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I find it funny to think that SnapChat did the opposite and removed Chat to become Snap.

Either way it’s a bold move. It’s clearly easier to type and say. I wonder if they found GPT is just too unpleasant to say so trying to switch the brand is worth it to them.


To add to this, when I think of ordering I’m reminded of the NP complete traveling salesman problem. It’s easy to make a program to visit all locations, but optimal order is so much harder.

I suspect thinking is similar, which brings up questions about LLMs as well. We all can now quickly write hundreds of generic business plans, but knowing what to focus on first is still the hard part.


This amazes me since I switched to go because its builds are so insanely fast and the module system is quite clean. Out of all the languages, go probably needs it the least!

I did use bazel long ago for c++ and it was quite good at it, but we didn’t have very many dependencies.


There are plenty of native languages that compile Go fast, unfortunely the scripting language revolution, and too much focus on C and C++ tooling kind of messed it all up.

Rob Pike even has a talk about how fast ALGOL compilers used to take, naturally one needs to take into account the additional issue with reading punch cards, but still quite fast for early 1960's hardware.

Or Object Pascal and Modula-2 compilers in the early 1990's.

Eventually we (as in industry) started focusing on the wrong points.


I have warm fuzzies for way back when I coded in Turbo Pascal. Even on the 8086 I had at the time, compilation speed was incredibly fast even on midsized projects. Much faster than my day to day work with Go on an M3 Max.

I had to install it last night in DOSBox-X and compile the Breakout example project. The warm fuzzies are justified.


Here is Borland's marketing material bragging about Turbo Pascal 5.5 compile times, on those 640 KB MS-DOS PCs.

34 000 lines of code per minute!

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/borland/turbo_pascal/Turbo_Pascal_...


This post reminded me of this killer btree implementation for swift. The analysis on GitHub is fantastic and reads like a thriller novel :)

https://github.com/attaswift/BTree#why


Gathering all that together sounds worthwhile, but let me encourage you to share more of yourself in small parts as well. It takes practice to find the right amount to share (it’s a balance and depends on you and them), but taking an extra moment after dinner to ask what they have been up to or share a thought you’ve had recently can really help you connect better to them while you’re alive.


Netflix is curated and not user created, so I’d say TikTok is more like YouTube. Then of course everyone copied the format including YouTube, IG, X, and even LinkedIn (saw this one just today). But even with that slight naming difference, I couldn’t agree more with you that MMOs are rich cultural hubs compared to endless short videos. It’s a low bar :)


Even Spotify. Just saw their short audio clips feed of interesting sections of songs, tracks.


I’ll try to be a bit more direct than other answers, so apologies if it is too much, but let me say that such a move would make more sense if you want to switch to a developer role. I’d say it is not a good plan for a PM role as honestly PMs don’t need the tech depth to be great and two years isn’t enough to be competitive technically with devs with 4yr degrees and 10+ years experience, etc. Instead consider taking an online data structure coding class to feel how it feels (coursera has good ones) to become technical. If you love it, you can choose to go further in that direction if you want. Hope that helps!


As someone who has worked in the game industry for years both in AAA and indie, I’d say the switching costs are quite high and proportional to the team and code size. The reason it can be so challenging is a late change can easily double your preproduction time as you have to port over existing systems/tools/workflows and the bigger teams have many more of these systems. Usually this means bigger studios only changes engines at the start of new franchises or when fully rebooting old ones (For example, the new Mass Effect is porting from Frostbite to Unreal 5, but it’s only viable because it’s a super high budget reboot with new creative direction and the time to do it)

It easier to switch if you’re indie, of course, but the reality is if your game is great it’s better to launch with the engine you have. And if your game is struggling gameplay-wise porting it to another engine isn’t going to help make the game better and puts the release at risk.


The difference is that web/social media is branded as an intelligent being you can ask any question of. We all agree the web is _also_ not reliable, but many people will think GPT / Gemini are verifiably accurate when they aren’t.


> We all agree the web is _also_ not reliable

You need to expand your circle a bit more :-)


I like the sentiment, but human children who are 2 completely dominate all known animal intelligence. They can speak in sentences and use tools in complex ways. There may be studies that show a raven might use a stick to help it find food. Well, a two year old will carry a stool halfway across the house to reach the scissors that will open a bag of veggie straws :) At 3 they can recognize letters _easily_ and start learning how to read. At 4 they can with a bit of practice learn the piece moves of chess and start strategizing.

Animals can definitely be intelligent, and we should learn more about them and how they perceive the world, but when you play with a 2.5 year old for five minute there is no doubt that humanity is beyond special.


The real separation (and is something that comes long after 2 years of age in humans) is the ability to observe one's thoughts. I totally get that dolphins and elephants and many "big brain" mammals can have social structures, long memories, and the ability to pass down behaviors directly (e.g. "here's how you hunt fish effectively" may not be in dolphin genes, but they do a damn good job of it, or also the "fads" of orcas like the "salmon hat" or, more recently, attacking sailboats).

The absolutely blistering pace a child can learn at, though, is indeed quite a sight to behold.


One interesting aside in this article was that the crows don't teach each other how to make tools. But a child might steal a tool from a parent and work it out. This demonstrates the problem solving type of intelligence, working out how to reshape a wire to a useful shape for instance. But not a 'higher' intelligence teaching or demonstrating to others. Which is kind of odd, as I see young birds following their parents and imitating and learning. So I guess this shows parent birds don't teach, but young birds instinctively follow around and learn?


In the time it took me to learn a new programming language, my kid learned how to be a whole entire human being. Including free thought and autocorrect mode. I don’t know what makes us special in the animal kingdom, but watching that happen certainly feels special. Do whales feel the same way about their young?


Whales almost certainly do not feel the same way. They feel like whales about their young. That's not to discount whales: that feeling may be profound and emotional for them. But it's probably alien to the human experience.


I’m sure their sensory experience is different from ours, but is the feeling truly alien? We share enough genetics to share the same brain chemicals, for one


Why probably?


For starters, whales aren't tool users. So it'd be something of a surprise if evolution had programmed them to feel joy when their offspring use tools. Humans, on the other hand, seem to get a bit of a kick out of teaching other people (especially kids) to do things which makes a lot of evolutionary sense given how strategically central tools are to our species.


I feel that people who study animal intelligence started with the dictum "don't assume similarity to humans" and immediately interpreted it as "assume dissimilarity to humans".


I dunno, I've never spoken with a whale to compare notes.


I've interacted with 6 month old puppies that can outsmart a 2-3 year old human baby.

Fawns/calves/... can walk almost as soon as they are born. It takes humans far longer to learn that.

If you put a 2-year old human child with every single possible benefit on its own into the wild, its chances of survival are pretty slim. Some creatures never see their parents and thrive.

IMHO, humans are special to other humans because we are built to value "our own." We have "us vs them" deeply ingrained such that many humans can't even accept that we are also animals. We also tend to value the things we can do over the things other species can do. This leads to arguments about how great we are at recognizing things we have evolved ourselves and our environment to do.


>Fawns/calves/... can walk almost as soon as they are born. It takes humans far longer to learn that.

Humans are helpless at birth because we have big brains and walk upright. Which means narrower hips which means we need to be born before the brain is fully developed.


Ability to survive != intelligence

Off the back of this comment I’ve just flicked back to a random video of my then 2 yo where we have a discussion about how houses in real life aren’t normally the colour of the ones in the kids book she’s reading.


Just to play devils advocate, I think part of what the OP may be saying is that our intelligence is mapped to our survival. From that perspective, animals can be more intelligent than a 2 year old. A stray cat is infinitely more capable of surviving the wild than a 2 year old human; they are more “intelligent” in that survival capacity by far. So again, to the OPs point, it depends on how we’re measuring intelligence; if it’s based on the skills humans are specialized for, of course humans will be shown to be more intelligent.


Speaking in sentences and learning chess moves seems more due to having the physical capacity for speech (and therefore conversation) than something attributable to raw intelligence, and picking up a stool and moving it requires the ability to pick up and carry a stool, which would be pretty hard for crows or dolphins. I feel like any test of raw intelligence would need to be independent of physiology/ability to understand instructions, which is pretty hard to do.


I have quite a bit of exposure to kids that age range. The behavior you described is FAR from normal.


Yeah, putting in effort for vegetables?


That is not the entire story, pigs have been shown to score higher on emotional intelligence (iirc) than human children age 4-6. As in, they have a higher ability for empathy and emotional distress than most toddlers.


I agree. At birth a human is much less capable than most animals - but the learning algorithm is so much better that they'll surpass any other non-human organisms in 2 years. This is honestly amazing an one of the best thing to witness when you are a parent. It's baffling - not only seeing your child learn new things, but also witnessing the ever increasing pace at which they learn new things.


A quick search on youtube shows that crows are much smarter than just getting food with a stick. Also isn’t the general agreement/stereotype about dogs having 5 years old int stat?


I’ve seen this before as well, but as a parent with two kids who loves to wonder about this very question, I can assure you a five year old (a kindergartener) is much, much smarter then a dog. They are filled with ideas and imagination, math / reading / writing capability, creative drawing and of course a massive spoken language advantage. Sure, they’d still lose in a fight, but then they’d (correctly!) tell their parents what is happening and we’d call animal control :)


Difference being that the 2 year old human would not survive in the wild whereas most other species would easily after 2 years of age


Depends on the species. A few can run, hunt, and keep up with the group within hours of birth. Some, like marsupials, are born blind, deaf, with an inability to swallow unaided, looking like weird larvae, and must live in their mother's pockets until they can handle anything. People and cats are like marsupials.

As cats get older, their parents teach them survival skills (by showing interest in certain activities that the kittens imitate, not through more explicit instruction; there are cat studies that show this.) It takes kittens probably a year to mostly learn how to be cats. As people get older, we shove a summary and guide to 3000 years of written and tested guidance into them and show them how to brush their teeth properly. It takes about 15 years.

No big difference between humans and animals here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precociality_and_altriciality


"humanity is beyond special"

My own offspring is so cute, surely we are unique in the universe.

AI in the future, talking to another AI: "These humans are so cute, just give them little challenges like increasing shareholder value, they will learn to speak up in meetings and move things around. They aren't really intelligent, but they can be trained to make things for us".


I taught the kids to dive bomb crows.


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