skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True but I think Spolsky meant it more as a metaphor for understanding users' psychology. Knowledge workers need empathy and creativity to solve important problems.

And design, product intuition, contextual knowledge in addition to the marketing, sales, accounting, support and infrastructure required to sell software at scale.

LLMs can help but it remains to be seen how much they can create outside of the scope of the data they were trained on.
The thing is, if they wanted to influence an election they could easily do it. They could start to feed you content which is bias towards "their" candidate, and there is no way you could probe they did that intentionally because "it's just an algorithm".

They don't need to and it would be too risky and not worth the tech debt tbh.

lol, a targeted propaganda machine would be worth every bit of a tech debt for an authoritarian regime.
My take on the Post Pretraining world
I wrote up a long form on Twitter / X on Ilya Sutskever's talk at NeurIPS about the post pretraining world, and just wanted to share it with the HN community!
My favorite serde format is Msgpack since it can be dropped in for an almost one-to-one replacement of JSON. There's also CBOR which is based on MsgPack but has diverged a bit and added and a data definition language too (CDDL).

Take JSON-RPC and replace JSON with MsgPack for better handling of integer and float types. MsgPack/CBOR are easy to parse in place directly into stack objects too. It's super fast even on embedded. I've been shipping it for years in embedded projects using a Nim implementation for ESP32s (1) and later made a non-allocating version (2). It's also generally easy to convert MsgPack/CBOR to JSON for debugging, etc.

There's also an IoT focused RPC based on CBOR that's an IETF standard and a time series format (3). The RPC is used a fair bit in some projects.

1: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper/blob/devel/src/nesper/ser...
2: https://github.com/EmbeddedNim/fastrpc
3: https://hal.science/hal-03800577v1/file/Towards_a_Standard_T...
Import substitution is not an alternative to basic industrialization. It's a policy advocated as a means to achieve basic industrialization. I regret that my comment was so misleading.

The usual alternative to import substitution industrialization is export-focused industrialization. Argentina and Brazil exemplify the former; Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and now the PRC exemplify the latter. The line between them is whether the country's manufactures are widely exported.
> I definitely expect them to improve. But I also think the point at which they can actually replace a senior programmer is pretty much the exact point at which they can replace any knowledge worker, at which point western society (possibly all society) is in way deeper shit than just me being out of a job.

Agree with this take. I think the probability that this happens within my next 20 years of work is very low, but are non-zero. I do cultivate skills that are a hedge against this, and if time moves on and the probability of this scenario seems to get larger and larger, I'll work harder on those skills. Things like fixing cars, welding, fabrication, growing potatoes, etc (which I already enjoy as hobbies). As you said, skills that are helpful if shit were to really hit the fan.

I think there are other "knowledge workers" that will get replaced before that point though, and society will go through some sort of upheaval as this happens. My guess is that capital will get even more consolidated, which is sort of unpleasant to think about.
> That makes an assumption that throwing dollars on AI training is a surefire way to solve the many shortcomings of LLMs. It is a very optimistic assumption.

That's not an assumption that I am personally making. That's what experts in the field believe.

> "The Internet" basically encompasses all meaningful sources of data available, especially if we are talking specifically about software development. But even beyond that, it is very unclear what other high quality data it would consume that would improve the things.

How about, interacting with the world?

> I love how you conveniently sidestepped the part where I ask if it would improve the pervasive issue of generating plausibly sounding bullshit.

I was not trying to "conveniently sidestep". To me, that reads like a more emotional wording of the first question you asked, which is if LLM's are expected to improve. To that question I answered yes.

> The assumption that generative AI will improve is as valid as the assumption that it will plateau.

It is certainly not as valid to say that generative AI will plateau. This is comparable to saying that the odds of winning any bet are 50/50, because you either win or lose. Probabilities are a thing. And the probability that the trend will plateau is lower than not.

> It is quite possible that what we are seeing is "as good as it gets", and some major breakthrough, that may or may not happen on our lifetime, is needed.

It's also possible that dolphins are sentient aliens sent here to watch over us.
Saving the sun's energy and storing it – with mirrors
> I love the idea of an IDL for describing APIs and a great compiler/codegen (protoc)

Me too. My context is that I end up using RPC-ish patterns when doing slightly out-of-the-ordinary web stuff, like websockets, iframe communications, and web workers.

In each of those situations you start with a bidirectional communication channel, but you have to build your own request-response layer if you need that. JSON-RPC is a good place to start, because the spec is basically just "agree to use `id` to match up requests and responses" and very little else of note.

I've been looking around for a "minimum viable IDL" to add to that, and I think my conclusion so far is "just write out a TypeScript file". This works when all my software is web/TypeScript anyway.
The card you might have paid with is though. I can’t remember any instances of a card hack revealing transactions of customers though (I might be wrong, just doesn’t ring a bell).

It’s not a given that digital record must lead to compromise.
Yes, of course. As a matter of fact -- I will be using one of those solutions myself and pair it with HA.

>I never paired my opener with any app nor do I have it on WiFi.

The opener may be advertising "configure me" network (WiFi or BT) -- which (in theory, depending on how bad did they screw the security up) could allow anyone to pair their app with your opener.

I think it might be better to add it to the network but firewall it off No ingress or egress. This is just so that it no longer advertises the configuration network.

Putting it into a faraday cage should also work but I suppose the firewall way is faster
No, not at all. You need to consider your service's risks against those seventeen categories once, and then review your assessment at least every year.

From the linked document above: "You need to keep a record of each illegal content risk assessment you carry out", "service providers may fully review their risk assessment (for example, as a matter of course every year)"

And links to a guidance document on reviewing the risk assessment[1] which says: "As a minimum, we consider that service providers should undertake a compliance review once a year".

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli...
I think you have to install the plugins for the main Dillo build, right? Whereas Dillo+ builds them in?

And Dillo+ has a reader mode.

Anyway, I see Dillo links to these other projects - just curious if the development goes both ways.
The amazing DIY Perks made a PS5 Portable back in January: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4PHhurAhwc
Why probability probably doesn't exist (but it is useful to act like it does)
Ollama Chat – Ollama Chat Interface for VSCode
In a long train ride over the weekend I made this little tool to chat with Ollama from VSCode.

I don't like AI assisted code completion as I find it distracting, but I like the convenience of not changing windows to look up the signature of `.reduce`.

It's very basic and honestly quite buggy (take a look at the issues) but I thought I'd share it here. If somebody else finds it interesting I can polish it up.
I bailed out of the industry entirely. Having fallen back on basic tool use skills I picked up during my 20s spent bouncing around in the trades I'm feeling pretty comfortable that AI doesn't pose a meaningful threat to my livelihood.
Estimating projects sells them short (and that's okay)
I was tired of long financial articles, ads, noise, and clickbait. Therefore, I decided to leverage AI to help me scan major news articles and aggregate any insights using data analytics.

I think it's pretty insightful and would appreciate any feedback on what type of information might be missing.

Sharing this with the trading community and seeing if there are any improvements you think I can make.
don't tell this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421245
Yes I think decoy drones will be critical to extending the useful lifespan of submarines, and perimeter drone defense critical to deep water.

But I think the Ukraine war has shown that shallow water navies are totally vulnerable to drones. So the purported numerical advantage of the current Chinese navy is basically worthless.

If course it is debatable if our deep water Navy can withstand missile guidance tech from the 1970s.
> The more I speak with fellow engineers, the more I hear that some of them are either using AI to help them code, or feed entire projects to AI and let the AI code, while they do code review and adjustments.

I don't see this trend. It just sounds like a weird thing to say, it fundamentally misunderstands what the job is

From my experience, software engineering is a lot more human than how it gets portrayed in the media. You learn the business you're working with, who the stakeholders are, who needs what, how to communicate your changes and to whom. You're solving problems for other people. In order to do that, you have to understand what their needs are

Maybe this reflects my own experience at a big company where there's more back and forth to deal with. It's not glamorous or technically impressive, but no company is perfect

If what companies really want is just some cheap way to shovel code, LLMs are more expensive and less effective than the other well known way of cheaping out
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42113113
Yeah my thoughts exactly. Better to just get the election done and move on.
E.g. the article is about their 5th grade math teacher.
Ask HN: Digital Declutter – How?
It's this time of the year when it's easy to set some too optimistic goals for the next year.

Seriously limiting my time spent online has been pretty high on my list for some years already, but except for some rather short stretches of time, it's been a failure. Inevitably I go back to checking news, HN, social medias etc. way too much.
Only things that work for me are the ones that increase the friction of getting around them to get online.

This year I'm considering getting a dumb phone, blocking most of the websites on the router's firewall and changing router's password.

Any tips and stories to share on what worked for you ?
Well I'm a little outside my league on SELinux, but as I understand it, SELinux a way to limit syscalls by configuration.

io_uring operations are similar to syscalls, but not exactly the same thing, so if I've read up correctly, I think SELinux originally may not have covered operations --- if the config allowed you to use io_uring, you could bypass SELinux restrictions, and the easiest/safest thing to do for that is to restrict io_uring. I think this may have been resolved, it looks like there was work on SELinux controls for io_uring back in 2021 [1] that looks like it got merged, but I haven't really followed this. There's also the issue that what happened in Linus's tree 2021 doesn't necessarily reflect what's in common kernels in 2024; some distributions are built from ancient branches.

Based on the language in the pull request, I would think you'd end up needing to have near duplicate policy entries for regular syscalls and io_uring operations, which sounds tedious (but the whole SELinux thing sounds tedious to me, so I'm maybe not the right person to ask :D )

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHC9VhRJ=fHzMHM6tt8JqkZa4bf0h7...
I got access to the preview, here's what it gave me for "A pelican riding a bicycle along a coastal path overlooking a harbor" - this video has all four versions shown:

https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/pelicans-on-bic...

Of the four two were a pelican riding a bicycle. One was a pelican just running along the road, one was a pelican perched on a stationary bicycle, and one had the pelican wearing a weird sort of pelican bicycle helmet.

All four were better than what I got from Sora: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/9/sora/
Don't whales communicate across oceans with moans?
Perhaps, but a lot of these arguments have been used for Starbucks, where it seems like their relentless streamlining and price increases have been catching up with them.

McD's has been on a similar path, and have reintroduced $5 meal deals in an attempt to bring customers that have been priced out back.
He had inherited an empire held together by brute force. When this force weakened, intentionally or due to economics, it fell apart. It is hard to maintain an empire and be humane at the same time. And he wasn’t always, but even that wasn’t enough to keep everyone aligned. In 1991 former fellows tried to correct him but they failed, and he lost both the throne and the country. Yeltsin later betrayed democracy twice plausibly to save it from the restoration. So did other fellow leaders. There was hardly any other possible outcome after that.
Okay upon further investigation it does appear I was incorrect about that case. I'm glad to have been, that was very concerning and scary. My mistake.

However there are still some concerning cases - a girl was punished for posting song lyrics:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
100 Miles literally don't matter. Even 1000. On average accidents happens every 500k miles.

Are you ready to have your tesla drive FSD with you sleeping in it for 500k?
You are letting your feeling dictate that FSD is ready. The math is more complicated.
The problem is that evaluating quality is nigh impossible these days.

So right over me right now I have this big LED light/ceiling fan combination. I've owned I think 4 of them so far, in 3 different kinds.

All 3 kinds look somewhat different yet are built obviously from the same base for the electronics, though those vary somewhat. One model didn't reverse, one does. One model has RGB lighting. Some go by RF and some go by IR. But overall the electronics seem to come from the same place in slightly different flavors.

They're all random chinese brands, old ones tend to disappear and get replaced with a slightly newer ones.

And the problem is that at some point, something in the LED driver of the first 3 died. I tried replacing the chip, but it's some particular weird model that can't be found anywhere online.

At this point I'm half-seriously considering doing my own LED/fan driver board, because it's getting ridiculous. The 4th one is holding up so far though.
> What if the regulations are bad because the problem is so hard we can't make good ones, even with the best and brightest?

To begin with, the premise would have to be challenged. Many, many bad regulations are bad because of incompetence or corruption rather than because better regulations are impossible. But let's consider the case where there really are no good regulations.

This often happens in situations where e.g. bad actors have more resources, or are willing to spend more resources, to subvert a system than ordinary people. For example, suppose the proposal is to ban major companies from implementing end-to-end encryption so the police can spy on terrorists. Well, that's not going to work very well because the terrorists will just use a different system that provides E2EE anyway and what you're really doing is compromising the security of all the law-abiding people who are now more vulnerable to criminals and foreign espionage etc.

The answer in these cases, where there are only bad policy proposals, is to do nothing. Accept that you don't have a good solution and a bad solution makes things worse rather than better so the absence of any rule, imperfect as the outcome may be, is the best we know how to do.

The classical example of this is the First Amendment. People say bad stuff, we don't like it, they suck and should shut up. But there is nobody you can actually trust to be the decider of who gets to say what, so the answer is nobody decides for everybody and imposing government punishment for speech is forbidden.
I walked by the Starbucks in my neighborood recently and there were about 30 customers inside sitting at long tables. Every single person was staring at an electronic device. Maybe that's how a public square works nowdays.
I can chip in from my tech consulting job where we ship a few GenAI projects to several AWS clients via Amazon Bedrock. I'm senior level but most people here are pretty much insulated.

I think whoever commented once here about more complex problems being tackled, (and the nature of these problems becoming broader) is right on the money. Newer patterns around LLM-based applications are emerging and having seen them first hand, they seem like a slightly different paradigm shift in programming. But they are still, at heart, programming questions.

A practical example: company sees GenAI chatbot, wants one of their own, based on their in-house knowledge base.

Right then and there there is a whole slew of new business needs with necessary human input to make it work that ensues.

- Is training your own LLM needed? See a Data Engineer/Data engineering team.

- If going with a ready-made solution, which LLM to use instead? Engineer. Any level.

- Infrastructure around the LLM of choice. Get DevOps folk in here. Cost assessment is real and LLMs are pricey. You have to be on top of your game to estimate stuff here.

- Guard rails, output validation. Engineers.

- Hooking up to whatever app front-end the company has. Engineers come to the rescue again.

All these have valid needs for engineers, architects/staff/senior what have you — programmers. At the end of the day, these problems devolve into the same ol' https://programming-motherfucker.com

And I'm OK with that so far.
There's no reality in the next twenty years where a non-technical individual is going to converse with a persistent agentic AI to produce a typical SaaS product and maintain it over a period of many years. I think we'll see stabs at this space, and I think we'll see some companies try to replace engineering teams wholesale, and these attempts will almost universally feel kinda sorta ok for the first N weeks, then nosedive and inevitably result in the re-hiring of humans (and probably the failure of many projects and businesses as well).

Klarna said they stopped hiring a year ago because AI solved all their problems [1]. That's why they have 55 job openings right now, obviously [2] (including quite a few listed as "Contractor"; the utterly classic "we fucked up our staffing"). This kind of disconnect isn't even surprising; its exactly what I predict. Business leadership nowadays is so far disconnected from the reality of what's happening day-to-day in their businesses that they say things like this with total authenticity, they get a bunch of nods, and things just keep going the way they've been going. Benioff at Salesforce said basically the same thing. These are, put simply, people who have such low legibility on the mechanism of how their business makes money that they believe they understand how it can be replaced; and they're surrounded by men who nod and say "oh yes mark, yes of course we'll stop hiring engineers" then somehow conveniently that message never makes it to HR because those yes-men who surround him are the real people who run the business.

AI cannot replace people; AI augments people. If you say you've stopped hiring thanks to AI, what you're really saying is that your growth has stalled. The AI might grant your existing workforce an N% boon to productivity, but that's a one-time boon barring any major model breakthroughs (don't count on it). If you want to unlock more growth, you'll need to hire more people, but what you're stating is that you don't think more growth is in the cards for your business.

That's what these leaders are saying, at the end of the day; and its a reflection of the macroeconomic climate, not of the impacts of AI. These are dead businesses. They'll lumber along for decades, but their growth is gone.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/klarna-stopped-hiring-ago-rep...

[2] https://klarnagroup.teamtailor.com/#jobs
you are programmed to think this way because you will focus on some
“good regulations” and say “look, regulation in ____ caused all these positive things.” but regulation means that government decided what can or cannot be done. and government is run by people that spend 70+% of their time fundraising. and people that shell out money at said fundraisers will want things and return. and that leads to regulations which are not in the interest of people in general but you know… also regulation is a double-egded sword as you always imagine that regulation will “go your way cause you are smart and have common sense” but we both know (especially in the USA) that is not the case. every regulation made by one political party the other will do everything possible to remove once they get the power back and vice versa
>Vintage Yamaha solid state electrical devices (or anything 1970s ish with real hardwood cases, and discrete components you can test and replace)

Too bad active (especially active digital, for anechoic factory calibration and room correction) is definitely the way to go these days. But as I said in other posts, Genelec is the brand to go for in this space; ME Geithain might be a good contender if you're in Germany.

Some other examples to complement your list:

A modern Mazda (from after Ford sold its shares back, i.e. made in Hiroshima) after a lot of research; including the software vulnerabilities side, quality of its engines and manual transmissions.

Been buying AMD for almost 15 years now, ever since I learned of Intel's ubiquitous anti-competitive shenanigans and consumer disdain (in the form of locked non-K CPUs, constant socket changes or switching to non-solder TIM with Ivy Bridge).

Rocking an Eizo CG, one of the last with a Panasonic panel with polarizing filter and generally rock solid build quality.

Key is knowing the rare good technically minded reviewers: TFTCentral for monitors, https://www.spinorama.org ASR/Erin, AudioXpress, Fidelity Online/Sound&Recording for audio (as long as you know your theory and the various physical/psychoacoustic limits), JonnyGuru (RIP) for PSUs, Chips&Cheese (and before it RealWorldTech) for CPUs, notebookcheck.net for laptops, etc...
No, math can describe programming, but that's also true of everything. You wouldn't say "Playing basketball without math is impossible" even though it's technically true because you don't need to know or use math to play basketball. You also can do a ton of programming without knowing any math, although you will more than likely need to learn arithmetic to write enterprise code.
I've always wanted to try an external e-ink mounted vertically as a side monitor for documents / code views / etc. Honestly I'd be fine with an exceptionally low refresh rate if it would mean a reasonable reduction price - right now I just can't justify > $1200 for a single monitor.

On another note - unlike "streets ahead", I don't think "rake on my lawn" is going to catch on. I had to scratch my head and even after I understood what you were going for - I'm not sure how it makes sense. What's wrong with having a rake on your lawn?
Not sure exactly, but the first think that comes to mind is "let them eat cake" vibes.