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ThereIsNoWorryon Tell HN: The issues of Twitter are not a technical problem to solve

> It's more of a personal, interpersonal and a social problem which needs extensive research, surveys to find the "why" and how we might be able to fix it or avoid it from happening again.

Changing human behavioural patterns that emerged after millions of years of evolution? This seems incredibly naive to me. We can build our technology around the fact that we humans as a species are as we are. Limit this kind of toxic behaviour by various means, e.g. moderation and developing algorithms that detect such emergent patterns and then change recommendation types. Things like these. But changing how we biologically work goes into a direction that is filled with moral and ethical landmines.

ThereIsNoWorryon Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code?

I worry for the productivity of the field if Copilot would be successfully sued. Destroy innovation and gridlock progress.

ThereIsNoWorryon Copilot sells code other people wrote

So, rearranging conditionals or loops or variables then, problem solved. You cannot 1:1 copy paste anyway. That never works. You always have to adapt it to your particularity. So it's "reworded" by default. And CoPilot is doing nothing else. It's not just 1:1 memorising code, it's a tiny bit smarter than that. I strongly believe you're not a developer. Point taken. I understand your considerations. You should write code sometimes to solve a complex problem that uses some libraries and see how far you get without consulting the internet or books.

ThereIsNoWorryon Copilot sells code other people wrote

Obviously we do. Don't copy paste 10 pages of source code unaltered and sell it as your own.

But that's something entirely different from small code snippets, changed and adapted to solve the same problem a thousand other people already had. Nothing else are developers doing going on GitHub, StackOverflow or any other website to find answers to their questions. That's not naivety, that's how coding works (partially). If you would have to re-invent the wheel everytime you build something new, good luck.

ThereIsNoWorryon Copilot sells code other people wrote

https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/12/30/how-often-do-people-ac...

I feel like you're arguing in bad faith. So, whatever.

ThereIsNoWorryon Copilot sells code other people wrote

I'm disturbed you believe regurgitating code snippets is plagiarisation.

ThereIsNoWorryon Copilot sells code other people wrote

Ok, then there doesn't exist a single reputable company with a tech division and we're all unethical. Have a nice unethical day.

ThereIsNoWorryon Copilot sells code other people wrote

Code plagiarization is not a thing by all practical purposes (it's even almost impossible to go to court with that for very obvious reasons). And that's good. Because with that insane lockdown of "Intellectual Property" nothing would ever get done. So, think what you want.

ThereIsNoWorryon Copilot sells code other people wrote

1. You most likely agreed to that by using GitHub.

2. Copy&Pasting Code by manual search exists.

3. This is just a smart tool so you don't have to figure out yourself what to copy&paste (in the best case) and save a lot of time.

Sometimes I truly wonder how people can genuinely be upset about things like this. What is broken are copyright and patent laws in the 21st century.

ThereIsNoWorryon An overview of version control in programming

My previous employer still uses svn. It created so much headaches and frustration due to unproductivity because e.g. someone pushed a bug without testing and you unknowingly downloaded it. No way to easily reverse of course. It was my first job after University and taught me that CRUD b2b Java enterprise jobs are to avoid at all costs in the future. For what it's worth though, I had some very funny-sad stories to tell when I interviewed to get out of there after just 6 months. Never tought a versioning system could burn me out. Git is standard for very obvious reasons.

ThereIsNoWorryon The Mathematics of Artificial Intelligence (2022)

I finished my studies in CS less than a year ago. Nothing about this paper is new, but it gives a quick overview.

ThereIsNoWorryon Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics

For the one important exception that Deep Learning turned out to be very useful already very early on in the hype boom during the last decade...

ThereIsNoWorryon Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics

It seems to me he's doing some kind of combinatorial enumeration and using biases to find related patterns in Math and Physics in some kind of iterative bottom up approach?

ThereIsNoWorryon Reasons to not use PCA for feature selection

I mean, that's the point. What kind of real world complexities are actually linearly explainable? Almost none. It goes all the way back to why classical statistics failed to provide real world value after a certain point and the trend has been going towards using non-linear black boxes for the last decade.

ThereIsNoWorryon Microservices: Why Are We Doing This?

I'm just leaving my first job because - among other things - I really start dreading adding business features to a 20 year old huge monolith riddled with terrible code and even more terrible OOP inheritance roller coasters of madness - up, down, up, up, down, up, down ... who thinks this has anything to do with good abstraction wtf? - It certainly doesn't help that the company has a "it always worked so we will never change" kind of attitude towards absolutely everything.

Currently, I couldn't be more excited to start my new position in which I'll be responsible for speed, reliability & security of millions of cloud transactions in a microservice backend.

That being said, let's see how I feel in 6 months. Experience need to be made by oneself.

ThereIsNoWorryon Ask HN: I got into MIT. Should I go?

Swiss. It was easy to get in for me as a Swiss, but they filtered heavily during the first couple years.

ThereIsNoWorryon Ask HN: I got into MIT. Should I go?

I went to ETH Zurich and while I can't speak about the US, compared to peers that went to no name schools, it seems I have it a lot easier getting interviews and getting through them. I'm barely one year into my career and get interviews at more than 3 out of 5 places I apply, including direct contact with a lot of FAANG companies + recently received an offer from Adobe, which I declined as I value unconditional full remote atm more than a 30%~50% higher salary.

Point being, I can't regret going to ETH, even though it got really stressful sometimes and I have 50k debt to pay off - school just cost about 15k total for BSc & MSc, but you still have to pay for living - because at some point I will inevitably end up at a FAANG(-like) company as I too want to be able to afford a decent house and retirement.

I now know enough people that just coast by in (below) average jobs making (below) average money that have a hard time teaching themselves relevant skills and struggle getting interviews for well-paid positions.

ThereIsNoWorryon Ask HN: Where should I live?

Zurich, Switzerland. Very high living standard, great public transport, healthcare and whatever you could need. High to very high salaries (120k to 150k TC for experienced SWs at local companies, more at FAANG). It can be quite cold, though and there's certainly more diverse places.

ThereIsNoWorryon Swiss German is not context-free (unlike virtually all other languages) (1985) [pdf]

Another funny thing about Swiss German is that we don't have a simple past. There is no "We ate" or "I made" or "You played". Rather, we always say stuff like "We have eaten" or "I have made" or "You have played". I.e., we only ever use present perfect. It's rather weird and as a native, never noticed this particularity until it just came to me once when I casually switched from speaking Swiss German to High / "normal" German (or English, for that matter).

ThereIsNoWorryon Do Dev Careers Die at 35?

I super rarely use SO and even googling is relatively limited. Am in my first year out of University as a Software Engineer in a reputable conpany and get nothing but praise in my performance reviews. I have no idea what these memes about copy&pasting code from SO mean? Like, are they serious?

ThereIsNoWorryon A new link to an old model could crack the mystery of deep learning

Neural networks are very non-linear. The blessing and curse of non-linearity is its usefulness while escaping what mathematical logic inherently is able to model. So yes, I strongly assume there will never be a mathematically sound theory that predicts deep learning in any meaningful way. Same problem with everything non-linear. From two-body to chaotic systems, biological interactions to the stock market. All just wishful thinking until Mathematicians give up and instead continue to play around in their well-defined esoteric spaces.

ThereIsNoWorryon MLP-Mixer: An All-MLP Architecture for Vision

MLP is basically the vanilla neural network. The thing everyone sees first when getting taught about deep learning or similar. It turned out that (usually) MLPs are not very efficient to process matrix structures with it (e.g. 2d matrices like images). So, computer vision invented convolutional neural networks specifically to make image data highly efficient to process for neural networks. They outperformed MLPs in basically all aspects across the board. Transformers / Attention is a relatively new invention initially made to solve NLP problems more efficiently; but as it turns out, they work great on images as well.

TLDR - we've come full circle.

ThereIsNoWorryon An old programmer loses his job

Looking through his various articles and profiles; I don't see any relevant language from the last 10+ years (Java, Python, JavaScript). He seems to have scratched C, C++ and C#, all of which are still in use, but he didn't really get into them? His history of learning "new tech" seems extremely modest. It seems I've had significant exposure to more languages and architectures in my University program than he had in his 30 year long career. And from the year of experience I've had, I can also tell that switching between languages and APIs is easy. So, maybe age-ism is a thing, but I'd also argue a lot of age-ism can be reduced to "I never even tried keeping up and hyper-specialized myself into a dying corner even when the signs became clear I'm becoming outdated, so why doesn't anyone hire me?"