skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am working with printed documents. Maybe LLMs currently make a difference with handwriting recognition. I wasn't directly responding to that. It's outside the little bit that I know, and I didn't even think of it as "OCR".

I'm not saying that I need high accuracy (though I do), I'm saying that the current accuracy (and clarifying that this is specifically for printed text) is already very high. Part of the reason it's so high is because the old complicated character-by-character classifiers have already been replaced with neural networks that process entire lines at a time. It's already moving in the direction you're saying we need.
Here’s a tweet from Elon with a table of ages of all people marked not deceased who are collecting social security

(hint: there is a smooth trend of people of all ages up to 199, so the 1875 thing was pure misdirection)

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076?s=46&t=NN3...
The article mentions, he is going to run the marathon, looking forward to what he can do in that distance. I feel it's only a matter of time until someone breaks the 2 hour barrier in an official race. Lot of people thought it would be Kelvin Kiptum, unfortunately he passed away in an accident.
^ this. If a junior dev is legitimately interested in software development and how things work, they will use these tools for more than just completing their tasks and a paycheck and will eventually stand out above their peers who don't.

If the author is suggesting that more junior devs today than in the past are only interested getting tasks done and the paycheck, then this really has nothing to do with AI.
It has been dead for years and years. I had an interest in learning and using Elm several years ago, but the bus factor of 1 told me it was dead on arrival.
These decisions haven't been made by programmers in over 10 years.

These lists made sense in 2000-2010 when programmers had the autonomy ( in most corporations ) to decide on what feature to develop and how it should behave.

This hasn't been the case since the industry introduced roles such as product owner.

I've had to implement my fair share of anti patterns that I was fully aware would degrade the experience for the user. At the end of the day, the programmers have been reduced to essentially blue color workers that just do whatever the MBAs decide on.
Laser optical pickup unit (OPU) hacking (2020)
> An electric motor is really good at arresting high rpm movement

I don't think any EV that I've heard of has full-range electric brakes.

There are two interesting kinds of things that I think EVs could use...

brake resistors - if the battery can't absorb the full power of regenerative braking, maybe giant resistors can take the dissipate the rest of the energy.

eddy currents - it might be cool to use eddy currents to brake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake
Officers getting shot is super rare in SF.

South or Midwest is a different story, of course.
> Just want to make sure folks know who was fired.

yet…
Old people have been complaining about the youth for 2000 years but THIS time they're right.
I haven't seen such shameful flagging in a while. This is a gem.
Mobile phones date from the 1930s.
>"Laser optical pickup units that are used in CD / DVD and BlueRay players to read the disc are amazing pieces of engineering with built in lasers, optical stages, filters and mirrors. These small units, that can be found in almost any electronics dumpster, are a perfect starting point for building amazing scientific instruments."

[...]

"...we started working on building a DIY Laser Tweezer (optical trap) built only from a DVD pickup and a webcam."
The Half-Life Wiki has a list of candidate cities that more or less capture this: https://breezewiki.com/half-life/wiki/City_17#Background_and...
Wonder if these are open models like RNNoise now is.

https://github.com/xiph/rnnoise
I've gotten lazy and do that far too often. But yes, it's better to only use actually running it to verify that it does why I already know it'll do.
How long can a junior dev last simply using AI day in, day out? Is it enough to ship high quality products? I assume at least most of them eventually learn the proper skills when they are no longer "junior" devs. It seems like the usual "fake it til you make it" style a lot of people do to get by.
I think it is an understandable reaction. They're a long history of articles like "man saves multiple orphans from the orphan crushing machine" and people go "ahhh that's so sweet" and nobody stops to ask "why do we have an orphan crushing machine and why can't do anything about that?"

I think it's important to do both.
There are ways you could establish eligibility without a birth date. For example, they may have a WW2 service record but no record of their birth.
I for one am very excited about where things are going.

I know we're getting fewer "traditional" junior devs, but I'm seeing more and more designers and product managers contributing, at a frequency which was much harder pre-GPT.

In my roles as a head of product/eng, I've always encouraged non-technical team members to either learn coding or data to get better results, but always had limited success, as folks were scared of it (a) being hard, (b) taking too much time to get proficient.

But that's changing now, and fast - and these junior devs are becoming proficient much faster and leading to much business and customer outcomes.

I'm seeing more realistic goals, sprints, etc. I'm seeing fewer front/backend bottleneck, and lastly I'm seeing fewer pixel moving requests going to senior engineers.

As other have mentioned juniors were often unable to code prior to LLMs, and what helped make them better was code reviews, bugs and general mentorship. Those tools to make them better are still available to us.
I didn't say anything about their morality, just that by some statistics gen z is better than previous generations.

They are not better or worse. Just different.

Their music sucks, though.
A Computer Science degree does not teach you to be a good software engineer. In fact, you don't even need a degree to be a good software engineer. For 99% of the software engineering jobs, employers are not looking people who know the theory of computation, algorithmic complexity, operating systems, compilers, or even how a database works. What they want is the following:

0. A strong desire to solve the user's problem and the organization's problem.

1. Knowledge of a major programming language like JavaScript, Java, Python, C/C++, C#, etc.

2. Knowledge of how to use an SQL database or maybe a no SQL database.

3. Knowledge of how to debug the build process and write scripts in Bash, PowerShell, etc.

4. Knowledge of at least 1 major framework.

5. Knowledge of Linux, MacOS, or Windows.

6. An ability to read documentation and learn.

7. An ability to debug large programs and fix bugs without introducing more bugs.

8. A desire to think critically and choose the appropriate technology for the problem (very hard, takes a lot of experience).

9. An ability to write clear code which others will understand.

10. The ability to write, argue, and persuade others.

11. A good person who works well with others, puts the product before himself, and is honest.

Almost all of these things are not taught to computer science majors. At best, a person will learn 1 to 2 languages and maybe Linux. Expecting computer science programs to produce good software engineers is crazy because software engineering and computer science are two different things.
What do you even mean? You are comparing apples and oranges. Can an H100 churn through deterministic instructions to get to a fixed result in a computer's combinatorial envelope fast? No doubt.

However an abacus does not know how or what to add to achieve a goal.

Can an H100 or a bunch of H100s achieve better biological control than the human brain in real time as a self directed agent?

No way.

Apples and oranges.
So the logic is we should jail all the people I don't want my kids around?
Neither is it useful to make such claims as he did so blatantly
Crudely overviewing:

Mathematics is seen a formally grown, logical system, that has features that are "discovered" rather than invented .. "Given some {X}, {Y} follows without question".

However it rests(?) on Axiomatic foundations ..

Most famously: https://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/euclid.htm

It is understood that one can tweak an axiom, the fifth posulate for example, and get a different logical ediface - a non Euclidean hyperbolic geometry in that case.

The ZFC "Axiom of Choice" has bearing on infinities and other things, including many proofs that depend on reduction by absurdity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_t...
Baking in the assumption that cognition is equivalent to computation will tautologically lead you to this result, but this assumption itself is unjustified. Of course if you start with the premise that the brain is a computer you will come to the conclusion that the brain is a computer. You haven't justified the most important part of your argument, so I have no reason to take it seriously
> the same software could also just use a unique port for each console today, in IPv4+NAT.

Why solve a problem once properly in the network stack when you can add an ad-hoc workaround to each individual protocol instead?

> the console itself needs to tell the service “this is the address peers can use to communicate with me”, and thus you may as well just include the port in that call, and then you don’t need to assume port 5000 will work

And if you're behind CGNAT so your home router doesn't know what the address and port are, what then?

Not to mention the case of a multiplayer game between two people who live in the same house and a third person who doesn't. That's one that's trivial with IPv6 but difficult with every IPv4-based system I've seen.

> It solves like 10% of the difficulty of writing good p2p software. All the other problems are still there

It all helps. I mean, people mostly manage to play games with each other today, they just get disconnects or random lag every so often. Cutting down on that, even if it was only 10%, would make a lot of lives better.
Even if they could rehire everyone instantly, these people are now ripe for being turned by a foreign adversary like Russia or China. And I bet the Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies have increased their espionage efforts exponentially over the past few weeks.

And that’s even before we consider that the current administration has shown a tremendous affinity for enemies and dictators while putting the hammer down on allies and friends.

And I nearly forgot the appointment of individuals to the highest positions in charge of state secrets and intelligence, who are either already compromised or highly sympathetic to those enemy regimes.
> I’d assume that demographics should somewhat match real demographics.

At work? I doubt that. Only for a job available to anyone and chosen by everyone. I don't think there's any jobs even roughly like that.

People get jobs and then their social and professional network now has someone who works at $BIGCO. Now folks can see themselves there and apply for openings, which could accelerate this effect. Now you can see minorities hired on merit, showing up in clusters.

> I don’t think it’s impossible to tell even if “99%” is hyperbole.

I dunno - it just seems like "majority ethnicity implies merit, minority implies DEI" to me.
I'm not sure if it's just me, but it reads like a significant portion of this blog was written by a LLM.
Batteries are getting cheaper and better at a brisk clip.
You can't please every body. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I just made something for me and shared for maybe 10 other people to possibly like? I didn't expect to be angering people.
“Better” because they’ve found even worse replacements.

Who needs to get a girl pregnant, when you can jack off twice a day to a unique body every day for the next decade? Heck, why even get married or even get a girlfriend at all, at any point (also a statistical low)?

Who needs alcohol and drugs, when you can drown your sorrows into hundreds of hours of gaming? And you’ve been doing this since you were 10 years old and playing 12 hours straight on weekends? (There is literally a 10 year old relative in my life doing this.)

This generation is better on the statistics - but we have no reason to believe the outcomes are better. We have every reason to believe that they will be worse for it.

Not just that they might - look at the statistics, it’s already happening. Antidepressant rates among teen girls has literally increased 130% in 5 years.
> And why is AI hailed as a game changer? Precisely because AI takes the thinking out of the achieving.

So, like WYSIWYG designers and RAD tools?
If functional code can be written and deployed by juniors using an LLM, then perhaps the required business logic isn't that complex after all. Ask them to write a device driver or a kernel module, or code a faster algorithm for, say, stock trading, and they'll soon see the need for closer inspection and manual coding.

The reality, though, is that for most CRUD / code scaffolding, what you need the most is good knowledge of the problem space and a solid enough foundation to ask LLMs for solutions. Because, let's not forget it, people with no coding knowledge whatsoever can't get functional stuff out of LLMs as fast as non-developers.

We need to get used to a world where augmentation means "getting rid of the boring stuff at the margins". There's no heroics in doing that stuff the old way.
How are your "unknown facts" that you've NOT substantiated at all, more relevant than my "unknown facts" that are based on logical conclusions?

If that field is the qualifying field that it was presented as, Then any record with that data means you shouldn't be getting payments. And it was communicated that there are individuals getting payments with that dirty field.
Also factor in there were civil war widows legitimately eligible for pensions from their dead soldier husbands until the last one died just a couple of years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_...

Also can be via your father, this lady was collecting a civil war pension until 2020:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Triplett
Before StackOverflow, we copied stuff from physically printed material. My personal favorite is the Perl Cookbook, which is still on my bookshelf.

The thing with printed books is that you have to type in those snippets yourself, and the act of typing out code reinforces knowledge. I only used the cookbook for each new problem a few times, after which I have committed the relevant bits to memory.

The act of copy&pasting from Stack Overflow might have the same reinforcement effect, but perhaps not as much because it didn't cost as much effort. The act of having a bot generate code probably doesn't do much reinforcement at all, although perhaps these new developers will be better at asking questions or creating prompts.
Generative AI is being used in journalism
It is not the same imho; the code copied from SO, they had to change a bit; even if there was no understanding in the beginning, after changing and running and changing and running in a loop until it works, you learn something (often about how variables work). This is more like when I was typing in BASIC source from magazines in the early 80s and changing things to see if I could cheat in a game or make the gameplay different etc. The difference is that even if it doesn't work one-shot with an llm, the loop doesn't have you in it; sure sometimes you have to hammer the Yes button (but you can switch that off); it will be auto for all very soon, if you don't make a real conscious effort, you are not going to learn anything from it. Maybe just you wondering why they are paying you for clicking Yes.

Because of where the HN community works and hires, things are a bit different; in the real world, senior programmers (people who are hired in that role and make money for >=decade, not whatever your feeling what it should be is) are not very different either. Very many don't know what they are doing either, just they deliver by trial and error and got their years and stripes in, still barely understanding what they are doing. This now has become easier with llms for them too, but it's the reason why I, vs other people on hn, am bearish on programmer jobs; by far most outside the hn bubble are and always were terrible and can be readily replaced by llms now and will be soon. The ones that do understand what they are doing and can architect, write and read complex software won't be replaced by the current or next gen, but when we read that companies are going to lay off programmers in favour of llms, they mean the people I have to work with daily (we go into large companies and do emergency repairs; there was an article yesterday somewhere saying that all companies have outages all the time; sometimes we get called in for those) who have massive teams of people who cannot write anything sensible; it is useful for the problem, but reading the code or looking how it's done makes you cry; clearly there was no real understanding to begin with. Most commonly, and this wasn't all that common when we started out, an (or rather 1000s now) external library was used, the way it was supposed to be used wasn't completely/fully understood and so a bunch of brittle code has been produced to make it work in the way the author believed it should work, breaking in a myriad of edge cases that are discovered (by outage often) years/decades later. I am thinking that maybe llms are better at these cases; sure they 'understand' about the same nothing, but at least, once it works, they can clean up the code without effort so it might not be that crust of misunderstood pain plastered on top to hold things together.
Apple Private Relay causing mail delivery issues
It forces the use of some system that statefully tracks packets and makes routing decisions based on that information. Such a system will be capable of firewalling unless you go out of your way to make it not.
Mr. Deez Training Video (Fast Food Simulator)
Not so forbidden a topic that you can't site some sources, I hope.
> Their capabilities are pretty extraordinary.

While building Tesla from 0 to what it is today is nothing short of amazing (regardless of their stock performance), considering that their autonomous driving promises haven't left the promise stage for more than a decade ("it's only like a year away, this time for sure"), I have my doubts.
That reported 26:13 split is incorrect. It was actually 26:33, which is still crazy fast but more in line with the rest of the race.

> his 15km split was initially recorded as 39:47 before it was confirmed after the race as 40:07, improving his own world best.

(5km was 13:34)

https://worldathletics.org/competitions/world-athletics-labe...
Applied some fixes, should work now
ZeroBench: An Impossible Visual Benchmark for Contemporary LMMs
All frontier models, (o1, o1-pro, QVQ, gemini-flash-thinking) score exactly 0% on main questions of this benchmark.
a.) While I can't possibly know, yes, I think there's a very good chance. I think it's the top comment chiefly because it expressed a view that was popular with commenters. It's not like AI is a magic spell that bewitches people into upvoting.

b.) Another way to look at it is, "do you think it would be the top comment if the author didn't solicit feedback and thoughtfully edit their comment?" To which I would say, "who cares? Editing is fair play. Let's talk about our actual points of disagreement."

c.) To be frank I think this response from you is very telling. I haven't seen you engage at all with the substance of the comment. But you press very hard on this "AI" angle. The commenter has now shown us their pre-AI draft, and it's much the same - I think if you had a good-faith concern that it was "manipulated," that would satisfy you. Since it hasn't, I infer that your concern is either puritanical ("no AI must ever be used in any way") or that you are attacking the style of the comment when your real issue is it's substance.
I mean the article dances around it. I hate to say this, but we have to face reality.

It is empathy that is in great part responsible for for the crime ridden shit show that is much of SF.

How do we balance empathy while making SF not a gigantic pile of shit? I don't think there is an answer here. It's choose one, or choose the other.
The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people.
Most of the time you still need them, they just have no time to do what they are supposed to do.

For instance, would you fire doctors to reduce bureaucracy in medical services?
Agreed. I'd say there is a ladder to the cognitive aspect of writing code.

1. Constructing an algorithm yourself from first principles, then implementing it. Let's call this "architect level"

2. Reading someone else's description of an algorithm (from a textbook, a blog post, etc.) and implementing it yourself. "Senior dev level"

3. Starting with an existing implementation, treating certain parts of that implementation as a blackbox, but adapting other parts. (e.g. a StackOverflow solution doesn't have a cache, but you need one for performance and add one yourself) "Junior dev level"

4. Copying/pasting with minimal modification. (e.g. ChatGPT gives you a solution that doesn't have a cache. You reprompt it, asking it to add a caching strategy. Your contribution is correcting some names or parameter order and adding some glue code. The main insight you gain here is how to drive ChatGPT, not how the code itself functions.)

Can today's new devs climb from rung 4 to rung 3? If the answer is yes, then maybe nothing has fundamentally changed. If it's a no, then we may be in for trouble 10 to 15 years down the road.
Teen drug use is increasing

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/marijuana-hall...

And a rise in crime rates

https://www.newsweek.com/america-rise-juvenile-violent-prope...
A lot of anti-drone jamming is severing the wireless communication between a drone and its operator.

In most of the write-up, these drones were on pre-planned autonomous routes, and would thus not be affected. Unless you also had anti-radar installations :-)

Or hell, some kinda highly-illegal and mostly-unfeasible microwave gun or multi-watt CO2 laser that you could point at a drone and bring it down.
We're talking about the same team that said they were sending $50m of condoms to Gaza and went on to say that Hamas was using them to make bombs?

I note that the same dude also said in his White House interview not to believe him because he'll often be wrong.
It's not the republicans, but a cadre of crypto bros, who are in power. They stand to gain a lot from the destruction of the dollar.
I think that in a physical sense you can compare computation throughput unfairly against GPUs, by comparing 1 FLO against a minimum window of time in which a particular neuron spiking or not is significant, multiplied by the number of neurons.
> At Uber, our MySQL®

> stateless services hosted in Kubernetes®

> using the JDBC™ protocol

> Percona™

> Cadence™

> Docker®

> Oracle InnoDB® engine within the mysqld process. We can configure this to use other MySQL engines like Meta RocksDB™.

Trademarks that obnoxious are off putting. The audience must not be engineers.
> I've been following Argentina's struggles for a while given my time in Brazil and the parallels to hyperinflation so I was willing to consider his unorthodox approach, but perhaps it blinded me?

???
Yeah these days I just go to LiveATC and start my own choice of music before I start my day. I used LofiATC and it gave me this hobit.

Judging by what happened to LofiATC though, it seems LiveATC was not fond of this kind of things.
I was counting on that just a few days ago and failed spectacularly when Windows SMB client refused to connect to 127.0.0.2
What an amazing project! Great synthesis of skills to make such a cool project! I’m in awe!