skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Vote for ranked choice voting, starting at the local levels.

Grade school needs rank choice voting activities to help make it feel familiar.
The Great Scrape
I have implemented Elixir in critical financial applications, B2B growth intelligence applications, fraud detection applications, scan-and-go shopping applications, and several others.

In every case, like the engineering team in this article demonstrates, the developer experience and end results have exceeded expectations. If you haven’t used Elixir, you should give it a try.

Edit: Fixed an editing error.
Pip-anything: Select and turn any div into a Picture-in-Picture window
Don't we all love German law...

Where I live, code requires that if you build a fence, it should not block the view and should be lower than 1.6/1.7m. So you cannot build a full fence for privacy or to block road noises.

Some neighbours wanted to build such a fence, because the road passing by is busy and noisy. So they build a "fake" pre-fence to code, next to the road, and 2 meters back, the first allowed distance for any construction, they build a "natural" 2.5 meter high "fence" of stacked wood to dampen the noise and have some privacy.

The town hall is furious, but cannot do anything, because nothing prevents you from stacking wood 2.5 meters high. The winters are harsh in the mountains, after all. And even the locals a few villages down the valley were impressed and laughing about it.
Yes it's interesting how many just did that.. Lotus, Novell. But iirc there were also some bare knuckle stuff involving C++ which was supposedly vastly better than VC but not given the right support as OS vendor.
I cant with this man. How did you not realize that my offhand comment on a web board doesn't call for the same level of politeness as the front page of a platform for professionals.

And to characterize it as "wanted to showcase their web design skills". Its a startup.

I don't feel like I'm a smart guy but damn are you stupid.
Thank you for your feedback.

You can try the prompts that I share in the article with any model you'd like. Here's the link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QLQwPnKM_RKglueteCdD...

Which HN tag do you think fits better in this case?
And we did go out to play.
Your point is well taken, but I think we need to question why Europe declined so significantly as a centre of innovation.

A big part of it is obviously the relative effects of twentieth century wars, both hot and cold. However, we also need to be aware that in recent decades, the US has just offered a better deal for entrepreneurs than Europe. By that I mean it has been a democratic, rule-of-law-based country with relatively easy access to capital and relatively low taxes.

It still has the last two things, of course. But the first two are also essential, long-term, and if they're eroded then the US might stop looking like a better deal.
Hogs: Homogeneous Gaussian Splatting
Thankfully. It was outrageous how inferior DALL-E 3 was to any other image generation system.
> Most pundits feel like this administration is trying to keep things out of FOIA and discoverability reach which has its own problems.

Similar issues have come up in the UK about Boris Johnson et al using Whatsapp etc during Covid, and one of the things they said in their defence did have some value - at least in relation to the idea of unminuted discussions.

ie these chat's are what used to be corridor/bar/cafe conversations - ie unminuted discussions are old as government - it's just they are now happening on various messaging apps rather than in person, at much faster pace, and with more people involved.

So I think it's a mistake to think its reasonable that all discussions should be recorded - the real question here is how to get the right balance - and make sure any decision making meetings are recorded - rather than the chat around the decision.

The way it worked in the past - was to get a proper decision you needed all the people in the same room - and so it was automatically minuted as it was an official meeting ( but not the chat at coffee before the meeting ) - now it's possible to get people together virtually that distinction is blurred.

Not sure what the answer is - but just saying it's probably unreasonable to expect all communications to be recorded - people need space to float ideas, or bitch like normal people - however on the other hand it is essential key meetings are minuted - not just for transparency - but for the study of history.
"This would surprise me just because its GDP is smaller than Italy's"

GDP to US dollar is only works IF your export and import is only traded with US dollar which doesn't to be the case since Russia is trade with Brics partner that bypass all sanction and not using US dollar
Does Columbia still merit the name of a university?
Or.. god forbid.. not track users?! I know this isn't viable for many businesses, but back then I just removed Google Analytics and all cookies from my sites, so no cookie banners needed.
If you want a (long) peek at RL read Sutton and barto. Amazing book.
Curious what people here have built using RL?
<< Things exist in an unstable equilibrium, like an inverted pendulum. It takes little to throw things off balance (I can explain more if needed, with examples).

I think it may not be a bad idea. I think I understand what you are referring to, but some examples would be great.

<< Defeatist (I apologize if I'm misinterpreting).

I want to believe it is pragmatic, but I do take your points seriously and will do some self-reflection on it. I believe you are especially right about the ease with which we allow ourselves to reduce cognitive load.
Leveraging the power of decorators in Python's unit-test by Vivek Shrivastava
They're pointing out a surface-level symptom of a much deeper bureaucratic sickness in parts of Europe. There's a reason British comedy is what it is.
I always felt that Gitlab CI was a lot more understandable. But in Gitlab CI, just as in Github Actions, you're usually running some container. And aside from the container you're also running some globally defined actions.

That's the most obfuscated part for me, the globally defined actions that can belong to any organisation in Github.

In Gitlab it was at most a globally defined git repo with templates, but you could somehow understand it better.
System Font Deep Dive
Hooters Became a Refuge for Young Gay Men
Very good questions, but the answer is disappointing:

because money
All the President's Men:

https://youtu.be/ihHU3IVVrfM?t=477

https://youtu.be/isNlC0RYOyE?t=565
We do. In the end, Trump 2.0 might end up being a net positive for the world.
I don't agree with what appears to be the core premise of this article. Sure, if you want recognition or career benefit from your work, you have to advertise it. But this assumes that the purpose of work is getting recognition or money.

What if I want to do work for making the world a bit better? Submit a fix for an open source project anonymously? This article feels like the career drivel I so often see on LinkedIn.

Also, I might not want the world to benefit at all from my work. I could spend a year building a better alarm clock for my own personal use. Was my time wasted? I think that people should try to help others, but there is value in developing things for fully personal use. Not every program needs to be a product, startup or open source project. Not every solution needs to be a blog post.
"that if I shared Classified or Controlled Unclassified information over unapproved channels"

You are confuse yourself, THEY ARE THE LAW

these are the most powerful guys in the nation, who decide to catch who and whom??? these guys who decide that not the other way around
> All generated images come with C2PA metadata

How easy is this to remove? Is it just like exif data that can be easily stripped out, or is it baked in more permanently somehow
Perhaps it’s so important that you take it for granted, even though it took a great deal of effort from others to make sure you don’t notice the problem in the first place.
But they are all mixed together, like sand, that's why they don't separate the specific type of plastic but use a generic "microplastics”
Expressing the wish to adopt a Latin idiom using Gen-Z slang and AAVE. A linguist could write a PhD thesis on your comment alone.
Would be cool if the LLM can break up the request into sub-requests processable by LLMs. Current talk about agents mention some sort of router/orchestrator that delegates to other agents. But these can be another llm, another agent, another router itself or a simple tool call, etc - all function calls that wrap other llm-enabled sub components.

My feeling is that we have the pieces to build AGI. Like humans, we don't need a 400IQ person to solve all problems ('AGI'). What we have is coordination problems and in LLM land it's 'the glue' that's missing. Hopeful it's a matter of patterns/best-practices emerging.
First it will dream up the interaction frame by frame. Next, to improve efficiency, it will cache those interaction representations. What better way to do that than through a code representation.

While I think current AI can’t come close to anything remotely usable, this is a plausible direction for the future. Like you, I shudder.
MQTT is used for messaging between processes on the embedded device itself, which can be the remote control panel, or a camera node. The panel itself is driven by a microcontroller which gets all the parameters to display and request changes through MQTT. If the camera is controlled locally, like on a LAN, then another process picks up the action and handles the communication with the camera. If the camera is remote (over cellular for example), we don't rely on the bridging functionality that some MQTT brokers provide but rather use Elixir sockets to send the data over. Typically parameter changes would be sent towards the camera and new status would be populated back to everyone. In most cases it's been a single control room, sometimes 2 at different locations, and one camera site so the needs for a wide distributed architecture hasn't been felt yet.

One of the next steps would be to have a real cloud portal where we could remotely access cameras, manage and shade them from the portal itself. In this context we have been advised to look at NATS. Remote production or REMI is now getting more traction and some of our clients handle 60+ games at the same time from a central location. That definitely creates new challenges as centralizing everything for control is a need but keeping distributed processes and hardware is key to keep the whole system up if one part fails.
I meant FP libraries like Cats Effect / FS2 / ZIO et al. – they don't really do the things that Akka / Pekko is very good at, such as multi-machine parallelism, but the conventional wisdom nowadays seems to be that it's easier to start with those libraries and progress to Pekko if you ever need that, rather than architect the system with Pekko from the start when you don't need its power.

I don't know if I personally agree with that, I've had a better experience with Akka (even raw actors) than with FP libraries, but what I mentioned is definitely the general vibe in the publicly active part of the community that's I'm observing. We gotta keep in mind that there are lots of companies and devs that never talk about what they're doing in public, so of course my perception is biased by that.

My own expertise is shifting more and more to the frontend / Scala.js these days, so please forgive/correct any inaccuracies.
Simplicity and Global Mutable Values
How was the Trump/Adams quid pro quo not corruption? 7 DoJ prosecutors resigned rather than sign the dismissal, because the corruption case against Adams is a slam dunk and absolutely should proceed. Who eventually signed it? A just-appointed official whose former job was one of Trump's personal lawyers.

How is Trump using executive orders to punish law firms he doesn't like not corruption?

Open your eyes, man.
What was it, don't leave us hanging.
> as something that will bring incredible wealth to humanity.

As things are going, it looks like it's more going to bring incredible wealth to the very few. That don't pay taxes.

> It seems like the 21st century is on the cusp of becoming like the one everyone dreamed about in the 20th century.

No, to be honest, for the time being it looks like it's going to turn into a techno-fascist hell-hole.
> found it strange that more people weren't talking about it.

Some simply dislike everything OpenAI. Just like everything Musk or Trump.
For an LLM conscious thought is the tokens in its context window, and subconscious thought is the training embedded in its parameters. A person thinks in a similar manner, with subconscious gut instincts modulated (more or less) by a thin veneer of consciousness.
Java will never "catch up" to Scala (for example, the type system / generics will not evolve in the foreseeable future).

But once Valhalla lands, with some additional JEPs, Java will be very close to the core of what Scala offers. Where there are gaps, some of these can be filled via libraries (think immutables.org, or others providing persistent data structures).

As a matter of fact, these days at most companies that I see the typical deployment model is "micro"services, which you can quickly develop via Spring Boot or the alternatives. No need for ultra complex code or asbtractions, Java does it just fine. And you have all the tooling you need for the enterprise world.

I think Scala is an excellent language for teaching ML-style programming. I would still recommend it for that purpose. But there is no longer a killer app or need for Scala, that would convince most people to use it for new projects.
If you haven't already, you can read about "model collapse" which is what you are speaking about.
I can't help you with REST, but I can show you how to make a SOAP request

https://imgur.com/3u75Ldf
https://archive.ph/do5gk
Yeah who wouldn't love a dip in the sulphur pool. But back to the question, why can't such a model recognize letters as such? It cannot be trained to pay special attention to characters? How come it can print an anatomically correct eye but not differentiate between P and Z?
Not a thought experiment. Black people do this or something similar all the time. It’s called loitering or “making the neighborhood look bad”
What about GraalVM licensing?

According to https://www.graalvm.org/latest/introduction/#licensing-and-s... the community edition is free software (GPLv2 + classpath exception).

But it isn't really clear what the differences are between the free software version and the proprietary version.

There does not seem to be a page detailing the differences between the two (or at least I couldn't find it)
> Another common request is to “stop implementing features”.

Yes, it's a very common one shared by virtually all Scala 3 developers. Stop. At least for a couple of years.

Tooling and the community just can't keep up and the language is very good already that the focus should be on the ecosystem and not language.

But Scala devs are beyond deaf and that's what you get when a programming language is an ongoing research project on which many students and professors depend.

It's not enough to say "if we stop developing new features the language will die" when there's 0 evidence by it and a huge fatigue towards the relentless development coming from most of the community.
It’s like a lucid dream version of using and modifying the software at the same time.
IANAL but I actually think "Engineer" in Germany is not the same protected word, thus companies use this, or "Software Engineer".

You also don't always get a say what they put in your sig or on your business card (and I think internal names would not matter anyway).
> Huge Kudos to Daniel for his courses. If you think Scala is difficult, check his course, these will change your mind.

Daniel Ciocirlan I guess ?
For the time being, the crack dealers are hacking through the US government instances..
These are all logical fallacies and red herrings that have nothing to do with what we're talking about.

If we try to steer the ship back to the topic at hand...here's why we should be concerned that Europe's private sector isn't growing much or innovating much.

It turns out, Europeans entire way of life is funded by taxing the activity of the private sector and redistributing that money to things like healthcare, education, pensions, etc. Innovation (increased productivity) is the only way to reliably grow this pie, and innovation is exclusively the domain of the private sector due to the competitive pressures of markets.

If our private sector is entirely composed of aging industrial-age conglomerates waiting to be disrupted by more dynamic and innovative Chinese competitors (China is rapidly becoming better at the things European industrial companies used to dominate), our entire society is at risk. Militarily, we're sitting ducks, and economically, we are as well.

Modern Europe is economically heading the way of the Soviet Union, with an increasing share of GDP driven via centrally controlled government spending (we're now at over 50% on average in the EU, the Soviets were around 70-85% at peak).

Meanwhile, The Chinese Communist Party has ironically created one of the most dynamic, capitalist systems on the planet. The Chinese supposedly "communist" economy is in fact more market-driven than even the US economy (33% government-driven vs 36% government-driven), and you can see this in the numbers:
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/...

It doesn't take a Phd to understand that a much larger and more unified population in China, with a more unleashed private sector, is going to eat the lunch of the smaller, disjointed micro-economies in Europe. And this doesn't even factor in the rise of industrial investment in the US in recent years.
wow this is so cool
It’s very easy to start a business in the UK and the regulatory environment isn’t particularly hostile to it. It depends a lot on what line of business you’re in, of course (as it does anywhere else).
I bet it can do that if hooked up to an agent system. Rate limits are still very restrictive now in the free API, but as soon as they make it available for more frequent use we'll find out.
Do you need a study for every little thing?

You body does provide you with a quite elaborate feedback system. And you can also objectivly meassure. (E.g. how long you walk without pain)

And studies can be very misleading. For example it matters a lot, if and how often you walked barefeet as a child. If you didn't, your bones will be not so strong developed and then barefeet walking/running can be even dangerous. Trusting a general study that maybe did not take this into account (or did not mentioned it prominently) here vs trusting the feedback from your nerves in your feet would be not wise.
How to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border
They're not in the same playground. Scala has a far more advanced type system - more close in power to Typescript or Rust than Java - and capabilities like compile time metaprogramming which aren't on the Java roadmap. Or more mundane things like immutable collections or a copy method for "record" classes.

Whether that's an advantage in day to day business development is a different question.
So I have built all sorts of applications using Scala:

- Desktop GUI app which used Tauri/Rust but heavy Scala.js on the frontend

- Cloudflare Workers using Scala.js

- Web apps using Slinky React [1] and Scala.js

- Highly concurrent, fiber-based backend apps using Scala and Ox [2]

- OpenAI model inference against ultra large datasets using Scala, Spark and MS Synapse

- CLIs using Scala Native

[1] https://slinky.dev
[2] http://ox.softwaremill.com
They own European governments far more. They just have several hundred years of extra practice at being subtle.
Long pause: "I don't recall."

The exact legal advice passed on to me around answering questions in a deposition played out live; wild.
It depends what you think is meant by the term "effective". Courts foremost serve a truth-finding function and buffer against arbitrary authority being applied to individual people.

It's always been controversial whether a court can disparage a law of broad application or impugn the president directly. The "effectiveness" of those functions was always a little speculative.
> “The super-conservative perspective is to assume they are completely unhinged and that even the most benign reasons for travel are going to subject non-citizens to these device searches,” said Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit digital rights group.
Lillian's writing is really crisp without compromising the technical details.

I learnt reinforcement learning from Udacity course. It was one of the finest on the internet. Whenever I couldn't find some thing in the course I went to this website. I created my own small introductory course for RL, a pure hands-on experience for learners.
Didn't work for me on the first prompting (got a 10-pointed one), but after sending [this is 10 points, make it 9] it did render a 9-pointed one too
And yes, I share the view / feeling that we basically got the AGI building blocks. Models will continue improving, but we can already get most of what we need just by orchestrating the latest generation of SOTA models. Crazy time to be alive!
Next step into LLM evolution is teaching them to procrastinate
UX is actually increasingly the bottleneck. Most of the top models are very good if you micromanage their context and prompts. But people aren't very good at that stuff.

Some of the desktop chat clients are turning into great productivity tools. I tried the Claude one last week and quickly went back to Chat GPT. Claude might be a better model for coding. But it's less effort to make Chat GPT do what I want at this point and it's kind of good enough for a lot of stuff. Every release it's getting better. It connects to my IDE automatically, it can look at the files I have open. It can patch those files (I actually disabled that because it's too slow for my taste), etc.

But most importantly, I can trigger all that with option+shift+1. I do this gazillions times per day. Mostly simple stuff with really short prompts, "check this" (file, selection, current line, etc.), fix that, what do you think about x, "address the FIXMEs/TODOs", "document this", etc.

I can ask other models the same questions and they'd get the job done. But then I have to do more work to give them the same context. Claude has a Github connect option, which is great. But unfortunately it's just a glorified file picker, which really sucks. I have files open in my editor, just look at those. I don't want to have to manually open files do that for me or specify what files to look at every time I go near the tool.

Chat GPT actually asked me yesterday whether it could add a different file than the one it was looking at. I said "yes" and it did. That's a great UX. Don't make me do work.

That's a good UX.

I use Gemini mainly because it's integrated into google's tools. So it's kind of there. And chat GPT for whatever reason does can not look at the browser window. But from a UX point of view, that kind of deep integration is what you want. You have this implicit shared context which is the thing you are looking at that you don't have to spell out anymore.

The UX of populating the context is the deciding factor in how useful models are at this point, not how well it solves pet benchmark questions or renders pelicans on bicycles.

I have good hopes for agentic coding tools progressing rapidly this year. The ones I've tried recently need a lot of work though. I keep going back to Chat GPT because it's just the quickest & easiest to use at this point.
> it's been an awesome force multiplier for small teams who need to productively pump out safe and ergonomic code.

How much of this would be due to actual language features, and how much due to selection bias induced by talented and ambitious software developers looking into functional programming languages as a means to satisfy their intellectual appetite?