skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
nit: Coral and smithy are not comparable.

Coral is a schema definition language, yes. But it’s also a full rpc ecosystem.

Smithy at this point is only really an IDL that (in most cases, at least before I left) is “only” used to generate Coral models and then transitively Coral clients and services. The _vast_ majority of Amazon is still on “native” Coral
I often think that people saying others make things purposefully obscure to gain/retain legitimacy fail to recognize that any long standing field, be it in science or humanities, is inherently complex, due to its long evolved jargon and set of norms.

Still, I am aware of cases where complexity has been used as a mean of power. Some languages have for instance baked in
orthographic nuances and difficult grammar rules doing just that.

It would be interesting to measure the extent to which we can cut some of the complexity we find in such examples. I suspect not much, both for reasons of culture and power.
> Build something with an LLM outside of your comfort zone.

I need to try that. How do LLMs perform writing shaders? I need to modify a shader to add simple order-independent transparency to avoid a depth sort. Are LLMS up to that job?
This is a known area, with code samples available, so an LLM might be able to do it.

I'm not a shader expert, and if I can avoid the months needed to become one, that's a win.
> Have you, like, tried to write an academic paper without LaTeX?

It's only the core hard sciences that use LaTeX. Mathematics, computer science, physics, part of statistics, part of economics, part of engineering. When you move away from this core to e.g. chemistry, biology, applied physics, then it's all MS Word.
I had that experience with OpenBSD as well. The summer after university I played around with it on a HP Chromebook 13 G1, fixed a bug that broke it's eMMC storage and wrote a touchpad driver - which ended up working more reliably that the driver Linux had. I think I more or less stuck to the base system + Firefox, so cwm as a window manager, nvi as an editor, etc.

I use NixOS for my own machines these days, but I do miss the simplicity of OpenBSD.
> The Java impl for protobuf will never generate a NullPointerException, as calling `get` on a field would just return the default instance of that field.

This is NOT the solution lmao
Yep, sounds great. How about a EULA that just consists of a few icons representing standard legal statements about what the corp will do with my data?
Canada must reject adoption of the United Nations Convention against Cybercrime
Cheap in more ways than one.

Fast forward to 2020 and Apple introduces the M1 MacBook Air. (Though people still complained about the 8GB memory configuration.)

Apple seems to have learned their lesson with entry-level machines; the basic iPad and Mac mini are quality designs (though storage/memory upselling is still a thing - the cheapest iPad is probably aimed at classrooms/kiosks/streaming.)
I've identified a specific style of speech in my native language that is used by less educated people trying to sound formal. It involves as many official or legalese-sounding terms a layman could come across, intertwined with "formal" grammatical constructs, many of which are incorrect, but which managed to spread virally. It's the kind of tone that you will find in a private message sent by a stranger who got angry with you on social media and tries to intimidate you with vague legal steps or something that you find in a complaint to customer service. Similar stuff going on with religion - the religious texts are all translated to sound vaguely archaic, but still comprehensible (the most common Bible translation here dates to the 1960s). This gives a feel that there's something serious going on.
TBH, it's not really just a problem with Hergé. European comics throughout the century are full of stereotypes, typically used for comedic effect, which can look bad from a modern perspective. Asterix, by Goscinny and Uderzo, is entirely built on stereotypes. So is Alan Ford, by Secchi and Raviola.

In reality, most authors were not particularly racist; they just leveraged stereotypes to get cheap laughs, which was socially accepted back then.
Thank god for topoisomerase!
The Danny Dunn books were immensely enjoyable
Our first new Framework Laptop 16 Expansion Bay module
You can say it in your back yard to a garden gnome, the front yard is within earshot of public lands and the squirrels are locally endangered.
Software lives forever. You have to take the long view, not the "rn" view. In the long view, NFS's XDR or ASN.1 are just fine and could have been enough, if we didn't keep reinventing things.
This is one of my favourite interview questions to ask:

"You have an online shop with products that have some common attributes but each category of products also has it's specific attributes.

How would you model this in your code and database?"

The question is a bit more interesting if the database is relational.

Lots of answers exist, all with some trade-offs.
Do you have some advice on how to build the structure on how to move from one prompt to the next?

Are you using a separate state manager + function calling so the LLM knows where it is?
That’s a part of the appeal in E-Ink phones.
> LLMs are barely at the level of a diligent but not very good junior dev at the moment, and have been for the last at least 6 months.

> Your take is rather romantic.

I’m not sure you’re aware what you’ve written here. The contrast physically hurts.
Cr-SQLite – Multi-writer and CRDT support for SQLite
Funny enough, now I write better code than I used to thanks to AI because of two reasons:

- AI naturally writes AI code that is more organized and clean (proper abstraction, no messy code)

- I've recognized that, for AI to write code on an existing codebase, the code has to be clean and organized and make sense, so I tend to do more refactoring to make sure AI can take over them and update them when needed.
Interesting does anyone know where to find the American definition?

When I was serving in the German armed forces they taught us, that “Inner honour is the ones subjective sense of dignity and value” and that if those values would not align to what military service demands we should not take our pledge and leave.

“Personal honour” is a legally protected entity under German law, so the definition is more or less universally agreed on.
> 1) have books like 'The Art of Programming' on my shelf,

Decades ago I used to be constantly thumbing through vol. 1 of Knuth (Fundamental Algorithms) and coding those basic algorithms. Now that all comes from libraries and generics. There has been progress, but not via LLMs in that area.
Thank you, these comments were really enlightening for me :)
I would have suspected such, but innthe article they only mention the stereoscopic lense. So I suspect this is for making video that targets VR glasses (especially the audio part made me think that).
Alternately; this anachronistic idea that not going to a religious ceremony is “the wrong thing” can be disregarded.

I never attend funerals, and I rarely attend weddings. I skipped my father’s funeral. It simply doesn’t matter if you go or not.
Ah the junior dev starry-eyed mindset. Doing web dev isn't the only thing in the world.

AI will absolutely accelerate development, but we still need so much more modernization across all industries. We still have factories running on Windows NT with software made in the 80s. We have mines, lumberyards, farms, retail, parking, bio labs, etc. So many things need to be upgraded to the same standard as big tech is, but hasn't because it was too expensive.

Much of this AI isn't great at. It's easy to just spit out a web page with reactJS that was done 10,000x times already by millions of devs, but it's not so easy to make sure your smelter doesn't overheat or go cold using 20,000 live sensors.

New devs will have a harder time getting in, but they'll also have an easier time learning. Senior devs will be able to supervise much more.

The industry will change, but it's far from over. If anything, it will grow massively and make other industries much more productive.
This blog started my love for mechanical watches. Love how intricate and cohesive the entire mechanism is.
Thinking AI is silly is not the wrong trajectory. AI IS silly. The law of large numbers applies. 99% accuracy means that thousands or millions of queries daily are just wrong. So AI is not suited for large scale deployments.

When I was working with a company delivering a product to thousands (not millions) of customers, we still encountered very rare stuff like data corruption due to memory bit-flips. Quite regularly. Even though that's quite a rare event, much much less than 1% likely.

A 1% failure rate for something deployed to millions of places is utterly abysmal. And no, they will not keep improving indefinitely. They've already hit a wall.
My advice: Keep honing your problem solving skills, by doing math challenges, chess puzzles, learn new languages(not programming ones, though that might help too), read books; anything that’d help you get newer perspectives, challenges your mind is good enough to withstand the race against AI.
This is satire, right? The completely off-topic mentioning of your graphics programming skills, the overconfidence, the phrase "delve into"...
Let me guess: The prompt was "Write a typical HN response to this post"
I do think the two phenomenon are related... they both are caused when people fail to take into account the knock on effect of their actions
Design docs versus prototypes (called "throwaway code" in this post) is a false dichotomy. Both are ways of derisking projects and aligning others on the approach, but they work at different levels each can validate things the other can't.

Here are some things I expect to see in design documents that are unlikely to show up in a prototype code review. What is the high-level description of the problem to be solved? What are the success criteria? What are the functional and non-functional requirements? What are the edge cases and failure modes and how should the system handle them? Are there multiple possible approaches and trade-offs between them? How will this code be tested and released?

Prototypes, in contrast, are great for measuring performance of alternate approaches, validating unproven APIs and frameworks, and gaining practical experience with different interface design decisions.

See also Leslie Lamport's article, Who builds a house without drawing blueprints? https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/who-builds-a-house-without-draw...
I mean, I'm not sure it's done deliberately but... if I was trying to guarantee video gen was always 5 seconds in a consistent manner and the gen process was highly non-deterministic then if the resultant video would have only been 3 seconds I'd stretch it out, interpolate the frames, and then send it down the pipes.

Another point to consider is that if my generative video system isn't good at maintaining world consistency, then doing a slow-motion video gives the illusion of a long video while being able to maintain a smaller "world context".
I agree. Building on 200 Prolific answers and inventing names for their "own hypothesis" called "magic spell"? Odd.
Lawyers have written like entire libraries on this subject, there are specialized journals examining the legal language used (e.g. in English: https://link.springer.com/journal/11196, https://www.languageandlaw.eu/jll, but there are probably separate journals for this in every language with 10M+ speakers, like https://joginyelv.hu/)
I understand this is not about the lawyers' approach to the problem, even if the author has a law degree, but a "cognitive sciences" department trying their hands on a problem that is new for them.
But it would have been helpful if they had at least attempted to provide a reference to some prior art in the legal field...
Nice to see my comments on their proto3 design doc vindicated, lol. There were a lot of comments on that doc, far more than what you'd usually see. Some of those comments dealt with the misguided decision to basically drop nullability (that is, the `has_` methods) that proto2 had. The team then just deleted all the comments and disabled commenting on the doc and proceeded with their original design much to the consternation of their primary stakeholders.
It's window dressing for their planned IPO. Klarna wants to go public during the first half of 2025, so it's all hands on deck to prop up the numbers. And saying the "right things" to investors, especially AI.
It's actually insanely useful. Weekly clone to disk is something I value because if the machine dies I can use my clone on another machine and boot my real desktop without fuss and Continue Doing Things
It’s my belief that humanity has an effectively infinite capacity for software and code. We can always recursively explore deeper complexity.
So are we. My jaw dropped when we first received the email telling us to use more AI.
In the 90s a friend of mine made a watch that just showed the year. The year precisely, that is to say, considering leap seconds.

This is much harder than it sounds because the protocol used (DCF) transmits the leap year info spread out over a time span before the year change. So suddenly your stupid receiver + display needs memory and compute.
In Edgedb, we have multiple inheritance.

type ConnectEvent extending RTCEvent, SoftDeletable {
handle: str;
}
My understanding, which is limited, is that anything that is from the 1929 Tintin will be public domain, but the later additions are still under copyright. So you can use the character, but not reference later stories or characters introduced later. It’s much the same as how you can freely make fiction about Thor, but you can’t freely make fiction about Thor, the Marvel character.
See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
This is something I'd love to get right. Pixman does appear to support sRGB input, in the form of the PIXMAN_a8r8g8b8_sRGB format, which might work well enough for the premultiply step. It's the unpremultiply that I'm struggling to wrap my head around - I'm guessing I'd need Pixman to output to 16-bit channels in the destination, otherwise I wouldn't be able to convert back to sRGB? That's kind of a massive pain though, I'd have to allocate a whole other temporary buffer that's double the size, for something that is imperceptible enough I never noticed it with my test images or in my playthrough. So I'm unsure what the cheapest way to do it would be. This is all well outside of my area of expertise which is primarily hacking and reverse engineering, but I'm always open to learn.

I tried my hardest to create something that was as "technically correct" as I could approximate given my lack of graphics experience and the performance constraints I was under, but I kind of knew it was likely I could mess up some small detail. Maybe since it's open source someone will eventually come along to correct it? One can dream :P
"gzipped json" vs "protobuf"
My very personal opinion is maybe it shouldn't be ok for humans either. Maybe the benefits of cars absolutely don't outweigh the contant risk of deaths and injuries they pose (especially in metropolitan aeras where they are easily replaced by other modes of transportation)

Reality is "because humans can take responsibility for their actions". And it seems the way our society is built, we'd rather have individuals take responsibility than question the system
I have to clarify that my statement don't apply to software engineers who are not working in tech companies or tech industries.

I usually call them IT instead of tech. Wrote more in my blog post: https://16x.engineer/2022/08/23/it-vs-tech.html

I have no knowledge of other industries that software is not the primary product.
The real story is that amateurs mimic legal form language to borrow its authority.

The reality is mixed. Many legal terms have fixed meanings. But many expressions don't, and could be simplified.

Students learn to write that way because their source material is like that. And because they want to appear knowledgeable.
I'm confused about why there are so many managers/CEOs who mythologize AI.

Some of them use AI as an excuse for layoffs, but many of them do believe that AI (or ChatGPT, specifically) is some kind of magic that can make (1 employee + ChatGPT) equal to 3 employees.

I mean, they must have used ChatGPT, right? How does ChatGPT give them the conclusion about this?
End-to-end RCS encryption with iPhone users is still months away
It used to be on reddit but who knows now.
>Contracts are written to minimize costs already, and that's why they're long.

See OP. There seems to be this thing called "legalese" that makes contracts harder to understand than necessary.

In any case, if litigation risk is a major cost of a contract, then people drafting contracts will incorporate that factor alongside character length.

Overall, I think you may have a point. So my updated take is: Make the per-character tax low enough that it's not a factor for B2B contracts where it's standard for lawyers on both sides to review. However, make it high enough so that it's a factor in rental contracts, employment contracts, and EULAs, where at least one party typically doesn't retain a lawyer.
"a talk reviewing the impact of GANs"

Is that available online?
Many people here are claiming that it has to try to do with being unambiguously expressive, but many laws are excessively verbose, largely incomprehensible, and still extremely ambiguous, most often in sections that constrain the scope of a law. By contrast some of the most fundamental laws in the nation, the Constitution's Bill of Rights, are generally just a sentence or two - and that works just fine.

In my ever cynical opinion it's largely just a means of accumulating power without accountability. For instance in the terms and conditions of basically all major software now a days it says little more than "You forfeit all rights, we reserve any and all rights imaginable, and we can change this whenever want." But if it actually said this then people might be inclined to say 'hey that's not cool.' But when it's instead wrapped in page after page of incomprehensible legalese, people don't even bother trying to see what they're agreeing to.
>Only 78.9% of respondents now identifying as firmly committed to the Apple ecosystem, down from 92% in 2021.

80% is still very decent. But it is nice to finally see the cracks in Apple are showing up.
The Chinese saw opportunity with the Duck curve

The western boomers only saw cost and problems
This is the big question about abiogenesis. If it was easy then life in the universe could be very common. If it is exceedingly difficult, we might be alone.

What is the smallest set of molecules needed to self-replicate, and how common are the ingredients (& nutrients)? I believe all of this is completely unknown, but I havent looked into the research for years now.
Especially when there are zero other considerations making you (or the people funding you) think you need to rush past testing.
The Victory is still commissioned and predates the Constitution by 30 years or so.

Edit: but I'm not sure it's still afloat!
Google and Microsoft won't do anything that doesn't translate to money. These days are over.
To minimize the spread of Shigella to the point that it is not worth the electrons needed to publish a story about it, all you have to do is wash your hands with soap and warm water and wear a condom.

Therefore, it will probably run rampant.
Well it depends. If your data model doesn't include "this bool is optional", you can just include the bool directly in the struct and get all the memory layout advantages, and then you decide in your protobuf -> domain type conversion code whether it's an error if that field is missing or if it just defaults to 'false'. You only need to make ways for a field to be optional (such as naming it a pointer where nil represents "missing") when that actually makes sense in your data model.
Setting aside buzzwords, how are people currently dealing with the problem of LLM errors propagating/accumulating through a pipeline? All of these model call feeding into model calls feeding into model calls results in a pretty low probability that the overall task stays on a happy path. And adding even more calls to guardrail the steps adds compounding latency.
I've already started not to notice the quality differences in the photo-like images produced by each image generation model.

Now, examples of image or video generation models showing off how great they are should be stickman drawings or stickman videos.
As far as I know, no model has been able to do that properly yet. If a model can do it well, it will be a huge breakthrough.
How, specifically, has Google Maps become horrendous?

>Sometimes I wonder if the free market has stopped working.

The "free market" means people have the freedom to compete. It doesn't mean they are guaranteed do so. You might as well blame society for getting lazy and complacent.
There is plenty of them.

- Funkey S (Game Handheld): https://www.funkey-project.com/

- PiKVM (Server Remote Management): https://pikvm.org/, however, I think this will be obsolete as soon as NanoKVM is open source

- Mutant Cybergenetics (e.g. DIY Smartwatch): https://mutantcybernetics.gitlab.io/

- Tech Ingredients (e.g. DIY Air Conditioner): https://www.youtube.com/@TechIngredients

- Volos Projects (e.g. Battery Charger): https://www.youtube.com/c/VolosProjects

In fact there are so many, I cannot even think of which ones to list first. The next thing I'm going to start will be a portable audio player with a LicheeRV Nano, which is an excellent platform (yeah I know, who needs that..?).
You have a sota multi-modal LLM running in your head at 20W, shared with best in class sensor package and top performing robotics control unit.

There’s soooo much more to optimize.
HMS Victory is getting a major overhaul at the moment, but that's a different project, and much better funded.
The "collateral damage" you're talking about represented the UK's best answer to Meta - a UK-run collection of online communities that people were choosing to use instead of foreign alternatives. If they ban running them domestically then everybody will use American ones...
Does anyone use `-O` or `-OO` or `PYTHONOPTIMIZE=1` in their deployments? (2023)
A lovely ride down memory lane. These IBM machines were all works of old, beautiful computing art.
> how important your task is to continued revenue

Yes, that's what I meant by how much money you bring into the company.

If you bring in $1B a day (and save countless lives) and I can easily hire another employee just like you, why wouldn't I have done so already? Perhaps that is your point?

Be that as it may, how overpaid do you think tech employees are compared to the cost of replacing them?
Some will not survive their customers abandoning them. Think about the typical automated voice response on a customer service line. Imagine that becoming far more pervasive. And it slowing you down and becoming a barrier while you desperately try to get help with your insurance claim or mortgage or whatever. It’ll be absolutely awful and companies that built trustworthy services with humans who pick up the phone will stand out even more easily. Or that’s what I hope.
It is unbelievably expensive though, a 40 minute ride from Osaka city to KIX airport could cost you 30k yen.
The point was that Palm, like any tech company, would probably have loved cheaper labor as well.

Most companies will eagerly pursue profitable illegal action – and subsequently express sincere remorse that they were caught and punished.
Costco is probably a counterexample. But yes counterexamples are hard to find so I agree with you.