skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a funny parallel I see with Kubernetes that I also saw a lot with Linux in the early years. There are thousands of packages and tools you can install on Linux (think phpmyadmin for example) and new users sometimes go wild installing every single package they read about.

After a while, the more mature Linux engineers start going the other way. Ripping out as much as possible. Stripping down to the leanest build they can, for performance but also to reduce attack surface and overall complexity.

Very similar dynamic with k8s. Early days are often about scooping up every CNCF project like you're on a shopping spree. Eventually people get to shipping slim clusters running and 30mb containers with alpine or nix. Using it essentially as open source clustering for Linux.
I worked in a Walgreens photo lab circa 2004. At the time the mini lab kept a scanned copy of all images for at least 90 days. I think it was set to use rolling storage, so the time frame wasn’t definite.

On another note, the photo techs will be looking at your photos - at least, the good ones will, so they can adjust for color balance and exposure. The really bad ones will too, so they can keep a copy of any “interesting” photos.

When I worked there, I called the police about once a month, for exactly the reason you might expect.
I actually do this with my own Fraction CTO pricing. I use tiers.

The Advisor tier is essentially exactly what you describe. I join meetings and advise for up to 10 hours / month and then have an hourly rate after that. It's most appealing for companies who essentially want to make sure they aren't steering down a path that's going to lead to a lot of pain later on. CEO's who are looking to bounce ideas off of somebody to help refine them, etc. This is also month to month.

The next tier is up to 30 hours / month with a slightly discounted hourly rate for more, minimum 2 months. The final is up to 70 hours / month with a greatly discounted hourly rate for more, minimum 3 months.

I started doing this to set clear expectations with clients as well after having a client frustrated with me at the 10 hours / month rate when he wanted me to run his entire dev and operations team without going over the baseline hours. That wasn't clear until after I started and the engagement didn't last long.

Clear expectations work much better and I really like the work that I do. I get to work with execs, product, devs, operations, support, QA. I get to put together a clear picture of what is working and what isn't. Map out potential solutions. Coach people at different levels on implementations without being disruptive. Mob with dev teams around performance or architectural needs. Teach technical people how to put things in terms that the non-technical folks they work with will understand.

It's very rewarding work and the flexibility has been good for my family during our current phase of life.
I think that it’s one of those dichotomies. One needs both a design and a prototype.

As you say, weeks of coding can save hours of planning. But weeks of planning can be wasted, too. It’s easy to write things on paper which don’t make sense or are impossible, e.g. ‘We will colour the unicorn fleet semi-sad.’ Ideally, the design and the prototype would evolve in concert, each iteration of one driving the next iteration of the other, spiralling like the double-helix of DNA.

The great virtue of a bias towards building prototypes is that at the end of a round of prototyping one actually has software which can do something — at the end of a round of design one doesn’t really have anything.
That's an amazing project! I'm blessed to be in such company. Seriously, I use open source stuff and I prefer to do business with such relatively wise people. If you want a beta unit, email me and I'll put you at the top of the list!
> let's also not forget that the people involved didn't create this in a vacuum. it cost Google a LOT more than their compensation to make it possible for them to even start working on this project

...let's also not forget that Google didn't manufacture this opportunity in a vacuum. It cost the rest of society a lot more than their revenue to make it possible for them to employ people who can spend their entire days working on software.
Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
Now that everybody and their mother are fuzzing in social media about LLM agents and agentic LLM systems (or something), are there actual examples of live applications that are based on an agentic LLM process flow?

I'd be curious to know and see such examples in order to derive some inspiration from them.
That’s supposed to come with 18.3/4

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/11/apple-intelligence-feat...
After reading the article, it’s fun to just sort of riff from first principles to guess where things are headed.

I think there are two types of hiding: silence and camouflage. Silence is where you reduce the signal you emit and reflect. Camouflage is where you mask it with something else.

Hiding a gold bar in a basement is camouflage (by this definition). Making your sub reflect sonar to look like a whale is camouflage. Making your sub reflect nothing is silence.

Long term, I think silence is a losing strategy for the hider. You can hide with silence in the ocean because it’s so big. But as sensors become more sensitive, the ocean gets “smaller”. I think you run into basic physical limitations on silence well before you do on detection. Like the article suggested, I think the days of quieter propulsion and better propulsion detection being a big part of the game are numbered.

I can see camouflage going on longer. Seems like the second stage of the game. What happens when you have 10,000 vehicles emitting all sorts of signatures you can’t disambiguate, and 50 of those are nuclear subs? Or worse, a million objects including civilian UUVs and marine life?

That’s essentially the same as non-identification. It’s like using facial identification against a military to find the general, but everyone can change their face at will.
We have a family friend who is blind and a programmer. It's interesting to hear his perspective. His hope and expectation are that it will greatly increase usability.

I've been thrown into the usability deep end due to my wife also losing her sight due to an autoimmune disorder, and my dad losing his sight due to Macular Degeneration. Honestly, it sucks, and I mean like rage quitting, phone throwing sucks. (Try it. Turn on voice assist and close your eyes.) If Apple can improve it through AI, where someone can just talk to the phone to do a series of tasks. It will honestly change everything. The number of aging people who are going to lose their vision in the U.S. is set to go up exponentially in the coming years. This could be an unprecedented win for them, if they solve this issue with AI.
Writing code and making commits is only a part of my work. I also have to know ODEs/DAEs, numerical solvers, symbolic transformations, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, dynamic systems, controls theory etc. So basically math and physics.

LLMs are rather bad at those right now if you go further than trivialities, and I believe they are not particularly good at code either, so I am not concerned. But overall I think this is somewhat good advice, regardless of the current hype train: do not be just a "programmer", and know something else besides main Docker CLI commands and APIs of your favorite framework. They come and go, but knowledge and understanding stays for much longer.
> Tiktok is not banning certain topics, as other platforms do

Oh but they do, or at the very least carefully steer what you see by demoting certain subjects; don't forget that only in 2020 their internal moderator policies were leaked, telling them to suppress posts by ugly, poor and disabled people [0], or suppress streams that "harmed national order" or "defamed civil servants". Sure, this was the Chinese branch of tiktok, and the US / EU based version has distanced themselves from it - already mostly being its own platform. But this is where they came from barely four years ago.

[0] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
I highly doubt that the person writing this was hinting on anything remotely like that.
I was considering enabling it, and I could see the features being useful for some people, but not for me.

For example, notification summaries. If someone has apps blasting them with notifications, summarizing them into fewer more meaningful ones could be truly helpful. But for me, I’ve carefully managed my notifications. I get almost none. Every single one that is enabled is important and actionable. I don’t need to summarize what’s already small.

The writing help is another example. Maybe a person is a slow typist. Maybe they are losing a lot of time thinking of what to write, or how to word something. Maybe they are writing in a language in which they are less than perfectly fluent. In those cases the Apple Intelligence can be truly helpful. None of those are me, so I disabled it.
LLMs are most capable where they have a lot of good data in their training corpus and not much reasoning is required. Migrate to a part of the software industry where that isn't true, e.g. systems programming.

The day LLMs get smart enough to read a chip datasheet and then realize the hardware doesn't behave the way the datasheet claims it does is the day they're smart enough to send a Terminator to remonstrate with whoever is selling the chip anyway so it's a win-win either way, dohohoho.
I think there's been a lot of fear-mongering on this topic and "the inevitable LLM take over" is not as inevitable as it might seem, perhaps depending on your definition of "take over."

I have personally used LLMs in my job to write boilerplate code, write tests, make mass renaming changes that were previously tedious to do without a lot of grep/sed-fu, etc. For these types of tasks, LLMs are already miles ahead of what I was doing before (do it myself by hand, or have a junior engineer do it and get annoyed/burnt out).

However, I have yet to see an LLM that can understand an already established large codebase and reliably make well-designed additions to it, in the way that an experienced team of engineers would. I suppose this ability could develop over time with large increases in memory/compute, but even state-of-the-art models today are so far away from being able to act like an actual senior engineer that I'm not worried.

Don't get me wrong, LLMs are incredibly useful in my day-to-day work, but I think of them more as a leap forward in developer tooling, not as an eventual replacement for me.
I imagine that to look something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSK3maq8Cyk
The only use case I find it good for is coding. And even in that case it’s more of getting from 0 to 50% quickly and I have to make corrections and finish the last 50%. I have not had a single other use case that it seems well suited for.
> This method has been used countless times to waste the current defense budget on unproven tech that often goes nowhere.

It's time to rework how fundamental / "moonshot" military R&D should get done, then. And that's not just true of the US, it's also a hot issue for the German military.

We all need to separate "keeping the stuff we have up and running, and get new versions every so often to incorporate technical developments that happened in the meantime" from "let's try and see if we can hide a B2 bomber not just from radars but also eyes and ears" or "maybe we can get a Star Wars style repulsorlift antigrav system working".

The basic stuff should be done by buying whatever is available on the market. No matter if it's Abrams, Leopard, <insert whatever South Korea makes in tanks here>, and ideally the US, EU, NATO and their major allies (Israel, South Korea, Ukraine) should pool their IP and manufacturing resources for a common pool where everyone can draw from, and everyone can contribute to, alone to keep geographic redundancy.

Unfortunately for moonshot projects though, all the "easy" stuff has been done decades ago, and while the startups may have fancy ideas (especially the offshoots of university research), they lack the funding to get them to real-world stage, or they get bought out by one of the big experienced government milkers where the project fades into oblivion. And the US isn't particularly happy to share their stuff, not even with their close-knit FVEY circle.
I bought a dumb TV to use with Kodi. The TV is so dumb tho I wouldn't do that again. Ex. Audio out exists only as 'headphone jack' output. Which is excluded from volume control. The OS, whatever that is, boots before it enables HDMI, adding nonsense waiting time. ...
Gemini on android is miles ahead it seems
> We’re actively pressured to use co-pilot at work

Unless you work at Microsoft, that's really interesting to me. Can't say I've ever experienced a boss pushing for me to use a certain developer tool.
As long as it's possible, never connecting the TV to the home network, setting it to auto start to last HDMI used, and using a technician remote or HDMI arc control and mainly interacting with my apple tv / gaming console / audio receiver remote, has been able to suppress most of the TV OS garbage.
Hopefully that continues to be an option.
> 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.

It's not enough to make generalizations yet. What kind of projects ? What tuning does it need ? What kind of end users ? What kind of engineers ?

In the field I work with, I can't see how LLMs can help with a clear path to convergence to a reliable product. I anything, I suspect we will need more manual analysis to fix insanity we receive from our providers if they start working with LLMs.

Some jobs will disappear, but I've yet to see signs of anything serious emerge yet. You're right for juniors though, but I suspect those who stop training will loose their life insurance and will starve under LLMs either by competition, our the amount of operational instability it will bring.
On my Google Chromecast it was possible to download an app that lets me reassign the Netflix button to Plex. I also reassigned the Youtube button to Freetube.
Image Playground is available for iPhones too. I haven't used it on the Mac yet. But I've send people their AI generated images and everyone's been pretty impressed by it
I've been thinking about this a bunch and here's what I think will happen as cost of writing software approaches 0:

1. There will be way more software

2. Most people / companies will be able to opt out of predatory VC funded software and just spin up their own custom versions that do exactly what they want without having to worry about being spied on or rug pulled. I already do this with chrome extensions, with the help of claude I've been able to throw together things like time based website blocker in a few minutes.

3. The best software will be open source, since it's easier for LLMs to edit and is way more trustworthy than a random SaaS tool. It will also be way easier to customize to your liking

4. Companies will hire way less and probably mostly engineers to automate routine tasks that would have previously be done by humans (ex: bookkeeping, recruiting, sales outreach, HR, copywriting / design). I've heard this is already happening with a lot of new startups.

EDIT: for people who are not convinced that these models will be better than them soon, look over these sets of slides from NeurIPS:

- https://michal.io/notes/ml/conferences/2024-NeurIPS#neurips-...

- https://michal.io/notes/ml/conferences/2024-NeurIPS#fine-tun...

- https://michal.io/notes/ml/conferences/2024-NeurIPS#math-ai-...
Everything You Need to Ace PWAs in Rails
Traditional media is dead in the US. Joe Rogan dwarfs media midgets like CNN, in both ratings and shear influence. Most of this new media is still using platforms based in the US or friendly nations, but that balance of power could shift very quickly. The rapid rise of TikTok shows that the dominance of American platforms cannot be taken for granted, and so the government is reacting in a bipartisan manner to this threat.
>If the electron is both spin up and spin down every time we run this experiment, how come we observe the spin up version more often than the spin down version?

Because after a series of measurements your state asymptotically approaches |we observe the spin up version more often than the spin down version>, which is in fact a mere tautology: if it didn't, you wouldn't conclude it. You don't even need any interpretation for this, you can just calculate it, and asymptotic certainty is trivial to interpret. In this sense MWI is a shut up and calculate interpretation, the only difficulty is to formulate your question in a computable form. If your question has no computable form, it probably doesn't match reality.
> FreeCAD recently got to 1.0 and is quite capable

FreeCAD is capable and is indeed free, but as a beginner designing something somewhat complex it really led me into building a rat's nest of a project that I found difficult to salvage. The rough edges and general flaky behavior did not help things, and I found almost none of the user interface intuitive. If I had to do it over again I'd choose F360 or Onshape.
I'm planning to just putter along selling units, making about 50% of my living like that, and if a company comes along and wants to buy the design/company that's good. If not, I get some stuff done, earn a living. This isn't a get rich quick scheme, it's an honest living type stuff.
People who are over 65 are covered by Medicare.

People expecting children are exactly the type of people who should be able to shop around. Even in the case of an emergency delivery it's an event that you have what, 6 months to plan for?
Especially given that many people will elect to be stably and cheaply employed and do just as good work as someone asking a “royalties model” fee basis for this kind of solution, it’s hard to see the advantage of going it alone. The competition is the ”cheap” FTE.
I continue to be confused as to why there is such uproar over this.

If you don't want ads on your TV... don't connect your TV to the internet. It will work exactly like a dumb TV.
The full report describing the use of the exploits is published at https://securitylab.amnesty.org/latest/2024/12/serbia-a-digi...
I like the following jigsaw plug-in for Inkscape:

https://inkscape.org/~Neon22/%E2%98%85lasercut-jigsaw
I've seen in the last twenty years quite a few papers with novel meshing and remeshing algorithms. A few of them make it to specialty systems like gmsh, less of them make it to CAD and DCC end-products which are readily usable. Of those that make it there, not an insignificant fraction will crash your system from time to time (Quadremesh in ZBrush comes to mind).

Meshing algorithms are hard. They have cases and cases, and some of those cases are statistically impossible and thus discounted by time-pressed developers who forget that CAD and DCC programs have buttons to realize statistically impossible outcomes (i.e. "align these three vertices in a line"). In that sense, maybe having an ML thing with a random number generator somewhere producing statistically sane outcomes could be great ... :-)
Yes, people believe the same thing as you - that everyone who disagrees with them is unable to have a dialog - and votes for extremists who try to eliminate the people who disagree with them so they won't have to worry about it any more. Tale as old as time. Are you trying to blame that on the people you disagree with?
That's the worst. My remote doesn't have numbers, not even arrows in a traditional sense. But it does have 4 branded buttons, 2 of which I never heard of.
It's a good point, and I keep hearing it often, but it has one flaw.

It assumes that most engineers are in contact with the end customer, while in reality they are not. Most engineers are going through a PM whose role is to do what you described: speak with customers, understand what they want and somehow translate it to a language that the engineers will understand and in turn translate it into code. (Edit), the other part are "IC" roles like tech-lead/staff/etc, but the ratio between ICs and Engineers is, my estimate, around 1:10/20. So the majority of engineers are purely writing code, and engage in supporting actions around code (tech documentation, code reviews, pair programming, etc).

Now, my questions is as follows -- who has a bigger rate of employability in post LLM-superiority world: (1) a good technical software engineer with poor people/communication skills or (2) a good communicator (such as a PM) with poor software engineering skills?

I bet on 2, and as one of the comments says, if I had to future proof my career, I would move as fast as possible to a position that requires me to speak with people, be it other people in the org or customers.
Back in the late 80s and early 90s there was a craze called CASE - Computer-Aided Software Engineering. The idea was humans really suck at writing code, but we're really good at modeling and creating specifications. Tools like Rational Rose arose during this era, as did Booch notation which eventually became part of UML.

The problem was it never worked. When generating the code, the best the tools could do was create all the classes for you and maybe define the methods for the class. The tools could not provide an implementation unless it provided the means to manage the implementation within the tool itself - which was awful.

Why have you likely not heard of any of this? Because the fad died out in the early 2000's. The juice simple wasn't worth the squeeze.

Fast-forward 20 years and I'm working in a new organization where we're using ArchiMate extensively and are starting to use more and more UML. Just this past weekend I started wondering given the state of business modeling, system architecture modeling, and software modeling, could an LLM (or some other AI tool) take those models and produce code like we could never dream of back in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s? Could we use AI to help create the models from which we'd generate the code?

At the end of the day, I see software architects and software engineers still being engaged, but in a different way than they are today. I suppose to answer your question, if I wanted to future-proof my career I'd learn modeling languages and start "moving to the left" as they say. I see being a code slinger as being less and less valuable over the coming years.

Bottom line, you don't see too many assembly language developers anymore. We largely abandoned that back in the 80s and let the computer produce the actual code that runs. I see us doing the same thing again but at a higher and more abstract level.
“Don’t load balance, erm, here’s our loadbalancer” struck me as quite humorous too. :)
All of the issue you described are specific to basebands, not all "chipsets and drivers", and this article is talking about exploits in DSPs, not basebands. Moreover, AFAIK the baseband (or more specifically the modem) is separated from the application processor on both iPhones and Pixels, so a baseband 0day allowing you to take over the entire phone is already unlikely.
Nonsense. The majority could figure out how to install games or Microsoft Word. Why can't things be this simple? It's a failing of the tech companies and a $ issue.
They may not legally be allowed to ban it, but that doesn't mean it has to be easy to access it. This is probably also why banning Tiktok was / is such a challenge and couldn't just be done with Trump's exective order after Zucc whispered it in his ear in 2019, and why they can't just block it, but have to subpoena the app stores to delist it.
Show HN: Ted, a sed-like tool for editing files using a Turing Machine
AI Art Will Only Make Us Love Artists More