jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Interesting idea, but I don't think that's a realistic proxy, particularly when you look at the automation-per-dollar "efficiency" of computers relative to other industrial processes— like, how much compute do you get for the power that it takes to boil water or weld together a car or something? Or what about a case like a self-serve till at the grocery store? The power those consume is probably actually comparable to the power consumed by a till with a person operating it.

There are good reasons to tax energy and carbon, but critics are right that it ultimately is a tax on everything. An automation tax needs to find a way to specifically tax the gains made by putting humans out of a job, similar to what organized labour achieved for a generation of longshoreman when containerization killed their industry in the 60s and 70s (as documented in Marc Levinson's excellent book The Box).
gf is a game changer! Great article – hard to soak up so much knowledge at once. Bookmarked.
Years ago, not long after I started at Amazon, there was a huge Netflix outage[0]. It surfaced - or at least was widely speculated - that the cause was a pretty green employee running a DROP TABLE command against a prod database instead of a dev environment.

One morning when I came in and sat down at my desk, all of the old-timers were having coffee and discussing the fiasco. I was very happy to hear all of them talk about how mistakes happen, and the last person to be blamed for such an outage is the poor guy or gal that hit the ENTER button. Rather, blame falls (to various degrees) on: the engineers in their orbit who should be backing them up; the managers helping to onboard them; the chain of command; the entire system that is in place to prevent inappropriate access.

One of my best early-in-career lessons was that it takes maturity to own up to your mistakes (no matter how bone-headed), and it also takes good managers and a good company to foster an environment in which you can own up to them without fear of losing your job. Any company that wants to hang a weight around an intern's neck for something like this is not a company I would want to support in any way.

[0] https://netflixtechblog.com/a-closer-look-at-the-christmas-e...
Short story: data is aligned in a way that favors batch processing. Less branching, great setup for SIMD or GPU processing.
`->` used instead of `|`?

How does that not severely destroy any kind of attempt of compatibility with bash?

`-` is often used as parameter to mean "read from stdin" or "output to stdout", and `>` is a redirection.

`cat ... ¦ myprog -> log.txt` would now call myprog with no parameter and try to pipe that to a file, instead of just having myprog read from stdin and write myprog's stdout to log.txt

A workflow I often use is:

`aws s3 cp s3://somewhere/file.txt -`

That copies a file to stdout (i.e. it displays the file content from S3). I would then routinely just "arrow up" and add a `> file.txt` to save it.

Something I wonder too is why writing a new shell while most of the features could be implemented as just regular programs that you would pipe to?

`file.txt -> cast csv -> [ column_name ]`

Why the need to create a special syntax with [] I stead of just writing a `filter` program that reads input optionally decorated by that type information added by `cast`?
Lower bitrates give you more space for redundancy, forward error correction an so on.

And as you said, in some situations you do have really low bandwidth available.
It's not about not allowing access to people--it's about provably being the person named "owner" of a given good.
> The other thing I found is my kids have plugged the lighting adapter into an electrical outlet on a surge protector...

Yikes! Oh well at least they are protected from power surges...
> Turns out xenix had a filename length limitation (I don't recall exactly, but maybe 12 or 15 characters?)

Fourteen. A Bell Labs Unix directory entry was 16 bytes: a 2-byte inode number followed by the file name. You read the directory by opening it as a file and reading it as an array of these.

It wasn't until 4BSD/SunOS and System V needed multi-filesystem support that this was changed and what became the POSIX struct dirent replaced it.
Will it definitely evolve into such a version? What's to stop any other virus doing the same? How do you intend to stop this, without continuous vaccination and social control? What new piece of information do we have, that justifies the apparent change in policy from "flatten the curve for a few weeks" to "global control and vaccinations until...(?)"?
>"if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor."

Which was always a stupid line because it's not "your" doctor, it was never your doctor. It was your insurance's doctor. If you get a new job and "your" doctor isn't in the insurance network, they're no longer your doctor.
C# has some wonderful quality of life improvements over, say, Java. I had to learn it in a rush for a job and really loved the language.

Unfortunately, it was the worst job ever. Abusive, corrupt environment. I found a subtle accounting glitch that no one else seemed to quite understand. Assuming good faith, I showed mathematical proof for it, and I was canned shortly thereafter. On its own, the glitch wasn't too serious, but I suspect people were nervous that I was digging too close to something else.

Never bothered to set up the env at home again after that on account of the foul taste in my mouth, but that was hardly C#'s fault. Just found other things to do.
While we are talking about that, I actually have a PC running on an 80186 (rather uncommon, as it has peripherals built in that are not IBM PC compatible), running a XENIX descendant: SINIX.

It's a Siemens PC-D and it was a marvelous machine. Again, not fully compatible with IBM PCs, but often for good reason. The 640k barrier was not a thing on a PC-D for example. And it has its own MMU made of discrete logic chips for real process separation on SINIX!
This is a cool project. As a user entering information in a pdf file with hundreds of input boxes stresses me. Hiding the document until after I enter all the information makes it easier to file tax.

But it would not be feasible to use this for most of the people. Tax is often vastly complex and it ignores all those parts. I don't have any capital gain, any properties or any uncommon income such as from rent but even for me this would not work because I get 1099-INT forms from bank (for 1.25$) and there is only W2 option under income.

I am also a nonresident so I need to use 1040NR another block there but I am not even talking about that.
you don't need to convince hardcore opponents, mostly you need to convince undecided people. just like in an election.
In the spirit of "back to the basics" I'm proud to present shellmath, a decimal calculator written entirely in bash.

Shellmath does not call out to any external programs -- calculators, text manipulators, or anything else -- and achieves execution speeds competitive with GNU awk and bc.

Not only can you do floating-point math directly in the shell, but you now have a ready-made family of routines for doing so!

For skeptics ;-) I've included a demo that calculates 'e'. I've also posted a few words about the methodology, runtime efficiency, and a few bells and whistles on the README and in the project wiki.

I eagerly await your feedback!

Be good, and have a great day!
Please tell me an android phone that upon flashing will not null out the proprietary camera firmware and other things? I want a truly open OS but android just hides behind AOSP being open and it can only exist on certain phones with quite some negatives.

If you show me such a device, I would instantly ditch my iphone, pretty much the only reason I have one is the great hardware and the lack of google supervision. I even bought a pinephone, but it needs a lot of work (and a new hardware iteration) before it can become truly usable.
One is sci-fi reality, the other is putting a screen right in front of your eyeball.
I don't know whether this will be possible or not. Would love to know that.
> Who is this wording aimed at?

Part of this is probably just marketing people wanting to make things sound exciting. (I'm tempted to mock this tendency, but it may well be that this sort of wordplay works. I have no idea.)

But I also think there is a surprising number of People who are familiar with the phrase "browsing the internet" but are not necessarily aware that the software you use to do this is called a "web browser." I find that many non-technical people in my life fall into this category.

It's surprising that people don't make the purely grammatical connection between "browsING" and "browsER," but it seems to be a real phenomenon. Perhaps the word "browser" strikes people as jargon and so they screen it out.
> Variety is good but Microsoft has an ugly history with standards and that is very hurtful to the ecosystem.

That's no longer the case.

> They promised that they have changed in regards to that, but those are just words in the wind, time will tell on that.

No, they aren't just words. For example, in the ES6 committee everything I've heard is that Microsoft has been doing fantastic work, right now.

> Quality implementation and standards adoption is the name of the game in the browser market. After 10+ years in that market, my opinion is that they have neither.

I don't think that's fair either. The implementation of canvas in IE9, for example, is a very high quality Direct2D-based GPU implementation. (D2D is still arguably the best widely-used GPU vector graphics implementation around.)
bitcoin transaction fees do not depend on the amount transferred. for a standard p2pk transaction of any amount the fee is less than 50 cents https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees
Somehow I think you missed the whole "Every transaction is public" part of Bitcoin.

Cash is difficult but not impossible to track, Bitcoin is ridiculously easy to track by comparison.
True, but it is a LITTLE suspicious that they all charge exactly the same amount despite competition in the space.
I responded to this downthread.
> "voluntary trade" makes it sound like said trade wasn't actually illegal

Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong.
I'm a day late, but I remember Brick from a while back:
https://github.com/alfredxing/brick
discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406287

There are examples of Brick v GF, Brick does indeed look better (to me), but at the expense of file size. The same fonts in the examples are twice the size of GF.
We need to fix our urban housing problem, or provide further positive incentives for non-ICE vehicles so we aren’t creating a regressive tax. Newsflash: most people don’t like driving a lot, they do it because they feel like they must.
> What’s regular for computers is also more regular for humans.

What does this even mean? Can you define "regular"?

> neither is making a super complex grammar

This isn't about grammatic complexity, it's about the location of a type relative to the associated identifier.
It'd also be very trivial to script with a Mac using Folder Actions and a 5 line AppleScript.

(I wish Linux had an equivalent to Folder Actions. They’re really nifty.)
> Why work on a small thing with a few million users where you will never get promoted

That's the management problem right there. You should be able to get promotions for maintaining/improving a small product. The fact that you can't is what causes this endless shutdown mentality.
Brand value, maybe (even after this?) but they definitely haven't proven that they can turn that brand equity into higher margins. I believe if two offices were priced the same, someone might pick WeWork, but would people pay WeWork more than Regus for a comparable office? I'd imagine not much.
Obviously I'm not your mother-in-law, but I also don't answer my phone unless it shows it's someone I know because 95% of calls I get are spam. However, I will check my voicemail. So far every legitimate caller has left one to my knowledge.
The same thing has happened in the areas of engineering where licensure is required. An accredited degree is now an explicit requirement in most states to take the PE exam, and the FE exam is mandatory to start the clock on your experience period.
Soon... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Report (the film is quite good)
The problem with python was giving too much time, companies really started thinking about migrating in mid 2019.
Hitler owned a dog.
74 million voters. This is not going to play out well. There's really no coming back from this moment, the technocratic elite have changed American democracy forever. Edit: I mean this in the way Snowden tweeted yesterday, it will be interesting how this plays out for better or worse, but it is a monumental policy shift that will be a date marked in history books.
You're not the president of the United States.
Several presidents managed before Twitter, TV, or electricity.
I'm receiving your benign post in a harmful manner. What should we do in this situation?
I agree, inciting that violent mob to storm the Capitol building, while a join session was certifying the election seems to be a better reason.
It's extremely weak, but that doesn't matter. Twitter has been wanting to do this for a very long time. This was the perfect catalyst and they're going to be lauded for doing so by the left.
Maybe not directly, but there's no denying that he drives engagement metrics from all sides. Engaging products are stickier, and thus drives product teams intensely to continue doing so.

Of course we've seen intense polarization because of this, but all that aside it's easy to see why a company beholden to shareholders would hesitate for so long.
If it's any consolation, US Capitol Police chief Steve Sund was forced to resign by Congress. Seems like it's not just armchair quarterbacks who were let down by their shitty response.
Security shouldn't be optional.

And this wouldn't fix the issue at all... I bet that 80%+ of users would leave the default post@ submission address.
My email address is of the form firstname@lastname.com, and I got around this issue by creating an alias for sending in Gmail that's firstname+randomstring@lastname.com. As a security measure it's not perfect, but it's not something someone's just going to be able to guess.

That solves the issue for me, but not for most (less tech-savvy) people. I think what Posterous needs is the ability to require confirmation by email when a post is made by email. I get that you can do this by setting your blog to 'anyone can post', but that seems counterintuitive, and most people don't understand how easy it is to spoof emails. As long as the confirmation can be done by email, I don't think it'd be much of an inconvenience.
Please post contact information for bots wanting to be whitelisted. (Either here or in the robots.txt file itself).

For example, our ChangeDetection.com site has a couple hundred users monitoring pages on facebook. (User-Agent: ChangeDetection). We always honor robots.txt so if we are not whitelisted all these monitors will be disabled.

Edit: looks like you already have posted contact info in robots.txt
maybe to you it doesn't matter, but these things can be intensely personal to people. it's still an issue of violating your space (to the layman end user, i know the technical definitions of "your space" are nebulous, im talking about the emotional ones that i think posterous is kind of violating).

and what happens when the idiot who posts the nigerian scam on your blog scams your mother who is reading your blog and assumes it's from you? no big deal? move on with your life? try and be a little imaginative with the things that could be done here...

if it's not a big deal, posterous should make it clear to users what they give up for convenience. again, i really don't think users would make the same choice they are to user posterous if they understood the implication. whether or not it matters to you.

and more importantly, there are a ton of people suggesting pretty viable alternatives that wouldn't make it harder to post and would still allow a lot more security.
Surely the easiest way would be to require you put your password somewhere in the body of the email.

eg:

Hi this is an example blog post
I'm gonna see if this works
ys8uc99p
I'm finding Objective-C to be a powerful addition to C and refreshingly simple compared to C++. What are you comparing it to, and what should I be missing?
So it should be "US company kills 7,635 people on a pro-rata basis."
This is why I love Time Machine
> I am sure at least a few vegans would like to outlaw eating meat, but democracy also works the other way ensuring such extremely unpopular laws never get passed.

I would not be so certain about that one.

Many countries are thinking of outright "meat taxes", health scores (similar to smoking warnings in the desired nudging effect) or extending CO² taxes onto agriculture: meat production causes about 14% of global CO² emissions [1], and outlawing/disincentivizing meat consumption is a very easy, very fast and incredibly effective way of cutting down on CO², methane and dung emissions. Not to mention the indirect emissions from land burning (especially in Brazil) or the societal cost of overconsumption of meat (e.g. obesity and heart issues).

Personally, I'm in the "omnivore" camp but recognize that the way how we deal with meat products has to be massively reformed. We need to cut waste and curb consumption, the sooner the better.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/13/meat-gre...
Not deanonymise, no.

Come up with a way for siteops to block someone and all their sockpuppet accounts, without knowing the underlying identity, and you’ll become a billionaire.

Without that, the only option we have today is deanonymization, which is a terrible option. We ought to do better.
This is aviation engineering where everything needs to be checked and verified multiple times by multiple people because otherwise planes fall out of the sky.
Why is that funny? By definition, as a good business grows it will be worth more. It's not like Twitter has been standing still for 3 years.
I thought the clause in question was for iPhone SDK 4 apps. Since v4 isn't shipping yet, it doesn't apply to any of the apps in the store now.

As for the question of interpreters, I though for the current generation of apps, the issue was with 3rd party interpreters that allow the interpretation of arbitrary code. Code that is embedded in the app at approval time isn't an issue. Isn't this why frotz can only run games that are bundled with the interpreter when it is distributed through the store.
Yeah http://www.reddit.com/r/dailyprogrammer has challenges like this and in the comments people share their solutions. It's a great way to learn a new language and find out some interesting tricks.
> why is it called Perl?

The same guy (Larry Wall) who originally wrote Perl 1 to 5.6 is the one who is writing the spec (though not the implementations) for Perl 6. People let him do it out of respect, even though it's disastrous for Perl 5.
Here's a better reason; speech has value, some less than others, a feedback mechanism allowing the audience to make a judgement on how much value a given piece has is no more evidence for the innate psychopathy of men than a mute button on a TV remote or an install of adblocker is.
Extensive discussion from 3 days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2019665

More extensive discussion from an alternative point-of-view submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2020128

Yet more discussion from an article/submission about what it's really like to do a Ph.D.:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727
I don't think macros are inherently evil - but they certainly facilitate Lovecraftian horrors. I have seen production embedded code where the authors didn't really like C and decided that vaguely Pascal like syntax would be better and did this through macros - probably vaguely influenced by the original Bourne shell sources but with a darker madder twist.
Thank you very much - I think this is a great promotion for you and your customers. No better way to get new users then a free trial.

A little feedback on the presentation - this is strictly IMHO. I started reading the features and was presented with statements like "super-sexy interface" and "Finally, a tool that magically converts visitors into customers" - a little pretentious perhaps. Personally when i read things like calling your own interface super-sexy and magical a tech savvy person like myself may be turned off thinking this tool is for non-tech oriented (that's the message your marketing is sending me by telling people it's magical).

On the main page where you list the features you have a quick 2 minute intro which is fantastic (wish more people did that). One thing that might be improved on is integrating some type of case-study. When i sell software i want to sell a solution, not a tool. Focus part of the features presentation around a case study so at a glance someone like myself can watch the video, see the problem presented and quickly understand how it worked for someone else and how it can work for me too.
PS4 and Switch both have hardware decoders (though neither would be using AV1 in particular due to age). I'm not sure about how it works on PS4 but on Switch games just use NVDEC like a PC with Nvidia hardware would and the functionality is exposed in the SDK. You can use h.264, h.265, VP8, and VP9 (the hardware supports more but it's not exposed).

When Bink was released and the PS2 and Gamecube were on the horizon this kind of thinking was needed. When you get to PS4/Switch you're just running consumer PCs. The exact same Nvidia SoC used in the Switch is actually used by Nvidia for their Shield Android TV boxes whose literal purpose is to play audio/video streams - it's quite capable of doing so.
A 'sneaky suspicion' means it's derived from my slightly-paranoid intuition, not extant facts. We'll see!

(Maybe Gizmodo will get some jailbreak pro to make one of their phones selfidentify as Jonny Ive's, then crank-FaceTime Steve Jobs. Or maybe not.)
Al has higher conductivity than SS. I'd have to crunch numbers to see if it would make that much difference at cell phone frequencies (power budget). At 60 Hz, ACSR has most of the current in the Al not the steel from the skin effect.

SS has the advantage of strength over Al.

Possibly a SS exterior with Al inside.

edit:
I cheated and glanced at the ARRL Handbook (2005) page 20.7 "The strongest wire suitable for antenna service is copperclad steel, also known as copperweld. The copper coating is necessary for RF service because steel is a relatively poor conductor."

Based on that I suspect a better conductor inside the SS or as part of the SS.

Further edit: using google, there are SS Yagi antennas so that is nothing new, not sure about other antenna types at this time. If Apple used SS and made a better antenna (larger?) then it might use less power than a smaller antenna using a better conductor.

last edit: SS whip antennas are also available, such that the material choice probably is not that big of deal as much as the design of the antenna itself.
I guess the meaning of open can have different interpretations . Same difference as in "free speech" and "free beer". Should have clarified that i understand open as in open source, fully open, free to use by everyone for free. Half baked openness is not good enough for internet standards, IMO.
Strange. Last week a transfer took over 48hs across two banks in that list.
I wonder what the specs on the strength of this 'new stainless steel' are. I highly doubt that Apple is now pioneering new innovations in the realm of metallurgy "just to bring you a better iPhone," though their marketing would probably have you believe otherwise.