Hacker News Reader

fourtharkon Should you use Jest as a testing library? (2022)

I like that ospec does away with the `it(...)` convention in favor of “bullets”

“It” always caused weird grammatical problems with test descriptions. You can’t always describe tests that way. Some authors would try and some would ignore “it”.

fourtharkon The military is using e-girls to recruit Gen Z into service

It’s been copy pasted from here:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/simp-to-soldier-e-girls-milita...

Fair game, it’s Creative Commons.

fourtharkon Setting time on fire and the temptation of The Button

Yeah it manages to say absolutely nothing except restating the question, over an entire page. But the grammar is perfect.

fourtharkon The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

Yes this article is promoting the "open core" model those companies follow, as opposed to the "pure" open source model Red Hat follows.

fourtharkon Show HN: AI explanations for other people’s code

Thankfully, they have banned this behavior ("temporarily").

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po...

fourtharkon Python-based compiler achieves orders-of-magnitude speedups

Who is "we"? You don't have to have anything to do with it.

fourtharkon The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999048

fourtharkon Researchers Discover a More Flexible Approach to Machine Learning

Sorry, didn't mean to be flip. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34876658

My understanding is that we have achieved very good pattern recognition, but that's only one aspect of cognition. IIUC a large part of our brain works that way, but for example there is also the language center which has recursion.

Also I don't think logic is just word games (could be wrong).

I'm sure we'll get there but I don't think this is it. E.g. AlphaGo was really good because it combined machine learning with tree search algorithms. Seems like logic and language and world knowledge could be combined with the excellent pattern recognition we currently have, merging first generation AI with the current stuff.

I have no idea how! I'm not in this field, just watch from a distance.

fourtharkon Researchers Discover a More Flexible Approach to Machine Learning

I will read this, thank you.

I am open to the idea of emergent properties, but I think logic/truth and purpose/empathy are independent facilities of intelligence that do not come from this model.

Pattern matching is a huge part of our brains, but there are more directed parts too. So far modern ML seems to be entirely the pattern matching part.

(Not an expert, just followed progress over the last 40 years.)

fourtharkon Show HN: Turn your Pandas dataframe into a Tableau-style UI for visual analysis

They have a boatload of patents, too.

fourtharkon Researchers Discover a More Flexible Approach to Machine Learning

Hey if you want to say humans are also stupid, I’m not going to stop you.

But that’s not my opinion.

fourtharkon Researchers Discover a More Flexible Approach to Machine Learning

No, it's just regurgitating egotistical posts and science fiction from Reddit. It doesn't mean any of it because it doesn't have any sense of meaning.

fourtharkon Microsoft looks to tame Bing chatbot

I don't think a disclaimer can protect the company when the AI tells someone to kill themself, as Bing has apparently done multiple times.

fourtharkon A New Ocean Is Being Formed in Africa

Soon humanity might have two motherlands.

Soon? Like geologically soon I guess.

fourtharkon Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

A symptom of our bubble-powered economy in general.

fourtharkon Deep dive into diagram layout engines: Minimizing hierarchical edge crossings

Yes, this article describes two algorithms from the 90's for the crossing reduction stage of the Sugiyama algorithm (which has a few other steps).

fourtharkon New Sony Walkman music player

They discuss a higher end model at the end which costs more than $800.

fourtharkon Show HN: Graphic-Walker – A different type of open-source alternative to Tableau

Yes, it must not be an "obvious" idea.

However, they must use too narrow a definition of obvious, because many obvious things have software patents.

fourtharkon A Tale of Two Feet

That makes more sense, thank you.

fourtharkon A Tale of Two Feet

Infuriating that we still use the foot but it is legally defined based on the meter!

fourtharkon A Tale of Two Feet

I like how they gently say "this is a step in the right direction".

fourtharkon The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

Novelty is not the only value.

fourtharkon Stanford hates fun

Huh? This is not asking or telling? Is it suggesting at least?

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/12/22/how-twitter-hid...

fourtharkon What ChatGPT can't do

That would be great. I don’t think it can detect the contradiction, though.

It doesn’t have any logical model behind it.

fourtharkon A new chat feature has been released by You Search

I’m sure the next step is to figure out how to infuse gpt chat with deliberately skewed results and product promotions veiled as useful content.

fourtharkon I found a secret US Government surveillance program (2019)

Nothing to read afaict.

Lots of provocative flight paths to look at.

fourtharkon Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

So people have been saying for 70 years. If a robot exists today that can make a bed and dust every surface, it probably costs $1M.

fourtharkon Finding the B-21's hangar location from the stars in its press image

It doesn’t fly yet, so that narrows it down a bit.

fourtharkon Issue dialing 911 on Google Pixel 6 cell phones

This link posted by crooked-v seems to explain why it was like that, and how it has been fixed.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-fixes-nightma...

fourtharkon Snowdon to be known by it's Welsh name Yr Wyddfa

They give pronunciation in the picture toward the bottom of the article.