skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The name for me is less important so much as can I have something that does my work for me. I've been starting to play with my own solutions between the 3 foundational modal companies. I've started to try to build my own stuff a bit, I think I need to learn more about apple scripting, also so far my experiments have required me to have multiple systems running to make it super easy for me.

You're all going to laugh at this stuff because it's so remedial and also clearly not agents but a couple things I've done... I won't say I really USE this stuff daily, I just play to see what I can do. I've figured out how to pass screenshots back and forth between modals (I have one computer take a screenshot every 30 minutes, and then send that screenshot to another machine, that machine is set up with a mouse hovering over the upload button on perplexity, it uploads the screenshot, and then perplexity does the work from the screenshot) An example of this that worked ok was I had chatgpt create all the themes for the social media schedule I needed to do this year, then I passed that screenshot to perplexity to do the searching on the web, and then I passed that to claud to write the tweet. This actually works ok-ish and I'm going to expand it a bit over the coming weeks I guess. Things like this are super helpful for weird hacks like that: https://github.com/BlueM/cliclick

Another thing I've found actually works pretty well is setting up two computers next to each other with ChatGPT voice mode, if you give them custom instructions to be sure to wait for the other one to be done talking, they don't interrupt each other and can get quite a bit of work done. Here is just a video of the mvp that I sent to a friend ages ago once I started playing with the idea: https://s.h4x.club/kpuzNkNL - I actually use this method of working quite often now, couple times a week at least, I find it's pretty helpful. If I knew how to put 4/5 modals together in one app and give them each custom instructions, I'd love to try building a team (if someone out there actually knows how to build this kinda stuff, I'm happy to help flesh out how the product would need to work, but I don't think it's super difficult to build at this point, I'm just not technical enough)
Is it just me or this whole find my network capability is a security nightmare?

Settings → your_name → Find My → device → toggle off

If you don't trust that this will really disable the feature, then you are going to have to think hard about every electronic device you own.

Do you trust the firmware in your Android phone? What about the non-open-source modem chip? What about the SIM card, which runs Java? Are there microphones you haven't noticed built in to your TV remote? (Many have them.) Your toaster likely has a chip in it more powerful than a networked DOS-era computer. (Mine does.) How do you know it's not joining a nearby wifi network and sending out information?

Ever since the China/iCloud thing, I don't fully trust Apple. But among big tech companies, it's certainly the one that I trust the most.
Engineering ion channels to restore vision to the blind human retina
> However, the occurrence of the Makefile effect in a simple application suggests that the tool is too complicated for that application.

The author's overall point is fine (specifically, that one should consider developer cut-and-paste behavior as an indicator of unnecessary complexity in a tool). However, when discussing the designer's perspective, I think the author should have taken a broader view of complexity.

Much of the complexity in Makefiles stems from their generality; essentially, the set of problems to which a Makefile can be a solution. Substantively reducing this complexity necessarily means eliminating some of those use cases. In the case of make, this is clearly possible. Make as a Unix tool has been around for a looong time, and one can look at the early versions for an idea of how simple it could be.

But the rub is, simplifying make doesn't necessarily reduce complexity. Once armed with a simpler, but more limited make, developers are now tasked not only with knowing the easier Makefile syntax, but also knowing when make isn't an appropriate solution, and when and how to use whatever tool exists to fill the gap. Compounding this is the fact documentation and shared knowledge regarding which tool is appropriate for which problem is much harder to come by than documentation for the tool itself. This can easily lead to the tool choice equivalent of developer cut-and-paste behavior: "so-and-so uses build tool X so I must use it too", "if your doing (general description of problem) the only build tool you ever need is Y", "I used Z before, so I'm just going to make it work again".

Essentially you can think of make as one "verb" in a sprawling and uncoordinated domain-specific language that targets building things. Developers need some level of proficiency across this language to succeed at their work. But trading complexity that must be mastered in one tool for complexity that must be mastered across tools can very easily increase overall complexity and promote its own kind of "Makefile Effect", just at a different level.

EDIT: Some might prefer the term "Cargo Culting" rather than "Makefile Effect" here. I suggest they are the same behavior just in different contexts.
I saw the idea more as a reflection of a contradiction within his traits, which is also a common human characteristic. Regarding the ‘-isms’ it’s worth noting that nearly all intellectuals associated with Surrealism leaned towards the left wing. A notable exception is Dalí, who was mocked with the ‘Avido Dollars’ anagram.
How could this app possibly be considered a business associate to a provider? The provider has no idea it’s even being used, let alone a formal association with the application.
> My experience is that burnout tends not to come from the actual work, but all the politics and bullshit that come from office life

Totally agree. It’s not the stress of doing something new and just trying to figure it all out that’s stressful. That’s actually fun. It’s the arbitrary adjusting of priorities and putting tasks in hold to start some harebrained idea that ultimately gets tossed or proves to not work out that becomes tiresome. Then shit rolls down hill and people want to know why the paused project isn’t completed and assigns blame to the dev rather than piss poor management.

No. I’m not bitter
My thoughts:)
The closest unit I can think of right now was the SR-71's celestial navigation unit. I don't know how it worked internally, but it supposedly navigated the spy planes to targets across the globe before GPS existed.
I know a lot of people have terrible jobs at profoundly dysfunctional companies. I've had those too. That situation doesn't improve unless you, as they say, have the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Not everyone has a position where they have the autonomy to spend a lot of effort on paying down technical debt, but some people do, and almost every programmer has a little.

I think it's important to keep in view both your personal incentive system (which your boss may be lying to you about) and the interests of the company.
I’m curious about the open source nature of this and how you / people in general manage a project where you are hosting it and need to maintain its security, but are also presumably merging pull requests as people contribute to the project. I would be quite paranoid about this, ie concerned that someone might slip a line of code in with the intent of breaching the service that I would not catch during code review. I know this is true of any open source project but it feels especially fraught when you are also hosting it and letting people sign up and pay for it. I’m wondering if you or others have experience with this and what approaches and practices mitigate this risk.
One thing that seems to reliably cause burnout is when a person with high flying ambition finds herself in an environment in which she feels stripped of agency.

It's not primarily about expending too much energy, but rather about expending energy in a way that appears futile relative to an ambitious standard set for oneself.

Just my personal observation, but dovetails well with the learned helplessness theory of depression.
You make this to be a financial problem, but I think actually it is a cultural problem. Maybe lack of row models or not valuing education sufficiently. Having too much money can be a hinderance to educational motivation too.
Can you explain to me how this sort of thinking works? I couldn’t ever imagine making this sort of assumption based off an article and my admittedly very low understanding of Antarctica.
this post seems to mix some valid points and some completely bonkers unrelated things, like the assumption that somehow the US is in stagflation using a graph truncated at data from 2023. Not really explaining why stagflation would cause burnout anyway.

And while I agree with the idea that the society does not pay enough attention to burnout, the article offers no explanation of why he think it's a tsunami, beyond "three people I don't know quit suddenly" (sic).

The article says "everyday life is much harder now, and getting harder". That may be, but there's no proof this is causing more burnout.
Sure, but IME even when the tool in question is incredibly well-documented (like Django, or some other popular library), and has plenty of examples, most still don’t read the docs.

I don’t know how to deal with that mentality. I don’t mind showing someone how I came to an answer, but I also expect them to remember that for the next time, and do some searching of their own.
If you are lucky enough to be born in a family which goes through posh London and then goes into posh universities and does a posh job in posh London, that is maybe the peak of our civilization right now.
Show HN: Lexoid – A Library for LLM-Based and Non-LLM-Based Document Parsing
Why we built Lexoid:

1. Recent advancements in LLMs make them incredibly powerful for extracting meaning from unstructured documents. We wanted to utilize these different LLMs through a single library.

2. Static (a.k.a. non-LLM-based) parsing libraries like PyMuPDF work fast and accurately for simple documents, but often their licenses aren’t as permissive as we’d like.

3. We wanted a single library that could integrate both static and LLM-based approaches in a seamless and efficient way.

Key Features:

- Unified Parsing: Use either static parsers or LLM-based ones, depending on your needs.

- Auto-routing Mode: Pages are analyzed independently—faster static parsers handle straightforward pages, while LLMs process pages requiring deeper understanding.

Why we think it’s useful:

Static parsers are fast but struggle with complex, unstructured data. LLMs, on the other hand, offer incredible accuracy but can be expensive and slow. Lexoid lets you use the best tool for the job — automatically if needed.
But it says little about the English language proper, things like syntax, the system of verb tenses, or even phonetics. It's only about the spelling, and specifically the hodgepodge of various historical spellings, and the tendency to import a word with its foreign spelling and foreign pronunciation. Chunks of Romance languages, mostly Latin and French, stick out as especially noticeable: things like "bona fide", or "corps", or even "beauty".

Most languages in which the connection between the written form and the sound is straightforward, like Spanish or Japanese, import foreign words by writing down the sound and ignoring the original spelling. The problem is that in Britain, French was directly spoken and written for centuries, and for a person who speaks and writes French daily, it would be rather jarring to write "bohteh" instead of "beauté" or "ko" instead of "corps". To have a taste of that, trai tu rait inglish fonetikalli. It's an attempt to avoid that what has driven us to the current situation.
Been in BigCo land for 20 years now, and have seen the rise and fall of quite a few AI/ML/RPA etc fads.

Honestly the whole landscape seems broken and unproductive at this point.

Countless vendors, platforms, cloud environments, industry/technical jargon - all with different pricing models, SLAs, tooling, etc etc.

Getting anything usable is a challenge and most orgs spin in a never ending cycle of data integration/normalization work that produces little business value.

My advice to teams now is simplify, reduce, streamline - get to the kernel of what you think you need and protect it all costs. Most of the shiny new objects being pitched as silver bullets are just ways for other people to make money off your margin.
> polarization started well before the personal computer showed up in the geological record.

What do you mean?
Or, just maybe, those stories about Scandinavia are a fig-leaf to justify discrimination. There's clear country-level differences in proportions of engineers(+scientists) in EU countries: https://www.trendingtopics.eu/bulgaria-with-the-2nd-largest-...

I would hesitate to advance any theories as to cause based on that data (e.g., Denmark - part of Scandinavia - is >50% and Finland - not part of Scandinavia but next to it - is <30%).
Tried with a video I previously watched and got a good enough summary, also liked the UI. Did you implement a RAG?
The USA who just threatened to invade a few NATO allies? People working with USA for the next few years seems pretty foolhardy. Surely everyone else in NATO needs to be getting together and building it defense system that exclude USA.
It’s not a “choice” Europe has made. That’s what they are. Most European countries, as a matter of history, are ethnic tribes with flags, similar to Japan or Bangladesh or Israel.
Theoretically, yes. And trust me, I loved static types. I use Rust for almost everything. However, the programming loop or the iteration loop that you get into with Lisp, especially with things like Common Lisp, it's not that much of a concern. But I agree with any other language which is not a Lisp, a static type system is far superior.
>> Good demo and I can see how you might make it do all sorts of things that are vaguely useful that way.

Unfortunately since that's a demo you have most likely seen all the sorts of things that are vaguely useful and that can be done easily, or at all.

Edit: Btw, the coffee task video says that the "AI" is "end-to-end neural networks". If I understand correctly that means an LLM was not involved in carrying out the task. At most an LLM may have been used to trigger the activation of the task, that was learned by a different method, probably some kind of imitation learning with deep RL.

Also, to see how much of a tech demo this is: the robot starts already in position in front of a clear desk and a human brings the coffee machine, positions it just so, places the cup in the holder and places a single coffee pod just so. Then the robot takes the coffee pod from the empty desk and places it in the machine, then pushes the button. That's all the interaction of the robot with the machine. The human collects the cup and makes a thumbs up.

Consider for a moment how much different is this laboratory instance of the task from any real-world instance. In my kitchen the coffee machine is on a cluttered surface with tins of coffee, a toaster, sometimes the group left on the machine, etc. etc - and I don't even use coffee pods but loose coffee. The robot you see has been trained to put that one pod placed in that particular spot in that one machine placed just so in front of it. It would have to be trained all over again to carry out the same task on my machine, it is uncertain if it could learn it successfully after thousands of demonstrations (because of all the clutter), and even if it did, it would still have to learn it all over again if I moved the coffee machine, or moved the tins, or the toaster; let alone if you wanted it to use your coffee machine (different colour, make, size, shape, etc) in your kitchen (different chaotic environment) (no offense meant).

Take the other video of the "real world task". That's the robot shuffling across a flat, clean surface and picking up an empty crate to put in an empty conveyor belt. That's just not a real world task.

Those are tech demos and you should not put much faith in them. That kind of thing takes an insane amount of work to set up just for one video, you rarely see the outtakes and it very, very rarely generalises to real-world utility.
Read about the French Revolution and the origin of the nation state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state
> Now if only the US (and others) would get their act together and build out a backup system to GNSS. China, for example, has built out an eLoran system:

What prevents other countries from using these other systems?
Very familiar story. I'm 9months into quitting my consulting career after 10 years. Relatively long hours, weekend work, and lots of travel. The first few years were great, lots of learning, lots of smart people to work with, smart leadership, interesting and even innovative work.

But then it just got boring AND exhausting. The leadership became uninspired and replaced by the classic sleazy sales persona, the work became mundane, and the constant 4-6month cycle of new clients began to overlap as I went higher up and managed more projects/focused more on sales.

I haven't figured out what I'm gonna do next, frankly the networking burned me out so much I am very averse to it. And ironically I became quite good at it (at least relative to where I started).

I'm booking my first intro chat with someone next week, and already my stomach is turning thinking about scheduling it. I thought I was ready but maybe not...at the same time, life ain't free.
The difference is that algorithms have known inputs and “agent” implies a a greater level of adaptability to unforeseen inputs.
What a delightfully arrogant article, to the point I believe it to be satire (stopped reading at section headers, perhaps I missed the punchline).

TOML is by far the most stripped down and easy to understand configuration format I've ever used, allowing just enough syntactic sugar to be useful without changing semantics. The fact it's made by Tom is meaningless, so its flagrant dismissal is silly to me.

Meanwhile, the proposed configuration format sounds like a nightmare to read. There is still clashing syntax, offloads all of the parsing work to the software (which means now you have the same config format with multiple different ways of interpreting values), restricts usage of certain characters with no way of escaping them (someone else mentioned base64), and otherwise requires that you recursively parse it for nested KVs rather than constructing the final in memory structures in a linear pass, adding a layer of indirection prior to parsing.

Not to mention, I really get turned off by this sort of pious writing style.

No thanks. Lots of reasons to dislike config formats we've seen before but this doesn't solve anything in my eyes.
Not sure if you're a troll... but for general info, in 2006 most desktop computers (laptops were still not so common) had something like 100MB of RAM if you were lucky. Maybe Google already had some huge machines with 1GB+ but that was not at all a common thing outside supercomputers.
https://merchants.ubereats.com/us/en/black-owned-restaurants...

Not bizarre, capitalism. Uber Eats should expand their offerings else someone else will take that market segment.
Nobody owes you anything.
I have been through the same process recently on my job.I was so much frustrated that I just wanted to quit. I didn't even knew what will happen afterwards, you keep on trying your level best and yet seems nothing is going to work out for you. By luck my health went down because of fever. I had got a week break. Then I got fine. But these words the author mentioned are right in each sense.
Yep, LSP is Language Server Protocol, and NeoVim has (I believe) built-in support for it - as in, it can talk to a language server using LSP and use that for, for eg., "Go to definition" type shortcuts that are language-aware and more robust than pure syntax-based attempts.
This is pretty much word for word what has already happened at least once.

Sonos at least reversed their decision to disable the devices when they sunset S1. They just made them incompatible with their current system but allowed people to download the old apps.

Unfortunately, devices that were already marked for trade-in before they made the decision are still completely bricked.
The loss of being unable to access old information is unknowable and therefore infinite. People can't just "deal with it." Every year there is more technical baggage that someone new to the environment is just supposed to learn. At some point it becomes an impregnable barrier.

If you start telling people they have to install an obsolete web browser, and then an obsolete operating system, and then patch the drivers because all the hardware doesn't support it anymore, you have effectively gatekept information that was once available in the open web to the tech elite.

Yes, "tech" is redone from scratch every 6 months so 5 years ago is an eternity, but there are plenty of fields where 30 year old information is just as invaluable as something published today.

Nobody is maintaining webpages published in the 90's. Nobody is going to update them. They are just there, sitting on some university's server that barely gets any hits. The author probably died 12 years ago and nobody even remembers who is responsible for it or that it's running. And it's in everyone's best interest to keep it that way: online.
Employee-owned businesses are certainly a coherent left-wing concept. On the other hand, NASDAQ is an organization built around exchanging money for ownership of businesses, which tends to concentrate ownership in the non-employee direction.
Wait, made and bade are pronounced differently? Is this an anglicism or have I been doing it wrong?
> The takeaway is that the extra length of the arc is likely much smaller than one would intuitively expect.

Maybe it’s because I’m a pilot and we never account for altitude when measuring distance, my intuition puts the difference at “effectively zero”. I also have it internalized that the earth’s atmosphere is very thin.
Updated Debian 12: 12.9 released
> My main issue is that I can’t find women who find me physically attractive

My main issue is that I can't find someone willing to sell me $VTI at $100/share. Is it possible that your standards of what you consider a woman "attractive enough to date" are too high, and so you are filtering out potential candidates that would be happy to be with you?

Four years seems like a really long time for someone actively looking to be in a relationship to stay single, and surgery with the objective of finding a partner seems wildly extreme (just my own opinion, I clearly do not know your circumstances).

I am the most average looking (if that) man on the planet, and really never had too much trouble dating, and I live in Silicon Valley where the statistics are not even in my favor. Certainly I never went after the prototypical "Instagram model" as that would have dramatically affected my chances, but by no means I am less happy.
Floating seabin collects ocean waste
There do exist paranoid schizophrenics, yes. Science generally doesn't have much trouble dealing with them, unlike, for example, institutional censorship regimes, which can transform minor personal delusions into major collective catastrophe.

I am not, in fact, denying you space for your views. I'm giving you the space for your views and explaining to you why they are incorrect.