skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was a CS student for 2 semesters at Northeastern before dropping out thanks to a job offer. No prior coding experience.

I think that the curriculum design and principles that guide the NEU CS education are fantastic. I’ve been fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your perspective) to quickly find myself in a mentorship position at work, and there have been a number of times where I realize that the boot camp hire just isn’t thinking the way I do _at all_. The first things drilled into my head were function signatures and manipulating data structures (by implementing a subset of the ruby enumerable module in Racket). This has made problem solving by manipulating data structures (a decently common part of the job, especially at first!) genuinely trivial. Things more or less immediately translate to a map, filter, andmap, ormap, or reduce when trying to get data from its input to its output for whatever unit of work I’m trying to do.

Other developers on my team though experience each new technique/thing as a new or different thing, which to me seems far more overwhelming. I think most developers naturally develop the intuition, but being told upfront “everything is just these 5 or a combination of them lol” implicitly by the work we were doing was something I’m grateful for.

I never enjoyed the pair programming at Northeastern. I was so behind my peers at the time, since most everyone else was like an AP CS student or had been coding since they were a child. I was busy trying to brute force the learning with 40+ hour weeks just for the CS fundamentals classes. I never found someone in my position. I was only paired with people that the intro course was trivial for or they just did not care at all haha. Most brutal part was waiting 5+ hours at office hours with a white board wait list 90+ names deep and then office hours would end and they would send us home. Life before ChatGPT was crazy.
yes i second this. just a bit clarification. not as "the concept of religion" as we call it today would have been an invention. it existed since humanity. rather that religion is something besides or independent of the everyday life ← this is a modern invention. today people say "you can be of any religion" and still do the same civil life as everyone else, go to school, to the grocery, watch TV, participate in the economy system: religion is "something like a hobby", a coloring to your everyday life, like a "community flair" of some people does not eat this-or-that on this-or-that day or cutting their hair in a specific manner, etc.
it just happened when common welfare got high enough that people did not need to worry about keeping "old customs" to keep the community and themself *aligned with the created order*. consequentially the rationale for "old customs" gets blurred and forgotten and mostly becomes "superstition". so people more and more trusting themself in the hands of industry and tech they themself created as a protection around themself instead of the tangible instruments of ageless wisdom gathered along the ages, which they swipe instead in the box of "religion" and move on.
thus economy + industry and tech become the new religion itself.
You fucked with squirrels, Morty!
Because

* A huge-ass slice of the things hosted on The Internet are hosted in or behind one or more of Azure, GCP, AWS, and CloudFlare.

* Recording the set of "cloud provider"-provided IP addresses spoken to by a piece of client software is a bit of a fool's errand. The nature of those services is that one can change the IP address assigned to one's deployed software at a whim... and it's often cheaper to set things up so that one doesn't have an IP address for one's services that survives a VM reboot.
CS183: Startup – Peter Thiel Class Notes Summary
Unpacking Attitude Certainty: Attitude Clarity and Attitude Correctness [pdf]
I see, a fellow Mike Benz respecter.
Some retro handheld devices (Ayn Odin 2 is the one I know for sure because I have it) have that feature.

Caveat though. Reports of spicy pillows are increasing as the age of the device gets closer to more than a year. They may or may not be using that feature.
> and the taint of C++'s template syntax.

Interestingly enough, nobody says that when talking about TypeScript…
Why would water prevent the evolution of hands? Lots of sea creatures have claws.

The sea is also not all that different from an atmosphere with a higher density in principle, we live "under-air".
Well, kinda, there are still fees for things like the right to use the various USB logos and of course to allocate a vendor ID [1] ($3,500 for two years, and $6,000 respectively).

[1]: https://www.usb.org/getting-vendor-id
They can have circuitry that bypasses the battery.
Clojure is fairly popular (I'm using it at work, though I'd prefer Scheme of course)
The name "Sheldrake" seems to coincide with colourful characters! The only other instances I know of are the Sheldrake family consisting of:

* Rupert, biologist turned crank scientist.

* Merlin, science populariser.

* Cosmo, musician.
In that case, there is 100% going to be a move to offshoring.

Ideally, the industry would relocate outside of the US, to a place where they can be competitive.

However, since this defense, they can’t, and will never be competitive.

So defense will languish.

I guess that’s all I have. I can’t see a way out of the situation if we accept your premise.

Defense margins aren’t going to beat social media margins, that too of something like meta.

Requirements are requirements. If you need a hammer, scalpels won’t help.
Safety Critical Components (ECM, ABS, etc) need to be certified. This is very expensive and modifications are done very infrequently. I doubt that auto-manufacturers will use Embedded Linux for them.
As person who is not currently trying to immigrate to the US I have mixed feelings. One one hand I wish all best to people who do want to move to the US, on other hand a non-broken H-1B could accelerate brain drain from the country I'm living in (which will be one more blow to already struggling economy).
>so if someone steals your authenticator they have access to your account indefinitely.

If a user's device is compromised, an attacker can also install a keylogger and steal all their passwords, or better yet steal all their cookies/sessions.

Once a device is compromised, it doesn't really matter what type of credential you're using to authenticate/login with.

But also, if device compromise is what it takes to steal a user's credential, then that would be amazing becuse it would mean that the goal posts have been moved dramatically in terms of attacker effort. Today, attackers only have to focus on either hacking/attacking 1 service or spin up a single phishing page, and they can mount attacks targeting hundreds of thousands of users with minimal effort.

If passkeys mean that all of a sudden the attackers need to try to compromise hundreds of thousands of unique endpoints/devices, then the amount of resources and effort they need to expend to compromise the same number of users will be raised astronomically. That's a win.
If I was trying to develop good developers, I'd add a 7th initial, recurring step to the vertical: Talk to your customer as often and directly as possible to ensure you are still working on the right problem.

It seems to me that a lot of wasted energy is in the form of working on problems that no one cares about. Not that this is necessarily bad (hobby, fun, art, side projects, new ideas, etc), but in a concrete business setting you need to be a bit more aggressive about making sure the customer still gives a shit about what you are working on over time.

I find all of this leads neatly into the 2nd most important thing for me which is making sure you have a good domain model (schema). If the tables, columns and relations that represent the business are high quality and accurate (I.e., your customer understands them), the code that follows will usually go smoothly. Staying on the customer's heels regarding the applicability of your software to the business means you can keep this well aligned over time.

I think much of the tech bloat we see today is a side effect of attempting to outrun the complexity of the customer's specific needs. After sitting on the phone with vendors and customers for a week, you will likely not find yourself playing around with the idea of using some esoteric language or infra to implement things. It's incredible what being directly exposed to the customers can do for a developer's growth.
When you are deeply involved in tech both personally and professionally you are probably very passionate about this and makes sense that you'd only look closely at this field and think "people are so deeply incurious. This seems to only happen in tech".

Tech is also one of the (if not the) most dynamic and fast evolving field a normal person will ever touch. Curiosity in tech can drain every single bit of free time and energy you have and you will hardly keep up with the progress, maybe barely scratch the surface. But people's available free time and energy wanes and curiosity is a collateral victim.

I've painfully gone through the entire cycle of this, including the bit of resurgence later on when you have a combination of free time but less energy. What I can say is that this absolutely does not happen just in tech. If anything tech is flooded with people with more curiosity than almost any other field.
And you’re going to remember that at a job interview 10 years later after never dealing with it after class? Uh, no.

I took through calc 3 + discrete math, but didn’t have to take the full linear algebra course for the BS in CS. I’m sure I could refresh myself on calculus, but almost no one is regularly maintaining their more advanced math knowledge in this field.
I know of people who go to church for social reasons, but are complete non-believers.
Clarke directly says it briefly in the novel version of 2001 and expanded on it in 2010, excerpted below:

"... As HAL was capable of operating the ship without human assistance, it was also decided that he should be programmed to carry out the mission autonomously in the event of the crew's being incapacitated or killed. He was therefore given full knowledge of its objectives, but was not permitted to reveal them to Bowman or Poole.

This situation conflicted with the purpose for which HAL had been designed - the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment. As a result, HAL developed what would be called, in human terms, a psychosis - specifically, schizophrenia. Dr C. informs me that, in technical terminology, HAL became trapped in a Hofstadter-Moebius loop, a situation apparently not uncommon among advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking programs. He suggests that for further information you contact Professor Hofstadter himself.

To put it crudely (if I understand Dr C.) HAL was faced with an intolerable dilemma, and so developed paranoiac symptoms that were directed against those monitoring his performance back on Earth. He accordingly attempted to break the radio link with Mission Control, first by reporting a (non-existent) fault in the AE 35 antenna unit.

This involved him not only in a direct lie - which must have aggravated his psychosis still further - but also in a confrontation with the crew. Presumably (we can only guess at this, of course) he decided that the only way out of the situation was to eliminate his human colleagues - which he very nearly succeeded in doing. ..."
I'm sure that after the hundreds of millions if not billions theseplants cost to mconstruct, as well as the expenses of millions per month just keeping the lights on, they are overjoyed to make a few million from when they were most needed.
I'm assuming they meant replacing the markov model with a modern language model, not having an LLM magically improve the repo.
> People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way

It's a natural approximation to a Total Perspective Vortex. Knowing what it represents probably makes the likelihood of an existential crisis more likely.
Epistemic Self-Doubt (2017)
We're also limited and shaped by keyboards. Why only one letter per finger? The datahand does five!

Why are key switches only press?

What about analog partial key press? There are Hall effect keyboard switches that do that, I want to try some.

What about finger twist for input? I don't think anything exists? Would that be a volume knob on a key switch?
From reading though the document, it seems like most of the requests are to enable proper interoperability with accessory devices, which seems reasonable and largely in line with the intent of the rules.

Non-Apple smartwatches are severely limited on iOS and the lack of these integration points is largely why.
Sure, and some companies strongly discourage looking over other open source code for exactly that reason.

But companies don't release their source code mostly for a different reason: they honestly believe that this is where their value is, or they believe support costs would outweight any benefits.

For some, it's true, but for most, it's utterly false (or there is a tiny little bit of code somewhere that is valuable, with all the rest being boring code that nobody else could put to use).
That joke is many decades older than the creation of the european union: http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html (probably not written by Mark Twain, but seemingly first appeared when he was still around?)
Biden (or whoever actually runs the country, since it's most definitely not Biden) is trying to undermine Trump's plan to turn H1-B into an auction, which is how it should be run, IMO. That's all there is to it. This will be canceled next year.
Oh so not Thatcher. Interesting.
As long as Jensen can polish up some sand and sell it for 5 morbillion dollars, nature and economic growth is not finite.
I used to hear this a lot — that (red European) squirrels are cute, but they take bird eggs! Then I started seeing, from lots of sources that should be reliable, that squirrels are in fact vegetarian, and that there little or no evidence of them taking eggs or animals. And then this article shows up, and I no longer know what to believe. Was "squirrels are vegetarian" a cover-up by Big Squirrel?
https://archive.is/62QnH
I now think of single-forward-pass single-model alignment as a kind of false narrative of progress. The supposed implications of 'bad' completions is that the model will do 'bad things' in the real material world, but if we ever let it get as far as giving LLM completions direct agentic access to real world infra, then we've failed. We should treat the problem at the macro/systemic level like we do with cybersecurity. Always assume bad actors will exist (whether humans or models), then defend against that premise. Single forward-pass alignment is like trying to stop singular humans from imagining breaking into nuclear facilities. It's kinda moot. What matters is the physical and societal constraints we put in place to prevent such actions actually taking place. Thought-space malice is moot.

I also feel like guarding their consumer product against bad-faith-bad-use is basically pointless. There will always be ways to get bomb-making instructions[1] (or whatever else you can imagine). Always. The only way to stop bad things like this being uttered is to have layers of filters prior to visible outputs; I.e. not single-forward-pass.

So, yeh, I kinda thing single-inference alignment is a false play.

[1]: FWIW right now I can manipulate Claude Sonnet into giving such instructions.
I contributed well-researched answers already when I was ostensibly a very junior dev, and even before that during my CS studies. Stuff you can lookup or simply try out is doable, of course questions where you need experience aren't a good fit.

When I was in high school I read the docs, and learned C++ from books and MSDN. Granted my access to the internet was rather limited back then, but it also never crossed my mind to bother people for things I could easily lookup myself.

Growing up in a RTFM, "search the forum first before asking" environment is seen as toxic today, but it really helps keeping certain behavior in check thats a drag on society as a whole.

One of the best mentors/bosses I ever had never answered coding questions directly, but always in the form of a question so I could look it up and learn for myself.

I try to do the same with my junior devs today, unless there's time constraints or they're under stress, I try to let them figure out the final answer themselves.
Not sure I understand. My father is catholic. Mother is protestant/evangelical. Both decided in their adulthood to stop practicing it and not push a single speck of it in me, consciously, without caring 'what others will say'. They didn't push me into some religious schools (unlike my wife who has rest of her life to deal with maybe well-meant but massive trauma of strict religious upbringing, psychologists can only help so much). My parents literally defined my cultural upbringing, more than anybody/anything else combined.

Anybody strong enough can do that, but lets be honest here, most people are not that strong and rather will go the path of least friction and most comfort and not the best long term path.

As said, I am eternally thankful to them for this since when looking back I clearly see choices they've made.
A free market requires a government that will enforce laws against fraud and force. Government also plays a role in dealing with externalities. A free market is not "completely unregulated".

> Almost literally everyone here is in favour of free markets

How does that fit in with single payer health care, rent control, universal basic income, calls for wealth taxes, calls to eliminate wealth "inequality", government football stadiums, government deciding who can play on sports teams, government funded TV, Amtrak, government subsidies, government bailouts, "you didn't build that", and, of course, the ever-increasing taxes and catastrophic amounts of spending?
I think it works exactly that way. It's doubt that protects you. If you think you're too smart to fall for it, then you've now got a blind spot that can be exploited.

Assurance makes you a sucker.
Well, a lot of the factors explicitly have nothing to do with general productivity at all, such as alignment. The goal with regards to selecting for productivity would be "someone who seems productive enough" but getting hung up on exactly how productive feels like a mistake, as aside from being unquantifiable, that isn't going to be the only or probably even main factor that decides the fate of the endeavor. Productivity is not the most challenging problem in software development. In my opinion, as far as factors for success for a technology endeavor goes, even overall technical competence winds up factoring in fairly low at the end of the day. What's important is meeting the threshold you need, not getting as high of a score as possible.

I should clarify that I actually agree with you if what you're saying is that the best measure of productivity we have is literally just going off your gut, but my argument is that this gut feeling is terrible. This is in large part because humans are biased, our gut feelings are swayed by things that simply shouldn't factor in. We tend to have more positive opinions of people that we think are like us and we sometimes wind up having negative opinions of someone based on stupid things like disagreeing with them on something that is ultimately irrelevant to whether or not they are productive.

And to me, the ultimate nail in the coffin is really in the question of what really constitutes productivity. Productivity is supposed to measure the efficiency of producing something, which already has pitfalls in and of itself when dealing with things that do have discrete, measurable indicators of progress, but programming doesn't, it's not even always obvious if progress is forward or backward sometimes. What's most important, performance optimizations, disaster planning, features, robustness, minimizing resource utilization? The best answer you can generally say is "It depends," and moreover, everyone will have a different set of competencies they're best at, so a person doesn't really have some single "productivity value" you could summarize them with. Yet, all of those things are pretty important for any serious technology organization, so you would want people with a variety of different affinities.

At that point, it starts to beg the question of whether or not attempting to directly measure software productivity is a worthwhile endeavor. I'd argue not.
> What if I could draw the letter on my trackpad?

The Apple Newton did that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton#Notes
> But you don't get interstellar travel out of biology. Too low-powered.

The thing is interstellar travel makes no sense except in science fiction books: there's literally nothing of interest to be worth trading in other planetary systems, and trade has always been the motive for maritime exploration, because it's what get you the massive funding such endeavor requires.

And btw even close space colonization doesn't make any sense either: we may end up with a vanity base on Mars before realizing that it costs a lot, for living conditions that are more harsh than at the top of mount Everest. Even if world population wasn't plateauing and headed to a decline, colonization of Siberia or even Antarctica would make much more sense.
Keynav is good but warpd [1] offers all of keynav's features and more (and on Windows, an equivalent of warpd is mousemaster [2]). They not only implement dichotomic splitting but the hint grid too. And they're both FOSS software as well.

[1] https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd

[2] https://github.com/petoncle/mousemaster
Anti-immigration rhetoric always descends into fiction.
> The cloud servers are known to be malicious...

Malicious software is malicious regardless of whether it's running as a VM on Someone Else's Server, or a Linux process on personally-owned bare metal.

> Saying we "need" APs to segment VLANs is missing the point.

> What we "need" is for IoT devices to communicate through purely local networks and have no Internet access. [They will do this via a mechanism using MQTT where they're required to declare if they're bad.]

a) Who said anything about APs? While I do have WiFi Access Points (that I did not mention), I also have hard-wired VLAN segmentation. [0]

b) From a network design perspective, it's a lot easier and more efficient to provide a VLAN that doesn't have Internet egress than to attempt to sort out which of a mess of hosts are permitted to talk to the Internet from which aren't, and ALSO prevent MAC- and/or IP-address spoofing to evade any such filtering.

c) I have no idea why you're invoking MQTT (specifically), but any scheme that requires a potentially-untrusted host running potentially-untrusted hardware and software to declare whether or not it's to be trusted is doomed to failure right off the bat.

[0] Sure, I'm a power user. But, a "VLAN-isolated network for untrusted machines" feature shouldn't be something that only power users get. This SHOULD be a baseline feature in consumer-grade WiFi APs and switches. (The race-to-the-bottom feature of the "market" for consumer gear is very sad.)
2024 End-of-Year Review: Open-Source AI Definition v1.0
I have similar feelings though maybe a bit more optimistic take. Obviously the AI hype train hasn't taken us to anywhere objectively better. Software has in no way become less buggy (if anything it feels worse in the past few years) and most if not all of the software I use predates the LLM era.

It feels like most developers en masse have taken on some masochist pleasure at deskilling themselves while becoming a prompt engineer beholden to OpenAI/MS/Google.

The upside is that those who take time to learn and improve can write software that most devs have given up the hope of being able to write. Write the next Maigt or org-mode while everyone else is asking AI to generate tailwind HTML React forms!