skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have ample room to define the hardware you want to see, though. [0] Setting bytes in a buffer isn't some ultimate graphics abstraction: it's just one way to express it at a low level, and only capable of drawing anything of interest in the sense that a Turing Machine can compute anything that can be expressed digitally. You're gonna crave higher level concepts really quickly. And going higher level does come with its own limits, but that's always been the case. Every sufficiently complex production graphics renderer will eventually develop some kind of hybrid approach to the data representation while achieving the necessary flexibility: Simply define line segment drawing, and boom, suddenly you have a vector-to-raster pipeline. Or, maybe you have a sprite all laid out perfectly for fast memory copies. But then you have to clip it against the screen bounds, add a mask so that it can overdraw, and so on...and so you end up carrying geometry and color data around too. And if you desire to do something fancy like scale and rotate it, you will probably define it not in terms of bytes but in terms of linear algebra, so now you have a requirement for some matrix math.

And the only way in which we're more limited is when we start talking about distributing the work, creating products. Then we start saying, "well, that API doesn't let me dip into the hardware to create the abstraction I need." But that's because we moved the goalposts from "it can run on a computer" to "it can run on many people's computers, in many different contexts." And back in the day that really was never a guaranteed thing. There were stark differences between platforms, and many ports amounted to remakes.

So, then, does it matter? Does "minimalism" in programming even functionally exist, given our unsatiable appetite for dependencies?

[0] https://prog21.dadgum.com/66.html
You're not breaking any contracts or laws, but posting a clone of a previously discussed project with ads tacked on by a third party is worthless spam. I flagged the link and I suggest others do the same.

Not the first spam, one of which was even titled Show HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ent101
I have no chips in the game, but the author does state:

> I’ve been using C since about 1993, and C++ since 2002..

> ..I later put a lot of energy into talking other teams at X into using C++, rather than straight C, for their firmware.

So a charitable reading of the flawed phrase "C/C++" would be C and C++, and the author clearly knows both well to back up his assertions.

All in all, I found the title a fair statement to make, he does offer plenty of reasons and even alternatives.
Ordeals [pdf]
From[1]: "For the second question, we found a marginal effect with men being more open to the idea of having sex robots (36 men in favor vs. 21 against) as a result of filling out the survey, while women being more against it (19 women in favor vs. 24 against)"

Or from[2]:"The only specific robot type with significant effects was sex robots: men (Mdn=3) reported them as being significantly more useful (women, Mdn=4), and men (Mdn=5) were also more willing to acquire a sex robot (women, Mdn=5)."

But both of these are user/owner-based perspectives on sex robots, rather than directly answering "How do you feel about competing with robots in the sexual marketplace?"

However, [3] points out that "Women compete by enhancing physical appearance and denigrating rivals’ reputations." [emphasis mine]. It stands to reason that women would continue to denigrate sexual competitors, even if those competitors are artificial constructs.

[1]https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/scheutzarnold16hri.pdf

[2]http://hci.cs.umanitoba.ca/assets/publication_files/beyond_p...

[3]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016748701...
Google Fixes White Screen Problem in Chrome, Admins Furious
Seems like circular reasoning to say that the things that can be copyrighted are the things that we have agreed can be copyrighted. Seems like if the courts decide that APIs are copyrightable then you would be fine with it since it would be part of that case law.

There was a time when software didn’t have copyright protection. Somebody had to make the first move.
How to Cut U.S. Carbon Pollution by Nearly 40 Percent in 10 Years
App.net, the ambitious project to build a better Twitter, is finally dead (2017)
It's pretty fast to work with a pixel framebuffer and just blit it to the screen with GDI, DirectX, OpenGL, or something. You might not be able to do 1920x1200 at 60fps but you can do something smaller and stretch it to fullscreen. I wrote a minimal framebuffer library for doing this, because I just wanted to work with pixels: https://github.com/samizzo/pixie

I used it for the Windows port of an MS-DOS demo I wrote recently: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=83648
I had the opportunity to play a very small part in a previous project of Ryan’s. He’s a great person and I’m incredibly happy to see the success he’s had.

It’s encouraging to hear stories like this — you don’t know how any particular side project (hobby) might do, but the right product at the right time can be what makes all the difference. And you don’t need to have VC money and tens or hundreds of developers working on something to bring genuine value to people.
> "We are confident the Supreme Court will ... reject Google’s continuing efforts to avoid responsibility for copying Oracle’s innovations."

Serious question: which part of Oracle buying Java from Sun was innovative?
I’d like to see city design which is cost optimized around travel time. Let’s say that you are building a city such that you want everyone to be able to get to the center 10% within 30min during rush hour. What is the cheapest solution (for housing as well as transportation) For a city of 1M, 5M, 10M, 50M?
I thought the same thing, this sounds like the CEOs approach is to cover up the issues rather than work on addressing them, probably one of the worst things you can do honestly and he now has the issue to solve of making sure the right information is communicated effectively without misinterpretation.

It sounds like they might even need more transparency rather than less of it. If some of the conversations were being leaked, well why not just open it up?
> You seem to be the revisionist. Implying that people of colour that were brought at the company changed the culture for the worse because this is what the media wanted. Implying that politics came in only because they tried to bring diversity in the workplace.

Yes, when they stopped caring about engineering skills and starting caring about diversity checkboxes, their overall engineering capabilities declined. Google has done relatively little of note over the last 5 years given their size, and part of it is that they have an incompetence cancer and engineering teams cannot trust other teams (or even coworkers in larger teams).

Do you realize how harmful it is to an organization when you can’t tell if a coworker you are depending on is competent or if they were hired because of their genes?

> This was political from day 1, remember their stand on China?

Which stand? Because they flip-flop all of the time.
Super pumped to see the fate of modern computing decided by a bunch octogenarians who think "the blue E" is the internet.
That would be my concern for this business. It'll disappear instantly when they do (and it's got to be a when, right?) but he's getting good value for moving quickly. Or maybe they get acquired.
I love you guys are giggling about what’s written on the company shuttle while everyone else is giggling that company shuttles are a thing in SV.
I cannot stress enough that the author, David Graeber, is a professor of anthropology.
please dear god just copy paste alsup's ruling. either his first saying you can't copyright it, or his second that clean room interface is fair use.
This case is more nuanced than that. Google is not copying the Java API for interoperability with existing Java programs — they’re copying the Java API to provide a familiar environment for Java developers. I agree the former ought to be fair use but the latter I’m less sure of.
i don't have anything that fits that criteria specifically but you might be interested in philip mirowski's book on the social history of neoliberal thought:

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=16D0875D5BCCD74581E...
It's true that Google doesn't need creative all stars. It needs line workers, and there's no way its culture of whimsical creativity could have survived expanding so much and so quickly.

Your point about emotions is also good. Here is another way to put it.

The issue IMO is that they told people they were changing the world and by making information universally available etc etc. The people who went to work for them early really believed it and those people seeded their culture.

The people who just wanted to make a bunch of money went into other fields (like Wall Street or law). Those people also talk about politics and undoubtedly have political activists. But the politics of someone who just wants to make a ton of money are aligned with a company whose stated goal is to just make a ton of money.

This political alignment doesn't happen for free at Google. And since they seeded their culture with people who cared about improving the world, they have a higher than average rate of influencial employees who don't want to make money in traditionally "dirty" fields like arms dealing and private prisons.

Google has to solve this problem because their cloud division can't survive if they can't take government contracts. I see no way of solving it except that they just have to kill the old culture while attempting to minimize attrition.
Google throws away obscene amounts of money on non-adtech things. Some of those are pretty interesting and useful for humanity.

You can say, well, those don't count, because Google isn't making money from them! But if you take that route, you also have to exclude all the startups working on "interesting" problems that don't and won't make money. You're left with a very small set of companies. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the null set.

I'd say a fair assessment is a random team at Google is as likely to be doing something interesting and beneficial as a team at a random startup (which is to say, unlikely but possible). At Google, though, you're going to have both better average financial outcomes and lower risk.
Glasses and ID together.
Car keys on top of work items like laptop and badge.
White board next to front door with dates and reminders and mail to drop off.
Arrange things like you would for a Sims character.
It is truly remarkable - Amazon appears to want to track everything about their operation _except_ inventory provenance.
> It takes a non-trivial amount of extra time and work to do that though, especially on Amazon.

Probably the easiest/fastest way is to just default to brands that are known for enforcing supply chain standards, which mostly won't be available on Amazon anyway.
I am very militant about my lunchtime, and view eating a sandwich in front of a screen as a form of peasantry.

I often shoo away people with "this is a human right"
> If you only hire people from the same political pool, for example.

That’s not possible. In fact, one of the best ways to stoke internal political fires is to make the mistake of convincing those holding the majority political viewpoint that they represent the viewpoint of the whole company.
Some of the most technically mundane projects I’ve worked on have been the most
exciting simply because the impact it would have on the people who would use it. Oh and I was talking to those users to get a good handle on what they needed and how it would help.
Over 16 years I've worked at only four companies, but one of them was Google, and it was honestly my least favorite.

Creature comforts: I have an actual cubicle with >2x the space. Excellent meals are still provided, but now lines are <1 min. I can always find a parking space. I can always find a bathroom stall.

Engineering culture: No more promo or perf review nonsense. There's none of the internal competition / pressure that I felt every day at Google. The org and leadership has vastly less churn. The place is dead at 5:15pm. And the people I work with are incredibly smart.

In terms of company: my new employer is not creepy. My grandmother understands what I work on.

Do follow your heart, but I'm so happy I left.
Well, to be fair, my claim was that it was the fastest in the world that I'm aware of, which is a much weaker statement. :)

The random UTF-8 in the benchmark was generated from the code in Daniel Lemire's fastvalidate-utf-8 repository, specifically this code: https://github.com/lemire/fastvalidate-utf-8/blob/ed53c0c64b...

Looking closer at it, I think that the distribution of random UTF-8 is not as uniform as it should be: it generates one byte first, and then generates continuation bytes depending on the value of that byte. Which means that half the code points will just be ASCII.

But I think this doesn't matter very much for benchmarking, at least for the mostly-branchless SIMD algorithms like mine. For each vector of input bytes, there's three branches that can get taken: the early exit for ASCII-only, and two branches that exit the loop due to validation failures, which don't really matter for benchmarking. Even though the distribution of code points will be roughly half ASCII, for a 32-byte AVX2 vector, the probability of a pure ASCII vector is something less than 2^-32 (since non-ASCII initial bytes translate into more than one byte of output, and the probability of 32 ASCII code points in a row is 2^-32, the probability of 32 bytes in a row is less, by an amount I'd rather not try to calculate). So for this particular benchmark, random UTF-8 should be roughly equivalent to "no ASCII". To verify, I disabled generating ASCII in the linked code, and the numbers came out pretty much identical. If anything, even more ASCII bytes would be a more interesting test, since that would make the quick-ASCII branch less predictable. If you know of any good UTF-8 corpora for common use cases, I'd be happy to benchmark them.

Given that different sets of "random UTF-8 bytes" generated with this method will virtually always follow the same path, the exact distribution doesn't really matter when measuring cycles/byte. Input that is purely 2-byte code points will be faster in terms of cycles/code point than purely 4-byte input, but that's mostly a property of UTF-8 being variable length.

I doubt there's much speed to be gained by adding any sort of adaptive behavior beyond the ASCII check. Generally these days you want as few branches as you can manage, and this algorithm has only one that matters.
I don't think that's FUD at all. One of the great things about open source is that there's room for people to use the free version and also a market for people who want to pay for something that's hosted or supported. Those are just normal aspects of software use in businesses of different sizes, and pretty much the reason Red Hat exists as a company.
1) Surely you can see the difference between topics? Politics are not relevant to work. Office policies are. You can discuss and protest the latter if you want, but not the former. I'm sure you don't discuss porn habits and drug usage with your coworkers, do you? But of course it's fine to discuss working from home or new laptops. There is no paradox here.

2) I would prefer any feedback and protests be in private when are relevant to the company. You don't make a fuss and nobody else does either, so we can all work in peace and quiet. Most companies implement these rules for the sake of everyone.

3) "unless you're clear about what makes something political." This is exceedingly clear for the vast majority of people, except the activists who are making the fuss.
I don't understand what you mean. I'm definitely not saying that "garden-variety, oppositional politics at work is how you can change "political and power dynamics" most effectively."

The type of politics I want in the workplace is the politics of building worker power and fomenting radical labor unrest.
How is treating people equally "not even close" to complying with those laws? I feel like I'm misreading to your comment, but it seems like treating people equally is exactly the point of those laws.
Honestly, I have a strong interest in US, Chinese, European, and now Russian politics, and how they relate to the future of the humanity and all life on earth. It is clear that most real innovation happens much more quickly and decisively if centralized under a government that decides to spend a lot of money on research, so those are discussions and reading materials that I have to find on places like reddit. Ultimately, many of the decisions and things occurring today, while political, have deep personal philosophical roots. Discussions in particular spaces regarding that simply can't happen here due to the rules; rules that differ on different subreddits and for each community I agree with.

Reddit is the best place to find those, IMO.
It's not circular reasoning. The flow is clear: the Constitution gives Congress the power to make copyright law, Congress passed laws doing so, and the courts work out the details at the margins for stuff Congress didn't make explicit. Software is very much explicitly mentioned by the copyright laws that have been passed by Congress, so there's no reasonable doubt about the legal foundation there. API copyright isn't explicitly supported by statutory law, so for the courts to affirm API copyright on their own, they need to provide a convincing derivation of its existence as implicitly covered by existing statute. I doubt they can do so, and they obviously cannot do so without overturning a lot of previous precedent.

And all of the above is about the legal, technical questions about what the law is. The public policy question of what the law should be is a different matter entirely, and opinions about that generally should be addressed to Congress, not the Supreme Court.
I was actually surprised the WP even wrote this much. I read the title and saw it was a WP article and was immediately intrigued--not so much by the article contents but how the journalism would play out given the tight relationship.

To me, it almost feels like damage control and saving face with all the given FTC investigations on current market monopolies.
Ever heard of J++?
seriously with so many employees, nothing else would have sense imho
You're seeing folks with a certain persuasion downvoted because frankly, there is a right answer here, and it's astounding that people would undermine their own profession.

If Oracle wins, software engineering will be seriously hampered. And that's not hyperbole. If you are on Oracle's side you directly jeopardize the livelihoods of most of the contributors of this board. So not only am I not surprised by the downvotes, I think they're appropriate.
As a contractor, I've been paid via Bill.com it was very easy to collect and send money. (not like I had a choice in the platform)
It’s rather conceited to assume the entire workforce shares your opinions of which fields are ethically questionable.
Nobody might believe that such a thing is infringing but there are plenty of people who are mad that a competitor just copies and pastes their API. Smartcar was such a case that made it to HN.

I really do think the determination for this case ought to be if you copy an API to facilitate interaction with existing software then you should be in the clear. If you do the same because it’s easier than coming up with your own then I think it should be infringement.
That makes sense, do you have any annual spikes too? Like Uber has Halloween, which I wouldn’t have guessed as being the worst.
Agreed. It’s likely OP’s self diagnosis is wrong as well, since there’s no reason looking at a monitor should lead to eyesight deterioration. I would throw out as a general caveat to be mindful of one’s screen brightness. But this sounds like way past “time to see a real doctor” time.
Moderation transparency is the building block to what comes next: mod elections. That’s the one piece still in the works, after that is done, I’m going to consider it stable.
I'd say the first is always better than the second, provided the DoA..DoC aren't sharing data via global variables.

The reasoning isn't so bad. Complexity is a function of length and communication. Complexity is the enemy. When you optimise for speed, the other side of the equation is always complexity. Or: if you can decrease complexity and increase speed it's always a win.

Spitting code up in your example up makes it obvious the steps are utterly independent. In fact if there are go global variables those steps can be done in any order - or indeed in parallel. Since splitting it up makes that fact self evident whereas to learn it before you had to read the code, it has reduced complexity.

But of course you almost never split it up as you have done, because there is always a tradeoff between function length and communication. Reduce one you almost always increase the other.

Worse, communication is a multi-faceted beast, so measuring its contribution to complexity is hard. Communicating by passing parameters to pure functions increases complex less that communicating by global variables for instance. And can't check communication complexity using code length - if you pass a single value "a" that is in fact just a copy of the local variables, you've achieved nothing! Using length as a measure for complexity is equally fraught. If DoA() is a single like of code, I doubt anybody would say you've improved things much. But if DoA() was, unlike your illustration, lines intermixed it lines from DoB() and DoC(), then you've made a huge impact on it.

Put it all together and there is rarely a a simple answer to the "should I split code" question. The only time there is an unambiguous "yes" when when you reduce both code length and communication.
(fyi I really appreciate this thread of discussion, it's quite interesting)

To your first point, this is only true if you're forced to participate. We have workplace social events, I sometimes choose not to participate. We have political arguments, I often disagree with the majority in those conversations. I simply don't engage when I'm not up for a debate. It's yet to be an issue. I'd agree that forcing people to express their political views is unreasonable, but that also isn't a position I've seen expressed except as a Boogeyman.

To your second point, if your values are independent of the current political climate, you need to be able to discuss how your actions align with your values. If you're working in political spaces, this necessitates discussion of political issues. To be concrete, if your values are "don't be evil", you need to be willing to have the discussion on whether or not working with the Chinese government on a censored search tool is evil. This is a really complex question (and I use this example because I've heard great arguments in both directions), but if you censor political discussion, the organization can't be held accountable, because no one is allowed to ask.

To your third point, I'm in agreement with your specific example, but asking a question about improving the healthcare policy at an all hands on HR issues would be warranted. Similarly, asking about access to gender neutral restrooms would be warranted even if it's political to some people.

To your last bit, I'm not saying that you can't ban certain things for certain reasons. As an example, banning discrimination is okay, even though some discrimination might be political.

In essence, I'm of the opinion that if you hold a belief strongly enough to ban dissent, you should be forthright about the belief. If your want to ban Republicans, or ban people who openly identify as trans (both of which are legal in various US jurisdictions), at least have the decency so say so and not hide behind banning "political discussion" or "political activism".