skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hmmmm, I can't quite put my finger on what it is but I suspect there are some fundamental differences between firing a bunch of bureaucrats from the federal government vs. Hitler's purge of the SA or Stalin's purge of the Soviet officer corps.
He seems to combine a number of skills. Everyone seems to agree he's a good salesman and fundraiser. And he hires good people. But contrary to many peoples view I think he's a good manager and engineer. You can see him on video here talking about getting Starship done and judge for yourself https://youtu.be/cIQ36Kt7UVg?t=61
Right now in Canada the libs are just one no confidence vote away from irrelevance, at least partly because of the carbon tax. It's not a direct poll though, as the liberal politicians are basically the junkest junk that party has ever gotten elected and all the corrupt and/or stupid things they have been up to are all coming to light at once. The carbon tax isn't helping them but it is unclear if it's the major problem for the voters or just one of the very large basket of problems that are becoming obvious.
I wonder if we can get a flyby mission by 2031 from NASA or ESA.
The delusions of an online news site with a paywall.
The key observation about the Dunning-Kruger study is that humility, hard graft, and honest perseverance towards improving oneself are the three most important factors in achieving proficience in crafting large software data flow systems. How one designs and implements such systems is the art of any form of creative endeavor.

Designing and implementing large and correct systems is a matter of growing them, from small, trusted pieces into larger interconnected systems of systems, with ever greater care, knowing that the entire thing can collapse at any time if the wrong decisions are made or have been made.
> Being on-call gives you no extra pay by itself

If I’m not paid to be reachable, nobody gets to complain when I don’t pick up the phone though.
Not so fast, Frida can be detected.. you need to deal with those detection vectors first.

I'd not be surprised if the next version of the app included an "integrity proctection" added officially in order to "protect couriers' security".. these can be bypassed, but it shows that exposing your tools is not always a wise move.
Probably, charging per tokens is the best pricing for AI products.
Who cares what they think? If they operate like this they won’t exist much longer.
I started using proxmox a couple months ago and it's great. A really great alternative to VMware after the broadcom takeover.
I don't think that struggle is really the defining feature here. If anything, many of the most toxic people I can think of in geeky circles are precisely the people who still have a chip on their shoulder about something that happened in middle school.

I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.

Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable. But once tech became a powerhouse of investment, it became taken over by investors, financiers, and the kind of geeks who would play ball with them.

Some of them drank the kool-aid and became financiers themselves, corrupted by the same forces that corrupt bankers or politicians. Some of them sold out because hey, ping-pong table in the office, that's pretty cool! evil never has ping-pong tables! Some of them sold out because times are hard and they wanted a job. And some of them don't realize they have sold out, because tech culture does a very good job of propagandizing selling out as a virtue.
The first easy or hard question should be "There is a wart that annoys you, is it really that bad?"
> having financial means to not have to work at early age (while you are still youngish and healthy) is probably one of the biggest goals any human on Earth can achieve

I'd rather just do a job i like to do until i am not able to do it anymore.

I know people who are old and do charity work, who i envy. They could as well be doing half time paid work, but for them work is work, it's not so much about money or early retirement. It's about the contentment of doing something useful together with others.
They've needed support since antiquity. I recall Tycho Brahe getting into an argument with his serfs after he was made a lord that eventually went to court. What's changed is that it no longer requires extravagant wealth to produce one.
The problem is that there's so little money in academia. In the US, state support for public universities has plummeted in the 21st century. In the last state I lived in, the state university near me went from providing over 75% of teaching costs to under 25% in less than 20 years. Tuitions have risen, but it's important to understand the sticker prices are usually discounted with financial aid. If a university raises tuitions by an amount x, they are usually brining in less than 1/2 x new funding. Ironically, reducing university funding leads universities hire more administrators, as they attempt to replace lost funding with donations or indirect costs.
Yes, yes, we all know it - Elon Musk eats babies and Tesla batteries set Rome on fire.

Seriously, all this Musk talk stopped being funny years ago, when people started believing and regurgitating all that bullshit with a straight face.

"Tech Bro culture" is another Yeti - everyone is an expert on it, no one actually saw it. It's just a strawman from early culture wars that gives people another way to hate each other. It's perfect for cementing groups and gaining power in them, and for increasing advertisement exposure. It's really, really bad for one's sanity.

Techno utopia failed for a simple reason: people keep imagining what is possible with technology, but what actually materializes in the real world is what's possible under current economy. "Bicycles for the mind", tricorders, Mars colonies - they don't make money, so they don't happen. Instead, we get eshittification, and innovative blends of finance and medical insurance, and ad-funded social media.

For all his issues, Musk actually performed two miracles - revitalizing the space sector by making the business case for launches add up (a first piece of serious progress in space exploration since the Space Shuttle program), and dragging the market kicking and screaming into accepting BEVs as a serious, mass-market product. In both cases, the miracle part wasn't tech - it was making the economics work (including fighting the already established efficiencies).

> I can definitely see how many in the younger generations are looking at Big Tech as being just as evil as Big Oil

Because it is, and I wish more people understood it exactly for what it is. Key insight - it has nothing to do with tech, everything to do with business. The technology itself isn't a problem - the problem is that we allow (and encourage) entrepreneurs to engage in the same immoral business practices, the same abusive business models, that previously defined Big Oil, and later on several other Big industries.
It isn't the government's job to stop people from being stupid with their money. Go look at https://www.withyotta.com/. It is literally a gambling site. If people want to put their life savings in there then, well, that's on them.
The assumption being made is the most valuable people can be replaced by a couple of “less valuable” ones by make them toil harder and re-learn all knowledge the valuable ones had.
the best path forward would be for all nerds to stop fitting into the programmed stereotype of being incredibly imbalanced/high-strung as part of being talented and thus wasting the life-force away from those who capitalize on this
> North Korea is doing better than South Korea on every metric except "consumer goods availability" and "international relations".

This is very, very false and a pretty strong signal there's no useful discussion to have here.
In my opinion where this behavior really began to run rampant was with the popularization of quippy “dunk" quote-tweets (though this may have earlier precedent, perhaps on tumblr). It’s a deeply antisocial action that just about every internet connected demographic has come to partake in.
For me and my cohort (I'm in my early 50s now), yes, absolutely. Again, from my point of view, things got even worse post 2008, with the rise of mobile and social media. The tech world specifically evolved in directions dramatically opposed to the pro-human mood of the 90's towards a much more predatory stance.
Come on with this bs again. You'll never hear me siding with Meta on anything except this. They keep trying to blame them, they need to look in the mirror. Meta claims it delivers value to news organizations by helping them spread their information, and asks for nothing in return because it is mutually beneficial. The news orgs disagree. The government sides with the news orgs, Meta turns out to be right. This is an open and shut case. Attempting to extort the only thing propping up your dying propaganda industry is a fools gamble, as has been thoroughly empirically demonstrated.
https://archive.ph/X1fcp
You might be interested in this nice write up: https://shopify.engineering/how-we-built-shopifys-bfcm-2023-...
My daughter, SIL, and I are 100% remote (three different companies, all located in different places). RTO was an important but not deciding factor in her recent job change, but 100% remote made the new spot all that much more attractive.

She's a marketing event manager, he's an accountant manager, and I'm a, well, it depends on the day; let's say senior systems architect and programmer across our HW-and-container-based security products.

Of the three, mine needs the most in person time, which we mostly satisfy with ad-hoc whiteboarding sessions, but we've gotten good at doing even that in video calls.

When we do get together, it's for team lunches, mini-golf tournaments, etc.

It's great.

My co has people in TO, NYC, London, with most of us around but not necessarily in Ottawa.
> As far as I can tell every instance of these "soft sciences" are just an arm of the geopolitical body/state that backs them...with the sole purpose of rationalizing what ever that states status quo is.

This is 100% a sociological take though. Ie: it is in part doing sociology. Perhaps without knowing it, you've arrived at an Althusserian perspective on structuralism through the lens of conflict theory.

Do you suppose that these institutions be systematically studied and can we build models of how they work to reproduce the status quo?
I run a small network, but this might come across as advertising. It’s been running for 20 years now.

People come and go, but its wild how the community spirit largely remains, even with significant changes in the lifestyle of the people that have been frequenting the network for a large segment of that time.

anyway, the network is:

* ircs://irc.darkscience.net:6697/darkscience

* https://darkscience.net

* https://www.darkscience.net/webirc/
> Why do they all listen to classical music? Why, because there is no culture of course. Nothing new has happened culturally since our era.

That's an interesting read on it, but the most likely reason is simply because the writers had a high regard for classical music.

But nevertheless I'm reminded of the Zentraedi from Macross, who were created as a warrior underclass to protect the interests of the spacefaring Protoculture (ancient precursor beings; it's implied that humans are descendants of a stranded Protoculture colony). They are genetically engineered and raised with enough knowledge to fight interstellar battles, but not really do anything else. They know how to use their battleships and mechs and stuff, but not how to repair them. Even their language is a restricted, Newspeak-like version of Protoculture language with plenty of words suitable for battle but a dearth of words for other purposes (there is no word for "friendship" or "love"; there is only "ally" and "not-ally"). They have no culture to speak of.

So the first love song they hear causes them to utterly go to pieces. It's what wins the war for the humans, as sure as our germs did against the Martians in War of the Worlds.

This also calls to mind one of our real attempts at utopia -- the Soviet Union, whose citizens smuggled in Western music and fashion because their own culture had stagnated.
Social media was a very strong nail in the coffin, no argument there. But the 90's optimism absolutely died that day.
I would check out react three fiber if you want to see how people are building things like this. It essentially brings a component model to three js development and creates good standards for sharable code since things are just react hooks.

Rapier was brand new when I was making things in R3F 2 years ago. Glad to see how mature it’s gotten!
Tailwind CSS v4.0 is in beta
Antenna Diodes in the Pentium Processor
As someone approaching 40, who was a techno-optimist back then and still generally techno-optimistic today, I'm feeling increasingly out of place in the tech world. As evidenced by this blog post and the vast majority of comments here, I'd say the HN-adjacent space is majority negative on technology.

But I wonder how many people have had a change of heart, and how much is just the influx of younger people and others with different opinions. Now that tech went through a "glamorous" phase, and is still in a "lucrative" phase, it certainly has a much broader draw.

It's fine for people to update their beliefs with their experiences, I'm just curious if the cause is that vs new people with different beliefs. I haven't really been on social media (other than curated subreddits and HN, I suppose), and I have a lovely wife and children and lots of real life time, too, so I feel like I don't doom scroll or anything. I wonder how much that's colored people's opinions vs first hand experiences.

As a simple example, the tech ethics question du jour when I was coming of age was whether it was okay to pirate music. Of course it was, it's free to copy bits! "You wouldn't download a car" etc. But I don't see a ton of daylight between that and training those songs on an AI model, but now generative AI is destroying those industries and musicians, etc. And HN these days seems largely against the AI training, while it was for pirating back then.

Or another example, slightly before that was the Clipper Chip and the government trying to regulate encryption for the safety and security of citizens, and the PGP guys being folk heroes for printing their source code in a book to take advantage of free speech protections and get around it. Whereas these days a good chunk of HN wants the government to regulate AI models for our own safety. This one is a bit of a stretch, but it feels like the problems "rhyme" at least.
In this context, the difference is that intelligence agencies have a bigger budget: the cited hack does not show that an ordinary criminal budget would be sufficient.
This would have been illegal in Italy has their 1970 Worker Protection against automated management would kill this AI.
If you really value faculty involvement etc, I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like. That's as opposed to relying on a proxy like student/faculty ratios, low rankings or being a state school. Each state runs its own state schools (and some cities like NY have their own) and have wildly different levels of funding and support for education. And being public does not make them immune from going the adjunct all the way route.

Student faculty ratios can be reported using "full time equivalent" faculty. Meaning, your class of less than 20 students might not have a more available professor, because they're actually also teaching at 2 other universities in the same system to make ends meet. It's not the ratio to the number of tenured faculty, adjuncts count.

For class size, you can have dozens of small classes nobody takes, and have giant lectures for the core intro classes everyone takes. Then the average class size of the classes offered is quite small, but the average class size of the classes you take is quite large.
9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing
Just the guts of the simulation showing through at higher resolutions.
Most likely

1. Fear and embarrassment. Back then the expectation was that online you were anonymous, today you constantly hear about doxxing. People were also less aware of the consequences.Even if it's unlikely for some random person, that doesn't help introverts.

2. Outnumbered. Back then the internet was mostly weird people, so most posts including the popular ones were weird. Today, "new" and "random" are filled with spam, and "popular" is filled with posts upvoted by "normies". Weird posts and posters are still here, but they're obscured by the noise.

3. Feedback. People imitate what they see, and feel more comfortable following trends. When "normal" people see weird posts, they become weird and make weird posts. When weird people see weird posts, they feel safer and make weird posts. When normal people see non-weird posts, they make non-weird posts. When weird people don't see weird posts, they feel embarrassed making weird posts, so post non-weird or not at all.

I think 3 is the biggest factor, caused by 2. As other people mentioned, "weird" people are still on servers that are private or otherwise hidden from the mainstream (preventing 2 and 3). 1 is probably not a big factor, instead it explains why less people show their face or post identifying details.
It's still common. Nobody really cares if a site is offline for a few minutes. You try again later (or not, but so what). Heck, nobody cares if they are offline for half the day, it gets fixed and at the end of it it's just a post-mortem for the nerds to read and a shrug and life goes on for everyone else. People vastly overestimate the importance of anything that is on the public internet. None of it is life-critical (if it is, it certainly should not depend on an internet connection or a web server being up).
I don't think any of them are non-starters, indeed I think one should have been given immediately without Moscow asking. But this is obviously going to be a long thread and that isn't the area that is most interesting to me about your opinions.

> I didn’t.

This on the other hand is. So what concessions do you think the US is willing to make if Moscow negotiates? Because the last time I asked I got a "In reality? Publicly announce the U.S. will not honour Article V if Russia leaves un-annexed portions of Ukraine". And there is no way that that is something the US is going to offer, since that is more than Putin was asking to before the war started. Even the mildest options on your list were things like "treaty guarantee Ukraine wouldn't be admitted into NATO" which was asked for in pre-war negotiations and rejected by NATO - people made a big deal about how no, if Ukraine want they are eventually going to join NATO and there is nothing the Russians could do about it. The NATO negotiators would much rather have this war happen & continue than make concessions like that - we can tell because that is what they did and are doing.

If you don't think these suggestions are serious - I'm struggling to understand your position here but it seems that you might be just throwing out ideas - what do you think is on offer at the negotiating table? Russia tried negotiating and it doesn't cut much ice with NATO, that is why we have this stupid war. I assume I'm misinterpreting your comment on the topic, so hopefully some exposition and clarification by yourself will help.

I reiterate that I think Russia is being offered, to a first approximation anyway, "give up, admit defeat and let the US do what it wants". I'm interested to see what you think the Russians can get from negotiating that they can't get from effectively surrendering.

> Armchair generals in the voting public forgetting about SLBMs.

My armchair staff were of the opinion that SLBM were not part of the conversation since they were deployed at sea rather than to nations. I'd be happy if everyone abided by that condition if it does include SLBM, it seems like a good idea to me. Those things nearly triggered a nuclear exchange in the Cuban Missile Crisis, they are too risky and will, literally, eventually get us all killed. And while avoiding nuclear war might give Russia and China the upper hand, I've been pointing out for years that the US's industrial and financial policies are going to put it at a major material disadvantage to anyone who adopts more competent policies. Their foreign policy is also on that list of things they are screwing up.
Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a giant free fussion reactor!

Close enough to get the energy, but far enough away to allow isolation of the reaction.

Maybe the energy could just beam down on us from space?

That'd be awesome...
Conclusion: most of us don't need AI in the same way most of us don't need a chainsaw.

"We’re all mostly just regular people interacting with other regular people, trying to go about our business and get through our days. Nobody’s asking us to index and catalog entire libraries of information. Nobody really cares if we reuse a stock photo that somebody else might have used somewhere else at some point. We’re not so busy that we need everything predigested before it’s presented to us. We’re still clever enough to work our way through unfamiliar problems. Some of us, I would have to think, still possess the ability and the desire to produce some sort of output in our chosen medium without relinquishing creative control to AI."
Why do people keep trying to create Utopian visions?
> How many machines have you all used with a CD Player that had "Save Track As..." built in as a standard option.

The CD Player in BeOS could save all or parts of CD Tracks. Also, BeOS would show CDs as a directory of numbered AIFF or WAV files, I can't remember which. There was also some optional software that wold look up the CD info up with CDDB and would show the track names in the Tracker (the BeOS file manager)
What do you mean, and? They're clarifying the original point, as was expressly requested in the parent comment. The image undoubtedly has some amount of "artistic freedom" taken. What threshold decides when an image becomes more art than science is a parameter that each person is free to decide for themselves. I think it's absolutely relevant to discussion to point out that there might be more "artistic freedom" in this image than most might believe, especially when the post is about photos of the sun of a much more scientific and exact nature.
They're making noise, but they will absolutely not act on them. That would be a career ending event for many political figures in both countries.
> I think it's simpler than that: we sold out.

> Tech in the 80s and 90s was the land of curious geeks who played with it because it was interesting, or because they had a goal they wanted to enable

For me it was tech in the 90’s and 00’s so I think the real explanation is even simpler: we grew up.

It’s very easy to be pure of intention and intellectual curiosity when mom fills the fridge.
> VB6 was the best IDE by far for people that get things done right now.

No, it was second-best. The best was Delphi. (And now possibly Lazarus.)
Replacing Pencil and Paper with Latex for Math
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_origination_beyond_planet...
The word "mélange" has been here longer than chainsaws, but I wouldn't trust 90% of people to use it correctly either
Problem Solving and Combinatorial Explosion
Honestly? So far the most problematic EVs I've seen are from Mercedes, Tesla and South Koreans EVs suffer much less, Chinese EVs much, much, much less... I do not know who much investments have all automakers but...
We’re on HN; regardless of the validity of your point, there’s less inflammatory ways to word it.