MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by turtleyacht | 2025-11-11 02:43:03+00:00
> Java and legacy C# development

Functional Reactive Programming (2016) uses examples in Java 8. Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) recently announced Fabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms, which uses C#.

That is to say, within languages there is still plenty to learn.

There's the operating systems and hardware route, systems programming, low-level stuff. Maybe not immediately applicable to present work.

There's cloud and DevOps, observability and monitoring. Hard to start that unless there's already a "digital transformation" initiative.

But you could segue to an ML platform while working out a data-driven ML thing.

React (frontend) is fine, but how's the backend knowledge? Would you use Spring and Hibernate, .NET Core, or Node.js?

Maybe work on some side projects and develop a portfolio? Blog about issues you've solved, handy shortcuts, migration tips, or discuss YAML pipelines?

Don't know about certs. Spinning up from Terraform (Gitops) seems eminently more hands-on.

There's also formal reasoning and software validation. Provers, constraint solvers, and dynamic programming. Operations algorithms and management science, optimization and the like.
by rester324 | 2025-11-11 02:43:06+00:00
I think slack and other mail/chat clients rescale the image and apply aggressive compression on it. Sometimes they even crop the image or make it so that you need to scroll left and right. Also your syntax highlighting might be annoying to others and might make legibility worse for the receiver, and as other people pointed out most chat/mail clients support monospace code blocks. Plus I agree with all the things that the blog post author pointed out.
by theamk | 2025-11-11 02:43:13+00:00
> The current Backblaze client excludes non-physical drives not connected via a USB or Firewire connector. While this has been Backblaze's policy for some time, our Client Teams have taken steps to reduce the number of allowed exceptions.

Ah, I see.

The backblaze backup cost is not size-based - people pay per computer, and this includes all internal and external hard drives (the external ones have to be attached every once in a while to be kept in backup). This definitely sounds like a game-able policy - what if I pay for a single computer license, and attach 100TB worth of drives there? What if I mount NFS share of my homeserver - can I backup it for the same PC fee a well?

I've used Backblaze backup for a long time (for my non-techinical friends) but never really thought long about how they can afford the flat price. Prohibiting non-physical drives would go a long way towards that. Looking at the docs, VeraCrypt can operate off the network drive, so I am guessing they had issues when it was used to present NAS/File share as a local drive?
by tppiotrowski | 2025-11-11 02:43:15+00:00
I think what Claude generated code is still missing is the feeling of "I learned something from reading this code. Reading this code made me a better programmer". We're not there yet. That's why we have forgiveness for the scripts/tests/etc Claude writes - those are purely for utility. However, reading Claude code must make us feel like we're getting smarter, not dumber.
by carterschonwald | 2025-11-11 02:43:23+00:00
My monad-ste library on Hackage does a pretty clean no dirty state core dump in code space. I wrote it originally for ability to have mutable state optimizations in an industrial interpreter where I didn’t want overhead of every monadic bind doing a tag check. It winds codifying a fun pattern for avoiding dirty state though it could probably be extended to regions or something. But unclear if the Ux would stay nice
by atlex2 | 2025-11-11 02:43:33+00:00
I think spatial tokens could help, but they're not really necessary. Lots of physics/physical tasks can be solved with pencil and paper.

On the other hand, it's amazing that a 512x512 image can be represented by 85 tokens (as in OAI's API), or 263 tokens per second for video (with Gemini). It's as if the memory vs compute tradeoff has morphed into a memory vs embedding question.

This dichotomy reminds me of the "Apple Rotators - can you rotate the Apple in your head" question. The spatial embeddings will likely solve dynamics questions a lot more intuitively (ie, without extended thinking).

We're also working on this space at FlyShirley - training pilots to fly then training Shirley to fly - where we benefit from established simulation tools. Looking forward to trying Fei Fei's models!
by Maxatar | 2025-11-11 02:44:04+00:00
Being isomorphic is not the same as being identical, or substitutable for one another. Type theory generally distinguishes between isomorphism and definitional equality and only the latter allows literal substitution. So a Nine type with a single constructor is indeed isomorphic to Unit but it's not the same type, it carries different syntactic and semantic meaning and the type system preserves that.

Some other false claims are that type theory does not distinguish types of the same cardinality. Type theory is usually intensional not extensional so two types with the same number of inhabitants can have wildly different structures and this structure can be used in pattern matching and type inference. Cardinality is a set-theoretic notion but most type theories are constructive and syntactic, not purely set-theoretic.

Also parametricity is a property of polymorphic functions, not of all functions in general. It's true that polymorphic code can't depend on the specific structure of its type argument but most type theories don't enforce full parametricity at runtime. Many practical type systems (like Haskell with type classes) break it with ad-hoc polymorphism or runtime types.
by phlummox | 2025-11-11 02:44:12+00:00
gtk-vector-screenshot (<https://github.com/nomeata/gtk-vector-screenshot>) will do this, but for GTK apps only. It relies on a custom protocol layered on top of X Window, and I think traverses the tree of GTK widgets to create a vector representation. For a general screenshot program to work, I imagine it would need some sort of hook into every GUI framework used on your system.
by dietr1ch | 2025-11-11 02:46:10+00:00
> - Preserves the full 80-character width without line-wrapping, which destroys readability

Readability is on the eyes of the final user, they are free to use whatever narrow column width they prefer.

> - Guarantees monospace, so tabular data doesn't get all misaligned

When was the last time a computer shipped without a monospace font? This points at the rare occasion where there's a problem with the setup, but you could also argue that maybe there's a system with a broken image decompressor.

> Screenshots are incredibly useful for keeping code and terminal output looking like code and terminal output, and not getting completely mangled in an e-mail or chat message being read on a mobile device or in a narrow column.

Are you complaining about GMail's rendering maybe? Its awful[^0], but that's more of a GMail problem that could be solved if they wanted.

[^0]: Column width unbounded even on 4k monitors. Weird and inconsistent font sizes across different fonts (monospace is smaller). Reads poorly on phones too.
by paulmooreparks | 2025-11-11 02:48:25+00:00
OP here. You raised a point that I should have mentioned in the article: screenshots of web pages that don't include the URL. I'm perfectly fine with screenshots of browser windows, since the context is almost always relevant. The system I work on right now puts a lot of useful context into the URL, but it's almost never included in the initial screenshot, so I have to ask for that. Of course, I generally ask for it as text so that I don't have to try to type the whole thing without making a mistake.
by alyyousuf7 | 2025-11-11 02:48:59+00:00
I have Shottr keyboard shortcut (cmd+opt+control+o) setup to allow me to OCR from whatever is on the screen and copy the text to clipboard. So whether someone shares code or error log as screenshot on slack, it’s 3 steps: 1. cmd+opt+control+o 2. select the area to OCR 3. cmd+v in vscode or google
by wat10000 | 2025-11-11 02:49:00+00:00
We can, we just don't want to.

Our military manufacturing volume was not very high before WW2. It wasn't until the potential adversaries became actual adversaries that we ramped it up.

If a similar sort of nation-uniting threat arose, to the extent that we'd be willing to take extreme measures like halting all manufacturing of civilian automobiles, drone production could be massively increased.

Of course, the problem is that the willingness is unlikely to be there until a serious war breaks out, and then we may not have the luxury of taking a couple of years to ramp up.
by aatd86 | 2025-11-11 02:49:02+00:00
How does it become Unit if it is an integer of value 9? Why would cardinalities be undecidable if they are encoded discretely in the type?

For instance, type Nine int = {9} would not be represented as 9. It would probably be a fat pointer. It is not just an int, it would not even have the same operations (9 + 9 is 18 which is an int but is not of type Nine, but that's fine, a fat pointer does not need to share the same set of operations as the value it wraps).

It could be seen as a refinement of int? I am not sure that it can truly be isomorphic? My suspicion was that it would only be somewhat isomorphic at compile time, for type checking, and if there is a mechanism for auto unwrapping of the value?
by avree | 2025-11-11 02:50:03+00:00
OCR is a godsend, 100% agree. Not a fan of the metadata idea personally, 'screenshotting' is done by the operating system, and exposing ways to allow apps to know that they were 'in' the screenshot plus expose some metadata of their choosing (like your examples of GPS coordinates for a maps app, url for browser) sounds like a privacy nightmare, and like something that will make a very reliable core feature much harder to use.

There are companies like Evernote/Zight/CloudApp that at one point tried some things like this, but they never really caught - I think because it's pretty easy to add annotations yourself or some note of your own - and a screenshot not "trying to do everything" is part of what makes them useful & ubiquitous.
by tom_ | 2025-11-11 02:50:37+00:00
Key things required for posting to the chat: people reading can read it, people reading can copy and paste it, and people searching can actually find it. It doesn't need to exactly match what you might see in a text editor. Anybody wanting to look at the actual text in context won't be doing it in the chat, but will rather be opening the file of interest in the appropriate tool, and examining it that way; anybody stuck reading the text only in the chat is probably on their phone or something and will be best served by being able to easily see all of it.

For reading purposes, the question of screen width is best left to the reader. They will have the window set to their preferred width, possibly limited by screen size. If the text has to wrap, so be it. It's better that than having to try to squint at your 3713x211 screen grab on an iPhone (portrait orientation). Also bear in mind that even the most basic of font and colour choices (large/small font, dark/light mode) can cause accessibility issues for some readers.

For copying and pasting purposes, images suck. Yes, macOS can do it, sort of, and I expect Windows 11 can do it too, probably to about the same extent. But it's not as easy as having the text right there in copyable form.

For searching purposes, ditto - only worse, because at least when you copy and paste and it comes out wrong, you'll notice. When you search: you just won't find the thing. You'll never know.
by brandon_bot | 2025-11-11 02:52:24+00:00
I was first convinced to try Lazygit after reading https://jesseduffield.com/Lazygit-5-Years-On/#weighing-in-on... (written by Lazygit's creator).

Haven't regretted it at all; the tool is a pleasure to use due to its great design decisions. Contributing back to the codebase is also quite straightforward.
by woleium | 2025-11-11 02:53:07+00:00
I know this must be frustrating for you, but seriously, don’t start with one like this.

If you have a university nearby, call them and see if they have an accessibility lab, or a service for disabled students. These places usually have all the decent ones, and they will usually let you come in and try them.

failing that, maybe try an ErgoDox EZ or Glove80?
by nocoiner | 2025-11-11 02:53:41+00:00
Fortunately or unfortunately, the New York Times is now a gaming/recipes company with a newspaper attached to it.

Probably mostly a good thing now that I think about it - it moves the paper closer to the model of 20th century journalism (a local quasi-monopoly on news gathering and distribution funded by advertising) that was, for all its faults, pretty fucking good in retrospect.
by Measter | 2025-11-11 02:53:44+00:00
> Take Herb Sutter for example, who argues that "memory safety" as defined in this article is an extreme goal and we should instead focus on a more achievable 95% safety instead to spend the remaining effort on other types of safety.

One thing I've noticed when people make these arguments is that they tend to ignore the fact that most (all?) of these other safeties they're talking about depend on being able to reason about the behaviour of the program. But when you violate memory safety a common outcome is undefined behaviour, which has unpredictable effects on program behaviour.

These other safeties have a hard dependency on memory safety. If you don't have memory safety, you cannot guarantee these other safeties because you can no longer reason about the behaviour of the program.
by LeroyRaz | 2025-11-11 02:54:07+00:00
You realize that they will gladly hallucinate science...

You should check the papers it claims to reference as see if the claims it makes are actually backed up.

In my experience, it can completely mischaracterize scientific literature. For example, I asked it if a codebase was a faithful implementation of an algorithm described in a CS paper, and is said "no" and then proceeded to list a dozen small changes. Every single change was incorrect. The codebase was in fact a completely faithful implementation.
by tombert | 2025-11-11 02:54:37+00:00
I don't dispute that at all. I don't think it matters, it just needs to look like they're doing something to avoid forks and the like.

That said, there might be stuff that's actually using open source Android for profit. For example, the Nook Glowlight Plus, which runs a modded version of Android, doesn't appear to have any direct or even indirect references to Android anywhere (and I had to contribute a bit to the discourse to even get the rooting to work [1]). I have no ideas about the inner dealings of Barnes and Noble, but it wouldn't surprise me if they're running a completely forked version of FOSS Android and aren't paying a dime to Google for it.

I suspect these are the things that Google is trying to crack down on.

[1] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=360563&pa...
by skybrian | 2025-11-11 02:54:43+00:00
It's not network requests that are a problem. It's nondeterministic network requests. Build systems do make network requests, but assuming the network is up and the build servers are running, the result of a compile should always be the same. If the server isn't reachable then the build fails.

Also, while build systems can do stuff over the network, the program isn't allowed to run arbitrary network code at compile time. At most it can import a library at a particular URL. The build system will need to download the library the first time, but it can also cache libraries so no download is needed.
by pseudalopex | 2025-11-11 02:54:45+00:00
Some governments reject separation of powers. Some countries have politicians select judges openly. Some countries' politicians worked around or subverted the systems intended to prevent politicians influencing judge selection.

Appointment is the most common method of selecting lower- and higher-court judges in common-law countries, and for supreme and constitutional courts in civil- and mixed-system countries. In most countries, this appointment is by the executive, but there are systems that assign the minister of justice and members of the judiciary a role in the appointment process.[1]

[1] https://judiciariesworldwide.fjc.gov/judicial-selection
by rustystump | 2025-11-11 02:55:13+00:00
That is an issue that exists regardless of ai but i do get it. Most furniture is not hand made. But that doesnt preclude people from enjoying buying or making handmade furniture.

The fact that i think people need to get over is that you are blessed beyond measure to have a fun job that gives you creative joy and satisfaction. Losing that because of ai/new tool is not some unprecedented event signaling the end of creativity. A job is a job.

What amuses me is i have just as much fun clacking away with some ai help as i did before. But then again i like the problem solving process more than writing the same code in one specific programming language.
by hamishmckay | 2025-11-11 02:56:09+00:00
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by VladVladikoff | 2025-11-11 02:56:46+00:00
Pretty much every new programmer I’ve ever hired has done this in their first few weeks. Every time I have to tell them why it’s so unhelpful to share screenshots of text instead of just pasting the text. Usually they learn. When they don’t I usually end up firing them, not for that reason but for others.

The reason I personally hate it is I am often working from my phone. And it’s much easier to read text rendered properly than pinch zooming text in an image. What’s worse is slack will downgrade images for mobile and you can’t even pinch zoom in fully.
by BoorishBears | 2025-11-11 02:57:26+00:00
It depends on the level of quality you're going for, but prosody even changes based on how related the preceeding paragraph was to the upcoming one.

And the current SOTA for TTS includes breathing too, so you can't just put a fixed empty pause between your paragraphs.

People are chunking by paragraphs anyways (or even sentences) and it works, but the top commercial models support maintaining a context or passing in the most recently generated text for that reason.
by zer00eyz | 2025-11-11 02:59:09+00:00
> Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “artist”, flooding society with low-quality content using AI trained on the work product of actual artists?

Change the statement to: Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “photographer”, flooding society with low-quality photos using cell phones, never having to learn to develop film, or use focus, or understand lenses...

Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “painter”, flooding society with low-quality paintings because acrylics are cheap, the old masters made their own paint after all...

Why does it matter how it was created? It wasn't Bob Ross's "Joy of Making Incredible Art", it was simply the "Joy of Painting".

And people do enjoy content that, for lack of a better word, is disposable. Look at the "short dramas" or "vertical dramas" industry that is making money hand over fist. The content isnt high brow, but people enjoy it all the same.

> AI trained on the work product of actual artists?

Should we teach people how to play guitar without using the songs of other artists? Should those artists be compensated for inspiring others?

Some of this is an artifact of our ability to sell reproductions (and I would argue that the economics were all around distribution).

There is a long (possibly decades) conversation that were going to have on this topic.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-11 02:59:27+00:00
> In a heartbeat

I respect you for that. I don’t think most Americans would, particularly if their prosperity isn’t threatened (which it wouldn’t immediately be).

> not a realistic possibility

Why? It’s a precedented hybrid war tactic.

> If you don't consider fighting them to be a real military campaign, shooting through 300,000 desk clerks who don't even have uniforms isn't going to make it one

America could occupy plenty of strategically-interesting Canadian territory before it can mobilise. That’s the advantage of reserves. They’re already distributed.

> I'm saying this is a bad way to oppose it

Do you think it’s counterproductive? Or just useless?
by rramadass | 2025-11-11 02:59:34+00:00
The next best thing : Implementing a Functional Language for Highly Parallel Real Time Applications by J.L.Armstrong et al. (pdf) - https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/joe-armstrong/erl... Seems like this is the design behind the original JAM VM. The "References" section cites more early work.

See also The Erlang BEAM Virtual Machine Specification by the OG Bogumil Hausman himself ! Note: This document describes BEAM as it was in 1997. BEAM has grown and changed significantly between then and the time this note was added (2012). This information is mainly for historical interest. - https://www.cs-lab.org/historical_beam_instruction_set.html

Together, they should provide a lot of insights into ERTS/BEAM.
by estearum | 2025-11-11 03:00:01+00:00
Other symbols don't appear on the keycaps just like there's only an upper or a lowercase letter on each key on your keyboard. Your keyboard also doesn't tell you there's ¶ or ‡ underneath the 7 key!

Layers sound pretty crazy but if you start slow and adapt towards them, they're just amazingly useful.

Putting all your modifier keys on the homerow is probably the most immediately understandable use of layers: https://precondition.github.io/home-row-mods

These let you type every character/key combo without awkward pinky stretches.

A somewhat bespoke layer usecase that I find valuable as a programmer is holding "S" on my left hand sets characters hjkl; to the open-surround characters like ({[<