skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The industry managed to convince people that they are just bad at using computers, and when everything is slow and buggy then that’s what people expect.

And Apple is not immune but my impression is that they have more issues with intermittent bugs & annoyances and less with performance or overall stability.
Not at all! I think there's a pretty natural flow for folks to have a love affair with YAML over the past decade or so of comp sci. You're seeing plenty of folks with "YAML DSL fatigue" because folks have seen this pattern many many times, and I imagine are a bit gunshy of "yet another YAML thing". That said, I have regular conversations with someone who would rather do everything he could in Ansible if he could, where I've become a fan of using CDKs since the power of an existing language's primitives combined with specialized knowledge distilled and packaged in an API I can call gives me superpowers. You're comfy in YAML and that's awesome. Keep making stuff that vibes with you!
Nice work!

I’ve been thinking recently that a local collection of pre-processed for RAG using curated focused structured information might be a good complement to this dynamic searching approach.

I see this used LangChain, might be worth checking into txtai.

https://neuml.github.io/txtai/examples/
> The Irish famine is roughly comparable to other famines of the 19th century in terms of its mortality rate (i.e. Mysore in the 1870s)

Yes, absolutely. But at least for me it was shocking to learn that Ireland, right next door to Britain, was suffering from similar famines to India.
Untested but Promising Blueprint for Writing Production-Ready Code with AI/LLMs
Sharing this, hoping someone finds this useful, also would like to hear what others think about this approach.

This gist outlines a two-phase approach to generating production-ready code using AI.

It emphasizes using pseudo-code, example code, and a modular design to guide AI code generation.

Phase 1 focuses on creating a functional prototype, while Phase 2 refines it into production-ready code.

It also links to a separate document with related best practices.

https://gist.github.com/ditpoo/387d2fc94a1bbfbe0f2312686eb09...
When there’s no algorithm, just a list view feed, upvotes don’t really serve any purpose. I think people like doing it though, so I’d make it just something the liker can see - like it adds it to your “liked” list. The poster doesn’t get a notification or any indication of the popularity of their content.
Very cool and also pretty expected results tbh. Some thoughts:

Factorio is a game that requires SIGNIFICANT amounts of thinking ahead, often requiring investments into things that won't pay off until much later and which might even significantly hamper initial development. Building a main bus vs spaghetti belts is one of the obvious examples here.

Humans with a little bit of experience playing factorio know that while building 1 item/s of some new resource is good, the game is about eventually building thousands of the new item. Until the LLM learns not to be short term minded it will probably build itself into a corner very quickly.

It is kind of amazing that these models manage to figure out a strategy at all, considering the game is not in their training set. That said, the current research goals are not very good IMO. Building the largest possible base has the predictable result of the AI building a humongous belt loop covering much of the map. A much better target would be the "standard" goal of SPM.

I think 99% of Factorio could be "solved" with GOFAI algorithms from the 80s and enough processing power. Set up a goal like 10k SPM and then work backwards towards how many of each resource you need, then recursively figure out fastest way to set up the production for each subresource using standard optimization algorithms from OR. No LLMs needed.
Clinton era consultants were the only ones saying the obvious: “it’s the economy stupid”. On the other hand it was the Obama era consultants who were fixated on the massive loser that is identity politics
>the same library exemption

Reference please? Genuine question. As far as I know, libraries have very little in the way of special privileges outside of some specific rights in the analog realm which don't really apply in digital where first sale doctrine also doesn't apply.
First Ammonia-Fueled Ship Hits a Snag
That always fascinates me. I genuinely don't see how anyone could lose money running a business where people just turn up expecting to lose thousands of dollars for very little in return
How can you say this with the current state of US politics? It's clearly inferior leading to such poor outcomes.
Physical buttons alone don't solve the problem.

Have a relatively new Subaru, if I don't wait long enough after turning on the car, the front and rear defrost buttons won't register that I pushed them (my son thought I was crazy until he had the same issue).

Similar story with the windows down buttons. I'll push them all the way down (past the detent), but if the car hasn't been running long enough, it won't register.

Almost as bad as no physical buttons. Infuriating when you take a specific action, don't get a response, and have to do it again.
The Right Level of Abstraction
Towards the end he had an example of splitting a sequence of "graph.nodes(`node[name = ${name}]`).connected().nodes().not('.hidden').data('name');" adding variable between some of the . in there and claimed it was marginally less efficient. This is sometimes true, but if it ever is you need to talk to your tool vendors about a better optimizes. If you are working in a language without an optimizer than the marginal difference from that optimization applied by hand will be far smaller than the performance improvements you will get by rewriting in a language with an optimizer. Either way, readability trumps performance: either because the performance is the same, or if performance mattered you would have choosen a different language in the first place.
The biggest factor (IMO) is that during the pandemic chip shortages, about the only WiFi/BT module in stock anywhere was espressif. They consistently had stock when no one else did, so a lot of home hackers got into it.

As our industry is so fond of forgetting and rediscovering, if your product is easy and accessible to home hackers, it will be used in those hackers' real jobs.

But also they're so goddamn cheap. Espressif somehow scaled production super fast and got the price way below any of the competition.
What a steaming crock of shit.

The far bigger problem is creating entitled masters, not entitled slaves.
In terms of pixels, it was 4x the resolution. And for fun, one of the window textures (visible in the difficulty choice lobby IIRC) was implemented as a mirror in glquake - IIRC John Carmack said it was so easy to do in OpenGL he did it as a kind of test.
Exactly the point, you don't need to buy a RTX 5090 to play games, there are plenty of games around to chose from that don't require a RTX 5090.

Not everyone is hunting GPUs for AI, other than hyperscalers.

Additionally, maybe Linux users would be left out, everyone else is already migrating to NPUs, GPUs for AI is fighting the last war.
I went to elementary school in Belgium from 1978-1982. I had the sense there was some national pride in having had a major African colony, but maybe Leopold II wasn't a benevolent ruler. Unlike Leopold I or Albert I, who were depicted quite heroically. I didn't learn quite how far from benevolent Leopold II really was until much later in life.
Yes! Better strategy would be great - especially for grand strategy games (like Paradox EU4 etc). Even more for games with aspects of diplomacy...
Any politician that suggests solutions to declining birth rates that do not tackle the economic realities facing most couples of childbearing age should be immediately ignored.

You can’t raise children when you’re underwater on student loans or unable to afford a house down payment or can’t afford the cost of childcare.
Sure. There are certain similarities between all authoritarian revolutionary movements with populist roots. MAGA shares commonalities with European fascism but also with Leninism and Maoism.

The basic template here is that the people (populism) become so discontented that they see no salvation in any of the existing elites or political movements, so they essentially appoint a dictator or an oligarchy to sweep it all aside in favor of <insert magical thing that will fix all their problems>. The level of naked authoritarianism and brutality varies between these movements -- some are more gloves-on and some more gloves-off -- but they all have an ultimately authoritarian character. The whole thing nearly always backfires into some form of "meet the new boss, worse than the old boss."
Tale as old as time. If your product is DIY accessible, it will eventually become some engineer's favorite tool and they use it at work.
It depends on estimates. I have seen estimates which included all that and also things like illegal prostitution in services category.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/business/worldbusiness/27...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/sep/30/nicholaswatt.m...

> The revised GDP will include some money from illegal activities, such as money from cigarette and drinks smuggling, prostitution and money laundering.

(Greeks were highly motivate to have higher value by any means necessary as discussed in article, this is a quite extreme case)
> In 2017, Apple put out a new iPhone, and in the same week, made my 1 year old iPhone unusable on purpose overnight to make me buy a new one.

I don't follow iphone news. What happened to make it unusable?
Sufficiently secure, scalable and reliable for a large organization. Usually implies that vendor can offer SLA for support and security updates, training etc. See for example the difference between RHEL and Fedora. In context of bespoke ERP it means that there are at least 2 tiers of vendors: top tier is responsible for building the integrated solution, underlying tiers are providing individual components for it.
This was plugged in so I suspect thermals especially given the temperature the computer was rising to.
The problem is it compares humans to wild animals. If you feed wild animals they'll see you as a food source and often expect you'll continue to feed them forever.

The question then is do you agree (certain) people are wild animals.

If so are you too not a wild animal and if not, what makes you special?
Can I find a non-US HN like news forum where I can find interesting news or comments aboout technologies?
Extremely valid counter points, thank you.

We already interact with false reality through our "old school" computers – internet is full of bots arguing with each other and with us. But my proposition doesn't have to distort the interpreted content.

Neural nets (RNNs) are Turing-complete, so they can simulate web browser 1:1. In theory, of course. Let say we find a way to train a neural net to identically simulate web browser. The weights of this blob might at first seem like an opaque non-sense, but in reality it would/could contain a more efficient implementation than whatever we have came up with.

Alan Kay believed computer science should take its cues from biology. Rather than constructing software like static buildings, we ought to cultivate it like living, evolving organisms.
If you think western countries are in a state of constant change just wait until you visit india a few times.
Yes, this, exactly. I was going to write the same thing. FPTP produces this result.

In the US, the combination of FPTP voting and campaign finance rules lead to congress being fundamentally broken.
I my view, code complexity is best expressed in the size of it's syntax tree, with maybe an additional term for the number of unique nodes. The real mistake here is the assumption that local reductions in complexity make a meaningful difference to overall complexity. Small local decreases in complexity may guide you towards the local minimum of complexity, but will never substantially change the complexity of the code-base overall. All measurements of code complexity are essentially as good as asking "how much code do you have".
Fascinating. Would have loved to see more pictures of the bigger factories-- or is the zig-zag belt into plastic production currently the best result?

I think this very clearly illustrates a big weakness of current LLMs-- humans might struggle just as much at first, but are able to specialize and adapt to a task, while LLMs can't-- yet.

I'm expecting even greater improvements from figuring out online learning/adaptation than what we got from chain-of-thought approaches.

Do you think the "API" to interact with the game is a big obstacle, compared to a human interacting with the game via monitor? Did anyone try to interact with the game via this API, and how does human effort measure up to the AIs?
Aphantasia and "The Sixth Sense"
As an example, for my first decade of programming I worked on code where the coding style banned the ?: operator, so I didn't use it and found such code hard to read the few times I encountered it. Then I got a new job where one of the programmers really liked that operator and so I was forced to learn how to read it, now such code is more readable then the if statements to me - when used in the way we use it on this project.
how can it upload a .env when its there in .gitignore? even if you go and remove the entry of .env from .gitignore, it doesn't start getting tracked right?

but yeah there should be some commit hook that rejects a commit like this for obvious non starters like a .env or credentials.yaml or something (UNLESS the dev explicitly goes and toggles that setting to be off)
Beyond Bad Output
I think it's unrealistic to build a cost-competitive open-source 2D printer. But it's relatively easy to just build your own printer. The parts that have the most R&D tied up in them (and so are unlikely to be replicated from scratch easily) are the inkjet heads and the ink's composition. If you can get those off the shelf then you can easily DIY everything else. There is a large existing industrial market for inkjet heads and ink. Many industrial inkjet heads are very easy to drive and have freely available data sheets. But they cost >$500 to a few $1k each and you probably want 4 for CMYK. I just built a custom printer in a few weeks for an art project with some of these (specifically, one called the Xaar128) driven by an RP2040. The experience definitely gave me a sense of awe and resigned respect for my humble desktop printer.
Why not apply a programming methodology which allows one to leverage a rich set of tools which were created for making text more readable and visually pleasing?

http://literateprogramming.com/

For a book-length discussion of this see:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy-of...

previously discussed here at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27686818 (and other times in a more passing mention --- "Clean Code" adherents should see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43166362 )

That said, I would be _very_ interested in an editor/display tool which would show the "liveness" (lifespan?) of a variable.
They're not the hardest problems we have, they are just very nice benchmark tools because by definition they already run on a computer and you can fairly easily interface an AI with them.

There's probably also a distorting factor in that all the AI research into stock market and military applications probably doesn't get published, so it seems like video game AIs are a much larger percentage of research than it actually is.
Because there's an AI sales pitch at the end.
> You believe that what you believe is true (you have to by definition). But is it? What is truth? That's the whole point of propaganda in shaping public opinion.

I don't know what you think your point is. Back in the real world, having dependencies on services provided by the US became a serious risk. De-risking is what every single decent project manager does. Only a moron drops by a discussion on risks and argues that a risk scenario doesn't matter because of propaganda.
Southwest Kills Bags Fly Free
Is there any positive differentiation for SWA anymore?
The US movement is full of affluent people that were more bored than discontented.
thanks for explaining, i meant something like xkcd would do
Or, have N available 3 hour windows, and if you've interacted (viewed the website/posted) in any way with the website during one of those periods, you cannot use the other periods for that day.

So basically the same idea, but letting the decision be more dynamic.
> And I mean, other than white papers from right-leaning think tanks

If political bias means we shouldn’t look at scholarship, we should also ignore papers from uniformly left-leaning university academics, correct?
> All the more reason why we shouldn't vote for parties and politicians but rather vote on specific individual decisions/topics/choices.

This sounds nice but if people can't even vote for favorable outcomes now, how can we expect them to make informed decisions on dozens of matters of public policy?
Three Implementation Models for Scheme (1987) [pdf]
Non mainstream are they guys who are accidentally being directly paid by Russia...
Yes, the -x flag does that. It saves the audio as opus and not mp3 though, maybe that’s what GP meant?
The same is visible in having to parse a bunch of Linux's more complex of the /proc entries, vs. simply using syscalls in (say) FreeBSD.

"Everything is a file" is not a bad abstraction for some things. It feels like Linux went the route of a golden hammer here.
> Falling asset prices hurt the middle class far more than they hurt the wealthy.

For that to be true, the wealthy would have to have a lower percentage of their net worth in non-cash assets than the middle class. That sure doesn’t seem true. Is it?

> Every time asset values fall, the wealthy scoop them up

How do they pay for them? If they are buying depreciated assets with depreciated assets, that’s a wash. If they are buying depreciated assets with cash … what percentage of his net worth do you think a wealthy man has in cash? This goes back to the earlier point.

> If Elon Musk lost 90% of his net worth, he'd still have $34 billion.

Sure, but that’s a different effect than the one you posit earlier in your post. Yes, a rich man can lose more and remain rich.
Cerebras to start datacenters in N. America, France packed with AI accelerators
Whilst at the EVERY site you should also read The Misfit Who Built the IBM PC. As its title says it's the story of IBM's Boca Raton, Florida division and the team that built the IBM PC led by Don Estridge.

Many already know this story and about the tragic death of Estridge in a plane crash (which I well remember from the time) but this account by Gareth Edwards is the best I've read.

It's well worth the read.
For those who don't want to apply firmware updates like this, you might want to use Linux. No printer company is going to work with your distro to automatically install their firmware updates. If your printer works today it's going to work tomorrow.
Mozilla's Response to Proposed Remedies in U.S. vs. Google LLC
wait, I'm talking about the one linked upthread about asthma[1], and I think you are talking about this[2] one, right?

[1] Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma - https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526

[2] A Mouse Model to Test the Effects of Gender-affirming Hormone Therapy on HIV Vaccine-induced Immune Responses - https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830
There is a (large, I believe) aspect of good code that is fundamentally qualitative & almost literary. This annoys a lot of computer programmers (and academics) who are inclined to the mathematical mindset and want quantitative answers instead.

I love dostoyevsky and wodehouse, both wrote very well, but also very differently. While I don't think coding is quite that open a playing field, I have worked on good code bases that feel very different qualitatively. It often takes me a while to "get" the style of a code base, just as a new author make take a while for me to get.
FYI the author of the CBC article is science reporter Bob MacDonald he's like the Canadian equivalent of Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bob has been around what seems like forever.

edit: he also hosts the radio program Quirks and Quarks. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks
The source, Fox Business, is the better side of Fox, but still Fox. Maybe Newsweek is more neutral:

https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-x-twitter-outage-ukraine-...
Very human like lol.

But in truth,not necessarily in practical things like coding but more ethereal things like analysis, it is very convincing. More so than a human, in explanations of why that's it's answer is the case, even if it is wrong. If you're looking for an excuse better than my dog ate it, ask a SOTA LLM.
No parametric polymorphism aka generic types?
Good abstractions make it easy to change the things that will change. Abstractions always make some changes harder and some easier, but good ones make hard the things you wouldn't change anyway.
Whats very interesting is if we could use LLMs to generate GOFAI methods. Its often not at all obvious how to do so. Than being said its still hard to express goals in terms of natural language and resources to LLMs. I;ve been trying different things and none seems to work for me to say hey this is a step improvement. Its also hard to come up with a dataset for these use cases.
Might be noteworthy that in recent enough k8s lifecycle.preStop.sleep.seconds is implemented https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/...
so no longer any need to run an external sleep command.
No, GPUs are not needed for efficient inference.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04732
I think it does: https://juanraul8.github.io/master-praktikum/
I mostly agree, but for short one liners and where there will be no reuse elsewhere, instead of a function I prefer;

something_is_valid = something > 0 and something != foo and something > bar
if something_is_valid:
# ....

It achieves the same thing without needing to scroll.
It’s a very cool in comparison to the standard train of thought. Human beings are just as much ecosystems as we are organisms.
The sibling comments are a perfect demonstration why projects tend to balloon in complexity and ever-increasing requirements just to deal with rare corner cases.

YAGNI. A niche tool whose selling feature is time-restricted usage shouldn't have to account for weirdos that miss the point of it and cheat with their clock.
For what it's worth (nothing, just interesting to note): Ganymede is larger, and less dense. Mercury's mass is more than twice Ganymede's.
Sounds like they might be permanently broken if HP doesn't fix it. I doubt you can downgrade the firmware.
The original reporting by AP with a different headline:

"Army chiefs or their representatives from nearly all of the 32 nations of the NATO military alliance will attend the Paris talks — with the notable exception being the United States."

https://apnews.com/article/france-ukraine-russia-war-militar...
They did, HN 6 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43271507
No.

It is literally just a debug port exposed over the wired HCI interface.

This gives you absolutely nothing at all that you can't get with a normal UART debug port or JTAG. Everything in the HCI commands already exists in the normal bootloader. If you can get a device into bootloader mode, you can peek and poke flash and memory, along with everything else.

There is absolutely nothing here.

You can create malicious firmware, sure, but it has nothing to do with this HCI thing.
Global Smartwatch Shipments in 2024: Market Declines for First Time
Emmy Noether: the genius who taught Einstein [pdf]