skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it quite the arbitrary distinction you're making it out to be. If you were cloned every time you went to sleep, and those clones awoke with the same memories you had before going to bed.
Would you consider all of those clones' consciousnesses to be part of your own? Surely not, because you're not experiencing them, you're only experiencing your own. This means that the "you", in this case, is the self reflective portion of the collection of interpretations of sensory stimulus and memories, whereas consciousness is that collection as a whole. That's why these clones can't possibly be "you", because if there's no sensory stimulus being experienced or interpreted by your brain, then there is no consciousness and there certainly is no "you". What this ends up meaning is that "you" are necessarily bound to the mechanical component that interprets stimuli. That component can be adjusted over time, but the process must be interpreted in such a way that it seems gradual enough that your brain can still recognize those intermediary interpretations as "you".

So, when you state that robo brain is still "you", I have to disagree. While robo-brain can still believe it's "you", it can't possibly be "you", as "you" could potentially still exist in the original biomechanical device, which isn't interpreting the new body's stimuli, and thus not building a sensory profile based on the stimulus. Even if there was a transfer that resulted in the original device's (i.e. your body) death, the new body still couldn't be considered "you" as there isn't anything physically different about the two scenarios for the body.

Of course, if you consider every clone to be an extension of your consciousness, then you could argue all this. But at that point I think we'd have vastly different interpretations on what consciousness and "you" are. You could also argue that there is something physically different about the two scenarios presented in the robo-brain example, but the only way I can imagine a sincere argument for that is if you told me it was due to the transference of some soul-like entity. But, of course, if you were to tell me that, I would simply disagree.
Standing is more comfortable than sitting in those tiny seats so you'd have to pay extra.
I'm replacing things that I used to delegate to juniors with generated code. Because it's quicker and better. And there's a category of stuff I used to not bother with at all that I'm also taking on. Because I can get it done in a reasonable time frame. It's more fun for me for sure and I definitely am more productive because of it.

My feeling is that this stuff is not bottle-necked on model quality but on UX. Chat is not that great of an interface. Copy pasting blobs of text back to an editor seems like it is a bit monkey work. And monkey work should be automated.

With AI interactions now being able to call functions, what we need is deeper integration with the tools we use. Refactor this, rename that. Move that function here. Etc. There's no need for it to imagine these things perfectly it just needs to use the tools that make that happen. IDEs have a large API surface but a machine readable description of that easily fits in a context window.

Recently chat gpt added the ability to connect applications. So, I can jump into a chat, connect Intellij to the chat and ask it a question about code in my open editor. Works great and is better than me just copy pasting that to a chat window. But why can't it make a modification for me? It still requires me to copy text back to the editor and then hope it will work.

Addressing that would be the next logical step. Do it such that I can review what it did and undo any damage. But it could be a huge time saver. And it would also save some tokens. Because a lot of code it generates is just echoing what I already had with only a few lines modification. I want it to modify those lines and not risk hallucinating introducing mistakes into the rest, which is a thing you have to worry about.

The other issue is that iterating on code gets progressively harder as there's more of it and it needs to regenerate more of it at every step. That's a UX problem as well. It stems from the context being an imperfect abstraction of my actual code. Applying a lot of small/simple changes to code would be much easier than re-imagining the entire thing from scratch every time. Most of my conversations the code under discussion diverges from what I have in my editor. At some point continuing the conversation becomes pointless and I just start a new one with the actual code. Which is tedious because now I'm dealing with ground hog day of having to explain the same context again. More monkey work. And if you do it wrong, you have to do it over and over again. It's amazing that it works but also quite tedious.
For companies, whose main service is not the website/app itself, no one forces them to run a website. They are doing it for publicity reasons in one way or another. Putting extra ads or tracking there is trying to make more money from something that should in itself make them money already, by making them more widely known, possibly motivating people to use their actual services.

It is unacceptable behavior. I do check how much uBlock Origin has to block for a website of a business and that does inform my opinion of them quite severely. Biggest detractor: Google analytics. It will always be blocked, and not be loaded, but if I see it on their website, expect my opinion of them to fall quite a few levels. Combine that with some JS only website, then they are already lost. I then know they neither care about user experience nor accessibility, and if that was a potential enployer, they would have dropped out of that category, because I don't want to work in a dystopia shop.
> What I don’t see (yet) are these tools delivering for non developers

Technically, you never will. Anyone who uses these tools in that way becomes a developer.
It's impressive. I want to be a doubter and say I feel like it just shows what you can do with tailwind/typescript in getting a nice UI out, but it really would be genuinely useful for some cases.

The problem I have with it is that how do you get out of a corner with it? Once I start having problems with the application -- I asked it to generate a search engine for different websites, but one of the API endpoints wasn't working. It kept trying over and over again but failed to get it working.

It's - like other attempts I've had with AI - more frustrating to work with. It'll say "I fixed this" and then have a problem where it created more problems with what it's fixing. I thought it finally worked 100% but it just made it look better by breaking something else without actually fixing the issue.

Admittedly, it took what might have been a day's work into a couple hours, but now I have a chunk of code that I don't understand and will be deliberately harder to understand than if I wrote it myself.

It still feels like I'm trying to coax an intern into working a project, rather than having an application that actually does the work for me.
Don't work in ads, never did, don't make money from them.

I don't mind ads one bit, except video unskipable ones. I find stuff to buy there all the time, or discover new tools, sometimes I'll buy an equivalent thing years later that I remember I found first in an ad.

If I want to research competitors to something, I just google the something and click the ads.

And I also like that I like something that makes so many people pissed off.
As the adage goes:

If you aim for the stars and fail, you'll end up on the moon.
People used to joke about charging for a carry on. Yes it will come that you have to pay for the personal item/space under your feet is my prediction
I have worked with juniors. Those who use AI copy bad code without learning anything. Those who learn and will become seniors are not using AI. We will have a massive reduction in the amount of seniors (good for me, not good for programming in general).
Yes. I also notice that ads in magazines and newspapers aren't nearly as annoying as ads on a screen, so I don't mind them as much.
Fur seals are closer to canids than other seals, and could be an intermediate host.
Although I no longer pay for a subscription and can't be certain, I used to have a paid subscription to The Pragmatic Engineer and I'm pretty sure the paragraph "brought to you by X, Y and Z" was still included in each post. I don't think there's any other advertising on the site. Might not quite meet your definition.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/
Surely MS wouldn't abuse that trust.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42245124
It's not a scam, it's a proof of work.
Looks like a great course.

I’m sorry to say my experience has been “Android = pain” as far as the oldies are concerned. Had years supporting MiL and her endless devices. Then two years ago we got her an iPad instead. Support requirement has dropped to pretty much nil.
I like the idea of subject or source focused ad feeds that I can choose to see, but are never thrown in face without my explicit request.

That is a win-win-win for everyone. If the ad feed has a clear focus its viewers will even be self-selected for ad relevancy without surveillance & manipulation involved.

Being able to discover what products their creators/suppliers are trying to popularize on my timing and topic terms is a worthwhile service.
LSE publishes Charles Booth's poverty maps
I wonder if they're using appendvfs, too https://www.sqlite.org/src/file/ext/misc/appendvfs.c

> This file implements a VFS shim that allows an SQLite database to be appended onto the end of some other file, such as an executable.

(A quick search of their codebase reveals no results for "appendvfs", so I guess not. So single-file was a lie!)
Just look at spreadsheets.
A more mathematically rigorous implementation might consider the incompleteness theorems and actually need a third option between true and false (i.e. undecidable). There are non-Boolean algebras out there, such as Kleene's. So us seeing Boolean algebra as the king is mostly a historic outgrowth, not a fundamental truth.
Django/Rails-like platforms revolutionised programming for the web, people take web frameworks for granted now but it wasn't always like that.

And PHP (the programming language) just before that, that was a huge change in "democratising" programming and making it easier, we wouldn't have had the web of the last 20-25 years without PHP.
I always treat various AI tools like an intern. You have to oversee it.
Which is the actual product.
Does anyone know why gitea is developed on GitHub?
> Even though Fred Brooks explained why in 1986. There are essential tasks and there are accidental tasks. The tools really only help with the accidental tasks.

I don't know this reference, so I have to ask: Was "accidental" supposed to be "incidental"? Because I don't see how "accidental" makes any sense.
20 years ago when the industry-created problem of making checking a bag such a horrible choice didn't exist...
In my company the official policy is that nobody but the admins gets administrator privileges. If you need them the workflow is that you go to IT and they do what is necessary. Or they just might say no. People had to complain that makes work impossible for them and will cost the company a lot of money so that they got exceptions -- but only after escalation to upper management.

I think this was a security directive that came from the top.
If you aim for the stars and fail, you end up going in circles for all eternity.
Definitely not "fully" as required an additional purchase and planning of what to record. Normal usage of sitting down and turning on the TV to what something being shown at the time does not have skippable advertising.

Whenever I'm in the US and turn on a TV I'm always amazed at the amount of advertising and the effect it has on the media itself. One of the effects of streaming services was that it allowed script writers and producers total freedom from having to structure a story around the ad breaks.
The NHS was properly sabotaged by the Tories, exactly because they wanted to privatise it. Starving the NHS has been per design, no accident there.

- https://tribunemag.co.uk/2023/07/defunding-the-nhs
This is a bad take. Ads are not the problem. Behavioural ads with suriveillance and data economy is. Static ads or contextual ads are the answer. Some of the best examples I can think of on the top of my head is duckduckgo.com and https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

Paywall doesn't stop data surveillance. All the news sites have become paywalled because ads revenue dried up because people installing ad blockers and are more aware of privacy. But now, not only don't they not provide content for free, but also make you pay and collect your data as well.

- Go to most of the major news sites in firefox.

- Install noscript extension

- See the bizillion scripts that loads.

Note: You can load all these scripts indirectly with google tag manager or platforms like cloudflare zaraz etc. So you won't even directly see the analytics script that is loaded in a website. Just google tag manager etc.

Ads are a good way to make revenue when it is done right. Behavioural ads makes it the worst it the problem we should be solving. It makes sense from the business POV as well. You cut the middlemen like facebook and google and get paid premium directly. You curate the ads for your product/website. People want to just plug in an api call and generate money. That won't fly anymore with users being aware.
I'd disagree that OS/2 was "worthless garbage", as MS would keep using it for several generations for their server/LAN OS.

I'd argue that OS/2 2.x was pretty much a ground-up re-write, as OS/2 1.x had been written for 16-bit 286 protected mode and not the 32-bit 386 protected mode which the next version targeted.
IBM did insist that the new version run all of the 1.x 16 bit stuff, but like DOS and Win 3.x mode this was done through some virtualization if memory serves.

The big hurdle OS/2 faced was being memory hungry at a time when memory prices were still high and when the installed base had less then half of the required amount by default.
Yes, hence why "if you have nothing to hide" is infamously so stupid a phrase. You don't get to decide that, the accuser does and who the accuser is may vary and may in fact be utterly deranged by all normal points of view. You don't want the information out there period because it can only end in an especially twisted form of Pascal's Wager based upon who is in power at the moment. And that this is not in fact a paranoid hypothetical but something very real which has happened throughout history.
IIRC 10 year old report states 100 million usd net worth is enough to buy whatever you want.
You left out the freedom that's supposedly missing from streaming now.
I wonder how most of the world reacted to the news of the death of the leader of Hamas... or how they'd react to the news of Putin's death. Etc, etc.

BTW thinking the comments of people outside of your bubble to be fraudulent seems... elitist.
Hardly, if you worked with the web in the mid 90’s, modern tooling is a much larger improvement than what LLMs bring to the table on their own. Of course they aren’t on their own, people are leveraging generations of improvements and then stacking yet another boost on top of them.

Programming today is literally hundreds of times more productive than in 1950. It doesn’t feel that way because of scope creep, but imagine someone trying to create a modern AAA game using only assembly and nothing else. C didn’t show up until the 70’s, and even Fortran was a late 50’s invention. Go far enough back and people would set toggle switches and insert commands that way no keyboards whatsoever.

Move forward to the 1960’s and people coded on stacks of punch cards and would need to wait for access to a compiler overnight. So just imagine the productivity boost of a text editor and a compiler. I’m not taking an IDE with syntax checks etc, just a simple text editor was a huge step up.

And so forth.
The old antarctic stations and huts are littered with corpses, from dogs to ponies to seals to penguins to bits of whale. The first thing you see upon entering Scott’s hut on Ross Island is a giant stinking heap of blubber, and the stables are still full of corpses. The dead dogs outside are still chained and collared, for all eternity.

The Antarctic conditions preserve bodies for a long time - in the dry valleys, there are freeze-dried seals who have been there for tens of millennia - the only thing that wears them down is the relentless wind.
It sounds like the grandparent poster is maybe talking about OS/2 1.x, which was definitely hamstrung by 286 compatibility.

But OS/2 2.0 was practically a 32-bit rewrite of the entire system with a new GUI too. It certainly was competitive with the first versions of Windows NT.
Intel won't go down after receiving the billions it did for foundries. The USA doesn't burn money. IBM 2.0
Don't feel you are unique, there are a lot of you out there and Google et all love you.
The "eager junior" takes 1-2 days to come back with the solution, AI takes 3-4 seconds.
Why is the company hiring a new security team each year? Where the ownership and strategic thinking?

Sounds like your organisation is extremely dysfunctional, and the ridiculous security you have is a symptom of that. None of that is inevitable.
A dictator, sure, but also a breath of fresh air from the previous regime that went on a mass-murdering spree.
Kim Dotcom unable to communicate effectively following stroke, lawyer says
> BTW thinking the comments of people outside of your bubble to be fraudulent seems... elitist.

Well I didn't say that, and I even noted that I recognize my bias in the matter, but ignoring the widespread use of bots to shape narratives online for various purposes and taking social media comments at face value to indicate actual public perception in 2024 seems... naive.
It might be the Showstopper book or similar one, but I seem to remember Cutler's core team on NT was less than 10 devs
The mother of all bubbles the US has never been so overhyped
You download a single executable file and execute it and it runs everything needed.
I would say, how it has helped me is :

My prof's teaching is not that good, he skips several things (not basic) while teaching & when I refer textbook, I don't get it.

Theorem consists of several statements, conditions, and understanding of those things where & why they are required, what happens without those conditions?

To understand theorems, I never asked it for providing examples. But I asked it to prove some difficult exercises from textbook and it was able to do it. In my experience, all this improves my learning.

Also sometimes for problem solving, I want to know, what are different techniques to solve that problem. And it does very good job.

I've never asked it to do basic additions or calculation, because I have heard from others, it does calculation wrong.

Some times it couldn't answer average question. But for my use case, I find it extremely beneficial.
Nor literature about AI taking over the world!
I think they meant it as a acronym potentially? But the "big 4" are typically to refer to the accounting firms.

"big 3" are for management consulting? Bain, Boston, and mckinsey? Or does deloitte fit in there? Anyway neither here nor there.
Whenever I see a DB written Java, I run, very fast and very far away.

I've never had good experience with these implementations. If you say, the DB isn't performing well, the only answer you get is, well you forgot to tune these 1000 knobs and good luck if your data doesn't fit in RAM.

For some reason I feel your DB in a text file, would fare just as good as these given the same memory and resources that these Apache/java DB servers demand.
> Low growth

For 2024 prediction is 2.6% US and 4.8% China. I don't see how it's low compared to US.

> high unemployment

5.1% China vs 4.1% USA

> huge debt from infrastructure spending

What do you mean by "huge" and compared to whom? The U.S. is currently running a $2 trillion deficit per year, which is about 6% of GDP, with only a fraction allocated to investments.

> weakening capital markets and real estate

China's economy operates differently from that of the U.S. Currently, China records monthly trade surpluses ranging between $80 billion and $100 billion.
The real estate sector indeed presents challenges, leading the government to inject funds into local government to manage the resulting debt. The effectiveness of these measures remains to be seen.

There is a lot of wishful thinking on HN regarding the rivalry between China and the U.S
Poe's Law in action again!

There's a certain point where difference in degree becomes difference in kind.

An accountant working for a major company which does evil things is a very small piece of the puzzle, the rank and file need a salary to live their day-to-day, there's an open job and they apply so they can live their lives.

The CEO is directly taking action to drive the company to harm people, it's their leadership who materialises the evilness, it's their leadership in pursuit of a fucking large paycheck who directly decides that harming thousands of people is worth it for earning a big paycheck.

This is a huge difference in kind of evilness, don't conflate them.
The general perception, and often true, checking a bag means losing it or waiting two hours.

So it makes you wonder if the airlines are even putting any pressure on airport operators to improve baggage operations when it allows such commercial opportunities for the airline. Seems like a win win
"single file"

https://github.com/trailbaseio/trailbase/blob/main/Cargo.loc...
Shipping and diving logs is a bad idea for anything other than last line debug defence.

If you're going to agregate your logs, you're much better off converting them to metrics _on device_. it makes comparison much easier, and storage and pensioning trivial.
A minimalistic single C-file text editor for terminal fanatics
Whenever a lecturer responded to a student's complaint about other group members doing no work by saying something like "I don't care, work it out amongst yourselves, in the real world you have to be able to work in groups", I would think to myself "in the real world, people who refuse to do work get fired".
Barring the insider trading case (where Rajat Gupta was largely an smaller accomplice to most of Rajaratnam's scheme), Rajat's rags to riches story is actually extremely inspiring. Perhaps he did not benefit from having good mentors - his mentor-professor at IIT Delhi being slimey Subramanian Swamy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subramanian_Swamy
You might like property based testing.
The Mythical Man-Month, by Fred Brooks.

Chapter 16 is named "No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering."

I'll type out the beginning of the abstract at the beginning of the chapter here:

"All software construction involves essential tasks, the fashioning of the complex conceptual structures that compose the abstract software entity, and accidental tasks, the representation of these abstract entities in programming languages and the mapping of these onto machine languages within space and speed constraints. Most of the big past gains in software productivity have come from removing artificial barriers that have made the accidental tasks inordinately hard, such as severe hardware constraints, awkward programming languages, lack of machine time. How much of what software engineers now do is still devoted to the accidental, as opposed to the essential? Unless it is more than 9/10 of all effort, shrinking all the accidental activities to zero time will not give an order of magnitude improvement."