skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's fascinating. You should do a writeup about it!

I had thought (perhaps incorrectly? it's not something I've spent a lot of time pondering) that a stateful connection like this is fragile in the real world compared to HTTP because it requires some sort of manual reconnection to the server on network changes (like if you're on a phone in a train or in a car), and that it would require both the server and app itself to be aware of what is dynamic realtime data, what is cacheable, what is stale, etc. Like kinda related to your other statement about state... doesn't this mean you're sharing and syncing state across both the server and the client?

Competitive video games operating over UDP are the closest everyday analogy I can think of, where the server handles most state (and is the ultimate source of truth) but the client optimistically approximates some stuff (like player movement and aiming), which usually works fine but can lead to rubber-banding issues and such if some packets are missed. But most gaming happens between one server and just a small handful of clients (maybe 100 or 200 at most?).

In a web app, would the same sort of setup lead to UI jank, like optimistic updates often flicking and back and forth, etc.? I suppose that's not inherent to either HTTP or websockets, though, just depends on how it's coded and how resilient it is to network glitches.

And how would this scale... you can't easily CDN a websockets app, right, or use serverless to handle writes? You'd have to have a persistent stateful backend of some sort?

One of the things I like about the usual way we do HTTP is that it can batch a bunch of updates into a single call and send that as one single atomic request that succeeds or fails in its entirety (vs an ongoing stream), and it doesn't really matter if that request was one second or one minute after the previous one as long as the server still knows the session it was a part of. Like on both the client and the server, the state could be "eventually" consistent as opposed to requiring a stable, real-time sync between the two?

Not disagreeing with you per se (hope it didn't sound that way), just thinking out loud and wondering how the details play out in a setup like this. I'm definitely intrigued!
> I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.

Sorry to hear. Yups you are/were/will be. It happened before. It will happen again. Perhaps not to you, but to me, him (pointing left), her (pointing right).

Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."

I don't seem to sound like an asshole. For the past couple of decades "your services are no longer required - please return your laptop" happens on a monthly basis. If you follow the news (and I believe all of us here do), every now and then we read about Company XYZ laying off 3000. Company ABC laying off 5000. So, it's just a roulette and it has to do where the ball will sit. It's not personal (in 99.9% of the cases).

I had the 'pleasure' a few years back to work for a global bank and I was asked on a quarterly basis to give names of who will be gone on the next round(s). Nothing personal. Simple arithmetic.

So.. save, invest, keep emergency fund(s), and you will be ok.
I agree. Saving web-links is a solved problem. Saving the CONTENT afaik is not solved and I've wanted a solution for YEARS, as well as the rest of humanity has needed this (including those who don't even know they need it, haha!).

Closest thing would be to "print" to PDF but that always creates a trainwreck in the PDF and is never good enough for me. Looking forward to trying Omnom if it's open source.
High or rising TIOBE ranking might as well be viewed as a warning sign, like “why are people struggling with this language so much?”

Especially with AI tools integrated into IDEs and able to usually get you over small hiccups with syntax or explaining a language concept interactively and with RAG on the language and framework docs, personally searching through the SEO slop is increasingly a waste of time.
Breaking Down MCP: An Architectural Analysis
Tested Meilisearch recently, was a great experience, getting a multi-index search running in our frontend was very easy. Just wish they had an Australian instance, the closest is Singapore :(
there's nothing dubious about Le Pen, she was found guilty of embezzlement for €3millions of public funds.
> You’ll see the latter form [interface{}] in older code

Code I wrote a few months ago is now "old" :')
The authors here are claiming, as your quote states, that biological evolution is just one instance of a more general phenomenon. I'm not sure that's contrary to the views you're expressing. You wrote:

> The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There is, as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog and those in a rock

But the authors' examples do include the "speciation" of minerals! As I read it, the authors describe:

- some initial set of physical states (organisms, minerals, whatever)

- these states create conditions for new states to emerge, which in turn open up new possibilities or "phase spaces", and so on

- these new phase spaces produce new ad hoc "functions", which are (inevitably, with time and the flow of energy) searched and acted upon by selective processes, driving this increase of "functional information".

I don't think it's saying that living things are more complex or information dense per se, but rather, that this cycle of search, selection, and bootstrapping of new functions is a law-like generality that can be observed outside of living systems.

I'm not endorsing this view! There do seem to be clear problems with it as a testable scientific hypothesis. But to my naive ear, all of this seems to play rather nicely with this fundamentally statistical (vs deterministic) picture of reality that Prigogine described, with the "arrow of time" manifesting not just in thermodynamics and these irreversible processes, but also in this diversification of functions.
DOGE declared it woke fraud, waste and abuse.
> The other side of the table has no legal right to audits or reviewing the books so the opportunity for fraud is huge.

Are private companies allowed to share some information with a subset of their investors and not others?
That makes me wonder now. I had duplicates on mine on TurboTax once too ... but I assumed it was me ... maybe it wasn't.
That's quite a straw man example though.

If your daughter could draw a house with enough detail that someone could take it and actually build it then you'd be more along the lines of the GP's LLM artist question.
So the key thing here is that this didn't used to be how things were at Google.

People outside the ecosystem disbelieve, but I had the mixed privilege of watching the company evolve from a spicy startup to a megacorp. There isn't one point in time you can put your finger on when it shifted, but the shift happened. And for Googlers who'd been there forever, they were legitimately startled to learn that all their years of work hadn't made them insiders as the lines were drawn and management consolidated into something more approximating a traditional corporation.

If there's a lesson here, I think it's that there is a difference between a company like old Google and a company like new Google, but if you only want to work at old Google, you have to pay very close attention to the signs that things are changing around you. Capitalism, to be certain, incentivizes drift in that direction, from small outfit where everyone knows everyone to 100-thousand-person megafirm with concerns about its tax obligations to Ireland.
Console.log(write your content)
It hardly ever raises to the level of crime.

The issue is that the IRS has 7 years to audit a tax return, and since taxes are due at the time you receive the income, the interest is backdated if you happen to underpay taxes and it compounds. So if they audited your 2019 return today and you underpaid $1k, you’d owe $1333 today with compound interest over those 6 years.
Are you referring to this bit by Joe Zimmerman? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpWCK7t_iaw>
My handle arose from a former colleague's attempt, decades ago, to describe a network malfunction he was trying to diagnose as either (or both) of spurious and erratic in a single word...
Almost certainly going to get killed by DOGE though:

https://www.businessinsider.com/irs-direct-file-doge-treasur...
Sentences like this, i.e. "everything turns more complex", must be formulated much more precisely in order to become true.

The article talks a lot about biological evolution, but in that case the only claim that is likely to be true is that the complexity of the entire biosphere increases continuously, unless a catastrophe resets the biosphere to a lower complexity.

If you look only at a small part of the biosphere, like one species of living beings, it is extremely frequent to see that it evolves to become simpler, not more complex, because a simpler structure is usually optimal for constant environmental conditions, the more complex structures are mainly beneficial for avoiding extinction when the environmental conditions change.
I like Python of short scripts. Anything over 100 lines and bash is painful. Python works great up to about 50,000 lines of code. Anything larger than that and I need a strongly typed language. A larger number of programs/services/scripts can be done in less than 50,000 lines of code and python is easier than getting those type details right, but as you get bigger than that the effort of getting type details correct becomes well worth it.

The lines of code numbers above are somewhat arbitrary and not a hard block. Instead their are a continuum, the more lines of code you have the harder code is to maintain. Languages offer various things that make it easier to maintain long programs, but they just help, 10k lines of python will always be easier than 10 million lines of Java.
Google's internal systems have been written against the Colossus semantics for many, many years and thus benefit from it's upsides (performance, cost efficiency, reliability, strong isolation for a multi tenant system, ability to scale byte and IO usage fairly independently, tremendously good abstraction against and automation of underlying physical maintenance, etc) while not really having too much of an issue with any of the conscious trade-offs (like no random writes).

On the other hand, if you've been building your applications against expectations of different semantics (like POSIX), retrofitting this into your existing application is really hard, and potentially awkward. This is (IMO) why there hasn't been an overtly Colossus based Google Cloud offering previously. (Though it's well publicized that both Persistent Disk and GCS use Colossus in their implementation.)

One of the reasons why it would be extremely hard to just set up or build CFS elsewhere or on a different abstraction level is that while it may look quite achievable to implement the high level architecture, there is vast complexity in the practical implementation side. The tremendous user isolation it affords for an MT system, the resilience it has against various types of failures and high throughput planned maintenance, the specialization it and its dependencies have to use specific hardware optimally.

(I work on Google storage part time, I am not a Colossus developer.)
I think I'm not yet desperate to the point that I would agree to that.
But they could absolutely move to a system where the vast majority of filers could attest that the numbers IRS already has are all the income they have and be done with their returns. Then only the subset that has other income or adjustments would need to do a more involved filing.
A $10k tax bill (every year) is less than what the median worker owes.
Is it still the case that you can't run Docker Engine Community Edition on a windows machine?
Pretty reliable sanity check, don't you think?
Graphs, Embeddings, and LLM-Generated Jokes
Hype EDM for Adrenaline Boost – FPS Gaming – Apex Legends, CS2, Valorant
You should see the humor, the silliness and mostly the opportunity in rating systems that involve checkmarks, hearts, thumbs up and down, 1-5 stars, points etc. Slashdot was sophisticated by comparison while still useless. It should make you shake with laughter where Wikipedia argues credentials can't be validated. 1 professor < 2 teens. Community notes might be the most soph.. least unsophisticated of them all.

Meanwhile behind the curtain the most impactful of the activity is profiling people. Nothing you say accomplishes anything you hoped for. You watch toddlers get machine gunned and by that action you are now an anti semite who shouldn't be hired. Expressed distaste for tarifs aimed at people in sweatshops earning 1 buck per day? How dare you!

Is this the best we can do??? In the old days the debate would arrive at a plan then we would write and experiment towards the goal. Now we dump driftwood into the ocean and pretend we are building a boat.

Like the topic, I have no idea why I'm even writing this. I should be crafting a review mechanism or at least write up a design for one. Its pretty funny if you ask me.
For many Googlers, this is their one-and-only company so they actually have no frame of reference, including no frame of reference to notice the company culture was shifting over the past decade-ish.
I think there's been a number of studies showing that overall political identification among physicians and providers is pretty balanced in the US, but it varies a lot by specialty area, so that some areas tend to have providers that are fairly politically conservative, and other areas tend to have providers that are politically liberal (in the US sense).
DOGE is planning to ax Direct File, so that'll be less efficient. And they're cutting tons of jobs, so that'll less efficient.

I'm sure there are plenty of things wrong with the IRS, but DOGE's approach seems to be to make them wronger.
Something about DEI I guess?
Because of the intermingling of law and wealth. If you don’t intermediate, then justice becomes the will of the wealthiest, and the market stagnates. The only way that evolution works is if it is the highest and only law, so we would be warring individuals killing each other for resources on the daily.

As soon as you add social organization, you disrupt evolution inside that social unit: it then becomes one social unit vs others…. We’ve already been down that road, and now we live in large, relatively stable social units we call nations.

Anything inside a social unit is subject to the monopoly of coercion that the unit possesses over its members. Evolution is short-circuited by the presence of external existential forces.

Making evolution work inside a social unit is equivalent to dissolving it.
No one expects NATO to exist for much longer. if your country is Denmark then your fellow NATO member recently threatened to invade you. The organization became a farce within a couple of months.
You can’t reason someone out of a viewpoint they didn’t reason themselves into.

There’s no economic argument to be had with someone that says monetary policy is theft.
Ah right, that's odd, wasn't aware I lived in a totalitarian society here in the Nordics. We literally just get a notification to check it, and because the state is neither trying to gotcha us or baby us, that's just the norm. The part that takes longest for me in the whole process is usually the 2FA.
Tax prep companies lobby congress so that they can continue to exist and be profitable.
An immediate follow-up is: why do we always travel at c?
The War of The End of The World is one of the best books I’ve ever read:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_End_of_the_Wo...
Image Splitter – Free Online Tool for Image Splitting
If I may refer to a Zen koan, "your teacup is full."

I started programming professionally around java 1.3, and the greybeards around that time were talking about how they had moved to OOP. Most disliked it but the people who didn't adapt got stuck in dead ends. (Stay in a dead end long enough and it becomes lucrative - see Oracle DBAs and COBOL developers - if you can stay there long enough!)

You absolutely have to treat coding with LLMs as a new skill. It's just like learning a new editor to the same precision that you know Emacs or Vim. It's learning the rough edges - and the rough edges keep changing. As a senior, it's frustrating! However, as I learn more, I learn the necessary concepts to utilize what is good and try the frustrating part in a month or two when it has gotten better and so have I.

I've spent a career reading others' code, so that doesn't bother me.

Now, I prompt through TDD for code that matters and that has helped stop many of the problems I see others face. It's a little slower as an iteration loop but it generates the test data well, it allows me to make sure I understand the problem and the prompt, and it forces the changes to be small, which increases success.

If I have to make a non-trivial change to the code, I know it will try to rewrite it if I don't start a new agent session. So, I'm liberal with creating new sessions.

It is much better at small problems than large problems, which makes me cognizant to keep my problems small. Not only is that good for the LLM, it's good for the codebase.

In some cases, it's better to have the LLM create a script to make the change than try and have it go through the code with a prompt. It's very good at simple scripts.

And I'm not afraid to discard it when it's not valuable at the moment.
And ARM32.
I guess the lesson is: don’t get emotionally attached to your job. Despite all the “we’re like a family” talk, at the end of the day, you’re just an employee. Never forget that.
Isn't that Direct File? Unless they give it the axe of course...
A great question, and worth asking those who want to gut it.
>Since we don't live in a totalitarian society where the govt knows everything about you.

But… we do?
Not true at all in my experience. Employers who do not give equities tend to pay much more generous bonuses.
> then it makes sense to pick one or the other and stick with it.

Oh, being stuck with incumbent decisions.
Implementing anything is more error prone than using something battle-tested.
Passive Non-Comittance (I will need more information, more prediction power, more certainty about future events) ironically is still more expensive, then active Non-Comittance (We just built all the implementation-components in such a way they can be exchanged later).
There have been attempts to do the same in the US. It's blocked by two blocks; the tax preparation companies who make bank every year charging people for their services, and generally anti tax people who want the process to be painful to make people dislike taxes more.

Generally though if you just make a mistake the punishment is paying it back with some fee/interest not prison. If they think it's an intentional effort to dodge taxes though it can escalate to prison time of course.
Do you have some sources?

Last time I read the IRS actually doesn't cost tax payers money. Additionally, every dollar increase in IRS spending will net the US govt. $12.

Whatever DOGE is doing is illegal.

https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/revenue-and-distribution...
The Magic of Fast Feedback Loops (In Biology)
ApolloInRealTime
I’d be pretty skeptical of any of these surveys about AI tool adoption. At my extremely large tech company, all developers were forced to install AI coding assistants into our IDEs and browsers (via managed software updates that can’t be uninstalled). Our company then put out press releases parading how great the AI adoption numbers were. The statistics are manufactured.
I don't think that's necessarily true, though. Even back in the pre .NET days, when Microsoft pretty much did have a monopoly on PC desktops, Visual Studio (not VSCode, but its full-fledged big brother) had pretty awesome DX.

And having a standard UI layer (like WinForms) made GUI development way way better for both the developer (who could drag and drop shapes and easily align frames and tabs and buttons and such instead of having to try to wrangle CSS) and the average user could have standard UI looks & feels across many different apps.

The openness of the Web led to its popularity (and my career), but then every company ended up making their code style, IDE, APIs, UI layers, etc., leading to extreme fragmentation in both DX and UX that to this day is still a mess. Of course I still prefer this over a closed Microsoft monopoly (or an Apple one), but it's certainly made for a lot of unnecessary reinventions of the wheel.
Mistakes are not a crime. The people that goes to court for tax evasion are the ones that commit fraud: they knowingly lie in the tax forms to avoid paying taxes. It includes people that forges expenses, or other documents.
DOGE and this admin won't be around forever. Looking forward to the reboot.
> As I understand in some countries, they instead send you a "pre-filed" statement (Finland, Denmark, Sweden, etc.). If everything looks fine, you don't need to send anything back at all. It's only if there is a discrepancy that you need to get in touch with the country's tax agency.

Yes. I'm in Sweden and self-employed so I have to take a few extra steps when declaring taxes, but just did that last month and it took around fifteen minutes. If you're an employee and your only active source of income is your job, as is the case for most people, "doing taxes" amounts to just approving the prefilled form that you get, which is just a couple of clicks. Or one signature and letter if you want to do it on paper the archaic way.

It works because every company has to submit a monthly report of what it paid its employees, and also deducts income tax on your behalf. So when the tax year is over, the tax agency knows how much you earned and how much tax was paid on that, which is all it takes.
I Built an AI-Generated MMO Game (Just by Vibe Coding)
Minor correction, macros CANT have newlines, you need to splice them during preprocessing using \ followed by a new line, the actual code has these:

from https://github.com/codr7/hacktical-c/blob/main/macro/macro.h

#define hc_align(base, size) ({ \
__auto_type _base = base; \
__auto_type _size = hc_min((size), _Alignof(max_align_t)); \
(_base) + _size - ((ptrdiff_t)(_base)) % _size; \
}) \

After preprocessing it is a single line.
the reason for this is simple.

1. "truly free markets" don't and can't exist.

In the absence of a strong government to create rules, companies and individuals will fill the power vacuum (e.g. the east India company). "free markets" are just as much of a fantasy as "Communist utopia".

2. Redistribution is less inefficient than the alternative

Without sufficiently redistributave policy, the alternatives arise. The French revolution and various communist revolutions throughout the world over the 20th century are the alternative to a populace that thinks inequality is too high.
And Intuit is one of the big powers keeping it like that.

In Spain we have had a "pre-filed draft statement" (that you have to confirm, but it's as easy as clicking "OK", or just mailing it back in the days when it was all paper) since 2003.

And there has been free government software for doing your taxes since 1988 (back in the day it was difficult to use and a bit terrible in general, but it was there and you could print your statement with a dot matrix printer... The web version nowadays is kind of ugly but pretty decent.)
You can use numbeo to compare. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Basically, almost all places, particularly in the UK, have worse salary to cost of living ratios.
Many prominent figures in Latin America and Spain turned away from socialist and communist positions after experiencing their effects: Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Octavio Paz (also Nobel Prize), Fernando Savater, Jorge Edwards, Jorge Luis Borges, Teodoro Petkoff...
AI, ML, NN are fundamentally flawed. Else, like you, and other who try would have made the computer conscious already.