skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Just admit" that the stuff in the article is UB, because you were going around badgering people to point out the UB, and because your last post demands: "Right now we need to get the UB-ness claims out of the way. Once we agree it's correct in the first place..."

So yes, let's get the UB claims out of the way - but agreeing that it's UB. Not just the flag_ example, but with the LockingPtr example that is the "point" of the article.

> you and everyone else here are trashing it

To be clear, I'm not really "trashing" the article. It's a relic of its time. I am trashing the idea that it's somehow a good introduction to any clever MT technique today.

> by insisting that the only possible way anyone can read that article is a naive verbatim copy-paste of its text from 2001 to 2019...? Why?

I explained it earlier: because the article has too many flaws to be a clean illustration of the technique. It starts with UB, ends with UB, makes wrong assertions about the purpose of volatile, etc.

Again, I agree there might be a glimmer of something here - but this article isn't the way to show it. The reaction you got was expected and fine. I can imagine a different article, written today, without the claims about the purpose of volatile, without the flag example, without the UB of casting away volatile from volatile objects, acknowledging the existence of std::atomic and how this technique complements or replaces it. That could be useful.

I looked at your example, and yes, I see the potential if you want to have an object with a thread-safe and non-threadsafe interface split like that (or really any split: you can overload volatile like that for any type of access control where you can cleanly divide the functions like that). It has the unfortunate side effect that volatile is not for that, and it implicitly makes all your members volatile and hence may pessimize code generation. I guess it doesn't matter that much if all the volatile functions follow the pattern of immediately shelling out to a non-volatile function though.
In real life you can make money by creating a corporation which is not a zero-sum game because it brings value to both the owners and workers of the company and its customers.

What value does the creation of Eve Online bring to its customers, if they're never allowed to play it?
You can apply this logic to all kinds of things though.

Why waste time learning chess when you can join the military?

Why type into a box on Hacker News when you can have conversations with people face-to-face?

Why waste time watching any movie when you can do those kinds of things in real life?

Why even bother with the abstract nonsense of money at all instead of just growing your own food and learning to make things for yourself.

Different people get pleasure from different things and if you're going to judge one it seems weird not to do so evenly.
An hour and a half every day for ten years (if this can be believed) at a deadly monotonous task in a game already known to have a serious addiction problem, in a genre with the same. And I for one don't believe the claim. It's fabulous. Addicts always minimize.
Has your experience led you to develop any innovations?
I always thought the same about pro guitar hero players. They could have been spending all that time learning a real guitar, and making music for real.
Have you read Neil Stephensons fear? Or daemon ( I forget the author)
Honestly, I disagree with your last point. There may be some "pros" who prefer the clitmouse but I consider myself a "pro user" in that I use my laptop(s) every day for work and for personal stuff, and I greatly greatly prefer a quality trackpad. Apple in particular ships laptops with excellent trackpads.

If all you've used is the garbage trackpads that get shipped with most Dell or Lenovo laptops, then sure I can see why a clitmouse would be preferrable, but having used them all I can say that after using my macbook's trackpad I have zero desire to go back to the pointer, and mine is the comically-large one on the touchbar macbook pro. It's enormous, but even so I've never had a spurious click or mouse-movement with this machine, and that's not hyperbole.

If I need reliable pointing for a particular workflow beyond what a trackpad can deliver, I have a bluetooth mouse. Or a desktop computer with a corded mouse. The trackpoint/clitmouse pales in comparison.
I think that would be great, but without getting several famous researchers to serve as editors for each new journal at the subfield level, it’s not going to address the real problem. Citations and impact (real and perceived) are the currency of academia — people publish in Science, Nature, and high-impact-factor Elsevier journals because those are the journals that “everybody reads,” and a new open access venue is going to be written off by many academics (read PhD advisors) as “nobody has heard of it, no one will see it, no one will cite it.” I don’t think this is really true anymore, since we have much better tooling for discovering research, but it’s a very commonly held attitude among older academics.

Without changing this perception at the subfield level, academic publishing isn’t going to change. Citation counting and h-index ranking just plays too large a role in hiring, promotion, tenure, and funding decisions.

What might help is for an established researcher to publish a splashy important result in a new open venue. It doesn’t happen much because publishing Nature-worthy research in “some upstart open access journal” leaves a lot of prestige and fanfare on the table.
There are a number of times I've had to present something, and the "non-VGA" laptop crowd was unable to, for various reasons, but a VGA port will cut the crap and get you an image on screen no matter what. It's wet? Stepped on it? Bent pins? It'll still work, dammit. Maybe your slides will have a blue tint, but you'll get em up there.

This is also the advantage that analog signals have over digital ones: HDMI is basically all-or-nothing (especially when HDCP DRM decides it's doesn't like something), but analog VGA degrades far more gracefully.

At one of the places I used to work, the HDMI-VGA adapters seemed to die surprisingly frequently, and also got very hot even when they worked.
> all projectore, even new [...] do not have HDMI

BS
Funny, to me it just reminds me of a standard laptop from a few years ago. I have a consumer lenovo from a few years back, and it has all those ports except the USB-C.
How Can You Manage Stress and Anger in Your Daily Life Activities
From what I understand it’s a lot of entangled photons showing the behavior that was forced onto their entangled counterparts.

In short:
- Create beam of entangled photons
- Split off half of them
- Pass one half through liquid crystal making them behave funny
- Photograph the ones that where not passed through crystal and, lo and behold, observe the funny behavior
According to this Vox interview with Jenny Schuetz (https://www.vox.com/2019/5/17/18628267/jenny-schuetz-weeds-i...), there are two housing crises: the superstar city crisis of million dollar homes due to exclusionary zoning, and rising rents for low-income households in the rest of the country. According to Kevin Erdmann, the crisis in the rest of the country was caused by federal policies that restricted lending to low-income households, forcing them to rent for more than they would have paid in mortgage (https://www.mercatus.org/tags/housing-affordability-series https://www.amazon.com/Shut-Out-Shortage-Recession-Universit...).

When Kevin Drum looks at national medians, he entirely misses both of these problems.
Or so some random bloke says on a book.

Real life is more complex.

While buying lattes might not keep someone from being rich (as an expense), buying frivolous things, using too much credit (they can't back) and not investing their money on things with a ROI (not just in actual investments: also in self-education, better work tools, and so on) can and does keep many people from getting richer (where richer != rich).
> it can be much more fun in the game than the real life

Why is it more fun?

We have innate motivations to explore, create, trade, communicate. But there's a lot of extra work surrounding it:

Solving a coding problem is fun, but organizing and neatening and testing and documenting is not (as much).

Creating value and trading it for money is fun, but trying to understand international tax law is not (as much).

A government can harness innate productivity by stopping stopping it.
Are you taking about recent VAIO machines? If yes name then.
In California it will never get resolved at a city level since cities are almost all against upzoning. Agreed that state is appropriate place to handle it though (not federal).
You want the rest of us to suffer your nerf-fs too? No.
This even proposes the use of the zero node address in each network or subnet (6.1)
I have a vague hope that the city governments in question will, at some point, stop being awful.

I am willing to admit that this hope might be irrational and wishful thinking.
> If you don't want bots loading your website and scraping it, make an API so that they can easily access the information they want.

Precisely. While scraping competitor sites for pricing info etc is exactly as sleazy as it sounds, I have no qualms about scraping in certain situations. A couple that spring to mind:

- Where the site's UI is so dumb that it doesn't let me do what any reasonable person might naturally want to do (this would be the case in the original article)

- Where it's a govt. site and the data is only trickled out through some 90's era search function. Taxpayers paid for the collection of that data, taxpayers pay for its storage etc - give the taxpayers an API to access it!
Some of the problem is actually at the federal level. That makes it tough for cities to solve it.
Vaccine strategy to enhance CAR-T solid tumor activity
Off topic but do you have a resource for your second paragraph? I find this etymology fascinating!
Having played Eve for the better part of 6 years (2003-2009) I can tell you that it's a lot more fun to read about than to play. In some ways the game is way too close to real life. You typically have to put in a lot of work in-game to support your in-game fun time. PvP combat itself is plenty fun, but there were many times I spent all day (18-20 hours straight) logged in and participating in fleet ops in order to get perhaps 15-20 minutes of actual combat.
This is a terrific piece as well. Thank you!
Ports are good and what Apple does is ridiculous but it is also about which ports.

Nowadays, I tend to miss real Thunderbolt 3 ports on USB-C, better 2 than 1 and with 4 lanes. This is what they totally forgot. So I could connect to an ancient VGA projector but not to a common 2x 4k@60hz display setup? This doesn't make sense.
TADS has been free for as far as i can remember. Perhaps 20 years
Surprising quote: "Several instructors reported that female students like the HtDP curriculum exceptionally well. In a controlled experiment, an htdp-trained instructor taught a conventional AP curriculum and the Scheme curriculum to the same three classes of students. Together the three classes consisted of over 70 students. While all students preferred our approach to programming, the preference among females was a stunning factor of four. An independent evaluator is now investigating this aspect of the project in more depth."

That said, what I really liked about my SICP course at Boston Univeristy in 1987 was the fact I could do all the exercises on our office PC (an 80286), with Emacs as the IDE. Quite heady stuff back in day.
You just said, 'I had a whole bunch of problems', and that's why I believe the standard should change more slowly.

You didn't actually say what those problems were, you didn't provide any evidence that any bugs you hit were as a result of an increased standardization rate.

You're also assuming that somehow spending more time with unstable language features will result in fewer problems, which is something where we know you're wrong. Because we've seen what happens when a longer cycle exists, we know your claim that the compilers will be less buggy is exactly wrong.
It's a bit odd to go solo in Eve and I'd agree that you probably don't get much out of it. The medium to large PvP side of the game includes a lot of planning and communication though which should translate decently into RL for the leaders at least. The main Goon FC of BR- talked about it at Eve Fanfest if you're curious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oz4rzP-CAY
Just want to say that your company is really cool. Are you doing any knowledge graph stuff?
Sounds useful as an emergency power backup — where you could simply store lots of Al rods and worry about returning the oxide byproduct only after power has been restored. This system has a dramatically higher energy density per cost and volume than any secondary batteries, which makes up for any loss of energy in refining Al
> it's a real hacker's port, dammit!

Oh yeah, the i2c interface disguised as DDC is my favorite part. With a few wires, you can interface any i2c eeprom with command-line tools.

But projectors, oh yeah, I hear ya. VGA came out in 1987 and rapidly became ubiquitous. I think the Intel Skylake in 2015 finally shipped without integrated VGA, that's as clear a mark as you'll find for the closing of a chapter.

And the coolest thing is, except for a few weird VGA-on-EGA-connector attempts in the very early years, VGA has always been one single standard connector for the entire 28 years of its existence. And it's not gone, not by a long shot. That decades-long legacy means it's the standard you're going to include if you want your shit to be compatible with as much as possible.

Until my very most recent Thinkpad, I've had VGA the whole time, and got quite accustomed to mocking the portless people (principally Mac folks) when they'd show up without their adapters. "If your machine doesn't have the ports it needs to survive in the world, it is incumbent upon YOU to carry the adapter dongles", I'd sneer at them. "Your vendor invents a new port every few months, I'm not going to stock all those adapters on your behalf."

Welp, the march of time is inexorable, and I'm now the schmuck toting around a Mini-DisplayPort-to-VGA dongle that just takes up space in my bag and I know someday I'm gonna leave it out because I haven't used it in forever. That will therefore be the day I'm faced with a room full of Director-level people I need to impress, and the wrong variant of HDMI-DVI-Thunderport-Nano-MHL-whatever. And I know that damn projector still has a VGA port, just in case.
>As for disabling asserts in the code you ship: That is such a quaint 1980'ies thing to do, and people should have stopped doing it long time ago.

Sqlite makes all its asserts noop in release mode[1].

Chrome disables DCHECK() in release mode[2], and it's used many times[3].

RE2 has debug only checking[4].

In Rust debug mode, signed integer overflow panics, in release mode it wraps[5].

Firefox disables MOZ_ASSERT() in release mode[6], and it's used many times[7].

I doubt Huawei is more modern and less 1980s than all these other projects.

>My money is on Huaweis function doing the check with an assert which was compiled out for deliverable code.

Are you saying it was compiled out because asserts were disabled, or because the compiler could reason about the arguments at every callsite? It seems unlikely to me that the compiler could reason about the arguments at every callsite.

[1] https://www.sqlite.org/assert.html

[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/styl...

[3] https://cs.chromium.org/search/?q=DCHECK%5C(+case:yes&sq=pac...

[4] https://github.com/google/re2/blob/master/util/logging.h

[5] http://huonw.github.io/blog/2016/04/myths-and-legends-about-...

[6] https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mfbt/Assertio...

[7] https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?q=MOZ_ASSERT(...
Maybe much of the US economy is pointless jobs and pointless economic activity, but the system is viscous enough that the inequilibrium isn't readily apparent.
The housing crises that exists in many cities is the direct result of NIMBY bylaws and regulations. So yes, state and federal governments can mitigate these.
why?

It's simple; because it creates happiness to the player.

Why did you type that comment? Maybe because it creates happiness to you in the form of intrinsic reward when your question is answered or you simply become happier when expressing your thoughts. It's all for feeling joy in the end.

If you ask 'why' enough times to anything, you'll ultimately reach the conclusion that there no real deeper meaning to life so might as well live it in a happy way while you're here.
Talk from the author: https://www.netdevconf.org/0x13/session.html?talk-ipv4-unica...
I don't understand how that relates. The international phonetic alphabet is pretty widely used in its niche. Read any decent article about phonetics, phonology, historical linguistics, and you'll see it.
Why are you typing on HN when you could be doing a non zero sum activity?
For the record, some of the very good Guitar Hero players (e.g. Acai) are rather competent with an actual guitar.

But as an active GH and regular guitar player, comparing it to an actual guitar isn't fair. I enjoy playing actual guitar as an exercise in creativity. I play GH to enjoy music more interactively rather than creatively.
I mean, if it's that or reality television....
I appreciate that, it's encouraging to hear. But the cost has proven to be more than the current market will bare. Or maybe we just haven't figured out how to ask people for money the right way, but attempts have been made. As one would expect, subscriptions go down every time the price goes up. And it's very hard to get people to pay for digital-only subscriptions at all, even with metering, paywalls or friendly suggestions to subscribe - people are used to getting information online for free, and there is a surplus of free commodity information to be had.

My paper tried having a separate site for subscribers with very few ads (an occasional shallow sponsor banner or sidebar spot with no junk ads), a clean, print-inspired design and a focus on hard news. We tried a paywall and then a meter (3 to 5 articles before paywall). Print subscribers had free access. We launched that in 2013 and iterated on it until it was deemed a failure and abandoned early this year. During that time we maintained a free, ad-supported site as well, because we couldn't afford to lose that revenue. That site continued to thrive with mostly wire/commodity content and "stubbed" versions of our bylined work (basically teasers) encouraging people to subscribe for the good stuff.

It's not about big profits these days, it's about keeping the lights on, the presses running and hopefully having enough left to invest in the future. Margins are tiny if they exist. The fat has been cut - optimizations have been optimized, consultants have been consulted. We've all been through rounds of layoffs, buyouts, hiring freezes, salary freezes, reorganizations, consolidations, etc. Our goal is to keep our staff the size it is now, which is less than half the size it was in 2006. The big conglomerates are getting by on economies of scale (which comes with its own tradeoffs - a shared copy desk may sound ok until you realize knowledge of a place is pretty relevant to accuracy for stuff like which neighborhood or part of town something happened in, or when the web team is maintaining 50+ sites so everyone needs to have the same templates/CMS and your editorial objectives/concerns might not be a priority or worth adding complexity to the system).

Honestly I don't see how the publicly traded operations can be successful long term - they are serving too many masters, the product is suffering and diminishing returns are inevitable. Investigative journalism is magnitudes more expensive than the low hanging fruit, so when your objective is profit over mission and you're squeezing pennies, something's got to give. But it's not just profit-focused papers struggling. Those of us who have the luxury of some budgetary flexibility have, for the most part, been profit neutral or running at a deficit for upwards of ten years; we've maxed out our revenue (and it's declining) so our only option is to cut costs. We're so lean at this point that anything else we cut is to the detriment of our product (see: chum). I'm not sure the way forward but I think our best bet for a sustainable future is non-profit, or in some instances private ownership by benevolent patrons/ civic-minded companies.
So techcrunch still runs one sided articles about companies that are basically glorified advertisements. They haven't changed after all these years.

They did not dwell on the biggest difference between aluminum air and lithium batteries -- that the aluminum air ones are not actually rechargable. Whenever you run out of batteries you have to send each used battery back to the factory to be re-manufactured and get a new one.

If you want to really compare these to lithium batteries, then you should compare the energy needed to re-manufacture a new aluminum air battery compared to the energy needed to merely recharge a lithium battery. I bet that the al-air battery will end up at least ten times more energy intensive. (Manufacturing aluminum is a very energy intensive process). And of course you also have to worry about shipping heavy batteries back and forth between the factory and multiple recharge centers. Whereas with lithium ion you are only "shipping" electrons over wires.

Relying on single use battery for ordinary transportation is just crazy extravagance.
Incrementalizing RASA's Open-Source Natural Language Understanding Pipeline
Effort in real life is often dull and has no effect on your outcomes. Video games have objective, measurable progress. If you want to be a high status individual, it’s relatively clear what you have to do.
Tellya what, on my old Toughbook I had done a shit-ton of modding, and when I removed the 56k modem, I repurposed the RJ11 jack on the side to bring out an internal (TTL-level) serial port from the CDPD module connector. With some inline resistors to current-limit any stupidity I might get myself into.

Then in my bag, I carried an RJ11-to-female-headers cable, and a handful of jumper wires of various genders and a handful of minigrabber clips. And a butane-powered soldering iron, because you never know.

It was no Novena, for sure, but just having a TTL-level serial port made that a hell of a hacking machine. This was in the heyday of the WRT54G and similar, and I can't count the number of console ports I invaded with no more hardware than a wisp of wire.
Sadly, you are right. SICP has vanished from most introductory courses. CTM a fantastic sequel, more oriented towards formal semantics, has never really made it into mainstream.

A central topic in CS studies should be formal system semantics. These days, students only get some computability and complexity notions. Usually embedded in an algorithms course. At that's it.

Which is sad. You can get a lot of insights into CS, and Software Engineering as true engineering, by going through some basic semantics notions. Take a theorem prover, and teach students how to model different computation systems and verify some properties on them.

If time allows, expand into more efficient but less general approaches like abstract interpretation, static analysis, model checking and type/effect systems.

You don't need a ton of background. Some beautiful texts cover these with just FOPL [1,2].

[1] http://www.concrete-semantics.org/

[2] http://adam.chlipala.net/frap/
My kingdom for the VGA port having an input mode!

A friend of mine has built a little raspberry-pi-laptop with an internal HDMI switch and a USB device-sharing gizmo, so he can use it as a portable KVM for sysadmin tasks. I wish that was more common!