take it as a metaphor of how you can spend USD 8b/year.
Exactly!!! So many Muskovites won’t shut the fuck up about the blue collar workers they never mentioned until now.
Nah.

The pieces are in place, it's just nobody has put them together.

AI /will/ be a net-benefit for humanity, even if it stopped progress as it currently is.
> Overall, about 16% of all young women who are working full time, year-round live in the 22 metros where women are at or above wage parity with men.

Thats only sixteen percent of women. Or put another way, 84% of men still make more than women.

> Younger women in urban/metro areas are doing significantly better than their male peers economically (higher employment rates and income). This gap is increasing.

In 22 metro areas.

You’re framing your argument in a way that seems especially combative and antagonistic towards women gaining a level playing field. It’s not a zero sum game, but men will absolutely lose privilege as women even the playing field. There will be cases where women make more, and that’s life. And if women as a whole for a while make more than men, big deal, it’ll eventually even out.
I've never heard of XRay or V2Ray. It seems like a niche thing?
For what it's worth, I appreciate your comments and find them civil and informative. (American. Comment a lot because Ukraine is my pet war.)
As with every other person who has wealth, you'd quickly find that the people who go to you with their problems are the ones whose problems would be magically solved if you only gave them a small investment of $10k, maybe $100k if they're bold and daring, but don't worry, they'll pay you back with interest after their business takes off.

Outside of people who crave the fame and/or flaunt their wealth to promote themselves (e.g. Michael Bloomberg), wealthy people do not advertise that they are wealthy, because doing so invites a lot of unwanted attention.
What's irrational is not starting from base values. It's hard to see how AI in its current form gets us any closer to a materially better future.
It's very difficult to make money disappear in the US system without getting caught eventually.
> Even trying out things that don't work is progress, since it narrows the space of possible solutions

Maybe, maybe not. You may be searching an infinite domain, or the wrong domain entirely.

> If you do genuine work and at least talk about it with colleagues on a conference that's advancing the field

Sure. But it’s not advancing a technology.

> classic graph everyone uses would be 1, which shows consistent progress over ~40 years

Fair enough. I’d argue that’s constant progress in one of the problems of fusion power, namely, ignition. The article’s point is the other problems are either being solved or showing similar progress. That wasn’t true until recently.

> it merely hints at information without providing any

It's debunking the assumption at the top of this thread. Especially with the "no really," it's arguing that the ground truth has changed.
What do you think about private jets, passes to skip theme park queues, world class life saving medical treatment etc?
If you were alive back then: yeah, pretty much? The expectation was that merely getting a tech education would seamlessly and immediately roll you into a six figure job no matter which industry you were interested in, because much like AI today, tech was literally seen as the magic ingredient that had been missing all this time.

Hindsight's cynicism is the enemy of understanding history in this case, obviously there was no golden age, but at the time the graph was going up, and money and not just the promise of an easy life but constant stories of people making it big because of their skills (unlike, say, crypto) made a lot of people go "this time it'll be different". And because in a rare few cases it was, everyone bought into it.
Is there not some sort of standardized, stringent filesystem test yet? Like Jepsen is for databases? If passed, one can be sure it is reasonably free from bugs? Guess not.
I use to love slugging (aka “casual carpool”) here in the Bay Area in the Before Times. There was a conveniently nearby bus stop where drivers would routinely offer rides into SF so they could use the carpool lane and get to work more quickly. It was a fun way to meet neighbors.
Tbh, I can't follow any of the reasoning that AI is a danger to anyone, except through the traditional form of enabling the worst parts of bureaucracy. I just think it's further evidence of a tremendously wasteful and suicidal society.
Remote work is about collaboration. That requires an effort from both sides to make it work. For sure, management has a huge responsibility. But putting every failure on management is overly simplistic.
>Then how did we end up with Volkswagen's situation?

Upper class don't buy VW.

VW is a posh brand for the middle class which has now been wiped out by inflation and rising CoL, that's why they aren't selling.

I'm surprised I have to spell out obvious stuff like this.
Probably unpopular opinion here but families, usually wealthy, that use the legal system like this to avoid consequences are parasites. It reveals not only your poor job of raising your children. But also the poor character of the parents.

Glad the courts didn’t grant a similar “affluenza” ruling here. The student plagiarized, short and simple.
>Your tax dollars are defending your country and its interests, and it just so happens that defending other countries is in your country's interests.

So you will have no objection if we reassess our interests and decide that defending you no longer aligns with them? Because that's what many Americans, including me, are starting to think. I don't want conflict with Russia or China. As an American, that's not in my interest! And, I have no desire to partner with a country full of dishonest, self-righteous individuals such as yourself. That's not in my interest, either. Nor is it in my interest to risk a conflict on your behalf which could result in US soldiers committing more war crimes!

"Helping me is in your interest, buddy..." I know a con when I see one.

I'm hoping with Trump's election, the US will act as more of a neutral and peaceful arbitrator, instead of automatically taking the side of "allies" like you for some bizarre reason.

>will not be a frequent thing

You still haven't even attempted to address the key question of whether the per capita rate of war crimes in Iraq was notably high.

War crimes are wrong. I condemn them. I support more US-internal war crime investigations. But you've persistently failed to even address the question of whether US war crimes make it unusual.

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

https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/06/24/death-and-destru...

Where are the executions? I suppose the Ukrainian military is all monsters?

Can you even give a single historical incidence of a country dealing with war criminals on its own side in a way you consider acceptable?

How about for your own country?

>No investigation; No prosecutions. Major-general Christopher Vokes commander of the Canadian 4th Armoured Division freely admitted ordering the action, commenting in his autobiography that he had "No feeling of remorse over the elimination of Friesoythe."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_World_War_II#Cri...

>it did nothing

You are making more straightforward exaggerations, trivially falsified with 60 seconds on Wikipedia. "Nothing" is what Canada did in response to its WW2 crimes.

I'm done. There's no point in continuing with someone who delights in dishonesty.
I am 40 yrs old. I get paid a shit-ton of money (just around $200K) to do this stupid tech work job. I work 40 hours a week, I get benefits, flex time, plus I work remote.

If I'm getting paged for a legitimate issue that is related to something I built or maintain, then, yes, I am going to respond on-call. Because it's a fucking privilege to get paid this much money to sit on my ass and type into a screen.

If I'm getting paged repeatedly, or for an issue that isn't my responsibility, then I will get pissed off, and yell and scream until I'm no longer on-call (or they fix the issue, whichever comes first). But I am grateful to be able to have this life. I can spend an hour or two after hours to fix my shit that broke.
I don’t fully disagree with what you say. I think social media also has some positives. The amount of transparency over government and exchange of knowledge and ability to learn is greater now than ever before. Hopefully we will swing back to a balanced lifestyle where phones and social media are just tools that people use in a limited way instead of being addicted to it.

My bigger fear of tech is how it’ll marginalize people economically and centralize power. We see it already with companies like Amazon. But the coming wave of automation over everything - manufacturing, entertainment, etc - may be far more damaging than even social media. Unfortunately right now it seems our political and economic systems are completely inadequate in preparing for this.
Mummy of juvenile sabre-toothed cat Homotherium latidens from Upper Pleistocene
After having read about some arrests relating to an underground network of people who purchase and view videos of monkeys being tortured and killed, for pleasure, and those who shoot and provide these videos... I'm beginning to wonder whether the internet itself was a good idea.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/s/vwCegmNdOE ?
How do I square this with claims that the US heavily subsidizes fossil fuels? Are those claims false or am I misunderstanding how the market works?
Rapid and Sensitive Protein Similarity Searches (1985)
> In live environments like Smalltalk images, there are no files.

Of course there are: image file, sources file, changes file.

And, of course, fileOuts to share code with others and to archive code -- so we can have a reproducible build process.
Yup. And in typical conservative fashion, they’d rather denigrate and ruin the lives of the talented liberals than pull up their own bootstraps.
It's quite difficult with current rocket technology: you have to counteract most of the Earth-given 30km/s speed around the Sun in order to get close (it's smaller than Mercury's orbit), and then brake again to circularize the orbit once you are there. I am not sure that it can be done with what we have now. That said, it's not that far off either.
Being optimistic and positive on tech in the first place is the root issue here. This reminds me of my mom in medical school who became disillusioned when she experienced the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit, not always in the interest of the patient. Being overly optimistic about an industry or field is in my view a worldview error, and a better approach is to be optimistic about one's own potential to contribute to the betterment of humanity, no matter the field. Also the understanding that there are and always will be bad actors should not dissuade one from being part of creating solutions, as one sees it. Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
Congrats on your work! You mentioned "using our custom render pipeline and shaders", can you please elaborate more on that?
Sword Bearers: An Analysis Uncovers Female Figures with Weapons in Mycenaean Art
AI (particularly LLMs) is a net-benefit for PRODUCTIVITY - it remains to be seen if it will genuinely benefit humanity as a whole.
> My guess is that this article may get flagged, but it encapsulates very much my feelings as a younger Gen X.

Ok so I'm curious about this.

In the broad strokes, did you think tech would be a major facilitator to things like unionization drives, campaigns to fight for and protect civil liberties, everyday citizens organizing together to gain a greater representation in their local government, etc.?

Or, again in the broad strokes, did you think tech would largely replace the need for these kinds of activities?
There are better ways of dealing with that than letting assholes roam free. It’s like tear-gassing your bar to keep out ruffians. It technically works, but it’s rather indiscriminate.
For MSVC, long is 4 bytes: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/cpp/fundamental-types-...
I’d rather hire a brave asshole than a compliant, meek little ship.
This narrative has been repeated ad nauseam, but I'm not fully buying it. What is the average S&P 500 exposure to real estate for their stock price? In a handful of cases sure, but en masse it seems much more likely driven by more direct management beliefs about productivity and/or calculation to drive a "silent layoff" through voluntary attrition.
This sort of thinking is what leads you down the “guns don't kill people” route. Each piece of technology has, in it's design, a set of biases. To someone with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The tools you have affect how you view the world.
In my senior design project in college, we were the only team that decided to use version control. I pushed for it, and set up a CVS server, mostly because I was the team lead and thought it was an easy way to feel like I was making a difference on the team. This was around 2005 or so, git didn’t really exist yet, svn was the new kid on the block and cvs was the established player.

I had never used any vcs before and neither had anyone on any team, but man was it worth it. The ability to have one place with the latest code and not emailing zip files around was great, but so was being able to easily roll back to a known good version if we caused an issue, compare changes, etc. By the end of it we all agreed it would have been impossible to do as well as we did if we didn’t do version control.

(This was a cross disciplinary engineering curriculum with ME/CE/CS, ours was slightly more software-heavy than other teams but everyone had some amount of software. Version control wasn’t taught and most teams just didn’t even consider it. It was a very different time from today.)
Most UK universities place a lot of value on teaching experience. If you have a PhD degree from Cambridge or Oxford, a decent publication track record and significant teaching experience, you will typically get lectureship (assistant professor) offers straight after you finish your doctoral studies. Some teaching experience will be valued more than having a stellar publication record, especially if you have a good research plan. It makes sense because most lectureships involve at least 40% of teaching and supervision.

Going back to the main topic of this post, using too many underpaid academics to teach creates some perverse incentives that are IMHO destroying Oxbridge. Many professors are no longer teaching. Teaching is a great filter. It makes sure they stay up-to-date, they are technically good and they take pride in their research field. Professors that are really good and passionate, i.e. Terry Tao-like personalities, are often getting displaced by ladder climbers. This is especially common in experimental fields and really disheartening.
to be fair, was there anything you didn't feel optimistic about in the 90s?

From what I remember everything about that decade was full of unrealistic optimism (end of history etc)
Cars already kill two million people per year, plus another two maimed, plus pollution. Are you sure you want flying cars? :)
Yet another “affluenza” raised child joining the ranks of society. Probably will become a future C-level exec at an American company.
> Authoritarian regimes have discovered how they can control their people with rage bait and blind patriotism.

I think this is blaming the outgroup. 'We' are the problem, too.
When Starlink was new I really wanted channel bonding to take advantage of its speed an work around the early beta unreliability. I ended up using Speedify which has a really nice desktop client implementation. But it only works for one computer, it's more like a VPN client. This system was the best option for a full network for a router.

Fortunately Starlink got more reliable so I stopped needing it. Bonding disparate network connections has a lot of really funky behaviors. In practice the biggest problem is the Speedify VPNs kept getting flagged as spammy: running your own OpenMPTCrouter endpoint fixes that.
Yup makes it easier than firing you. We don’t want less productive people.
Can absolutely relate and understand.

I taught myself C++ by writing games with SDL2.

The first game -- snake took about a couple of hundred lines and I put everything in one .CPP file. And I felt pretty good.

The second game, well, I forgot what it is, not Tetris nor Breakout, but it was complex enough that I realized that I need to put code into header files and source files.

The last game of that project was a Ultima-spinoff. I even used the same sprite sheet. The complexity completely drowned me. I was constantly asking myself how should I arrange things properly so I don't need a lot of global variables that every file can see, because naturally the Game class needs to see and know all other classes, and the Renderer class needs to see and know many other classes too, etc.

Eventually I dropped the project. A few years ago I picked it up again and figured out something that is close to Entity - System (not ECS just ES). I didn't complete the project but then firmly believe that it was the right architecture, and I was simply too burnt out to complete it.

This year I learned about ECS from pikuma. I think it's over complicated for small-medium games. Anyway I'm trying to say that I agree that writing a 10,000 line project is way more complicated than 10 1,000 line projects.
> We’re launching with $1.25 million to be invested across 125 projects, backed through the kind support of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, American Express, Chainguard, HeroDevs, Kraken, Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, 1Password, Shopify, Stripe, Superbloom, Vercel, Zerodha, and others.

Nice initiative, but don't go bankrupt guys!
Fission just isn't a competitive source of energy economically. Nobody is willing to pay 10x as much for energy just to get nuclear. Seems clear to me that the actual solution we need are cheap batteries so we can scale renewables