> If scaling doesn't stall out soon, then I honestly have no idea what to expect the visibility curve to look like. Is there any historical precedent for a technology's scope of potential applications expanding this much this fast?
Lots of pre-internet technologies went through this curve. PCs during the clock speed race, aircraft before that during the aeronautics surge of the 50s, cars when Detroit was in its heydays. In fact, cloud computing was enabled by the breakthroughs in PCs which allowed commodity computing to be architected in a way to compete with mainframes and servers of the era. Even the original industrial revolution was actually a 200-year ish period where mechanization became better and better understood.
Personally I've always been a bit confused about the Gartner Hype Cycle and its usage by pundits in online comments. As you say it applies to point changes in technology but many technological revolutions have created academic, social, and economic conditions that lead to a flywheel of innovation up until some point on an envisioned sigmoid curve where the innovation flattens out. I've never understood how the hype cycle fits into that and why it's invoked so much in online discussions. I wonder if folks who have business school exposure can answer this question better.
It's crazy how much your physical health is tied to mental happiness/lack of stress. I had a friend that during his most stressful period as a 24 year old in Investment Banking had strep throat 4 times in 2 months.
Several doctor visits concluded that it was the long hours and insane amount of stress that was severely crushing his immune system.
Moral of the story is love what you do and take care of yourself: nothing is as important as your own health and happiness
Is this a case where security through obscurity is good, or bad? Legit question. I am curious to read the responses it may prompt.
To me; philosophically; and to a first approximation, all security is through obscurity.
For example encryption works for Alice so long as Bob can't see the key...
... or parking the Porsche in the garage, reduces the likelihood someone knows there is a Porsche and reduces the likelihood they know what challenges exist inside the garage. Now put a tall hedge and a fence around it and the average passerby has to stop and think "there's probably a garage behind that barrier."
To put it another way, out of sight has a positive correlation to out of mind.
Yes of course a determined well funded Bob suggests obscurity with Bob's determination and budget. If Bob is willing to use a five dollar wrench, Alice might tell Bob the key.
Obscurity is extremely good at filtering out low to medium skilled griefers. It won’t stop anyone who is highly motivated, but it will slow them down significantly.
Hacker News is small enough that obscurity would give moderators enough time to detect bad actors and update rules if necessary.
I feel this article misses the main reason (unless it falls under "Build a better wheel") which is to build a wheel that is tailored and stays tailored to your purposes.
How often do I see people metaphorically trying to use a car tire on bicycle with thee excuse of not re-inventing the wheel. There can be great benefits for the parts of your system to be tailor made to work together.
in my experience, people who grow up as the biggest fish in a small pond (whether concerning just fields they care about, or in general) are always 99% of the time, one of these two when they end up a middling fish in the big pond: like you, happy to find peers and inspiring exemplars to collaborate with and learn from, or those who hate that they are not the best anymore.
the former group probably leads the healthiest & happiest life fulfillment while pursuing their interests — i'm heavily biased though because i too fall into this category and am proud of this trait.
the latter group consists of people who either spin their wheels real hard and more often than not burn out in their pursuit of being the best, or pivot hard into something else they think they can be the best at (often repeatedly every time they encounter stronger competition) like gates & co, or in rare cases succeed in being the best even in the more competitive environment.
this last .001% are probably people whose egos get so boosted from the positive reinforcement that they become "overcompetitive" and domineering like zuck or elon, and let their egos control their power and resources to suppress competition rather than compete "fairly" ever again.
i think there's a subset of people from both main groups that may move from one into the other based on life experiences, luck, influence of people close to them, maturity, therapy, or simply wanting something different from life after a certain point. i don't have a good model for whether this is most people, or a tiny percentage.
Spyder is the reason I could become Computer Scientist.
When transitioning from MechE -> CS, every programming interface felt unintuitive and daunting to set up. Spyder made it so simple to get started. It turned python into a Matlab-esque numeric computing interface, got out of your way and let you built whatever you wanted. It reduced the 'time to magic' like no other tool I'd tried. (Can I coin the term : 'time to magic'?)
If I had to setup PyCharm on day 1, I'd never have gone past the my first barrier. Before jupyter & colab, there was Spyder. It remained my trusty IDE for a full year until Jupyter notebooks & VsCode came around.
After being laid off more than once, I think I'd adjust the advice a little:
- You're only obliged to work your contract hours. If you do more then make sure that you, personally, are getting something out of it, whether that's "I look good to my boss" or "I take job satisfaction from this" or just "I get to play with Kotlin". Consider just not working overtime.
- Take initiative, but do so sustainably. Instead of trying to look good for promo, or alternately doing the bare minimum and just scraping by, take on impactful work at a pace that won't burn you out and then leave if it isn't rewarded.
- Keep an ear to the ground. Now you've got a job, you don't need another one, but this is a business relationship just like renting a house or paying for utilities. Be aware of the job market, and consider interviewing for roles that seriously interest you. Don't go crazy and waste the time of every company in your city lest it come back to bite you, but do interview for roles you might actually take.
It seems nice but every single time I see service allowing anonymous uploads like such I’m thinking immediately: criminal use.
How hard would it be write a protocol that uses relatively safe urls to encode messages, e.g. by ensuring that the ratio of emojis isn’t serialized URL, credentials to some stash or an encoded picture no one wants to keep?
> I can't even imagine why I should bother trying to understand it.
Well, maybe you should just try for the hell of it and see how far you get? Becoming fit seems impossible to a morbidly obese 45 y.o, and it is if that person's expectation is unreasonable, but if they just change it to be more reasonable, break it down into manageable
routines, then they can get somewhere eventually.
Find some papers, fill many gaps, dedicate a few years in your spare time, in 6 months you'll be 6 months closer than you were.
Whether there's a reason or not, idk, it's something to do, be curious. Don't forget that by dedicating their life to something, they're naturally not dedicating their life to other things, things that you might be able to do, like climbing mountains, making pizza, or coming up with witty banter in social situations.
While i do not share the opinion that jobs was such a genius at all, reducing him to be just a marketer seems very narrow-minded.
Sometimes it's about bundling potential rather than exploitation. I have read many stories of the people who worked for jobs, not many of the "first ones" seem to tell stories of being exploited. But many seem to be proud of how much work they put into their work guided by a guy who seems to be there mostly for saying yey or ney. Which seems to be crucial.
Think about all the dysfunctional organizations you have seen or worked with. In my experience, most of them were lacking clarity, responsibility, personal investment & decisions.
The potential to end all wars, end hunger, free societies etc is there. I mean just on HN, the potential to transform the world by tomorrow is there. There is enough people with good will, enough people in key positions, enough people who are the best in their field, enough people who love to hack away as a side project, enough people who enjoy debating etc... here on HN.
All that is missing is the right approach to get a few of these people together with the right goal and by tomorrow we could take out / stop a lot of evil. This person must be able to "market", to bundle potential. But this person must also be able to identify potential & make hard decisions & do the things others would call "insensitive". Otherwise the people would quickly lose interest or be lost in chaos.
Focusing potential seems to be the most crucial part. Having a lot of potential but high entropy seems to be irrelevant in most cases.
Anyway, had to type it out because i just realized that partially i am doing the same mistake with my startup. Too stuck fiddling on the tech while knowing that i should be focusing on bundling potential. Currently i am just contributing to a entropic potential, which serves no one. Bundling it might serve the right people, at the right time with the right people.
Which infects my mind with the question i have been struggling with: is there any way someone like jobs could have been more than just a marketer in your eyes?
I do feel like i am looking down upon people like jobs who seem to be happy with just talking and never trying to really do the things themselves. On the other hand having this opinion of potential entropy... what do you think?
Edit: just wanted to add the after thought that people most likely call these people geniuses, whose way of achieving results they can't quite comprehend. And usually for people too attached from the problematic domain, the same geniuses could appear like idiots or sharlatans.
Here's a wild idea: how about we accept that the Statcounter data just isn't any good, should not be used as the basis of any kind of journalism, and definitely shouldn't be amplified by social media? It's incredibly flaky and volatile data gathered by a tracking company with undisclosed methodology.
It's rare that a month goes by without clickbait articles about small fluctuations in the data showing up on HN. And that the data is obviously trash.
Computers last for years and updates aren't synchronized, so the stats should have a lot of momentum, with changes in sales taking years to materialize as usage share. That's not true of Statcounter's data. Like, just look at the stats for the last year: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
Does anyone honestly believe that OS X market share dropped from 21% to 16% in a month? Even the idea is absurd. The fluctuations in "Unknown" operating systems dwarf literally every change that these articles get written about.
Or drilling in deeper, Windows 8.1 was supposedly 6% of US Windows usage in January, but <1% two months before or after. Garbage. Data.
It's actually pretty profound for a certain audience, and that audience overlaps pretty heavily with HN. A lot of people expect to gain lessons about what'll work in the future by studying the past. They'll point to successful product X, and then build product Y that tries to replicate all the good parts of product X, and not realize that there are a lot of subtle interactions between a product and the social & environmental conditions of its audience that lead to it taking off. If you build the same product but the environment is different, you get different results.
Similarly, it's a lesson to pay very careful attention to what's going on in the environment today, and index more on that than what has worked with the environment of the past. That's why good VC presentations always have a slide for "What has changed? Why is this a good idea now when it wasn't in the past?"
I work in a German institution. I was recently hacked by such a botnet recently (lessons learned: use AuthorizedKeys, allow only one SSH user, proxy all http connections to a webhoster, and check your SSH and UFW logs often!)
It setup a virtual environment where it downloaded some kind of Tor node and ran some sort of code that used 100% of my CPU. My guess is crypto-mining. I purged the account, deleted everything before I could do forensics, but I checked the logs for the connections and they all came from Russia.
That's part of the reason to be wary about the possibility that our AI models may become conscious.
Most people happily dismiss the idea that a GPT-like model can be conscious, but the truth is that we don't know practically anything about how consciousness arises in living beings that are more similar to us and that we have been coexisting with for thousands of years. We don't even know how to tell if such a being is conscious or not (most would agree that a dog is conscious and a bacterium is not, but what about a mouse? A mosquito? A tardigrade? Where is the limit?). It takes a lot of hubris to make claims about if and when AI models can become conscious, with what we know right now.
I see so many comments from self-anointed do-gooders that I just have to explain something from my lived experience.
I'm Nigerian. I graduated high school at 15 and because my family didn't have the funds for uni, I got a job in what was essentially a sweatshop factory with extra steps. I got paid 12k Naira ($16) per month. After all, I had was a secondary school education and I couldn't bargain for better.
Roughly one year later, I got a job writing for a content mill where I was paid $1 for 100 words. I can't describe my happiness when I got my first $50 for 5,000 words. All earned while sitting at a desk, typing away on a broken laptop, using unreliable internet.
To a social justice warrior in SF or NY, it might have been exploitation, but to me an African teenager with no relevant experience or higher education, it was the first step I needed to pull myself up by my bootstraps.
I levered up and today, I make the same or a bit more than quite a few freelance writers in the West.
Point is, it's okay to feel bad for these Africans; but if you really do, you will support free trade - that's the most successful instrument for lifting humans out of poverty.
Without this "starvation-level" gig like some of you may call it, these workers would settle for something less.
Today, Nigeria's minimum wage is around 30k Naira, yet many Nigerians don't even make that much. On the other hand, a worker making $2 per hour 8 hours 5 days will net $80 per week or 59k Naira at the current market rates.
If you complain someone is exploiting me, please give me a better job - or let me take my least worst option.
Bathroom fans work too if you’re able to vent through the ceiling. I can recommend the Panasonic whisper fans (available under a variety of models with “whisper” in the name). I’m using one to exhaust the warm air from my home theater emitted by the projector. I think it’s this one:
I tend to think of Bash as a syntax-free language. There are no clear rules, you just have to kind of make it work every time. It's like the programming version of a freestyle rap or Parkour.
Why do you need to justify your place in the world in the first place? You aren't responsible for the world. You came to life because of some whim and happenstance from your parents. The things you experience might have been done before, but it's you who is experiencing them right now. All of the greats before you would have traded their entire legacy to have a few more conscious moments. Sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench has happened millions of times yet it's still going to be extraordinary each and every time, to paraphrase Einstein.
These emotions are normal when faced with the internet, but some perspective is important. Or rather, it helps to focus on the basic facts of life and its finiteness.
> We really need a 'Bash: The Good Parts' book like Doug Crockford did for Javascript.
Bash is incredibly less complex than Javascript and there is such a resource: the "Bash guide" [1] and "Bash pitfalls" [2] are both excellent resources that teach you how to use Bash properly.
For fast iteration with pipes, using only basic unix tools, and arguably less risky to fat-fingering, I write it in a file, and use watch -n1. Easy to modify, temporarily comment parts of it, etc...
Also, I wrote this plog function (for pipe-log, or something):
plog() {
local msg=${1:-plog}
tee >(sed -e "s/^/[$msg] /" | cat 1>&2 )
}
That allows me to see what's happening in the middle steps of the pipeline.
Lots of pre-internet technologies went through this curve. PCs during the clock speed race, aircraft before that during the aeronautics surge of the 50s, cars when Detroit was in its heydays. In fact, cloud computing was enabled by the breakthroughs in PCs which allowed commodity computing to be architected in a way to compete with mainframes and servers of the era. Even the original industrial revolution was actually a 200-year ish period where mechanization became better and better understood.
Personally I've always been a bit confused about the Gartner Hype Cycle and its usage by pundits in online comments. As you say it applies to point changes in technology but many technological revolutions have created academic, social, and economic conditions that lead to a flywheel of innovation up until some point on an envisioned sigmoid curve where the innovation flattens out. I've never understood how the hype cycle fits into that and why it's invoked so much in online discussions. I wonder if folks who have business school exposure can answer this question better.