kerblang

Under HIPAA requirements emailing personal medical info is a massive no-no. Admittedly, this is for the patient's protection, and of course being blind is not much of a secret... but it's completely understandable that email would be strongly discouraged. Nobody wants to get in trouble for breaking the rules.

Honestly, being able to accept a fax is great, although I would think any properly outfitted modern office that does accept fax would be able to route them straight to document storage rather than a printer. There are probably even internet services that can just act as a fax dumpster and hold PDF/image file for perusal at one's leisure. Yes even the govt can figure this sort of thing out.

Many Americans turn on subtitles when watching tv/movies

Gone are the days when American actors flaunted those crisply enunciated albeit preposterous "continental" accents

The soviet empire collapsed, even in the same lifetimes of many who saw its rise.

Lasted longer than the Nazi empire, I'll admit, but both were weak

Contrary to popular opinion, the "verbosity void" of the article is not a hopeless expanse without any useful information at all; it just has a much lower density than average.

nyuk nyuk

Anyhow it barely touched on dark matter... Like, are the voids themselves where the dark matter is, or is it spread out, um, orthogonally?

> what is widely regarded as the album that invented punk

This sort of thing becomes endless debate, but I'm still gonna say The Stooges were way ahead of them (yeah, noticed Iggy in one of the article's pictures).

And still not applied physics

The low accuracy of human guesstimation is why we use deterministic tools, not so-called tools that imitate our ability (or worse).

Tools are not replacements for people! Tools are enhancements.

AI is an attempt to replace people with something unhuman.

Engineering is two things:

1. Applied physics - Software is immediately disqualified. Symbols have no physics.

2. Ethics - Lives and livelihoods depend on you getting it right. Software people want to be disqualified because that stuff is so boring, but this is becoming a more serious issue with every passing day.

Those were deterministic rather than stochastic

Earlier today on the radio I heard Houston TX was 20 GW at peak load.

Texas is [d]oing its best to build as many datacenters & power plants as possible. They were describing it as "Texas will have more datacenters than anyplace else in the world." This was public radio, but everybody's taking a hit on the ol' AI pipe nowadays.

There is nothing wrong with Integer.parseInt(). It blows up if you give it invalid input. That's standard idiomatic behavior.

It might be helpful to have Integer.validateInt(String), but currently it's up to author to do that themselves.

I'm always going to say that if you have third-party integrations where you call out to other organizations' services, that will be the thing that breaks down the most. You have to armor the heck out of it and plan for contingencies, and yes, that includes when third party is <Famous Company Where Surely Nothing Ever Goes Wrong>.

Microservices are just a slightly more reliable version of that, since you can hassle the author as coworker instead of via harried FCWSNEGW support mouse.

In my experience, while monorepo makes shared libraries between services easier, that inevitably turns into "Hey, why not just put a copy of my application inside yours?"

> Java's language design over-uses exceptions for error handling

No, library authors' design over-uses exceptions. Also refer to people using exceptions to generate 404 http responses in web systems - hey, there's an easy DDOS... This can include some of Java's standard libraries, although nothing springs to mind.

Exceptions are not meant for mainstream happy-path execution; they mean that something is broken. Countless times I have had to deal garbage-infested logs where one programmer is using exceptions for rudimentary validation and another is dumping the resulting stack traces left and right as if the world is coming to end.

It is a problem, but it's an abuse problem, not a standard usage problem.

> Absolutely not.

Can also be dismissed without evidence

I don't [think] there is some threshold of extreme skepticism at which someone suddenly reverses polarity under skeptical duress and flips over into a mark. Rather, you just have a mark trying to be good at skepticism and failing horribly.

One might argue that this corresponds to the general shift of the political left towards these things. Old pre-turn-of-century tech was a much more libertarian left. Notice how a lot of the 50-something gen-X CEOs (and others) were once "left" but are now hated by that group, and more likely to go over to Trumpism. Obvious case in point: Elon

The entire playing field is kinda dissapointing, left or right. Which do you wanna be, self-righteous preening snob or batshit macho man?

I'm going for a blend, myself

But Github's publishing is at least _highly_ portable. You could move the same web site to a vanilla nginx setup on some random domain.

The nice part here is that you can update your site via git version control, and have easy rollback etc... assuming you can deal with git.

I don't think it's such a problem to have big corporations involved in your publishing efforts; the problem is when they lock users in with proprietary technology, and create barriers to entry like high costs and technical complexity.

I don't have a need to mix anticapitalist fervor with the desire for an easy way to make durable, portable web sites. The internet has always involved paying some kind of piper. Corporations are too big & monopolization is a problem, but one thing at a time...

I suspect the author is struggling with their own sarcasm.

> Naturally, AI is expected to play a significant role in all this, making people better at their jobs and more end-user-focused, he said.

> However, Pandya said IRS leaders are telling employees that AI won't endanger their jobs.

Not much of trump supporter myself, but I check HN for tech news rather than politics

I'm starting to realize that an LLM isn't gonna take my job, but it's beginning to make the job aggravating enough to quit anyhow. So many managers have decided they're going to have an AI Miracle and aren't interested in hearing otherwise, no matter what staff tells them.

Let me get something straight: That essay was completely fake, right? He/It was lying about everything, and it was some sort of... what?

Did the 80 million people believe what they were reading?

Have we now transitioned to a point where we gaslight everyone for the hell of it just because we can, and call it, what, thought-provoking?

Try buying an LED flashlight.. when the LED circuitry/bulb goes out, the whole thing's a brick, battery, assembly, everything. You have to throw it all out. The bulb assembly is usually fused to the frame so that it's hard just to recycle that frame.

Is this supposed to be a distributed DB that auto-synchronizes instances? Documentation doesn't seem to say anything about that.

If not, it seems like it would be quite a bit of work to implement the synchronization... and I don't understand why one would use it otherwise.

Short answer: No, things have not gotten easier. The toolchain is insanely huge. A computer science graduate is woefully underprepared for the tool tsnuami that will completely swamp their careers. Many of these tools are worse than no tool at all.

Causes: Bubble economics, perverse incentives, lack of objectivity, and more.

The good news is that huge competitive advantages are available to those who refuse to accept norms without careful evaluation.

I'm not being rude to parent poster (instead, am agreeing) or the person who wrote the article.

I might have been rude to all the people/bots who insist the article's author is lying because it contradicts AI-everything.

sorry, ref. other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kerblang#46467770

Late reply: Ah thanks

Being a lazy slob, I never saw fit to make a dedicated repo (or even, directory) so I have no place for a readme. After all the whole thing fits in one script.

Gron is a great name and the output looks pretty good... I like the idea of outputting perfectly valid javascript (with semicolons, even...)

Let's see if HN will format this sample output from mommyjson right:

    employees:   [199]   profile:   projects:   [0]   tasks:   [0]   description: Optimized grid-enabled parallelism
    employees:   [199]   profile:   projects:   [0]   tasks:   [0]   taskId: T368
    employees:   [199]   profile:   projects:   [0]   tasks:   [0]   assignedTo: {
    employees:   [199]   profile:   projects:   [0]   tasks:   [0]   assignedTo:   id: E00200
    employees:   [199]   profile:   projects:   [0]   tasks:   [0]   assignedTo:   name: Timothy Mullins
    employees:   [199]   profile:   projects:   [0]   tasks:   [0]   assignedTo:   skills: {
    employees:   [199]   profile:   projects:   [0]   tasks:   [0]   assignedTo:   skills:   primary: C++
    employees:   [199]   profile:   projects:   [0]   tasks:   [0]   assignedTo:   skills:   experience: {
    employees:   [199]   profile:   projects:   [0]   tasks:   [0]   assignedTo:   skills:   experience:   years: 10

This widely circulated claim ignores the fact that math is not science.

I made a silly groovy script called "mommyjson" that doesn't try to preserve JSON formatting but just focuses on giving you the parentage (thus the name) including array indexes, object names, etc., all on the same line, so that when you find something, you know exactly where it is semantically. Not gonna claim that everybody should use it or that it cures insomnia cancer & hangnails, but feel free to borrow it:

https://github.com/zaboople/bin/blob/master/mommyjson.groovy

(btw I would happily upvote a python port, since groovy is not so popular)