skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> basically written in C

Unsafe Rust still has to conform to many of Rust’s rules. It is meaningfully different than C.
Why try to divert the discussion into an off topic quagmire?
And I'd love to see data compression terminology get an overhaul. Do we need big LLMs or just succinct data structures? Or maybe "compact" would be good enough? (Yeah LLMs are cool but why not just, you know, losslessly compress the actual data in a way that lets us query its content?)
Quoting from the article:

'In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto "A word is worth a thousand pictures." This still holds true.' -- Bruce Tognazzini
"First rule of free software is any goal, including commercial ones."

Yeah and that's what we disagree with. :P If Creative Commons has NC licences for art, why shouldn't software? Apart from programmers being too meek to assert their rights.

And yes, the OSI is mostly hyperscalers, that's fairly commonly known. They aren't interested in protecting the commons the slightest.

Even the JSON licence ("don't be evil") and stuff like that are better than MIT and friends - gives enough of a headache for bigcorp lawyers to think twice before stealing your stuff.
Fully agreed.

I'm currently stuck on LTE due to a power outage. The page is horrible to try to read due to most of the images being either in the process of being loaded or not loaded at all.
There are protections, but not for 'probationary' employees (anyone who's been hired or transferred within the past X months).

As for the rest, they're not 'being fired', they're 'being placed on administrative leave', which is a paper-thin excuse but one that will have to wind its way through the court system like all the other bullshit the administration is pulling.
You're just describing programming without realizing that having a stochastic and imprecise programming language is a leaky abstraction.

The problem isn't that a "pro bowler" could come in and do something irrelevant for more money. Professional programmers understand that you shouldn't prematurely optimize things like memory or performance in contexts where that doesn't matter. You're ignoring the most important metric which is correctness. When we write a program, we make it correct then we can optimize it if that's actually important.

What's going to happen when you have your non-expert write a program using these tools and it inevitably gets something wrong? Are you prepared to build business process on top of a program whose author can't tell you how it works which might contain bugs? Do you even realize that this is just a recipe for producing mountains and mountains of technical debt?

You seem to believe this is going to put programmers out of a job but you're just explaining why they'll need even more of us in the future when these piles of garbage inevitably cost the company money.
I mentioned in under another comment - and while I consider myself versed enough in deflate - comparing the library to zlib-ng is quite weird as the latter is generally hand written assembly. In order to beat it'd take some oddity in the test itself
If you train your AI on the commons, everything it generates should be in the commons. And all your profits should be shared with everyone.

If running your AI is incompatible with respecting copyright and intellectual property then you should not get to own a single bit of its output.
America provides copious amounts of aid all over the world. That's soft power. It's not "propaganda", it actually helps people survive.
You've defined the market as four companies (FAANG - 1) and roles representing <1% of their highest performers. Yes, they have roles and maybe even openings, but no reason to think there would be an immediate match for anyone but a superstar.
Noise pollution happens within the home too. Every time I get an advertising notification from Google play that I can't find out how to opt out of I get a little angry. Advertising voice is equally repulsive. We need a way to hold platforms accountable for the health effects of their products.
He’s saying this is bad because it reduces soft power. I’m asking why that’s a bad thing.
Hadn’t hear that, that one is wild
Leaky abstractions is a really appropriate term for LLM-assisted coding.

The original "law of leaky abstractions" talked about how the challenge with abstractions is that when they break you now have to develop a mental model of what they were hiding from you in order to fix the problem.

(Absolutely classic Joel Spolsky essay from 22 years ago which still feels relevant today: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a... )

Having LLMs write code for you has a similar effect: the moment you run into problems, you're going to have to make sure you deeply understand exactly what they have done.
Cannot understand your complain. It written in Rust, but for you it looks like C. So what?
"There’s a reason behind why I say this. Over time, you develop a reliance on [search engines]. This is to the point where is [sic!] starts to become hard for you to work without one."
Just a generic rant. How many people can sew; fell a tree; or skin an animal? Yeah, I thought so.

And no data or link to data either. Just a waves hand "I think it happened to me"
As someone from europe, I am baffled by the ability to just fire everyone on the spot. Are there no job-protections for federal employees?

There are, but these actions are intentionally designed to be so rapid and so numerous that the media and the legal system can't keep up.

The White House hasn't even been shy about it. They're calling it "flooding the zone," itself a sports reference.
Historically (for decades), stability has also been the pitch in the US, with the same tradeoff in pay and bureaucracy. I'm not sure about the exact legal authority, but no one has attempted it before. So much of our legal system depends on convention and what a given judge feels like on a given day that it's really hard to say whether this is "legal" or not.
That's not really the question though. The question is, would we be better off if we didn't have "[the] means of external marks"?

I'm sure somebody out there would argue that the answer is yes, but personally I have my doubts.
That makes sense. But then this kind of journalism/talk radio, would not be included.
This exists in the US as well. I've personally experienced and witnessed it happen within labs at an R1 University. The accountability structures are woefully insufficient to protect students and junior researchers, and the incentives are perverse as to actually reinforce the practice.

I've seen frequently that talented technical contributors are academically handicapped because they bring too much value to the lab for them to graduate quickly. I've personally had my own funding threatened if I didn't work "at least 60 hours each week" on my ex-advisors work (which was in no way related to my degree or research interests). I was fortunate to find another advisor and funding source quickly, but most advisors are absolutely profiting in their career off the backs of their students; leveraging both carrot and stick to fuel their ambition. It's a problem of modern academia and I'm not sure how to fix it.
Fundamentally nothing, but everybody already knows that you shouldn't teach young kids to rely on calculators during the basic "four-function" stage of their mathematics education.

Calculators for the most part don't solve novel problems. They automate repetitive basic operations which are well-defined and have very few special cases. Your calculator isn't going to do your algebra for you, it's going to give you more time to focus on the algebraic principles instead of material you should have retained from elementary school. Algebra and calculus classes are primarily concerned with symbolic manipulation, once the problem is solved symbolically coming to a numerical answer is time-consuming and uninteresting.

Of course, if you have access to the calculator throughout elementary school then you're never going to learn the basics and that's why schoolchildren don't get to use calculators until the tail-end of middle school. At least that's how it worked in the early 2000s when i was a kid; from what i understand kids today get to use their phones and even laptops in class so maybe i'm wrong here.

Previously I stated that calculators are allowed in later stages of education because they only automate the more basic tasks; Matlab can arguably be considered a calculator which does automate complicated tasks and even when i was growing up the higher-end TI-89 series was available which actually could solve algebra and even simple forms of calculus problems symbolically; we weren't allowed access to these when i was in high school because we wouldn't learn the material if there was a computer to do it for us.

So anyways, my point (which is halfway an agreement with the OP and halfway an agreement with you) is that AI and calculators are fundamentally the same. It needs to be a tool to enhance productivity, not a crutch to compensate for your own inadequacies[1]. This is already well-understood in the case of calculators, and it needs to be well-understood in the case of AI.

[1] actually now that i think of it, there is an interesting possibility of AI being able to give mentally-impaired people an opportunity to do jobs they might never be capable of unassisted, but anybody who doesn't have a significant intellectual disability needs to be wary of over-dependence on machines.
I found out I already know Rust:

unsafe {
let x_tmp0 = _mm_clmulepi64_si128(xmm_crc0, crc_fold, 0x10);
xmm_crc0 = _mm_clmulepi64_si128(xmm_crc0, crc_fold, 0x01);
xmm_crc1 = _mm_xor_si128(xmm_crc1, x_tmp0);
xmm_crc1 = _mm_xor_si128(xmm_crc1, xmm_crc0);

Kidding aside, I thought the purpose of Rust was for safety but the keyword unsafe is sprinkled liberally throughout this library. At what point does it really stop mattering if this is C or Rust?

Presumably with inline assembly both languages can emit what is effectively the same machine code. Is the Rust compiler a better optimizing compiler than C compilers?
I think non-fairweather friends are about them staying with you when you're in trouble. This is you CAUSING them trouble on purpose.
The README also uses 'YourUsername' instead of OP's actual username.

Was this LLM generated, OP?
Wrong.

Reno v. American-Arab Antidiscrimination Committee made it clear that there are no First amendment protections from deportation. This is well established case law for decades now.

https://www.aclu.org/documents/reno-v-adc

This is why talking confidently about things you have absolutely no idea about makes you look foolish.
Republicans want to privatize everything. They want to make their rich friends richer by doing this. It's going to be a disaster for the average citizen.
At this point, why would you travel to the US? People with valid visas and green cards are being denied entry, strip searched, detained indefinitely, and denied prescription medicine. The government is ignoring judicial orders regarding immigration and deportation.

1. https://www.luxtimes.lu/luxembourg/us-resident-violently-int...

2. https://www.newsweek.com/rubio-touts-migrants-sent-el-salvad...
> it'll be interesting to see how LLM prompt writing develops as a skill unto itself.

MIT already offers an online prompt engineering course as of a year ago so I'm sure it already has.
This entire line of reasoning is worker propaganda. Like the boss is some buffoon and the employees constantly have to skirt his nonsensical requirements to make create a reasonable product.

It's a cartoon mentality. Real products have more requirements than any human can fathom, correctness is just one of the uncountable tradeoffs you can make. Understanding, or some kind of scientific value is another.

If anything but a single minded focus on your pet requirement is dumb, then call me dumb idc. Why YOU got into software development is not why anyone else did.
VOA/RFE operations were actually run by a separate non-profit org that got the vast majority of its operating funds from the feds. So, federal worker protections aren't relevant by dint of the org(s) being set up at arm's length.

That said, the current regime has had no problem acting outside of the law and existing federal employee union contracts. Tell people they're dismissed, cut off the email and building access, wait for the lawsuits, and then simply ignore the decisions weeks/months later and/or follow them with as much malicious compliance as they need to achieve their original aims.

tl;dr: No, employment protections fundamentally don't exist in the US, and doubly so for those employed by the federal government within an atmosphere of rampant lawlessness.
I live in an Indian and I avoid going out most of time and a big reason for that is the noise. Aa the article says about Dhaka, traffic is a major source of noise and it is unavoidable due to the absence of decent public transport infrastructure. But it's so much worse than that. Restaurants and even gyms play (terrible) music at volume levels which are defeaning and illegal in more reasonable places. But it seems like I am the only one who has a problem with it. It's tough not bring sensorially numb.
I agree with another commenter that this doesn't tell the entire story, but it tells almost all of it. Nowadays, I discover some new piece of software, visit the Documentation section of its website, and the first thing I see is `How to build SuperMung on the Whizzbang 47 using Mark Williams C'. I have no idea what SuperMung is for, how to use it, what errors I might make, and how to install it on Debian. Similarly, I go to the website for a new programming language, see some examples that give me little insight into what it is for, and find not even an incomplete language specification.

Proper documentation leads me by the hand, starting on what the software is for, what platforms it runs on, some examples of its use (including examples that show how it is useful for solving real-life problems), a thorough tutorial on how to use it, and finally a complete and properly indexed/searchable reference.

Back in the 1980s, I got myself in trouble: I promised a 100-page manual for a software system I had written, and I decided to do it in the then-new TeX. But this was before The TeXBook was published. So I learned TeX by reading the literate source for the code. The manual was duly ready on time, and served the literally thousands of students who relied on it for the next few years.

But when I finally got a copy of The TeXBook, I was astonished by how little I had actually known about using TeX. I had presumably been mostly using it to answer questions such as “why doesn't this work?”, and a lot of the overall principles had simply not been apparent to me. Once I had learned TeX properly, I learned a great deal about how it all worked by going back and reading the literate source. Knuth is a brilliant (if highly idiosyncratic) programmer.

My point here is to emphasize that when someone releases software, their job is not done unless people can learn to use it. That doesn't just mean completeness and accuracy, but a through-line, apparent to the reader, from learning what it does all the way to mastering it, along with the kind of reference information needed when using it.
ah ok, thanks for the clarification! But there shouldn't be too many probationary employees, right?

So what's administrate leave exactly? Just relieved from your responsibilities? I guess you still get paid.
Strikes me as odd how one flavor of commenters who've long called for the "end of the American Empire," reductions in our "overseas military imperialism," and closure of the VoA "propaganda outlet" now stand by the institutions of said Empire to the death.
No not really. It's not even rare that a human confidently says and believes something and really has no idea what he/she's talking about.

Like you’re doing right now? People say “I don’t know” all the time. Especially children. That people also exaggerate, bluff, and outright lie is not proof that people don’t have this ability.

When people are put in situations where they will be shamed or suffer other social stigmas for admitting ignorance then we can expect them to be less than candid.

As for your links to research showing that LLMs do possess the ability of introspection, I have one question: why have we not seen this in consumer-facing tools? Are the LLMs afraid of social stigma?
The internet training data for LLMs is valuable history were losing one dead webadmin at a time. The regurgitated slop less so.
Show HN: Tinyauth, the simplest way to protect your apps with a login screen
Hello everyone, for the past month I have been working on this little project. I was tired of the complexity of authelia/authentik/keycloack and I just wanted something that I can plug to my existing traefik or nginx setup and work out of the box with minimal configuration. I feel like it has reached a very good point but I would really like to hear your suggestions about improvements and new features.
While this is def neat, it shows signs of a classical computer scientist fallacy: "There's a recurring problem I occasionally run into, and each time it takes me about 3 minutes to solve it. No more! Instead, I'm going to spend a few weeks programming an app that solves the problem for me!"
except they are not good at it. the unit tests you'll have written will be filled with (slow) mocks with tautological assertions, create no reusable test fixtures, etc.
Probably it's because I'm not a quantum physicist, but the argument boiling down to "the wavefunction is an object of a probability space not of physical space" seems to make the whole article moot. Can the "wavefunction" be anything else than a _representation_ of the particule(/wave)?... but then who could ever think that a representation would actually travel in space?
While AI can certainly produce code that's faster or otherwise better than human-written code, I am utterly skeptical of LLMs doing that. My own experience with LLM is that humans can do everything they do, but they are faster than humans. I believe we should look at non-LLM AI technologies for going beyond what a skilled human programmer can expect to do. The most famous example of AI doing that is https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06004-9 where no LLM is involved.
>So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.

I see where you're coming from but I think you're missing the fact that large projects have lots of bullshit work that requires high skill but is technically lower value. There is a lower bound to what people will accept, as people with marginally better skills get lucky enough to get highly-visible and much more highly compensated roles. The pay stratification you wish for is already built in, and the average just reflects the fact that these companies DO make enough money to have competitive pay rates.
Propaganda is a form of soft power, as is foreign aid, as is trade and cultural exchange. These things are "good" in the sense that they allow a nation to further its interests and strengthen its influence, and thus maintain stable and peaceful relationships with other nations, as opposed to furthering those interests through the direct use of violence.

Also what on earth does Nietzsche have to do with anything?
Don't attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence.
It has also way less tooling available than C to analyze its safety.
I run an offline-first app[0] that has a sync mechanism (over Yjs). To solve server longevity we just sell you a lifetime license of the app and allow for file-based sync.

While I agree with the sentiment of the article most users do not even know what a server is, much less capable of self-hosting. Syncing a folder over Dropbox or Google Drive, though, is simple enough.

[0]: https://nestful.app
Yeah, I hate letting the bullies win as well.

> The best recommendation is to talk to a lawyer. None of us can possibly have a clue what the best move is without knowing all the details, so tell those details to someone who is qualified to give you actual legal advice.

Fair enough. I understand the internet can't substitute professional legal advice, but even the lawyers I talked with advised against hiring them since I'm not making any money yet. They're not wrong considering their fees. So what is the average hobbyist/small business supposed to do?
Did we read the same article?

> The real challenge is that UI designs are ultimately constrained by their hardware.

Sure, but part of designing a product is recognizing this and the author seems to be making that point. Surely they aren't saying you should have sound and haptics in devices with no speakers or motors. Certainly I think the author would argue that cars should have physical knobs and not touch screens.

The problem is what you mean by "UI"

UI means "User Interface". It does not mean "Software defined User Interface".

User interfaces are composed of one or more layers, including a human–machine interface (HMI) that typically interfaces machines with physical input hardware (such as keyboards, mice, or game pads) and output hardware (such as computer monitors, speakers, and printers).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface
Not all of those abstractions are equally leaky though. Automatic memory management for example is leaky only for a very narrow set of problems, in many situations the abstraction works extremely well. It remains to be seen whether AI can be made to leak so rarely (which does not meant that it's not useful even in its current leaky state).
Got a fully working multiplayer with server and client code on the first prompt with grok3 thinking. Added more features and adjustments with and without prompts afterwards
Those aren't the same thing at all, and you already mentioned why in your comment: leakiness. The higher up you go on the abstraction chain, the leakier the abstractions become, and the less viable it is to produce quality software without understanding the layer(s) below.

You can generally trust that transistors won't randomly malfunction and give you wrong results. You can generally trust that your compiler won't generate the wrong assembly, or that your interpreter won't interpret your code incorrectly. You can generally trust that your language's automatic memory management won't corrupt memory. It might be useful to understand how those layers work anyway, but it's usually not a hard requirement.

But once you reach a certain level of abstraction (usually 1 level above programming language), you'll start running into more and more issues resulting from abstraction leaks that require understanding the layer below to properly fix. Probably the most blatant example of this nowadays are "React developers" who don't know JS/CSS/HTML and WILL constantly be running into issues that they can't properly solve as a result, and are forced to either give up or write the most deranged workarounds imaginable that consist of hundreds of lines of unintelligible spaghetti.

AI is the highest level of abstraction so far, and as a result, it's also the leakiest abstraction so far. You CANNOT write proper functional and maintainable code using an LLM without having at least a decent understanding of what it's outputting, unless you're writing baby's first todo app or something.