skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few months ago I installed the venerable OPENSTEP 4.2 on an old Thinkpad T60 using a T7200 CPU and a PATA SSD, with about 950MB of usable RAM. On top of that I installed as many flagship applications as i could find to get an idea how working in such a vintage environment would feel like. The applications included FrameMaker, WordPerfect, the complete Lighthouse Suite of word processors and spread sheets, and a few dozen more applications.

The execution speed and general performance of these very capable applications on that old vintage Thinkpad was absolutely amazing. If this environment would be capable running on a more modern machine there wouldn't be much to miss, as these old applications are already sophisticated enough to get real work done. And definitely at a much more snappier pace than all those contemporary software behemoths we are blessed with today.
I don't believe that will happen. It looks like the eternal September will never leave the current giants. As more and more of the world came online, we passed a threshold where a majority of users are passive and undiscerning. The current giants are the generation of platforms that benefitted from this.
Thanks! I really do enjoy writing Dart. Hopefully one day it gets cross compile support. Go is nice in that regard but the syntax compared to Dart is not as expressive to me.
The temperature in LLMs is a parameter of a regularization step that determines how neuron activation levels get mapped to odds ratios.

Zero temperature => fully deterministic

The neuron activation levels do not inherently form or represent a probability distribution. That's something we've slapped on after the fact
Same thing but without Elon Musk. At this point (not) moving to Bluesky is just a vote of (no) confidence against Elon.
I found the moderation and choosing your own feed with blocklists so far implies that even if you copied and pasted all the odious people from Twitter, I still would never see them, nor would any other thinking person, and they would die in darkness. Also, there are examples of the most odious people joining and BlueSky banning them sua sponte almost immediately.

So, I am optimistic.
I quit Twitter in 2008, around the time I quit Facebook. Here's what I can say with confidence: Bluesky, Mastodon, whatever—they're all going to end up being bad, like Twitter. The problems ultimately come out of the format, not the specific instance of the format.
I explicitly don’t want squash. The commits are still worth keeping separate. There’s lots of distinct pieces of work. But sometimes you break something and fix it later. Or you add something new but support different environments/platforms later.
That is definitely an issue with many LLMs. I've had limited success including instructions like "Don't invent facts" in the system prompt and more success saying "that was not correct. Please answer again and check to ensure your code works before giving it to me" within the context of chats. More success still comes from requesting second opinions from a different model -- e.g. asking Claude's opinion of Qwen's solution.

To the other point, not admitting to gaps in knowledge or experience is also something that people do all the time. "I copied & pasted that from the top answer in Stack Overflow so it must be correct!" is a direct analog.
I have no interest in EM. I joined an anime themed Mastodon instance and left two months later as all I could read was EM hatred. I wasn't interested in EM to begin with!
FTR the old Twitter was as bad as the new X for those who strayed just a bit from whatever was the trend, in my experience.
Can it be worth it? Yes. But you're likely better off making low-brow jokes on X/Twitter and clickbait on YouTube like Primeagen and Theo Browne.
The ability to control your own experience via custom feeds makes Bluesky so delightful. The new X algo made it impossible to just follow the people I wanted to.
In Europe (and Japan), training LLMs and AI "art" generators on copyrighted work is explicitly permitted. So this is doubly confusing to me, since even if it wasn't public domain, it'd still be legal to train on it.
What do you mean by eternal September?
Why is it a tragedy that people are using "our great works of culture" to engage in other activities within our culture?
> Does changing my git branch naming practice harm me? No. Does it encourage me to be more thoughtful about how I use language in general, even if that particular case probably doesn’t really matter? Yes. I see that as an absolute win.

And that's how it's done: by inverting the rules of evidence from "prove that it's harmful" to "prove that it's not harmful" - usually followed on with something to the effect of "It's just a small adjustment... Why are you so adamantly against it? Are you one of those bad intolerant people?"

It's insidious because people are afraid of being on the wrong side of things socially, which makes them easy to manipulate in this way. But there are those of us who will stand up and say "No. The line stays where it's at until you can prove your claim with strong evidence."

> Why is it bad that people try to be virtuous, and why do you think that wanting to be virtuous implies a desire for status?

And there you go again putting words in my mouth, twisting things just so, in order to push me into an untenable position.
There's a subsection in the site that lists examples of Pharo use. See https://pharo.org/success/

As a cool example of an educational game created using Pharo, see the Pharo Chip Designer: https://github.com/pavel-krivanek/PharoChipDesigner/blob/mas...
Maybe a deeper truth that is harder to put into words but which feeds into both of them. Something captured in much higher dimensional concept space that, when forced into our 3D world (and our <whatever>D political discussion space), looks like a sphere in one projection and a cube in the other, but which is neither.
With proper, sensible moderation it won’t get the same posts. Twitter as it is now is what happens when you let certain types of filth be posted.
For me the relative tranquility of Mastodon is not a bug but a feature. I deleted my Twitter account shortly after Elon bought it, actually not so much because of him, but to get more time for being with my family and working on my startup.
Bluesky has better self moderation tools. You can mute entire lists of accounts that have certain keywords in their posts or usernames.
I don't remember telling you "Exceptions are worse than error codes" as these both seem like bad ideas from people with either a PDP/11 or no imagination or both. Result isn't an error code. std::expected isn't an error code either.

Among the things Linus doesn't like about C++ are its quiet allocations and its hidden control flow, both of which are implicated here - I think those are both bad ideas too, but in this case I'm just the messenger, I didn't write an OS kernel (at least, not a real one people use) so I don't need a way to handle not being able to push items onto a growable array.

The problem isn't that "if you modified it to be buggy then it would crash" as you've described, the problem is that only your toy demo works, once we modify unrelated things like no longer setting that global to true the demo blows up spectacularly (Undefined Behaviour) whereas of course the Rust just reported an error.

> Aren't there .unwrap() calls in the standard library itself

Unsurprisingly an operating system kernel does not use std, only core and some of alloc. So we're actually talking only about core† and alloc, not the rest of std. There are indeed a few places where core calls unwrap(), cases where we know that'll do what we meant so if you wrote what you meant by hand Clippy (at least if we weren't in core) would say you should just write unwrap here instead.

† As a C++ person you can think of core as equivalent to the C++ standard library "freestanding" mode. This is more true in the very modern era because reformists got a lot of crucial improvements into this mode whereas for years it had felt abandoned. So if you mostly work with say C++ 17, think "freestanding" but actually properly maintained.

We can't write unwrap here because it's not what we meant, so that's why it shouldn't pass review.
The action to take upon no match is configurable in recent Bash versions.

The 'failglob' shopt option will cause an error to be generated if a glob matches nothing.

The 'nullglob' shopt option toggles between no match expanding to an empty string and the traditional default of no match leaving the glob characters untouched.
Yes the problem is all these different literate needs.

There is a whole range of things we should want to document and encompass. From an outline idea or plan of how the software is planned to work and is currently implemented, all the way to more like programming journal or engineering notebook on the development, showing stuff that was tried and failed, record of performance experiments, all the way to day to day commits. Day to day commits is probably enough quantity that it will do fine with a separate system - but then should still have pointers or references in the engineering notebook aspect of the whole thing. And then of course multi-user by now. And for many software bases, this cannot be linked to "in order" execution like a python notebook. Execution is too variable, long, on-going and environment dependent. It's possible that what this ends up looking like is pairing "extensive in-code documentation" with a separate "overview narrative" and a separate "engineering journal" (with thoughts and rationales and test results pasted in or git-ted.)

But I don't throw stones at "typesetting". Nowadays "mind-map" is probably more appropriate or free-form layout, and there is a lot to be said for throwing low cost graphical representations including napkin diagrams here and there in the documentation. If we are trying to make it easy on the programmers to provide all this input, then let's make it easy.

(But then I object to the lack of "linearity, diff-ability, text-ability" of mind-map formats and my reaction to spreadsheets like one of the comments requests: "oh god no, let's not HIDE all this in countless tiny little boxes that must be opened one by one!" - but I would love a linear, text-based computable spreadsheet format.)
had a lot of fun writing this one! (had to get roasted by sama first though)
In the 1950s it was Lucky Strike and chewing gum in Europe. Let the cultural erosion begin!

How can the population afford this? This must be subsidized. It is also interesting that no one talks about the Al Qaeda roots of the apparently compliant new rulers any more.

Assad was obviously horrible, but can there be some kind of a middle ground?
I have never seen anyone in a social network self-identifying as "woke".

I have seen it countless times being thrown as a vague, shapeless accusatory things that can go from people being overboard in their language policing to opposing real, actual fascism.
That is my thinking, yes. Plus also simply the government has access to a lot of capital and land.

Overhead from running your own datacentres is a factor, but (taking this report at face-value) it seems like there will be some modicum of government owned computer resources built. I feel like the cost difference between standing up a small datacentre capable of what they are pitching, versus standing up an over-allocated datacentre is mostly centred on initial 1-time cost. Once things are running, the ongoing cost may not be much different. Even if the government was the only client at a small datacentre, they would still have to have support, maintenance, and management. If they were instead selling over-allocated resources back to the private sector, there would be sales staff, but otherwise the other expenditures would remain nearly the same. They wouldn't even have to be that competitive on anything other than price, functioning much like a utility. Fancy PaaS features can be fully the responsibility of the private sector to develop on top of the true-blue british metal + electrons the government is offering up.
A lot of schools these days weed out at the application level: if you have a great portfolio from middle school through high school, great! You have it made.

I sort of like the change to redeem yourself during the first two years of your university if you didn't have the ideal secondary school experience to get into a hot department of a hot university. CC can do that as well, I guess, but it is a much harder hill to climb.
This kind of implies that a rewrite requires better management than just sticking with the existing codebase. It's still a pretty strong reason not to do a rewrite unless you're 1000% sure the organization can handle it.
It is defined in the first two sentences of the article. I’ll duplicate those sentences here:

> The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad:

>> A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.
Yeah it's a conspiracy of the media, not even supporting neonazis salvages him from the hate : ' (
No, let’s not.
100% agree. I remember I had an on-call and our pagerduty started going off for a SEV-2 and naturally a lot of managers from teams that are affected are in there sweating bullets because their products/features/metrics are impacted. It can get pretty frustrating having so many people try to be cooks in the kitchen. We had a great manager who literally just moved us to a different call/meeting and he told us "ignore everything those people are saying; just stay focused and I'll handle them." Everyone's respect for our manager really went up from there.
I big question is whether "official" accounts will move to Bluesky - governments, businesses, organizations, etc. I see some, but not too many.

Of course, maybe that's fine, some people prefer it that way. But, for me, it seems nice to have a common place where organizations put out announcements.
Campaign aims to safeguard social media from billionaires using Bluesky's tech
The problem is that you are creating an echo chamber. My experience using let’s quit “insert company name” is that these echo chambers tend to be toxic and terrible. IE.. Gab, Truth Social, etc.

It’s very difficult to do unless you can have broad consensus. I tend to use Twitter for an industry wide group and while a few individuals have moved, the Bluesky version just doesn’t have the reach or usefulness of the twitter or x version.
Author here: Really interesting work. Updated original post to include link to the paper. Thanks!
Who teaches the "<math specialty> for business" courses? IME, it was math professors.

It's not unreasonable for the biology department to come up with the common programming use-cases for their students, then have the CS department build a course around those skills.

My minor was Bioinformatics. The biology department taught foundational course like biology and genetics and the CS department taught the courses on processing data.
I'll stay on X. May quit who wants. Me not.
Please indulge in my conspiracy theory as to why Bluesky will likely end up in the same place as Twitter[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42623590
I wish I was driven by feelings as so many others seem to be; would make my life much simpler.
Ah, It is the LocalCDN extension that was blocking some stuff. The dropdown menus weren't working at all. Sometimes I forget to check that. Thanks for the prompt to go back and check.
I think there’s a fascinating throughline from older Christian moral enforcement to what the essay calls “wokeness.” Historically, a lot of Christian movements had the same impulse to legislate language and behaviors—just grounded in sin rather than privilege. For instance, the 19th-century American Puritans famously policed each other’s speech and actions because the stakes were framed as eternal salvation versus damnation. That social dynamic—where the “righteous” person gains status by exposing the lapses of others—feels remarkably similar to what we see now with “cancellations” on social media.
In the past, unresolved questions were aptly named, like "UV-catastrophe" etc. as opposed to "dark energy" etc.

One clearly indicates scientists being baffled (a catastrophic conclusion), versus a linguistically tangible substance "dark energy", unnecessarily specific in quantity (energy vs position vs momentum vs ...).

For unexplained phenomena, doesn't it sound alarmingly specific?

Wouldn't specific issues getting their own names not have been more desirable? like "anomalous rotation curves", ...
Hypothesis Sheets: how to navigate and exit the idea maze with a startup idea
I worked in the Pennzoil building (mentioned). It was a horrible waste of space, for what? A couple of nondescript black triangles? They could have had so much more leasable space and the floors wouldn't have been these odd shaped low ceiling caverns to make up for the loss of useable space. Just think, each of those triangular towers needs its own core with plumbing and elevator shafts. Good grief.
that's not my point, my point is that that's not really what trumps policies have been
I couldn't stand plain vanilla X either and entirely sympathize. I did leave it, for several years. But now, my heavily curated X feed (I use Control Panel for Twitter) is the single highest signal to noise news source I've found in five decades as an obsessive infovore. I filter out everything but the direct opinions of specific contributors, creating the bespoke daily newspaper I dreamed of for so long. I'd really rather that this wasn't the product of a centralized platform and would happily leap to a decentralized platform with similar value. But I won't let perfect be the enemy of the best collection of smart people I like to listen to I've yet to find except maybe on HN. And HN would benefit from better curation options too.
No, it's not just that. Twitter had already been going downhill when Musk took over. Even if the old ownership was still in charge, now would be a good time for early adopters to find the next generation of platforms.
I'm not sure why but blue sky serves me a lot of very specific content I'm not interested in seeing and no matter how many dozens of pictures I choose (show less like this) on, it continues to show.

I've basically stopped using it.
1 of every 5 job postings is actually fake, study says
I do think there was a distinct period 10-15 years ago where, particularly when trying to break into the startup scene as a rookie developer coming from a non-CS education background, the blog was a useful place to write about technology just to show you were actually connected to "the scene" somehow even though you had limited professional experience. Somewhere out there I still have a neglected personal blog with posts from those days where I was hacking open source firmware onto a WiMAX receiver so I could use it as a router, sharing source for some audio processing effects plugins I wrote in college courses, things like that... cool stuff for a college kid, but not what I spend time doing now years into my career. At this point my credibility is from my professional work.

Of course, that's exactly why it eventually became standard for every aspiring rookie developer to have a blog; and eventually these just turned into straight-up programming TIL blogs as more and more people who weren't ever tech hobbyists entered the field. The signal quality diminished, and in the modern world of ML-assisted ATS resume screening it may not even be a signal at all.

Basically, "building a brand" as a certain kind of technologist had value when relatively few people were doing it. Now I think its very fair to question as a tool for getting hired.

Anybody who writes because they like writing should certainly continue to do so!
>The problem is that you are creating an echo chamber

Yeah but it's a left wing echo chamber and that's good! /s

Incognito window > bsky > discovery feed > every post is about US politics, Trump bad, rich people bad, Musk bad etc. Same shit just different colors

Bsky is not the answer, the only answer is not to use social media at all. And more or less that applies to HN too.
It's exactly the opposite, but ok
This doesn't really say anything useful. It definitely doesn't link or reference any source that's more reliable than trust me bro. It's also ambiguous, they could just as well mean it's the same on other dating sites and apps. There's no way to tell, because the whole article is a big nothing-burger.
This reminds me of the restrictions they had around encryption.

It seems like it may hurt open source efforts.
Oh the kids will be alright but what about me??!?

I jest, of course, but I have very specialized skills in an industry that requires esoteric bespoke things, so I feel less at immediate risk. That said, I should start building those skills, and I do see a lot of older engineers being left in the dust if they don’t adapt. Especially web / front end dev and dev ops, any field that has a bunch of boilerplate and repeated conventions will suffer first.
Honestly I thought most of that was strictly Facebook's domain. Maybe that's just the consequences of living in a smaller metro than most, the folks around here are slower on the uptake of new tech. But yeah, none of my local municipal orgs are on Twitter or ever have been in any capacity. They use Facebook for everything, that and local businesses are the only reason I still have a Facebook account.
> MuZero plays Donut Go, a variant of Go where a hole has been punched out of the middle of the board, but has not been retrained.

To be equivalent to a frozen/no retraining allowed AI, the human would need to have their brain chemistry prevented from altering synaptic weights.

The option to freeze weights in AI models is the only way they can be safely productised. Or training runs fairly compared — didn't Kasparov allege that IBM cheated by changing the algorithm during the game?

When it comes to "what even is this 'intelligence' thing?" there's definitely an argument about how much advantage these models take from the fact that silicon is around a million times faster than synaptic chemistry; but in practical terms, when it comes to "are we nearly obsolete?", it's the wall-clock time not the subjective time that matters — and AlphaZero took only 8 hours to beat its predecessor AlphaGo Zero, which itself beat AlphaGo Master, which in turn won 60:0 against professional players. So, how long would it take a human to get good at the new rules, and would it improve faster or slower than the wall-clock time of an AI learning the new constraints?

> I am not sure if they've done a Donut Go experiment, but DeepMind did show that the same algorithm trained on Breakout could solve Level 1 with superhuman skill yet completely fail level 2. I am fairly confident my thought experiment holds water, but it would be interest to run it IRL. There is an issue in that I'm not sure how you would get MuZero to "see" the hole... if it has a deterministic check for move legality then perhaps that could be updated.

Should be easy, given that MuZero did go, chess, shogi, and a standard suite of Atari games…

But yeah, 2019 is an eternity in AI, should be easy to do what you suggest today.
One of the first things I noticed when I started traveling internationally was that Pringles had penetrated all the way down to the smallest ramshackle closet-sized store in the boonies in Thailand. Good business if you can get it I guess.
That's fine. It's just not open source. Don't call it open source if it's not.

Definition: https://opensource.org/osd
Wikipedia tells me that the 1985 version's hunting minigame is in assembly; it does not explicitly say that the rest is in Basic but it definitely implies this.