skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since this is a post about a programming tool, I expected links to repositories. I like to pick up a tool and turn it around in my hands before I decide if it is a good tool or not.
> "Some groups have taken steps toward professionalization of our trade: ... PE certification in Computer Engineering ..."

Yeah, no, that's for hardware engineers not software developers. The initial fundamentals of engineering (FE) exam for EE/CpE would blow the average CS major out of the water: see sections 6-13 of https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/FE-Electrical-a....

Assuming the candidate passes that, then they need to find a fellow PE to supervise them for four years (https://www.nspe.org/resources/licensure/what-pe) to vouch for their work experience. Good luck finding one at your average software company.

Then they would need to pass the Principles of Engineering (PE) exam for Computer Engineering: https://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Computer-Oct-20... which is fortunately focused on CpE topics rather than EE but still well outside the day-to-day professional experience of the average developer.

After that they have their professional engineer's license but then what would they do with it? The topics that the license certifies them on aren't applicable to average developers so a professional engineer's stamp of approval means nothing to most software projects.
Was it written by an AI?
> textual WYSIWYG

You said it.

WordStar did not have fonts. MacWrite did.

WYSIWYG without fonts is ... I don't know ... "textual WYSIWYG"? Whatever that is.
At some point the AST needs to be serialized as bytes on disk. In the big picture, the cost of having that serialization format be also human readable is relatively small as long as the syntax is designed to be sane (i.e. not c++/perl)
Why do people even do this? What's the point in farming HN karma?
People won't pay for things they can get free elsewhere. People happily pay for differentiated goods.
Problem is that the investors forking the money that fuels the research as well as the development and maintenance of this tech are doing so expecting huge returns that are unlikely to come during their lifetimes.

Once the AI winter comes once again, investor money will dry up as the realisation sets in that LLM evolution has peaked and it is all declining marginal utility when it comes to investing in LLMs.

Once the snow settles, only the open source models by big companies will survive and likely mostly treated as another egg in the basket of opportunities. Companies like OpenAI will be the most affected as their reason for existing is getting more value out of LLMs several orders of magnitude higher than the current one.
Thank you! I’m familiar with the term but couldn’t place the acronym without more context.
I’m obsessed with structural editors because it feels intuitively like the right approach to creating software. However I’ve yet to come across an interface that really clicks. Still love it though. Right now I’m building a structured editor for creating UIs, so can attest to how difficult it is to get it right.

It’s a super interesting problem space.
I learned to type on an electric typewriter :) It wasn't a fancy word processing one with memory, but just that the hammers struck the paper using a motor making it easier to type. It also made a very satisfying 'thunk' which I would randomly trigger while the teacher was talking that in turn caused me to get thrown out of class a number of times.
And even if/when you are paid well, you probably aren't given any meaningful ability to do the things necessary for those business problems. Corporate inertia is strong.
How did you get used to eating natto? Did you like it immediately?
"Apple Intelligence failed?" The far-reaching project that just had its initial release like 60 days ago? Why would anyone read beyond a first sentence like that?
The Ocean Teems with Networks of Interconnected Bacteria
> Rust is just one part of a never ending cycle of people trying to reinvent programming.

Which is good. Programming is an open field, ideas are constantly popping in and out and you sometimes need to reinvent things to prove that they are worth it. More languages is a good thing, the bizarre tribalism around them is dangerous, but it is not possible to prevent it, people gotta be people.
It's also technology was much less ubiquitous back then and less evenly distributed, at least in my experience.

I went from a mechanical typewriter which had the whiteout tape as it's only "advanced" feature, directly to a WYSIWYG editor. It was absolutely night and day. I only saw an "advanced" electronic typewriter later in life at my grandparents house, which was used rarely and only for her accounting business as it was so expensive when they first bought it.

As far as I know my experience was pretty much normal for my peer group - as my school had a similar setup. As a kid in school, it was amazing going from having to totally re-type a rough draft to being able to make some casual edits and hit print. Hours saved for each paper, especially with the typing skills I had back then!
Though today much of the Microsoft.Extensions family is considered BCL by most users, especially in the way it is documented as "Core functionality" (the "Generic Host" model uses a lot of Microsoft.Extensions, up front in .NET documentation today) and also in the way that the majority of it (especially in this case of Microsoft.Extensions.Logging) is source controlled side-by-side with most of the BCL, including almost all of System.**: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/tree/main/src/libraries

(There are some of Microsoft.Extensions that exist outside of dotnet/runtime in dotnet/extensions: https://github.com/dotnet/extensions/tree/main/src/Libraries)
Maybe that's a way to recoup paying $86 for $50?
Soylent used to be decent. But now they push the bottled drinks over the powders and it's lamentable.
Textual means that it ran in text mode. That doesn't mean that it did not have fonts. It... Did. There's two fonts in the screenshot I linked beforehand.
Promoting HN posts can earn a lot of money I'd wager. The audience tends to be wealthy.

Edit: A quick search suggests that one HN upvote costs about 9 cents. I wonder why we don't see even more bots.
Apple has always done both -- invented and refined.

Claiming that Apple does not invent is as gobsmackingly wrong as claiming that Apple invented everything.
In Android they are way too common. Like an animation that decides to fire after the UI element it was made for has been destroyed, or a race condition in destroying a resource, or VE logging.
Not a single human being alive in the world believes that drinking Coca-Cola "leads to success and happiness."

Coke advertises so that when you're in the store or a gas station and you think "maybe I'll get a soda" you think of Coke before Pepsi. They advertise so that someone starting a restaurant thinks to buy the Coke syrup before they think to buy the Pepsi syrup.
An oracle is basically any device/API that you can plug into a Turing Machine to give you the answer to some problem.
You can have an oracle to answer the question "what is the optimal path that visits all these points" (an NP-complete problem) or even "does this program have an input that makes it loop infinitely" (an undecidable problem).

The point is simply to explore the consequences regarding computability and complexity if Turing machines can access such oracles. By definition, a machine with access to the first type of oracle gives you a O(1) solution to any NP-complete problem. But how does it react on more complicated problems, such as NEXP-TIME (non-deterministic exponential time) or PSPACE (polynomial space)? Does it even help or not?
The idea is to test different class of problems with different classes of oracles to create analogs of the complexity hierarchy.

The hope is that the relationships between these analogs provide a deeper understanding of the standard hierarchy.
You could use a Visual LLM to transcribe the PDF back into JSON data for you.

Something like: ghostpdf to convert PDF into images, then gpt-4o or ollama+Llama3 to transcribe each image into output JSON.
One Button Keyboard (2021)
I think the goldilocks path is to make the user the agent and use the LLM simply as their UI/UX for working with the system. Human (domain expert) in the loop gives you a reasonable chance of recovering from hallucinations before they spiral entirely out of control.

"LLM as UI" seems to be something hanging pretty low on the tree of opportunity. Why spent months struggling with complex admin dashboard layouts and web frameworks when you could wire the underlying CRUD methods directly into LLM prompt callbacks? You could hypothetically make the LLM the exclusive interface for managing your next SaaS product. There are ways to make this just as robust and secure as an old school form punching application.
It's actually that microgravity allows you to create much more effective drugs.

https://www.varda.com/science/gravity-as-a-knob-for-tuning-p...
I use cash because it doesn't require batteries, and because my cell phone won't let me use Google Pay, as it's running a custom OS (before that, was rooted) so I'm obviously untrustworthy.

I do use a credit card pretty often too, but I always have a little cash on me and I use it at least weekly.
Managing GitHub Repo Backdoors – Repo Deploy Keys
There is no evidence of a company using the fact that you've said "yes" at a random point in the conversation as confirmation that you've agreed to their (maybe unheard) pitch, despite variations on that urban legend doing the rounds for years.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/can-you-hear-me-scam/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_you_hear_me%3F_(alleged_te...
Prompt used seems to be here:

https://github.com/danielpetho/unbaited/blob/main/extension/...

Seems like a reasonable idea. I have doubts about an LLM being able to reliably detect when a tweet was made to *deliberately* trigger emotions. That’s setting the bar quite high on llm working out intent
The companies that came together to make MIDI all had analog polysynths capable of true polyphony before the MIDI standard was even finished. (distinct osc/amp/filter outputs per note and not just paraphonic synths that shared AMP/Filter circuits between OSCs)

MIDI was more about unifying the entire studio of synths, samplers, drum machines, and recording equipment. And creating interoperability between various manufacturers of music equipment. It was a solution to the multiple control voltage standards that predated it and made it troublesome to tie equipment together.
If I could work on my laptop, yeah. There's a list of reasons why I don't like flying, but I have to do it a few times a year.

And I work from home. I need a dependable Internet connection for my work, but otherwise I don't need much. If I could sit on a train instead of sit in my house, that would be nice.
Watching the countryside roll by is a nice office window :)
The copper coils are usually things like solenoids, never going to replace that, we still use that tech.

In practice doing this would take restoring a pinball machine from a "build/repair it with your hands" project and turn it into a programming project where you are starting at a computer screen the whole time. You would just replace the "brain" with an arduino or raspberry pi, connect it to the existing lights and solenoids, but then you need to program it and then it becomes a different thing.
Related - Technology Connections has several videos about old pinball machines that showcase how incredibly complex they are, here's the first video:

Old pinball machines are amazingly complex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue-1JoJQaEg
CUDA/Metal accelerated language model inference
This is a hypothesis, but it doesn't bear out in human out come research no matter how popular it might be on social media. No "perfect meal" would be high in saturated fat.

Animal flesh also doesn't contain all of the nutrients. Just plug 2000 calories of steak into Cronometer.com and look.
Do they? I can't name a single disc thrower, sabre-master, parallel bar gripper, judo person, or thing-shooter.

Every once in a while a Turkish guy shooting with no equipment becomes a meme, or the greatest swimmer or runner in the history of the world comes onto the scene. Newsmedia goes nuts because this sells advertising.

But then a southern girl in a 5-second viral video does 100x of that in notoriety, with no travel budget and for the production cost of a single Big Mac.
> One thing I want to note, you can't do it in few prompts, it feels like having to convince the agent to do what you ask him iteratively.

Success with current day LLMs isn't about getting them to output perfect code. Having them do the pets their good at - rough initial revs - and then iterating from there, is more effective. The important metric is code (not LoC, mind you) that gets checked into git/revision control and sent for PR and merged. Realizing when convincing the LLM to output flawless code ends up taking you in circles and is unproductive, while not throwing away the LLM as a useful tool is where the sweet spot is.
Three problems:

1. Switching costs. There are a ton of vending machines and other automated stuff that takes dollar bills but not coins. You can say “oh they’d switch”, and maybe, but they don’t want to because it’s expense and complexity for little/no benefit.

2. Critical mass. Similar problem: nobody will invest in supporting dollar coins as long as their customers don’t use dollar coins. Customers won’t use them because they won’t accept them from banks and stores. And they won’t accept them because they know lots of infra doesn’t support them.

3. US psychology sees coins as “change”, not money. If you see someone buying lunch with change, the assumption is they’re homeless or something. It’s irrational, but so what? And it would change… if we ever got over the hump.

Don’t think of the problem like a technocrat, where any 5% improvement is obviously worth it. Think of it like a marketer, where you have to change customer behavior, and that needs a 10x value prop.

Or I guess we can think like autocrats: we know what’s good for ‘em and they’ll just have to accept it.
I was a Linux zealot in the 1990s. I had a conversation with a friend from college who was developing solutions based on Windows in Arizona who told me that he loved Microsoft because Windows was a platform that made people like him rich.
I have gone through something similar where I won’t feel motivated to even pursue the interview properly because I’ve been burnt so many times already. Yes you just need one yes (ideally more for negotiating leverage) but those 1-2 offers are damn hard to come by these days
The purpose of a thesis statement is generally to establish a conclusion and then over the rest of the article, the goal is to build up evidence to support that conclusion.
PowerPC was pretty great for a while. Then Motorola and IBM started dropped the ball (or rather, stopped putting resources into what was not a particularly big customer) and Apple switched away.
I just want to say that I appreciate pin ball machines so much.

I used to think eventually screens will replace everything....but I get this amazing feeling from a pin ball machine. I wonder if this occurs because I'm older and grew up without touchscreens and phones?

Or do I just like knowing how much work went into building all the small components of the machine?
Akamai regained control of its runaway cloud bills
You could do that with the pointer methods on serde_json::Value too.
It's what Apple does. The first version of a product often sucks somehow, but is generally usable. They're masters at iterating.
It's interesting to note that when WordPerfect got a GUI, it had to be worked up separately for each platform --- the NeXTstep version was quite nice, took full advantage of Display PostScript, and was coded up by a couple of programmers in six weeks or so.
The Bryan Johnson Approach to Eng Productivity
apropos: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/magazine/worthless-pennie...
It just takes so many cycles to get to a point where everyone in the company is on-boarded to OKRs properly and by then people are burnt out on them, going through the motions without seeing the value, at least from the bottom up.
This reads as if the required amount of management for different initiatives is constant, but it isn't.

One thing that happens is that when money is plentiful, there is a push to find new ways to generate returns. When money is tight, new bets look bad, and companies may cut new bets and work on optimizing their existing cash-cows.

Strictly, that says nothing about the number of managers needed, but I do think it's less management intensive to keep on with what you're already doing.
The Sinclair Spectrum Z80-based home computer had a keyboard that had all its BASIC keywords on the keyboard. I can't say I liked it, particularly as the keyboard was a very horrible rubber affair.
Agreed! This was very fun, I felt like I was being gently roasted by the Friar's Club or a bunch of top HN commenters - or both!
Guesstimation of the numbers is not promising. The article mentions 1 to 3 million as targets, let's say 2 million as an asset at retirement. At 4% withdrawal, that gives 80k a year. Median wage is about that.

There are about 4 million people in an age cohort below, say, 80 (80 * 4 million = 320 million). Let's say a generation is 20 years. So for Gen X to retire all at this comfortable level, that would be 4 million * 2 million * 20 = 160 trillion dollars in assets. This is staggered, but still.

The total US stock market value was recently about 55 trillion [1] and 110 trillion for global stock market [2]

These numbers seem a bit off from each other. Looking at the chart for the US growth, the value doubled from 1998 to 2014, then doubled again from 2014 to now. The later bit is presumably due to the massive injection of money (inflation) from the past 5 years which all seems supported by looking at the massive jump in value in 2020 in the chart.

And here is some analysis about GDP to total market value [3]. Also not a promising conclusion. Has market value at 60trillion at the moment and GDP at 30 trillion.

1: https://siblisresearch.com/data/us-stock-market-value/
2: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-109-trillion-global-sto...
3: https://www.gurufocus.com/stock-market-valuations.php
The small business has even more incentive to keep it updated. I don’t speak the language of every place I go and it’s a huge waste of time to hope they’re open. And updating business hours might take a few minutes, but fielding phone calls takes a lot more effort and time. If I have to call a business to find out basic information, I’m not going there.
Apple wishes they had anything close to Windows (or Android's) market share. Yes, people want PCs because a lot of software just won't run on Apple hardware, and Apple hardware is too expensive.
Akamai China CDN shut down[0], were they using it? I don’t understand.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42603585
Also doesn't work correctly for me on Chrome Android 13 on a 4a. Missing terrain.

But it works on Firefox! :)
I’m sorry that’s your experience.

But it can’t function any other way. You are a filter of small problems for everyone in the org higher than you. If you bring up everything up the chain your level may as well not exist.
As the other guy said, that's why I mentioned using an ID. And as the other guy said, the same as required regardless of what channel you're using.
Sometimes there's no choice. If it's between beans and rice or nothing at all, then it's going to be beans and rice. Soup kitchens, school lunches, etc are a great help too.
Yeah, and I'm not in the northeast, so for me, an Amtrak ride almost always means riding through long stretches of rural (and sometimes practically wilderness) areas. Mobile data connection goes in and out, very unreliable.
You're entirely correct. However, most people on Hacker News are also making decent money on the side with their main job.

This is not the case for most Olympians, because even for sports that are not attracting large amounts of visitors and viewers and therefore sponsorships, you still basically need to dedicate your life to it.

You don't need to dedicate your life to writing code unless you are working for an early-stage startup or Elon Musk. So you have spare time which you can use to write code.
There's no need to go to the trouble of making these changes. Cash money has been illegal in the United States since before most here were even born. If they discover you have cash, it can be confiscated (and charged with a crime... not you, but the cash can be charged). If you deposit more than $10,000 at a bank, the banks are deputized to snitch on you. If you deposit exactly $10,000, they snitch on you. And, because some criminals might deposit less than $10,000 to try to avoid consequences, if you deposit less than $10,000. Not just banks, if you bought a new car (or new RV, or new tractor, etc) at a dealership with cash, they'd have to report that too. Social norms have been subtly manipulated to convince you that people who have cash or pay with cash are shady.
I am a dad. This happened when my daughter reached high school and now my son as well. When I ask what happened in school, they always respond with one word - “nothing”. Then I follow up and say that they had so many classes and time on the playground. How could all of that amount to nothing. To that answer with two words- “nothing much”. I heave a huge sigh and mutter under my breath, It’s okay and move on. It’s probably to do with onset of puberty and the generation gap. I probably don’t understand their world much at all.
I mean the same is true pretty much for most languages once English (or sometimes other) loanwords come into the picture. German for example doesn't technically have a "j" sound like in "John", but it's nowadays used all the time in English loanwords (some speakers might substitute "ch", which does exist in native German words, but most especially younger people don't). The letter "j" is otherwise pronounced like English "y".
FWIW, I read it as "here's how it could happen", not as "it's happening".

If it were happening, it would kill our battery really quickly, and be easily measurable and obvious in a router trace, so I find it very unlikely.
That part usually takes a couple quarters to show up though. :(
This is a topic I've been contemplating heavily and it's very instructive to see the iterative progress you've made here.

I think development tools like this are necessary to expand coding outside of just the desktop experience. For example, I've seen kids program some pretty impressive robotics with just a touchscreen and Blockly.

Also, from a compilers perspective, it feels almost absurd to rely on plaintext. Imagine how much harder code merging is using line diff compared to diffing syntax trees.

Thanks for sharing!
1) They're novelty collector's items.

2) Selling individual sheets has a lot more overhead per sheet/bill than selling fresh stacks of bills to banks.
My go-tos for cheap semi-healthy food:

- Sweet potatoes. I eat one almost every day. I live in NC and can buy bulk local-grown ones in the fall and they last a very long time, but even at the grocery store it's only like 1.50 for 3 good sized ones. Eat them cooked in oven at 400, wrapped in foil for 1.5hrs depending on size, with butter or just salt.

- Sardines - I just eat from the can or over toast. Can also be good mixed with mayo. Lots of good deals available here, but try to prefer Morroco or Poland sourced ones vs the bottom tier ones from China. Bonus is sardines are lower in mercury than bigger fish like tuna.

- Goat cheese from Aldi - It's like $2/8oz there, my regular store is more than double that

Then I pair it all up with toast. The toast part isn't very healthy, but it's cheap.

I don't have a real cost reason to prefer cheap eating, but I'm the kind of person who would happily eat the exact same meal my whole life if given the option. So it's fun to optimize a little.
same difference nowadays with everything being flash frozen