skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>impact is ambiguous

This is the core of the issue (most replies usually involve some slightly different definitions). I take many definitions of impact, including societal use, contributing to knowledge, etc. But it's much clearer there are many things people do that are low impact, especially in places with a lot of bureaucracy, politics etc.

A corporate job can, but it seems to me as a result of various incentives corporate jobs tend to be compartmentalized, low impact and repetitive. We're also at a down cycle where tech, the historical haven for impact in a job, is scaling back a ton of things to focus on stock prices. If you know of any corporate jobs that do have impact by some definition of it, I'd love to hear it. In my experience these have been mostly startups.
Yes, in the STEM fields, for published papers, it's easy just to count them; much harder to read them; to evaluate them, some people just count awards, etc. So, the hard work that makes the good material in the paper may never be noticed.

There is, "You get what you pay for." So, want papers, you will get papers, and you can count them. It goes, did Haydn write 101 symphonies or 1 symphony 101 times?

Early on, had a good career going in computing but where occasionally some math made a lot of difference. So, to help that career got a Ph.D. in applied math. Never had any intention of being a professor but for a while did to try to help my seriously, fatally, stressed out wife (Valedictorian, PBK, Woodrow Wilson, NSF, Summa Cum Laude, Ph.D.) -- took a professor job near her family home and farm.

In my little Ph.D department, saw the Chair and four professors get fired and one more leave, fired or not. The career I had before grad school was a lot better than the one those professors had.

Had to conclude that, tenure or not, being a professor is, on average, a poor way to even reasonable financial security. Generally there is low pay, e.g., too little to buy a house, keep cars running, support a wife and family. There's a LOT of dirty politics, infighting, higher-ups who don't want you to be successful.

Bluntly, a research university takes in money that a lot of people care about and puts out papers that only a few people care about: Net, there is no very strong reason to pay professors enough for even reasonable financial security. Key sources of the money are short term grants from the usual suspects, NSF, DOE, DARPA, NIH ("too many for them all to be turned off at once" -- JB Conant?), but that is essentially just contract work and not steady employment, with little promise that when a Professor's baby is ready for college there will be money enough for them to go. It's a house built on paper that can be blown away by any thunder storm.

Now, for a career, e.g., financial security, to leave something for the kids in the family tree, regard business, e.g., now involving the Internet, as the best approach, and there regard computing and math as important tools but only tools. Research? Did some, and it is a key to the business. Academic research? Did some, published, on my own dime, still waiting for the checks.

History, how'd we get here? Used to be that some guy built a valuable business and had several sons. One of the sons inherited the business, and the rest went to the military as an officer, academics as a professor, or to politics. Then WWII showed that the STEM fields can be crucial for national security, and some related funding started, e.g., summer math programs for selected high school students, research grants.

"If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?"

Ah, "The business of America is business."
thanks! still low b/w, but itm, SMBC's pedagogy tip: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1736632368-20250111.png
They block Brave browser cos of some crypto beef.

But Brave has some dank ad-blocking fu. Hard to resist.
> Started/founded are basically the same, no?

My point was that his name is Mike, not Mark :)
I meant “meaningless” in the sense that your encryption is then on heavy diminishing returns territory when it comes to defending against a qc.

It will likely work for a while, but it’s a fundamentally wrong approach and you’re going to be exposed into recording & decryption attacks, instead of breaking your encryption today, I just store all your communications and wait for the next qc to be online, then fish for stuff that is still useful.

It’s a silly approach if the timeframe is 50 years because most secret information goes stale quicker, but if you’re just waiting for say a year…
Great! The view of almost anything hard is gloomy online, probably because the conversation is dominated by those who either wish they'd tried and now have a chip on their shoulder or who made the wrong choice for them and are self-therapising by writing about it. Those who thrived in a PhD programme likely don't have a reason to bang on about their experience in quite so many words.

> You still have to be realistic

I'm expecting it to be very challenging. But that's the point — isn't it?

Good luck to you too.
Curated corner of Mastodon.
Open-source projects use Zulip/Discord/Matrix as forums so I go there as well.
Others like sub-Reddits, HN or blogs I access mostly through RSS feeds. (With occasional exceptions like now.)

For surface-level information/news there is huge overlap in those places. Many duplicates.
My 2025 resolution is to be less online.

I used to be on Instagram around 2010 till Facebook bought it and changed it from community to influencers-infested algorithms and ads - I have no time for that.
Trains!
The thing with Discord and Reddit is: using it means very little. The communities make or break it. For example, I play two games regularly: Wordfeud and Warcraft Rumble. For Wordfeud, I seek no community, I only play it with my mother and my wife. For Warcraft Rumble, I like to theorycraft for myself, but if I really am stuck that is one of the places I go to first. So I lurk there, which means I am a user. But I do not participate since I removed my Reddit account a while ago. Similar with Discord (I do have an account): I am member of quite some Discord communities but I almost exclusively lurk. Discord and Reddit are nothing special though, since their ToS are terrible (we own your data, here are some ads, we profile you). The only reason I am there is network effect and the signal to noise ratio regarding info is 'good enough'. You're not even allowed to use your own or a modified client though...
You can help the customer now, but you should keep in mind that the people working on the more general solutions will at some point take your moat.

E.g. you can build a drawing program where you can tell it in natural language to apply certain effects and make some changes. But another company might be working on a OS assistant that can help the user in any program currently running on the computer.

Or you can build a robot that can pick bolts from an assembly line, but at some point there will be a company building a cheap robot that can do anything from folding t-shirts to knitting a sweater.
This comment describes ActivityPub.
My oldest code still in production is 20 years old.

Work for non tech companies if you want it to last. Some industrial code is even older - my company has just removed some devices that requires a floppy disk to update
Mid-level dev looking to really upskill, apply here if you have fullstack profile. You need these kind of work environment every now and then
In the U.S., in most fields, it is virtually impossible.
And off-by-one errors :)
Just because someone doesn't trust Apple to build a worldwide live location tracking system doesn't mean they don't want someone else to build a worldwide location tracking system. There's an inherent risk to worldwide location tracking systems and while I think the genie is out of the bottle now, I would prefer there not to be a worldwide location tracking network at all.

Airtags have become a commodity at this point and despite attempts to prevent this, criminals are already using them to follow potential victims to their homes. I know GPS trackers and a bunch of different find-my style networks existed long before Apple brought the airtag to market, but those didn't turn up in purses and cars quite as often as Airtags now do.

Apple tries their best to make this thing secure and safe, but there's only so much safety they can add before the devices become useless.
>Not every business wants every customer. Some businesses know they can do very well if they keep their costs-per-customer low and their revenue-per-customer high, even if they have to have fewer customers to do it.

So they forego customers that just want to pay $N amount of money to try&use their software/service in favor of customers that want touchy-feely phone support at every step?
The counter approach is better for everyone, less work for the company and a nicer experience for the user, but only in a vacuum.

Unregulated competition is a race to the bottom, so the most unethical, invasive, borderline illegal, and manipulative tactics come out on top. Not the best product, but the best marketing. Not the most customer friendly, but the most customer-converting through coercion. Not pricing products and services what they're worth, but the most anyone will be wiling to pay for them.
I think you could approximate the phased array and frequency multiplexing with a bunch of dish antennas connected to separate radios, but the dishes would need to be connected to motors to follow moving targets. It would also require a lot more physical space.

The neat thing about phased arrays is that they are solid state, aka no moving parts, so they have a much faster response.

Here is a really good presentation on how they work and how to build one.

https://youtu.be/ytBmoL2wZLw?si=f7aTFNfeUbvbbqVe
Show HN: Interactive graph matching your resume to Who's Hiring posts
The reason examples are generally those from the past it's because those from the present are, by definition, controversial and so it mostly would just derail the topic.

It just so happens that controversial views on one era frequently end up being seen as 'right and proper' in another, and vice versa.

Here's a 'safe one' unless you actually think about the implications of what it means I'm saying - forcing people, against their will, to kill (or be killed) is a fundamentally unacceptable violation of human dignity and human rights, that should never be tolerated under any circumstance.

That's probably safe to say, yet now apply it to certain situations and suddenly it becomes tabboo. Of course in the future it will probably be as plainly obviously correct as the notion that slavery is wrong.
UK; more specifically Scotland. And mathematics; more specifically (algebraic) topology and (differential) geometry.
The only universal feedback for business is money – don't give them any and you're giving all the feedback you need to.

Anything else is wasting your time.
Quantum physics
Further suggested by the imagery used being AI generated
I'm not an AI founder, but I'd say there is still some value to be added by better architectures.

These AI wrappers run ship engines on a kayak. For example, most coding companion's ignore my code base the moment I close other files. Somehow their context is minimal. Such systems can be improved dramatically just by changing the software around the LLM.

But I get it, you have to be quick and don't waste time on MVPs. If you get critical mass, you can add that later... hopefully
There's a slew of models and different methods for recording.

The time period they record tends to be very short, but that does raise an interesting question, when do they stop recording?
So far, I seem to have all three. Let's see how it goes! Thanks.
s/25 year old founder/25 yr old first-time founder/
HFT is one, they switch off when they leave for the night, unless it's crypto. HFT is demanding in other ways though
In which specific ways are they wrong, though?

Being able to learn from others' mistakes is generally considered to be a sign of aptitude.
> That has been done in the past

Could you share some examples of how the old systems did this?
HTTP QUERY method reached consensus and may become a Proposed Standard
We don’t need to hack anymore by using invalid verb (like POST) method when making queries that need to have a body or breaking the standard by adding a body to a GET!

As documented in RFC 7127, it’s a great time to add explicit support for this method to your favourite client/server/library.

edit: As I was mistaken and it's not a Proposed Standard yet, it may be too early to implement it ...BUT on the other hand, node.js for example has released support for it already in June 2024: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/51562
ImagineSpaces
Plus assuming that your codebase is clangd parseable. Many aren't out of the box.

Plus assuming that you're not reading/modifying code on a (remote) machine where you don't have access to IDEs but simple editors only.

Otherwise, I also find auto helpful but I use it sparingly, mostly where type is obvious, e.g. can be easily deducted from the local scope.
this is not only not true , it has no basis's in reality.
In the "real" world there are tradeoff's and constraints.
scaling does not work infinitely , and products which are delivered by good engneering cultures have a non linear growth ( bad vs very good ).

comming back to research one of the frontier model's deepseek was able to come close to SOTA with a relatively small budget because of one of their mixture of experts approach.
I always preferred this one: https://youtu.be/5-OjTPj7K54?si=TYuCLJ9_2WvRHcHM
No, it didn’t.
> Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher has described Matt Mullenweg’s move to shut down WordPress’s sustainability team as “bizarrely heinous behavior.”

Is it bizarrely heinous? Or is it just kind of bad? I enjoy WordPress drama, and run a couple of lazy WordPress services, but I don't think that this is actually worth all the spilt ink and tears, relative to all the other injustices a person might choose to concern themselves with.
Then don’t lose your repo xD
Most quantitative recruitment criteria are arbitrary to some degree. Unless you rigorously examine every single applicant, you need some heuristics for initial filtering.
HMD Key – A lightweight, affordable smartphone
As long as people are not willing to acknowledge that we're not blank slates, but posses vast intelligence inherently, and that even the simplest life forms are infinitely more intelligent than LLMs, there won't be progress.
Too bad this doesn't use the system keyboard on mobile
Would love to see this in the wild! It's long overdue.

I have to ask though - what does "reached proposed standard" mean, for those us who one day actually use this. Will this be a part of eg browsers next decade, this year, what?
Well, you can hype the results and then put it into a black box and call it a LLM anyway

Which is pretty much what O1 etc are

Update: it seems your recent submission[1] is pretty much that... interesting :D

1: https://github.com/caesarhq/textSQL
You just need to use a lisp implementation that has a tree-shaker if you really care about binary size for since reason
This individual is pretty unique in this regard. I’ve never seen anything like it. Most students will acknowledge that I know the literature and will accept guidance. This person seems to think they know everything but their work is the equivalent of a tutorial case in the commercial software.
I want to write d, but I have a ton of c - d makes it easy. rust is harder as I have to write ffi. d makes working with something else easy shich it an advantage. Too bad it never took off.
This project pretty much pivoted into https://dragonruby.org, a framework for making 2d games in Ruby. It's pretty active and in-development, but has nothing to do with building cross-platform apps per se. No idea why this was posted.
I think it would be more vibes based - commonly occurring things would be reinforced more in the weights. Rather than it explicitly counting the number of occurrences.
To bake a cake from scratch, you must first recreate the universe
Could you be more specific about the pressure you felt to 'suck up' and 'lie'? I read this kind of thing often, but it's usually left quite vague. What exactly are people lying about?

Physics (since it's supposed to be rigorous) seems like a less likely area than some to be driven by politics and trends, but I suppose I can imagine that competing research programmes and ideas benefit from a certain amount of marketing and smooth-talking of people with funding rather than relying purely on empirical evidence for their claims.
Kenney is awesome.

OpenGameArt.org (OGA) has a lot of libre/free assets (Kenney often posts on OGA):

https://opengameart.org/

Itch.io also has many CC0 and CC-BY licensed assets:

https://itch.io/game-assets/assets-cc0

https://itch.io/game-assets/assets-cc4-by
Have you ever talked to the people who design those languages? Because they will disagree with you about as strongly. And, of course, they are in a position to be correct.
Emacs Users: I'm Okay, I Promise (2022)
The smarter AI app founders know that more advanced AI will easily replace their current tech. What they're trying to do now is lock in a userbase.
Yeah knowing that having infinite perfect data and infinite compute to train an end-to-end DNN is the way to solve anything is great, but not exactly helpful when you don't have either of those things. Not to mention having to actually deploy it on a low power system in the end.
C++ is trying to eliminate the use of preprocessor. they can't get rid of it but you shouldn't use it.
Name of Director Smithee Isn't What It Used to Be (2000)
Also, there's only one hard problem in software engineering: people.

Seems to apply to AI as well.
Most normal people don't read documentation of programming libraries.
I think one thing ignored here is the value of UX.

If a general AI model is a "drop-in remote worker", then UX matters not at all, of course. I would interact with such a system in the same way I would one of my colleagues and I would also give a high level of trust to such a system.

If the system still requires human supervision or works to augment a human worker's work (rather than replace it), then a specific tailored user interface can be very valuable, even if the product is mostly just a wrapper of an off-the-shelf model.

After all, many SaaS products could be built on top of a general CRM or ERP, yet we often find a vertical-focused UX has a lot to offer. You can see this in the AI space with a product like Julius.

The article seems to assume that most of the value brought by AI startups right now is adding domain-specific reliability, but I think there's plenty of room to build great experiences atop general models that will bring enduring value.

If and when we reach AGI (the drop-in remote worker referenced in the article), then I personally don't see how the vast majorities of companies - software and others - are relevant at all. That just seems like a different discussion, not one of business strategy.
> Perhaps something changes, I am waiting for this to happen for some time now (10y and counting).

What will change is that PhD will become an inherited title. If your parents were/are PhDs, you will ceremoniously be granted the title when coming of age. That title can then be rented out to people or organizations (such as companies) who are required to have a PhD by government regulation for the activity that they are in. You can of course also mortgage this title to a bank or other company that will take care of the process.
Your anti intellectual bias is showing. There are problems in all domains. I’ve seen plenty of arrogant fools in industry too.

They’re using an industry tool to do well trodden industry problems that were solved by academics decades ago.

I’m not tolerating his behaviour and I’ve made my views clear to my colleagues. He’s going to burn every bridge possible with this behaviour.
There's no known way to make this work well yet, but feel free to invent that. Until that happens, federated is mostly the best we have, because most people don't want to be responsible for their own servers.

P.S. ActivityPub is a euphemism for Mastodon's protocol, which isn't just ActivityPub.
>Eventually, you’ll just need to connect a model to a computer to solve most problems - no complex engineering required.

The word "eventually" is doing a lot of work here. Yes, it's true in the abstract, but over what time horizon? We have to build products to solve today's problems with today's technology, not wait for the generalized model that can do everything but may be decades away.
No, the idea is that a formula would apply. The reliance on voluntarily handing over from the founders is specifically what a legislative change would alter. That's the whole point of what I'm saying.
I think there's a more fundamental problem at play here: what seems to work in 'AI', search, is made better by throwing more data into more compute. You then store the results in a model, that amounts to pre-computed solutions waiting for a problem. Interacting with the model is then asking questions and getting answers that hopefully fit your needs.

So, what we're doing on the whole seems to be a lot of coding and decoding, hoping that the data used in training can be adequately mapped to the problem domain realities. That would mean that the model you end up with is somehow a valid representation of some form of knowledge about the problem domain. Trouble is, more text won't yield higher and higher resolution of some representation of the problem domain. After some point, you start to introduce noise.
I'm in complete agreement with your more recent timeline piece (the negative one), and as a younger user (22 year old student) I'm actively relocating this year to somewhere slightly more rural with a focus on physical/knowledge combined work to secure a good quality of life nearly solely because of how fast our timelines are.

A 'word calculator' this effective is the best substitute that we have for a logic calculator. And the fact that it's enough in 90% of situations is terrifying as it is transformative, as is the fact no one is awake to it.

Exponential power scaling in an unstable world feels like it only makes it exponentially more unstable though.
I think this argument only makes sense if you believe that AGI and/or unbounded AI agents are "right around the corner". For sure, we will progress in that direction, but when and if we truly get there–who knows?

If you believe, as I do, that these things are a lot further off than some people assume, I think there's plenty of time to build a successful business solving domain-specific workflows in the meantime, and eventually adapting the product as more general technology becomes available.

Let's say 25 years ago you had the idea to build a product that can now be solved more generally with LLMs–let's say a really effective spam filter. Even knowing what you know now, would it have been right at the time to say, "Nah, don't build that business, it will eventually be solved with some new technology?"