skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point. Perhaps we could store the length of the common prefix from the last time we went left as well as from the last time we went right. The minimum of those two should remain a common prefix with the search key for the rest of the lookup and should therefore be safe to skip during subsequent comparisons.
Ask HN: What inspires you about computing?
I am a ~30yo software developer working in the cybersecurity space who is pretty damn depressed. I'm dealing with a combination of family issues, work instability, and the fallout from exiting a 3-year relationship.

I understand that depression is a disease that needs to be treated like any other, and I'm in therapy and taking medication. I'm also doing other things like excercising and trying to eat healthy, with varying levels of success. There's plenty of health advice on the Internet of various quality, including on HN, so I don't really want to ask about that.

What I wanted to know was how you all feel inspired by computing anymore. Reading about security vulns used to feel like this incredible discovery, now they fill me with dread about the future of security and privacy. I'm doing Leetcode/HackerRank/HackTheBox to try and brush up my skills - such problems used to feel like fun mental excercises, now they just feel like endless drugery where I'm never as good as I want to be. Reading HN used to feel whimsical, now it feels like an endless list of useless factoids, time wasters, and anxiety about the world.

I used to spend a lot of my free time homelabbing and learning new languages, I usually spend it watching TV or sleeping now. Work feels useless, it is mental torture 40hrs a week, but I'm not in a financial position where I could quit.

Has anyone ever fallen out of love with computing and gotten back in? How did you do it? What inspired you? Do I need to fix my depression before I fix my outlook on computers, or can I work on both at the same time?

Thanks in advance and sorry for the long sob story.
It might not just be helpful but required one day. Depending on how the legality around AI-generated code plays out, it's not out of the question that companies using it will have to keep track of and check the provenance and history of their code, like many companies already do for any open source code that may leak into their project. My company has an "open source review" process to help ensure that developers aren't copy-pasting GPL'ed code or including copyleft libraries into our non-GPL licensed products. Perhaps one day it will be common to do an "AI audit" to ensure all code written complied with whatever the future regulatory landscape shapes up to be.
Funny, because we’ve been on RHEL. After one round of calcification, upgrading our datacenters for each future RHEL release took years of concerted efforts. We actually lost ground every year.
I guess I should make sure my scissors are UL listed from now on.
no, because a lot of bot service run on botnets, made out of hacked regular residential computers, routers and so on. They will feel a bit more sluggish, but it won't cost the botnet authors that much more.

On the other side, an amount of work reasonable for modern desktop will absolutely overwhelm an older cell phone.
This is not correct. Most US coins (other than the cent and the 5 cent nickel) cost much less to make compared to their face value. For example, it costs just a bit less than 6 cents to make a dime, and just shy of 15 cents to make a quarter [0]. The "profit" that the government makes via minting coins and printing currency is known as seigniorage [1], and is reflected in the government's budget as revenue.

[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/5136331-how-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage
Seams not supported in firefox
The thing is: how much

0.2x, 2x, 5x, 50x?
They are compromised. Our allies are their enemies.
I just finished Rovelli's "Reality Is Not What It Seems" last weekend and enjoyed it. It is a broad and high level summary of the progress of physics and the book ends with some of the more speculative ideas being pursued. I especially enjoyed the "thermal time" ideas you mention, which he touches on in this book.
The human ear is absolutely good enough to hear the difference. However the vast majority of the population has not had listening training. I’ve done double blind tests repeatedly and provided it’s not on crap audio gear I can absolutely tell the difference, as can most of my golden ears trained acquaintances.
> It smelled like a Band-Aid-flavored Rockstar Energy drink. It tasted like…heat. The capsaicin was subtler than I expected: nothing abrasive or punishing, just a blushing, ambient warmth like a string of white Christmas lights. There was almost a numbing, mala element, in the vein of a Sichuan peppercorn.
> Just add one VST plugin to an audio track and you will instantly add latency.

most plug-ins don't add latency ?
> Why do people think that Twitter is the support page for companies? Honest question.

Evolution. Sometimes it's the only way to get support; people migrate to what works.
That used to happen every morning in the DFW area, right as I'd be driving to school. Drove me absolutely nuts.

I think that pre-traffic-report sound effect probably contributed significantly to me purchasing a new head unit that let me play mp3s off burned CDs.
I did not say that it is diminished. Maybe I didn't express myself very well, though. If artificial intelligence takes over the universe, its origins in biological intelligence on planet earth will remain just as important, even more, but will be proportionally insignificant.
From the article: In the future, I fully expect to be able to have a frank and honest discussion about the Tiananmen events with an American AI agent, but the only one I can afford will have assumed the persona of Father Christmas who, while holding a can of Coca-Cola, will intersperse the recounting of the tragic events with a joyful "Ho ho ho... Didn't you know? The holidays are coming!"

How unfortunate that people are discounting the likelihood that American AI agents will avoid saying things their master think should not be said.
Anyone want to take bets on when the big 3 (Open AI, Meta, and Google) will quietly remove anything to do with DEI, trans people, or global warming?
They'll start out changing all mentions of "Gulf of Mexico" to "Gulf of America",
but then what?
It does seem awfully similar to that mouse that caught on fire a few weeks ago - https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1i7br8w/my_gi...
Why are they pushing it so much?
Bear spray is supposed to attract bears, and the story is they even like the taste - except when it's blasted into their eyes/nose/mouth/lungs. It is a food product. So I would be a little concerned about that.
Jeep customers fall into 2 categories, generally.

Folks who want a bare bones 4x4 rig

And

People who want a grocery SUV that they can take down a gravel road to a trailhead a few times a year and put ducks on the dash.

Jeep is definitely targeting the latter group here.
Steering laser-produced THz radiation in air with superluminal ionization fronts
What We're Fighting For
It's a screed, and yet, one that resonates. I try to avoid using MS Word because I find it unpleasant; these days, I often write in text editors, which at least don't provide an AI "critique". Imagine if every time you picked up your guitar it both fussed at you over what you are doing "wrongly" (according to the guitar) and tried to upsell you on new guitar models and better strings.
For anyone considering whether watching YouTube on TV might be better or worse than on the phone, I'd like to point out SmartTube: https://github.com/yuliskov/smarttube

Ad blocking, integrated sponsorblock, and other desirable features.
> It is only generating based on training data

This is not the case anymore, current SOTA CoT models are not just parroting stuff from the training data. And as of today they are not even trained exclusively on publicly (and not so publicly) available stuff, but they massively use synthetic data which the model itself generated or distilled data from other smarter models.

I'm using and I know plenty of people using AI in current "mature" codebases with great results, this doesn't mean it does the work while you sip a coffee (yet)

*NOTE: my evidence for this is that o3 could not break ARC AGI by parroting, because it's a banchmark made exactly for this reason. Not a coding banchmark per se, but still transposable imo.
So Apple M2 Studio does ~15 tks/second and A100-SXM4-80GB does 9 tks/second?

I'm not sure I'm reading the results wrong or missing some vital context, but that sounds unlikely to me.
The Hundred-Page Language Models Book
Also, starter packs, they're community curated lists of people to follow for specific niches.
Our country’s Telecom company support was on Twitter, tweet or DM.
Intel Datacenter Chief Departs to Run Nokia – Now What?
Tip of the day #4: Type annotations on Rust match patterns
UrbanSitter Speeds B2B Growth and Cuts Auth Dev Time by 90% with FusionAuth
What do you mean suddenly? The report is released every year. There's nothing mysterious about news pages, especially those related to cars, writing articles about a yearly report.
The article mentions no in-depth detail because it is an excerpt from the full report which you are free to purchase and read if you would like more information.
The reason Tesla gets mentioned is twofold: electric cars have been a topic of discussion in Germany for quite some time and the failure rate of Tesla Model 3s is significantly higher than other comparable cars.
I don't know why you have it in your head that this is some big conspiracy by Big Car TM.
Yes, TÜV does not assess reliability of a car, but road-worthiness. Evidently something that Tesla has a larger problem with than other manufacturers. I don't know why, nor do I claim to.
I don't care about Tesla. Neither do I care about VW or any other manufacturer for that matter. They are profit oriented companies that are selling you a product.

> In fact, right now Tesla has the best electric car technology available on the market.

By what measure exactly? The best isn't a measure and as of right now a subjective statement.

> Along with the best charging network available on the market.

Again, subjective. What do you mean by best? The amount of chargers? The cost/kWh? Location? And what market exactly?

> And the best software (light years ahead of the competition) on the market.

Again, subjective. You complain about an article having no detail, then make statements praising Tesla as the best electric car but provide 0 evidence or numbers.

Just because you like something, doesn't mean I have to as well. I'm not a mechanical/electrical engineer so I cannot speak to their car technology or reliability. I do know their software, because I drove one for work reasons for 3 months. You might like it and get along fine with it, I don't.

I didn't buy a Tesla because their choice to start placing all functionality into the touch screen is counterintuitive to the whole point of the car: getting me safely from point A to B. Other manufacturers, including VW are horrendous at this as well. I didn't buy a car from them either.

> Also they don't require you to service the car for a long time.

Given the percentage of their cars failing the inspection, perhaps they should.
Intel's Battlemage Architecture
Sorry for inadvertently advising but I met a guy who used v0.dev to make impressive websites (although admittedly he did use react before so he was experienced) with professional success. It's more than arguable that his company will fire/hire fewer devs. Of course in a decade or so they'll be a skill gap unless LLMs can fill that gap too.
it's pretty hard for me as a musician to record guitar tracks in sync if I'm not getting the lowest latency through my computer (since I try to use e.g. software amp sims & pedals, etc.). Past ~8ms I feel it when I play, past 15ms I can hear the less accurate playing in the recorded tracks.
I see your point here, but I want represent a counterpoint to this line of reasoning, from my personal experience. I've been in a lot of situations where someone simply wants their way--in this case they want the organization to choose their personal software preference--and so they call it the "boring" choice.

By calling it boring, they characterize their _preference_ as the majority accepted, mature, obvious decision and anything else is merely software engineers chasing shiny objects. The truth is almost always more nuanced. Both solutions have pros and cons. They trade-off different values that resonate more or less with different people.

So, please be careful with the "it's boring and therefore obviously better" argument. Don't let it be a way to summarily dismiss someone else's preferences in favor of your own--without a deeper discussion of trade-offs. Otherwise it's no better than any other condescending attempt (ex. I'm in charge, so we are doing it this way. No one ever got fired choosing IBM/Microsoft/..) to win an argument without having to present real arguments.
this reminds me of the old meeting room ipads in pivotal labs offices. if you swiped diagonally downwards from the top corner, it would start flashing rainbow colours and play (iirc) September by Earth Wind and Fire.
Agree that "months" is a bit hyperbolic. But note that 20 months or 70 months is still months :D The important point is, it's going to happen very soon in historical context.
That was 13 years ago. How are things going more recently?
The topic, the style...

Love it!

Just someone having fun doing something stupid and sharing it with the world.
>The simplest (but not optimal) way to do this is to just take the next one that isn't used yet.

The linear probe is by far the most efficient way to build a hashtable on any modern hardware, nothing is near close. Everything else leads to cache trashing on misses. For the nearly full table - that's a mistake - table should not go above a specific fill factor, e.g. the notorious 75% for large tables.
States sue to block new NIH funding policy–court puts it on hold
E Ink’s color ePaper tech gets supersized for outdoor displays
I have a feeling NileRed's senses may be dulled; he also made some of the world's worst smelling stuff and didn't get much from it.
Been playing since Civ I on windows 3.1.

I've played every version but it wasn't until I set a goal of beating diety that I really started loving it. Civ 5 was the first (hated on release) then Civ 6 (hated on release).

Civ 6 on iPad is nothing short of amazing. It supports mods and retina resolution (stylus is better on high res)

Civ 7 seems to be less hated. Usually the patches and DLC seborrheic everything out. Plus the mods for UI irritations.

I think this one is very promising.
I don't want to write commas at all. I want to write

SELECT
a
b
c
FROM d

Or even

SELECT a b c FROM d

Because now selected values are uniform and there's no superfluous punctuation to worry about.
Or possibly even more effective!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli
I do the same, though my muscle memory is `1=1` instead of `true`.

Of course then you get editors/linters/coworkers that always point out that the 'true' is unnecessary. This also doesn't work with ORs (just swap to false), but in practice it seems it is always ANDs that is being used.
When you run that, what quantization do you get? The library website of Ollama (https://ollama.com/library/gemma2:27b) isn't exactly a good use case in surfacing useful information like what the default quantization is.
The population was already declining when Europeans got here. But it dropped precipitously thereafter, starting almost immediately due to disease. By the 1600s, tribes in the east were nearly wiped out. Since the majority of "explorers" came to America after this time, the accounts of the native cultures reflect an already-defeated society.

For years, it was thought inconceivable that the native cultures encountered in the 1600s could have built such elaborate structures. The common understanding was full of racist overtones - these cultures were too "primitive" to have built cities. Reality is that if Europeans met Native Americans in say 1100, the situation would be reversed - the Americas were thriving with trade and cities while Europeans were largely subsistence-farming peasants caught in the dark ages.

If you're interested in this topic, definitely check out "Origin: A genetic history of the Americas" by Jennifer Raff.
> Languages like Python and Java come around, and old-school C engineers grouse that the kids these days don’t really understand how things work

Everything has a place, you most likely wouldn't write an HPC database in Python, and you wouldn't write a simple CRUD recipe app in C.

I think the same thing applies to using LLMS, you don't use the code it generates to control a power plant or fly an airplane. You use it for building the simple CRUD recipe app where the stakes are essentially zero.
For the same reason that we still have a finance and legal department even if you can outsource them, and for the same reason that non technical CTO’s don’t exist.

You can outsource the execution of a task but only if you know how to formulate your requirements and analyze the situation.
No sometimes you just want things to work.

Upgrading takes work. Upgrades break things. Upgrades make training required constantly.

At some point, you get to thinking "we've got better things to do than upgrade kubernetes", lots of businesses do. It's the kind of software that can be "done".

If you've got something that works, you can indeed be happy with keeping it the same for a dozen years.
The people who produce envelopes know that envelopes are likely to be licked, and that they would likely be in big trouble if they or a supplier substitutes in a material that sends someone to the hospital.
It is the standard library on the platform, of course it counts.

Get Smalltalk-80 reference manual without the UI documentation of its standard library, and no, GNU Smalltalk is not a complete implementation.
From that table I understand that WD are the most reliable nowadays. Especially 16TB models. Is my understanding correct?
One little known feature of linux is that there are ANSI sequences you can send to the console that turn off and off the PC buzzer and alter the frequency.

One innocent use I used for this once was when I set up an on-demand modem system using ISDN for the office. If it detected a packet for off-site, it'd start the modem dialing and when the link was up, it'd make a series of ascending tones and after a minute or so of inactivity, it'd take down the link and play some descending tones. People tried not to use the internet unless they heard the ascending tones, so we only used a couple of hours of dial-up per day.

One not so innocent use for this was trolling the phone engineers who were tasked with installing something in the rack in the corner of the office. Every time they went round the back of the rack and touched anything, I'd make one of the servers beep, but always a different one and only when they touched a wire. Occasionally I also ejected and then tried to mount the CDROM, so they'd just hear a thud every now and then too. They literally had no idea what was going on and got quite paranoid every time they went to touch anything.
What product types do you have in mind exactly? Even big server chips now use a huge fraction of their area for power-sipping "efficiency core" designs that wouldn't be out of place in a mobile chip. Power is king.
I've seen hype cycles like this before.

Imagine "The Innovator's Dilemma" was written in the Idiocracy universe:

1) We're in late stage capitalism, so no companies have any viable competition, customers are too dumb to notice they didn't get what they paid for, and with subsidies, businesses cannot fail. i.e., "Plants love electrolytes!"

2) Costs are completely decoupled from income.

3) Economic growth is pinned to population growth; otherwise the economy is zero sum.

4) Stocks still need to compound faster than inflation annually.

5) After hiking prices stops working, management decides they may as well fire all the engineers (and find some "it's different now" excuse, even though the real justification is 2).

6) This leads to a societal crisis because everyone forgot the company was serving a critical function, and now it's not.

7) A new competitor fills the gaps, takes over the incumbent's original role, then eventually adopts the same strategy.

Examples: Disney Animation vs. Pixar, Detroit vs. Tesla, Boeing vs. SpaceX.

(Remember when Musk was cool?)
Musk's Bid for OpenAI Puts Them in a Difficult Situation
I've been trying to work out what the end date of the good internet was, and if there was a trigger event, and I'm starting to think it was somewhere between Tahrir Square (2011) and Euromaidan (2014); once the political internet became really effective, it had to be countered by those in power.
Yep. You'd be surprised how stupid some bots are.

(And while I don't have hard data on this, I suspect that bot authors that don't know how to properly set up rate-limits and don't know how to set up captcha solving service bypass, so captchas are especially effective against them)
Less Precious
A professional photographer makes great Art regardless of the tool.
> yeah, don't know, it was just an example. People stream YouTube while doing other things (playing, working, coding) all the time. I didn't want to put too much focus on the "Let's Play" part, it was the first thing that came to my mind :)

That'd be very distracting to me, programming is (usually) a deep focus thing for me, having moving pictures right next to where I work would lead me to getting nothing done :P Interesting to hear though, probably should visit an office to see how it's changed since I last was in one.
the kinds of projects that software engineers typically work on for pay

This assumes a typical project is fairly big and complex. Maybe I'm biased the other way, but I'd guess 90% of software engineers are writing boilerplate code today that could be greatly assisted by LLM tools. E.g., PHP is still one of the top languages, which means a lot of basic WordPress stuff that LLMs are great at.
Incredible image. My squirrel neighbors may get a dose this spring
Email is not as easily available on website but an official Twitter
My take is that AI's ability to generate new code will prove so valuable, it will not matter if it is bad at changing existing code. And that the engineers of the distant future (like, two years from now) will not bother to read the generated code, as long as it runs and passes the tests (which will also be AI-generated).

I try to use AI daily, and every month I see how it is able to generate larger and more complex chunks of code from the first shot. It is almost there. We just need to adopt the new paradigm, build the tooling, and embrace the new weird future of software development.
Did they try and withdraw money from your account?
Extremely bitter
> K80 - the drivers were one of the most painful tech things I've ever had to endure

Well, for a dedicated LLM box it might be feasible to suffer with drivers a bit, no? What was your experience like with the software side?
Case in point: in Germany, there are occasionally "Durchgang verboten" ("passage forbidden") signs next to driveways leading to e.g. an inner courtyard. These are most of the time a sure sign that it's possible to take a shortcut through the courtyard to the other side of the block. Of course, this is a country where you can be reasonably sure of not getting shot for trespassing...