skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Even Obama failed to deliver to the American people. He was too focused on drone strikes.

I agree how Obama continued Bush's "war on terror" was a disappointment, but to state that as the reason for his relatively limited accomplishments is profoundly unserious. The Mitch McConnell's strategy was to do anything Obama did for no other reason than to make him look bad, because McConnell realised that Obama had the potential to be the most consequential president since FDR, with broad public support.

They used every trick in the book to hold up votes, to not schedule votes, voting against popular policy they themselves supported just a few years ago out of principle, etc.

I don't know how anyone could have forgotten this; the Republican party was not serious good faith participant in the democratic process long before Trump came along.
I wouldn't put 100% of the blame on the Democrats, here in Australia we are frequently voting for the least worst option not the best, and I'm not sure how the Democrats weren't the least worst option when compared to the other option

but for some reason a whole heap of people decided to stay home this time and this is the result, hope they still feel happy with their decision
You even say so in your essay. I'd say an issue is people picking up on the graph but ignoring what you wrote.
That would make sense if driver licences were difficult to obtain in US in any way shape or form, and they just aren't - almost everyone has one and it's not a big deal to get one.
I believe there are two kinds of skill: standalone and foundational.

Over the centuries we’ve lost and gained a lot of standalone skills. Most people throughout history would scoff at my poor horse-riding, sword fighting or my inability to navigate by the stars.

My logic, reasoning and oratory abilities on the other hand, as well as my understanding of fundamental mechanics and engineering principles would probably hold up quite well (language barrier notwithstanding) back in ancient Greece or in 18th century France.

I believe AI is fine to use for standalone skills in programming. Writing isolated bits of logic, e.g. a getRandomHexColor() function in JavaScript or a query in an SQL dialect you’re not deeply familiar with is a great help and timesaver.

On the other hand, handing over the fundamental architecture of your project to an AI will erode your foundational problem solving and software design abilities.

Fortunately, AI is quite good at the former, but still far from being able to do the latter. So, to me at least, AI based code editors are helpful without the risk of long term skill degradation.
Maybe there isn't that many 'single frequency' commercial products?
Interest is paid on the deficit, and once the interest gets large enough, there's a runaway doom loop.
> You have a narcissistic asshole in the White House who got elected because the Democratic Party fumbled the ball.

It don't want to sound too persnickety, but there is always at least one losing side in an election. It doesn't have to mean they dropped the ball, it could just mean people preferred the other option. Hindsight bias is wonderful, but you have no idea what would have happened if they'd run with a different agenda, they may have had a worse result.
>It will be good enough to produce 90% of the solution with very little input, and 90% is more than enough to go to market, so it will.

What backs up this claim? And when will it reach it?

We could be very well reached a plateau right now, which means looking at previous trends in improvements does not allow us to predict future improvements. If I understand it correctly.
You mean like how the CIA flew around doing “extraordinary rendition” during the turn of the millennium? Yea, that’s a shitty thing to do, hopefully all the people of the world can get better governments.
My new company of about 100 persons uses ThinkPads as their 'standard issue' laptops. Which I guess is great. I have a T480 privately. But modern ThinkPads are not as great as before, and I was just thinking about if the Framework might make a nice 'standard issue' laptop for the company. I guess it might be just fine!
Software is the connective tissue of the world, generating mediocre quality results (which will be the best outcome if you don’t really understand what you are looking at) is not just lazy it can be dangerous, do the worlds best engineers make mistakes? Of course they do, but that’s why building high quality software is collaborative process you have to work with others to build better systems. If you aren’t, you are wasting your time.

As of now (and this could change, but that doesn’t change the moral and ethical obligations), software engineers are richly rewarded specifically because they should be able to write and understand high quality code, the code written is the foundation of how our entire modern world is built.
Let's not forget the biggest of EVILs, Lesotho, with its 50% tariff. Mr Trump has just noticed that they have cornered the US economy. (A strange coincidence, Trump has recently said nobody has ever heard of Lesotho being a country...)
And they run Linux
Foreign countries will probably start taxing Google/Facebook ads if not outright banning US tech companies from operating. When that happens, watch the whitehouse roll back everything
Cool hack, but performance is terrible. That page makes scrolling on my phone laggy.
Location: Nurenberg, Germany
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No, hybrid
Technologies: Python, rust, aws, gcp, openstack, git, s3, distributed systems, postgresql, kafka, cassandra, clickhouse, redis, valkey, rpm, etc
Résumé/CV (python): - https://box.thejamga.de/cloud/index.php/s/6oqg4H96ZnA6YGW
Email: <IN CV>
I’ll second this. It seems that a lot of people assume it’s possible (or easy?) to make a living from open-source projects.

It’s probably due to a few famous projects being massively successful (think Vue.js), but I believe it’s directly tied to the project's size (audience), the maintainers' activities (conferences, etc.), and the type of audience. This last point is important—individuals are more likely to donate, while companies often need months of convincing, and it usually doesn't work, or they expect their logo everywhere with analytics (CTR, etc.) to justify it, which is basically advertising.

I have a sizeable seven-year-old open-source project (Mockoon) and, over its lifetime, I’ve received low four figures in donations, which is awesome, but far from enough to make a living from it.

Now, I’m creating a cloud version of the software, which has started generating revenue. It’s a lot of work, but leveraging the open-source success and sell something seems like a safer path.
“It would enhance productivity” is not a sufficient justification for requiring someone to do something. Ignoring safety regulations would often enhance productivity, but I’m sure you understand why we shouldn’t do that.
What basic rights do I have that you don't, and where are these codified?
Will try!
I think holding political opinions on the basis of what a famous (historical) person feels about them is sort of the thing being criticized here.
Indeed, most startups fail, so it doesn't really matter in the end how well their code is created.
Does this allow to run Xbox One games on Windows PCs? If not, what does this actually do?
Trying to imagine writing 3,000 words about how Paul Graham and I have ascended beyond tribes without realizing I’m just in a tribe with Paul Graham
The problem is that we don't have those same systems for getting an ID.

There's no "government comes to you" to give you an ID. And, many Democrats would love to make it easier to get an ID, but the Republicans often deliberately make it harder to get an ID.

They shut down offices and reduce hours of locations, so people have to travel farther and take more time off work. They increase the bureaucratic requirements and hurdles, so people are more likely to need to take multiple trips.

I personally wouldn't have a problem with making a voter ID a requirement to vote, if we could also agree to make it as easy as you describe to get an ID. The problem is the GOP wants to require getting a voter ID and simultaneously make it harder to get an ID.
Difference is machines break and that costs lots of money.

People just quit, some businesses consider it a better outcome.
The interesting part here is how it differs for you and me. I work on quite complex systems most of the time, and I write things much faster myself. AI needs so much hand holding that it's equivalent to trying to sprint while carrying a backpack filled with bricks. And also, it changes the way I think, which is really scary to me. I very quickly stop thinking about what a good solution to a problem is, and instead start thinking about how to convince AI to come up with a good solution to a problem. I basically become a manipulator, not a creator. A Steve to a Wozniak. If I wanted that I'd have gone into sales or management instead.

I also wonder what is the end of this relying-on-AI cycle? You need good problem solving skills to be able to use AI to make somewhat working solutions. The more you depend on AI, the worse become your problem solving skills. And then what. Since you're no longer capturing knowledge into your own brain, your moat as a problem solver is also slowly disappearing, no? And once the job market figures out you actually can't do anything outside of an AI, or the tech has moved on, and what you knew before you started using AI has become irrelevant, who will even hire you anymore?

I see this a lot with juniors entering the job market nowadays, unable to problem solve (many don't even know how to copy and paste text), and sure enough, they get fired a lot.
I recently tried to buy a ThinkPad with trackpoint and a high-resolution screen. The X1 AMD G5 is available with Linux but the 2880x1800 version is only available with Windows. Initially, I thought there was no 2880 version, because the OS selection comes before the screen selection in the Lenovo configuration tool. Once Linux is selected, the 2880 version disappears.

It's not been delivered yet, but I'm sure installing Linux will not be a problem.

A ThinkPad with ~14" 4k OLED touchscreen and trackpoint and AMD processor is what I was looking for, but those do not seem to exist.
isn't the x1 carbon keyboard basically the same?
Feels a bit like an April Fools announcement to me, to be honest.
(2010)

This refers to the era of COBOL, or maybe Hypertalk, not LLMs.
Other thing is that when you’re VAT registered, as a buyer of parts you reclaim VAT on things you purchase as inputs. So the tax on the final product is what matters.

With US sales taxes you accrue tax all the way up the chain.
I only mentioned DMVs to point out that even if you didn't set out to get a voting document, you can still check the box and get it.

In other words, it's not "people need driver's licenses to vote".
Any policy made with a lack of understanding this profound is a bad idea. Because they just ran this through a spreadsheet instead of paying any attention, among the tariffs are some uninhabited islands and another region whose only population is a US military base.

The highest tariffs are applied to countries like Madagascar, from which the US imports less than half a billion dollars of goods per annum. A drop in the bucket. Another silly example is the Falkland Islands, whose annual exports to the US don't even hit thirty million dollars. The formula they hit upon is what a high school student would come up with, and is not informed by any actual plan.
First Principles Problems, Secondhand Solutions
What is not true? A driving license may be a defacto ID, but it is not a dejure, designated national ID card. It's a different system. In the EU countries the ID cards are backed by a more-or-less central civil register.

(as an aside, it would be very funny to me if the they used the driving license for electronic signing of official communication with the authorities like we use it in some countries in the EU).
What? Note for any juniors reading this: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.

Does the author enjoy writing code primarily because they enjoy typing?

Are they not able to have the mental discipline to think and problem solve whilst using the living heck out of an AI auto complete?

What's the fun in manually typing out code that has literally been written, copied, copied again, and then re-copied so many times before that the LLM can predict it?

Isn't it more dangerous to not learn the new patterns / habits / research loops / safety checks that come with AI coding? Surely their future career success will depend on it, unless they are currently working in a very, very niche area that is guaranteed to last the rest of their career.

I'm sorry, this is a truly unnatural and absurd reaction to a very natural feeling of being out of our comfort zone because technology has advanced, which we are currently all feeling.
The excemptions outlined in the JEP still allow people to do pretty much whatever they want as granular as they want. They can even wholesale revert to the old behavior. I really don't see the issue.

> And, likewise, if the JVM never sees a write instruction to a certain field, except once in the constructor, it should be able to treat it as if the field were final, and avoid reloading it after method calls. If it loads a class with an instruction that writes that field, it has to recompile all those methods.

Right now, many opportunities for this optimization cannot be used because `final` for non-static fields cannot be relied upon. If such a field modification happens, then it's far more difficult to locate all the code that is the result of constant propagation from that field's original value. The impact of changes in the other scenarios is quite limited in comparison.

> None of this should be news to the JVM engineers.

I know how JIT compilers work, and the OpenJDK team knows as well of course. Which is exactly why they pursue this change. Deoptimizing and recompiling simply sucks for performance because this is time the application could spend on far better things.
Ignoring safety regulations would not enhance productivity in the long term, so that example doesn't quite prove the point. Productivity enhancement in general is sufficient justification for a company, as otherwise they can simply fire you, hence, to them, it is sufficient.
This is the problem with a two-party system. It makes every citizen either complicit in the worst party or the second-worst party.

You can't hold who they voted for against people in a two-party system. There just isn't enough choice.
Where does the 8mi/kWh number come from?
Show HN: A free YouTube video downloader
Well, after all that, it turns out the netlify app linked in the post is a copy of the original PDF! So, if you care about the actual content, just go read that. The PDF does have some cool graphic design though.
I think the problem there is that in Pakistan where they do this they can reasonably assume that everyone in that remote village is a Pakistani citizen - they probably don't need to see your birth certificate to get you an ID, right? In US they want to see proof that you are a citizen and you are who you say you are, which is what (some) people have an issue with, even if you sent buses with all equipment on them to random american towns people just might not have the right documentation on them to pass the checks.

But yes, I agree, it is a pathetic problem for a 1st world country to have - just sort it out.
Very cool, and you should consider making this into a book. I recently bought a similar book of traditional Japanese color combinations: A Dictionary Of Color Combinations Vol.1 and Vol.2 with Japanese Traditional Colors Chart.

https://en.seigensha.com/books/978-4-86152-772-2/
Still, the training of bigger and bigger models is expensive. Models that nobody asked for in the first place.
I dont drive a car, I also wont use LLMs. I live near dikes and I'd really prefer to be able to live here for a few more decades...
Reading all parts of

https://esl.cs.brown.edu/blog/how-to-search-on-encrypted-dat...

might allow for some options to solve this problem.
The stated goal of tariffs is to force companies to shift production back to the US. But US production costs more, hence the outsourcing in the first place, so shifting production back to the US increases cost.

If costs goes up then either prices go up too or margins go down or a mix of both.
And what will you do when that zero shot doesn't work, and continues not to work? It will always be necessary to dig in and manually change things, hence an editor or IDE will continue to be needed.
What replacement battery did you get for the 2020 M1 air?
Yeah. Specially because the U.S economy is service-focused (and consumption as well).

Like, imagine now that all your computers will be more expensive/worse. This will affect services from like, a law firm - to a tech company. Will make harder for young buy good computers and start to code, etc.

I say this as a Brazilian, to us Brazilians watching, this is like: Why are the U.S repeating the same mistake?

I don't think Americans know this, but here in Brazil, we also have phone, tablet and PC national brands (Positivo¹, Multi², Philco³). National TV brands like Semp, AOC, Mondial. A ton of home appliances brands like Mondial, Philco, Britânia.

But why Americans don't know them? Because they only exists because of the tariffs. So they only exists in Brazil internal market. They are worse than foreign brands, but they exists because it's cheaper to buy a Mondial Kitchen Stand mixer than a Kitchen Aid!

And worse that most of these products are only white-label Chinese products, sold way more expensive than the real chinese ones.

This also create a whole gray market. A lot of people start smuggling products without import tax.

And this only with a 7% average tariff. Not the U.S 29% lol. Brazil with 31%~ prior to the 90's was WAY worse than this. A lot of brands just died when we opened a little the market (Consul, Brastemp, were Brazilian big fridge, Washing machine etc makers, they got bought by Whirlpool in the 90's)

American Brands then will now look for the U.S gov to ask for exceptions too, and this create a lot of corruption. And after you put these tariffs and there's a whole new companies made to internal market, it's almost impossible to remove because of the lobby from these companies (and corruption).

[1] https://loja.meupositivo.com.br/
[2] https://www.multilaser.com.br/
[3] https://www.philco.com.br/
If you think these beleifs are inherent in the temperament of people, that doesnt explain the change of these beliefs over time. Progressive, left leaning ideology had different stances 20 years ago, let alone 50 years or in China or India.

Sometimes this is easier to see from the outside. For example, if the conservative right all independently arrived at the same conclusion based on personality, isnt it strange how the consensus all moves together and changes over time
Hi, I wanted to add some clarification on this topic.

I am Knut Sveidqvist, the inventor of Mermaid and creator of the Mermaid open-source project. I'm also the co-founder of Mermaid Chart.

To address the confusion: Mermaid Chart is not a separate entity "profiting off the name" - it's a commercial offering I created to help sustain the open-source project. Working on Mermaid during evenings and weekends became unsustainable as the project grew. Mermaid Chart allows me to work on what I love full-time while providing resources back to the open-source project. This support will continue to grow as our business matures.

I appreciate your concern about protecting users from deceptive practices. In this case, there is a direct connection between the open-source project and the commercial offering, created by the same founding team.
Nicholas Carr has a nice book on the dynamic the author is describing [0], i.e. that our skills atrophy the more we rely on automation.

Like a lot of others in the thread, I've also turned off Copilot and have been using chat a lot less during coding sessions.

There are two reasons for this decision, actually. Firstly, as noted above, in the original post and throughout this thread, it's making my already fair-to-middling skills worse.

The more important thing is that coding feels less fun. I think there are two reasons for this:

- Firstly, I'm not doing so much of the thinking for myself, and you know what? I really like thinking.

- Secondly, as a collary to the skill loss, I really enjoy improving. I got back into coding again later in life, and it's been a really fun journey. It's so satisfying feeling an incremental improvement with each project.

Writing code "on my own" again has been a little slower (line by line), but it's been a much more pleasant experience.

[^0]: https://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=18
The problem with this theory is the tariffs will both have to remain in place for a decade and businesses will have to believe that they'll remain in place for a decade for that to pan out.

Nobody is building a new factory, based on tariffs that they expect to be gone in three years time.
Low cost items, of the type the vast majority of the population are quite sensitive to the price of, have almost no margin on them to start with. There isn't 10% to cut.
> They've benefitted from it.

They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice.

> Because now most Americans don't slave away in unsafe factories 7 days/week for dollars an hour.

Now they're collecting disability in their unsafe neighborhoods, getting morbidly obese while their substance abusing kids play vidya games in the basement into their 30s.

Yes, it's really like that. People want their factories and incomes back. I don't claim that anything happening here is going to deliver that, but that's the pitch they're voting for. To their credit, at least they're pursuing that in lieu of some UBI ideocracy made of fantasy money.

As for you: it's fine to point out all the ways they may be misguided and/or misled, but unless you have an alternative that doesn't amount to expecting everyone to somehow earn an advanced degree, and then discover it's next to worthless (even before "AI",) your really not contributing much. So what do you have?

Anything?
So basically a lose lose from company and consumer perspectives. Either company makes less profit or consumers pay more or a mix of both.
I agree that you shouldn't over rely on AI, that you shouldn't rely on AI to write code when you are learning.

However, in most codebases I can't see that happening. Once the codebase is complex enough, AI will not work, take more time to use than writing the code yourself or breaks the existing code.

The author himself said that AI isn't usable for anything more complex than an University project, yet he complains he lost his skills because he used AI.

As far as I see it, in the current stage of AI, it has limited usage.

You can use it to start a greenfield project or start a new feature that is independent of the rest of the codebase. It will help with most of the setup and boiler plate.

Past that, it will either not be able to do what you need, it will take more time or will break the code. So this pretty much doesn't allow you to modify large code bases or add logic. But you can still use it to generate a function, a method or a service, provided that function, method or service does not require much context and you don't need to modify the rest of the codebase to accommodate it.

I see AI as merely an accelerator, not solving problems by itself but helping you solve problems faster, sometimes. I think it is very similar to Intellicode in Visual Studio and other editor tiols, which don't write code but provide method autocompletion, provide small suggestions, provide syntax highlighting, provide formatting and warn you when you make syntax errors.

Was I using a text editor instead of a good IDE, my speed of development would be slower.