skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's such a weird characterization of this article, which (in contrast to other writing on this subject) clearly concludes (a) that Nix achieves a very high degree of reproducibility and is continuously improving in this respect, and (b) Nix is moreover reproducible in a way that most other distros (even distros that do well in some measures of bitwise reproducibility) are not (namely, time traveling— being able to reproduce builds in different environments, even months or years later, because the build environment itself is more reproducible).

The article you linked is very clear that both qualitatively and quantitatively, NixOS has made achieved high degrees of reproducibility, and even explicitly rejects the possibility of assessing absolute reproducibility.

NixOS may not be the absolute leader here (that's probably stagex, or GuixSD if you limit yourself to more practical distros with large package collections), but it is indeed very good.

Did you mean to link to a different article?
Success is a cruel mistress.

Outsized success a curse.
They are merely exemplars chosen because they were the leaders of their institutions. The list is very, very long. I invite you to look into the issue further if you think I'm wrong.
That's cool, but as a developer building web apps, I'm not competing with php websites, I'm competing with native apps.
Destiny fan?
Honest question: are you not a "car guy/girl"? Lexus people absolutely love Lexuses. I recently sold mine (needed something larger after having another kid) and I miss it every day.
Great article. I've been noticing sites in general getting slower and slower. I've started doing things like blocking remote fonts and using Decentraleyes, but even stuff like that can't help when the site design is fundamentally broken
>the author had not, in fact, build a lot with Go at the time

So many programming books are like that, and usually it shows.
Is it about intelligence or just not being used to/having time for learning a different paradigm?

I personally have used LISP a lot. It was a little rough at first, but I got it. Despite having used a lot of languages, it felt like learning programming again.

I don't think there's something special about me that allowed me to grok it. And if that were the case, that's a horrible quality in a language. They're not supposed to be difficult to use.
Sure, but in terms of absolute number of packages that are truly reproducible, they outnumber Debian because Debian only targets reproducibility for a smaller fraction of total packages & even there they're not 100%. I haven't been able to find reliable numbers for Fedora on how many packages they have & in particular how many this 99% is targeting.

By any conceivable metric Nix really is ahead of the pack.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Nix, Fedora, Debian etc. I just recognize that Nix has done a lot of hard work in this space & Fedora + Debian jumping onto this is in no small part thanks to the path shown by Nix.
That's nonsense. IR35 basically makes it more difficult for companies to treat an individual like an employee whilst paying them as a "consultant" (saving themselves various obligations and allowing the "consultant" much more flexibility in avoiding tax). Accenture actually used to hire a lot of people that way themselves...

Individual consultants never were competing particularly closely with Accenture or Deloitte or McKinsey and their mass of bodies, brand and board level access, and IR35 really doesn't change their competitive position, or affect small boutique consultancies composed of people who quit Big Consultancy to do better at all. (sure, if you want to spend your next 6 months contracting as an individual on site for one employer you might now need to enlist the support of a specialist umbrella company to assure IR35 compliance, but if you're in that position you're not really competing with expensive big consultants selling massive projects at C level on brand rather than their own capabilities to departments based on individual skillset)
This is probably better when you're young. I'm in my 40s and it takes me some time to get over being squashed in a small seat on a plane with a bunch of other people.

I won't even travel on low-cost airlines anymore because my experience has been so horrible.

However, I used to do this all the time when I was in my 20s. I lived in Asia for awhile and would frequently take cheap flights on the weekend for fun.
Not for the enthusiasts. My neighbor has a $120k Porsche and a $20k Porsche and appears to adore them both
A lot of these jobs require clearance. Who can get such clearances? People with less history. So, young college graduates, young army folks, etc. There are tons of people who just have security clearances without competence. There is a huge demand for people who hold clearances. I have no problem with "make work" programs; however, these large companies are grifting 100% on top of what these people get paid.
I don't really care for these type of ads as I see them everyday. They're already plastered on products I use. I would be grateful if ads on website were that static.
Right. When I was working in China, I was only making about half as much as I do now at Google. The gap is much smaller for SWEs, even my local colleagues weren't making much less than I did. China is definitely an upper middle-income country, officially and just by looking at the numbers. They are breaking into being a lower high-income country next, and the graph really isn't slowing down.

But they are going off a demographic cliff, and that is why they are investing heavily in automation. They just won't have the people to do this work in the future, and expanding abroad and investing in robots are the only options for them.
they're called Large Language Monkeys
I definitely think you’re touching on some exciting possibilities, but adding a language model at this early stage would endanger the goal of this particular research: proving that the compositionality exists in the first place. If there was a foundational language model we’re involved, it might be reading patterns into the calls regardless of whether they’re really there — that is what it’s designed to do, after all!

Re:”lots of work”, I think you’re misunderstanding the quotes a bit. They applied PCA to categorical data to generate semantic positions for each call type—or, in other words, ran a prewritten mathy algo on a big csv. Collecting the CSV data in the first place certainly sounds extremely hard, but that’s more of a practical issue than a scientific one! Bonobos aren’t known for living in easy-to-reach places ;)
"The Inner Game of Tennis" for Entrepreneurs
Thoughts on the Future of Coding
You too can never ever relax
What I'm talking about isn't just "pixel perfectness" but layout of said document which breaks depending on the characteristics of the font.
The only reason that I'm sharing this is because there is a gem at the end. From the transcript

44:26
its responses but it's incredible it is incredible related to that and sort of last question in some sense this whole
44:33
effort which was hugely expensive in terms of people and time and dollars and everything else was an experiment to
44:41
further validate that the scaling laws keep going and why and turns out they do and they
44:48
probably keep going for a long time um I accept scaling laws like I accept quantum mechanics or something but they
44:54
still don't like I still don't know why like why should that be a property of the universe so why are scaling laws a
45:01
property of the universe

you want I can I can take a stab well the the fact that more compression will lead to more
45:07
intelligence that has this very strong philosophical grounding so the question is why does training bigger models for
45:15
longer give you more compression and there are a lot of theories here
45:20
there's the one I like is that the the relevant concepts are sort of uh sparse
45:27
in the in the the data of the world and in particularly it's is a power law so
45:34
that the like the hundth uh most important concept appears in one out of
45:39
a hundred of the documents or or whatever so there's long tales does that mean that

if we make a perfect data set
45:44
and figure out very data efficient algorithms i mean can go home it it means that there's potentially
45:50
exponential compute wins on the table to be very s sophisticated about your choice of data but but basically when
45:59
you just scoop up data passively you're going to require 10xing your compute and your
46:07
data to to get the next constant number of things in that tail and there's just that tail keeps
46:14
going it's long you keep you can keep uh mining it although as you alluded to you
46:22
can probably do a lot better

i think that's a good place to leave it
46:28
thank you guys very much that was fun yeah thank you
MCP vs. A2A: Complementary or Competing?
This is a big loss for India, it's like 15:1 India- vs. US-based "consultants."
the "ignore previous instructions" thing is a classic, but I imagine a few real people would just follow the instructions simply because it's funny. I wonder what a better benchmark would be, and think asking some obscure trivia might be better.

Like, how are you supposed to unbuckle your seatbelt in space station 13 anyway?
Doctor pay is already 10x.
Benchmarking Star Schema vs. One Big Table
Sorry, what did you say?
I'm pretty sure that a good chunk of this article is generated by an LLM.
> I'd note that these are the same folks asserting people with no criminal records are convicted criminals.

Oh of course, 100%

However when it comes to visa cancellations, from what I understand one is at the mercy of the port of entry officials. Any re-entry with that kind of a visa can trigger a review and the visa may be cancelled for a variety of reasons, not all criminal or proven criminal. I am not saying that's bad or good, it's just how the system works.

The next step is the person usually has to exit the US and re-apply for a visa. So procedurally she should have been put on a plane to Russia. But knowing what Russia looks like they asked her if she should be threatened there so she ended up in a detention center instead.

Like I mentioned in another comment, this was huge mistake from her employee to 1) send her any where, re-entries with these visas should be minimized, especially these days 2) asked her to bring any embryos or any such things.
No random federal workers have veto power over the law. Never did.

Having an executive with contempt for the law and the concept of separation of powers and judicial review is a perversion of democracy.

The democratic rule of the people is driven by the law. What laws have the republicans passed authorizing these actions?
For tax season alone! I'm in and out of Preview constantly, looking at PDFs, sorting the pages out, flipping scans. Utterly indispensable software. It feels crazy that it just comes free with the OS.
There's a bar I used to go to that has Whiskey Wednesdays. They're entire whiskey menu was half off. What they don't tell you (unless you ask) is they pour 1 oz shots instead of 1.5.
I heard a rumor that China has been dumping some of their dollar-denominated assets as a sort of "bad dog" reaction to the current state of affairs.
How I Stay Motivated Without a Boss (Or a Schedule)
Completely agree, I think that an abundance of caution is extremely important to practice when engaging with these systems, especially given the political climate. I just think that discussing counterfactuals in this particular case is unproductive and the original comment needlessly insensitive.
I think they were designed at the time of less powerful machines so they had to be designed better. Nowadays there is not as much push to eke out every last bit of performance because there is loads of power at everyone's disposal and developers are pushed to focus on features first without being given time to refine performance because features mean adoption. So the bloat creeps up, and hardware makers keep designing more powerful machines which further enables the bloatiness. It is a vicious cycle.
Language is not just "communication" and not every communication is language. Bees and ants communicate information chemically, but they're not using a structured language. Dogs may growl to intimidate or yelp if they get hurt, and that surely communicates information, but whether they are using a structured language is a matter of research.
I don't think anyone denies that communication is not unique to humans. It is clearly not. But what is (apparently - as far as we know) unique to humans is language, meaning the capacity to combine concepts in an infinitely recursive manner to represent an infinity of concepts and ideas. On top of that, we also posses the ability to communicate (verbally, through sign, or more recently through writing) those combined concepts in such a way that other humans can then recreate that concept in their own mind.

There's evidence that language first evolved as a capacity for processing the outside world internally - your inner voice, if you will. The ability to synthesize any idea about things you can and can not see or even ever experience. The speaking and communicative part of it may have actually arisen secondarily, as evidenced by the fact that "language" does not have to be spoken - it can be expressed in many different mediums.

Communication and language are not one in the same. Language is a means of communication, but it also so much more than that.

I found the book Why Only Us by Chomsky and Berwick to a be a great introduction to the topic.
If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
If you want security through compartmentalization, you should consider Qubes OS, my daily driver, https://qubes-os.org.
Seems like world class acoustics are being forgotten about and not being invested in. A lot of ink has been spilled about the famous underground Columbia Records vaults for recording and applying reverb. But that building has been in renovation purgatory for years now with gutted interiors and an empty parking lot. So clearly those exquisite vaults aren’t so in demand if they are even still used.
On a side note, I feel like this could be recreated as a Minecraft mod, it already has procedural terrain, the waypoints can be placed procedurally as well, and the maps can be generated from height data automatically.
Did you see the fake tweet by a satire account claiming tariffs were put on hold? The "media" picked up on that and broadcast it and there were visible reactions when looking at stock charts. I think news does pick up things from social media, regularly.
They absolutely have the consent of Congress. Congress can stop this at any time. They elect not to. Their silence is consent in this case. You can attribute that silence to active support or cowardice but either way they can stop it and don't so they approve of it.

"In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that type of arbitrary action led to revolutions."
Not sure if you have taken a look at Britain lately but they absolutely don't care about what the citizens want.
That's the problem with trust and reputation. Once it's gone, it's pretty hard for anyone to just trust you on this. How can anyone believe this administration when it says someone is a criminal without a video of them doing a crime at this point? And why were they looking through her phone anyway?
> They still don't generally need to use consultants. Even at the poor rates of pay in many government teams, there are still some decent technical staff who don't just chase the dollar. Bear in mind the salary standard is normal market, not FAANG/SV.

The stated policy of the current admin is to "traumatize" federal employees so the number of these people is likely dwindling fast. Burnout was already a problem before the current admin - if your efforts hit a bureaucratic brick wall one too many times that private sector job starts to look a lot more appealing.
> if you want to, for example, have a backend API and a frontend SPA running at the same time talking to eachother on your machine

Won't `localhost:3000` and `localhost:3001` also both be secure contexts? Just starting a random vite project, which opens `locahost:3000`, `window.isSecureContext` returns true.
In addition, by definition if the only way to bring manufacturing back to the US is by putting up import barriers, it means US manufacturing isn't competitive, domestically or globally.

Unless there is some hunker down period of isolation that'll make US manufacturing globally competitive somehow, all this will do in the long run is either isolate US manufacturers to the domestic market, or provide a temporary advantage that will disappear the minute the barriers are dropped.
Finish online?
Energy from tidal heating is a thing for Jovian/Saturnian moons (see Io for a particularly extreme example), so there is a possibility of a 'steady input of energy' that's neither solar nor dependent on residual core heat. I mean, something is keeping that water liquid. I fully confess to not knowing how significant for life that is on Titan (and I guess noone else is sure, either).
This is nonsense. The consultants charge above market rates, regardless of their own costs.

Consultancies have never saved the government money.

US governments hire consultants because they have been obligated to do <thing> but have not been allowed to actually hire anyone to do <thing>, which is a hilariously stupid situation but that's what happens when you are so miserable you micromanage the budget without ever thinking about downstream effects.

The government is obligated to provide it's services, and that doesn't change if the legislature didn't actually give you the OK or budget to hire anyone to do that job.

Instead, governments are forced to solve this stupid problem by paying for consultants out of more discretionary budgets. They pay well above market rates for the position too, which is insane.
Absolutely. I remember being about 14 or 15 years old, reading old .txt files about, like- how to build blue boxes and experiment with the phone system, C programming tutorials for MUDs that had peaked in the late 90s, IRC archives (even though IRC was still around, I had no way of finding my way to good channels), and getting this distinct sense that I had just missed something really cool, and was stuck with an Internet that had already passed its prime.
That's probably 50% what I use Claude for. But always "use matplotlib's explicit / object-oriented interface and don't add comments".
Meanwhile, far away, in the vast and remote reaches of Russia, in a modest workshop beside a weathered small house, an old man patiently teaches his small grandson the art of assembling a Kalashnikov.
That is irrelevant as he is talking about the Python http server that runs CGI executables, not using Python as a CGI executable. As for the latter, it is still an option:

https://pypi.org/project/legacy-cgi/
> But the truth of the matter, from his contemporaries, was that he knew is stuff.

Read anything on folklore.org, and you can see that's not really the case. He prescribes a lot of stuff that they just had to get around, typical pointy haired boss stuff.
Doctor pay is already 10x doctor pay?
I bought a watch about half a year ago just because I was tired of taking out my phone to check the time, so I know what I’m talking about.
the vast majority of economists agree that there is simply not enough income among the wealthy that we can reach a fiscally sustainable path solely by raising taxes on the wealthy. i favor raising taxes on the wealthy significantly, but there are also hard truths about tax receipts and current spending.

https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/taxes-and-mandatory-...
Nice, I've been wanting this - was just today talking about it.

Would be good to have the config all somewhere in my user's dir too.

Per user subdomains for their apps on localhost.
Similar in Nim as well.
Love How to sell drug online (fast), surprised to see it listed here tho 'cause I've never heard anyone talk about it. Considering it got 4 seasons, it must be popular tho.

And yeah, Bridgerton, Wednesday, Emily in Paris, and 3 Body Problem each certainly take their moment at least in my circles.
it mean it's harder for the us gov selling bonds
This is a lively debate in linguistics, so while it’s not objectively true (i.e. it depends on how you want to use the word), it’s much more justified than you’re implying here. As others have said, it’s about distinguishing the kind of communication humans do from simple animal communication — a common hook for this topic is the fun fact that “chimpanzees can learn sign language, but they’ve never asked a question”. It’s somewhat analogous to how animal communication can be seen as categorically distinct from simple signaling done by flowers, scent markers, etc.

I’m in a bit of a rush but suffice to say that Chomsky is probably the best champion of the “language is compositional” view, or as he puts it, “language is the generation of an infinite range of meaningful outputs from a finite range of inputs”. There’s dozens of great, layperson-friendly talks of his on this topic on YouTube, for anyone who’s curious!
The value of entertainment has gone down since the 90s. Inflation isn’t the only consideration. I don’t pay $15 for a movie ticket or CD anymore because 2 hours of video entertainment is basically free now and artists upload their tracks online.

That said, it’s Mario Kart and decades of price history of Sega Genesis games doesn’t matter. People will still pay whatever for Mario Kart.
I disagree. Interfaces are a trivial concept that can get bolted-on to any language. Even in languages without an official interface construct, you can replicate them in the program space.

The BEAM succeeds because you can run 1M processes on a single node, represent complex distributed state machines with ease, and restart portions of the system with zero downtime. Among many other things.

I really don't think behaviors/interfaces is the most critical piece.
> How does your post relate to consultants specifically?

He's not talking about consultants, he's just correcting the pop culture meme that "private equity is evil" which is what the parent comment implied. Everything he describes is correct.
I would argue that this is too much for any static plot. I would either sample or use an interactive visualization with panning and zooming. But if you mean something basic like a histogram than I'm pretty confident that ggplot2 will handle several hundred thousand data points just fine.
Mosaic (YC W25) is building a general purpose agent for video editing
Define "cancel culture".
Basically, but with big companies with on hand lawyer litigation is much more likely. They want things like contingency plans, licensing information, even asking what our own financials look like. We just walk and focus on clients who don't have so much risk
> Personal choice suddenly does not matter, when one feels disgusted over trans people existing.

Personal choice and bodily autonomy has never mattered to the current ruling group in office - unless that person is male identifying as a straight man that agrees with whatever they tell them.