skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But total monitoring and control over the entire global population has always been the goal for people who have so much money and power it's become meaningless.

This virus is just an excuse to accelerate the release of technology and laws that have slowly been trickling out over the last few decades, the last little push as it were.

It's mostly up to people now, whether they decide to listen and be compelled to give up nearly every freedom and right they have in the name of 'safety', or they push back against it.
You can enable this in GCC on a compilation unit basis with `-fsanitize=signed-integer-overflow`. In combination with `-fsanitize-undefined-trap-on-error`, the checks are quite cheap (on x86, usually just a `jo` to a `ud2` instruction).

(Note that while `-ftrapv` would seem equivalent, I've found it to be less reliable, particularly with compile-time checking.)
Stephen Wolfram: his physics might be completely unproven, but his blog posts stand as conclusive evidence that shameless self-promotion has no upper bound.
Well, at least this one study seems to conclude that surveillance can in fact help: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/04/09/scie...
I seem to have heard that there were other studies concluding similar things, but can't find another one right now.

Even privacy advocates have argued that apps can, if developed well, be useful if developed with privacy in mind. See the link by the CCC or this post by Linus Neumann, who is affiliated with the CCC (only in German, unfortunately): https://linus-neumann.de/2020/03/corona-apps-sinn-und-unsinn...
Tesla’s robotaxi plan is still on for this year
I mean, NY Times shouldn't be taken at face value. Al Jazeera shouldn't be taken at face value. CBC shouldn't be taken at face value. Everybody has bias/interests and I fail to see how the stuff coming from Sixth Tone is any more objectionable.
There are no aliasing differences between uint8_t and char as far as I know.
Smells like teen spirit was unintentionally ironic anyway.
So the car alternative is only 2.5x as much power as a bike, goes 100% the speed of a car, and is air conditioned? That seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.
Web of Things (Wot) Thing Description
Correct -- it would be nice if the glibc maintainers would reconsider their opinion of supporting the optional Annex K functionality. There is definitely user demand for the feature.
Web of Things (Wot) Architecture
New electronic cooling technology to enable miniaturization of quantum computers
But there's no way I'd buy a former rental car - I know how people treat those cars.

Not sure what part of the country you're in, but in my area most rental cars are driven from the airport to a hotel and back and nothing more.

I personally owned a japanese econobox that came off Enterprise after 18 months and I drove it for 100,000 miles. So YMMV (pun intended) but rental cars are usually a great deal for the price. The companies get the car cheap to begin with, they're maintained on schedule, and usually sold off fairly early in their lifetime with low mileage to keep the flow from the factory coming.
No one cares about online protests or petitions, please.

The majority of Germans is against the television protection money. You have to pay this protection money even if you do not own a television, or else you'll be thrown in debtor's prison and your credit score is ruined.

The protection money ruled "constitutional" by the Verfassungsgericht. That is how democracy works.

So, since you are so informed: What should I do? Found my own party, vote AfD? Neither of these is an actual option for me.
I like Taleb and really enjoyed Anti-Fragile and The Black Swan. His personality doesn't bother me too much, but I do think those two books could be 1/3 the size.
What does clean up c mean?
Amazon Is at War with Its Workers
I also love the idea that computation (ie rule/recipe-following) is fundamental to nature/reality, but I don't think it's pure-maths that is the bedrock.

Pure maths (as a tendency, not strictly) focuses on formal systems that are on the consistent end of the spectrum (as those are the ones that can be used to build more maths on top of). Nature probably doesn't (or needn't) have this restriction/tendency! Formally consistent might be higher performing in many cases (more stable over long time-spans, like dna), but it is not the end of the story as to what is ultimately possible in rule-following systems! Any sense of determinism demands this, even if the system makes its own rules as the universe/reality - the ultimate all, with nothing outside of it - must. Whether this fully gives way to a properly random (like an oracle of rand) system at the quantum level is still an open question.

It is possible to expand ones view of nature/ultimate-reality to include other rule-systems (such as including inconsistent or entirely 'complete' systems.) This can have more coverage (completeness) of any particular model, or even be totally incomplete and inconsistent! These 'degenerate' (according to maths) formal systems might sometimes be the ones that happen to work in nature/reality. Once you do this extension, now you're talking about computation, admitting a broader class of rule-following than pure maths. You can argue that the two are equivalent because sure, anything can be translated between them - i'm more talking about tendencies here. The computational universe includes lots of formal systems that are abhorrent or impractical to mathematical understanding, so mathematicians avoid them, but nonetheless they are still rule-following! Nature/evolution probably uses/finds those rules where they are the best performing solution (through its exploration of possibilities).

As to 'optimal end-states', I'm afraid you've lost me there. I gave up teleology (the idea that the universe or nature or evolution have any obvious goals) a long time ago, how could anything like that (high level) feed-in to reality? There is no hint of this in all of science. What self-organises and self-replicates is what persists. This self-support might even reach down into physics!

To me, religion is nearly the opposite to all of this: An explanatory system that says explanation-of-reality='fixed string' with no update method available. Very incomplete (unless ridiculously long, which current examples of religion are not) and inconsistent: The fixed string might assign True and False at once, or neither - to new knowledge that falls outside the original scope of its meaning.

So no, I don't think that this pi-result suggests that religion and science have a commonality here. Pi is awesome (even though very constructible) and we should probably expect to find it [0], especially in places like this (pure QM) that involve geometry.

[0] https://youtu.be/HEfHFsfGXjs
We're running an experiment on this with our small company.

Our core web application consists of a Java backend (40k LOC, plus 12K LOC of tests) and a Typescript/React SPA frontend (12k LOC, zero tests). LOC #s are 'real code' via CLOC. Not a simple CRUD app.

It's fine.

I can't say that this would be fine for everyone. We have a very small team (2 fullstack engineers) with good communication; we keep as much logic as possible in the backend; we have a robust test harness for the backend. Still, it works very well for us. Even without testing the frontend, it is very rare for bugs to hit users.

Our reasoning for skipping frontend tests: Most of the frontend code is visual. Tests can't tell you if the result is aesthetically satisfying, so you have to look at it no matter what. Since the backend diligently enforces data sanity, the frontend can't really get into too much trouble, and a page reload fixes almost anything. Frontend testing seems to be high-effort low-reward.

I don't think this would be possible without Typescript. TSX helps too since the compiler (really the IDE) catches what would otherwise be template errors. Large refactorings are pretty painless.

I would do this again.

I have also reverse engineered about a dozen other company's web applications recently (to automate them), and noticed that there are other app design philosophies that would make this approach difficult. Some teams go with a "smart frontend dumb backend" approach that can produce all sorts of nasty data corruption issues if the frontend screws up. I'm not a fan of this approach but if you take it, I don't think Typescript alone will save you.
Hacker News is more diverse than that. I see plenty of strong opinions on both sides of the argument. It’s similar to comments that claim everyone here is of one political persuasion or another — and usually dang has a list of comments that show otherwise.
ActivityPub isn't the future.

Useful things that are built, brought to market, and meet user needs that may happen to use ActivityPub under the hood are the future.

Knowing what is useful for whom and how to bring it to market in a sustainable manner for the people it's intended for is a super critical element. One that's often overlooked.

Specs are like plumbing pipes. People care about sinks, showers, and stuff like that. The pipe fittings, materials, and sizes enable a lot. But, it's not what the end users tend to care about.
Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, where they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. It was when the numbers were imported into left-to-right scripts that the order of digits was reproduced as-is, but read backwards.
Have you considered it might not be a love of programming you're lost, but other mental health issue?

I mean- burnout, depression, PTSD, ...?

Are there things you're highly passionate about and would want to do instead of software engineering or it's all grey for everything?
What plants can teach us about surviving a pandemic
Another opinion from the other camp - WFH generally sucks. I have much more work to do, everything is less efficient because people have various remote issues, and whole remote connection is yet another thing on top of everything else that can fail and slow things down.

I ain't cheaping out on current quality of life by having massive commute and adding stress, so shaving off those 20 mins each way doesn't mean much to me. Work-life balance is better with clearly-cut 'theatre' for work and life, having commute as a separator.

Oh yes of course team work with remote is inefficient, was before and will be in the future till we wire our brains together. Having a whole team nearby makes everything so much faster, and I don't even go to the topic of different time zones.

The only benefit for me - more time with my baby. But in these super-short bursts till another interruption from work comes, and they do.

Another thing which I haven't seen mentioned much - people are much less active in general, this will without doubt have bad consequences on their long term health (although these will be hard to track precisely). I am trying to motivate myself into weight training at home 2x per week, running 2-3 times per week weather permitting and long walks on the weekend, but its much harder compared to having gym, and I know literally only my parents (whom I motivate myself to do so) that are so active. Everybody took the 'stay on the couch' too literally. But that's another topic and maybe this is very local to folks around me.
Not to be conspiratorial about it, but the conspiracies seem to make more sense to me than the official explanations.
There are regulatory bodies overseeing generic prescription drugs and those still have quality control problems: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/05/12/7222165...
Not to mention, English is highly elastic and seems to have little issue "borrowing" words from other languages that don't have a reasonable translation in English. Schadenfreude is a good example. It's German, few people could tell you the actual direct translation into English, but generally people know what you mean when you say it.
The problem with this oft-used dogmatic argument is that it’s pure claim and no evidence. It’s a specious theory, it sounds great on paper but only comes true once in a blue moon. I happen to work for a company that got stuck with a stockpile after a bubble, a company that actually tried not to get caught up in oversupply, and it was not “socially beneficial”.

Your explicitly stated assumption in your argument above is that you have to be lucky enough to have guessed exactly the right amount to stockpile, which almost never happens in reality, and is pure luck. There is no way to see the future and know the “correct amount” for an unforeseen emergency.

There are multiple ways that stockpiling behavior can back-fire and turn into economic loss, and in reality these actually happen routinely. One is that you stockpile and the need never arises, which is not only economic waste, it’s also externalized environmental waste. Another is too many people stockpiling, and they lose money when sudden demand occurs. A third is over-stockpiling and losing income when demand drops too quickly. And there are more.

It’s a huge and unrealistic assumption to think that we can stockpile the “correct” amounts in advance of a crisis.

You’re also conflating money with well being. “Socially beneficial” is exaggerating the idea of market balance, the benefit you’re talking about is economic benefit, and fails to take into health, safety, or happiness of actual people. This whole theory that the unrestrained market will be optimal depends on having enough time to reach that state, it has never properly considered global disease pandemics. Neither Adam Smith not any economist since him has tried to claim that the free market balance happens instantly or always, nor that it can’t cause economic loss when the conditions for free market prosperity aren’t there.

> When prices for goods during a crisis are astronomical, that indicates that the market did not work effectively in producing stockpiles, either because there was a general lack of awareness that a particular good could see a spike in demand, or because anti-price-gouging laws prevented profit-motivated individuals from acting on their awareness.

I’m with you on the first part... it’s true by definition that a crisis brings demand for things that there was no awareness of. The second part doesn’t make sense, you said prices are astronomical because anti-price-gouging laws are in effect? What do you mean, why would anti-price-gouging laws cause price gouging?
> This is one of those things that sounds good when you're in college, and sounds, well, horrifying is too strong a word, but it will definitely set off the warning bells for anyone that's been programming for a decade or more.

Speak for yourself :) I'm a huge TDD advocate, and I'm personally responsible for making testing a requirement of any dev work in my company. I am well over a decade in experience.

Gary's quote sounds pretty close to my criteria for what to test (my criteria would replace "a lot of details that can't be statically checked" with "meaningful details that can't be statically checked").

The type system cannot replace all testing, but there are certainly places where it can make testing superfluous. Increasingly I strive to make more and more of a codebase like that. It improves confidence in the system, with a significantly faster red-green cycle, and isolates complexity to layers of an application where complexity is expected.

> But this goes beyond code coverage or TDD: firing up the debugger and executing a unit test is the simplest way to add a feature, period. I cannot fathom building and starting our application so that I can hand test every time I change a line of code.

In general, I agree with this, and in general this is my approach to programming. However, and this is a sincere question: do you work on web frontends? In my experience, some aspects of frontend work is absolutely easier to evaluate by simply running it. You may want to have automated tests for certain interactions, but even then as a regression test, as writing the test first is often harder than getting it working first and making sure the test exercises it after.
Isn't safety an issue too? You'd be turned into pizza toppings in a highway speed accident in one of those.

They do show that huge efficiency improvements are possible, but they are not there yet. I feel like there's probably a happy medium: a larger somewhat heavier car with safety features built around active immobilization and advanced materials. It wouldn't be quite as efficient as these, but it would be more efficient than a conventionally built car.

I also must point out that weight and aerodynamics are more significant for efficiency than size in an absolute sense. Aerodynamics matters the most at highway speeds. You can lengthen the vehicle and add a trunk for cargo without losing too much.
Zoom Caught in Cybersecurity Debate
I hadn’t understood the utility of undefined behaviour until reading this, thank you.
But surely actually working from home wouldn't involve taking care of your children all day. When you actually go to work, your children are presumably not sitting at home unattended all day, correct? You either have a spouse who can take care of them, they are in school, or they are in daycare. So working from home shouldn't be any different, and the only reason it is now is because all of those things are closed due to the pandemic.
1. How likely are named constants of any types to be included in C2x? I'm referring to the idea of making register const values be usable in constant expressions.

2. Is there, or was there ever a proposal to make struct types without a tag be structurally typed? This would not break backwards compatibility as far as I can see, and would make these types much more useful as ad-hoc bags of data.
Small example:

struct {size_t size; void *data;} data = get_data();
int hash = hash_data(data);

I believe there was at least one proposal about error handling that more or less relied on the above to be valid semantically.

3. Is there any interest in making the variadic function interface a bit nicer to use?
I would like to bring back an old feature and have an intrinsic to extract a pointer from the variadic parameter list, so that we can iterate over it ourselves (or even index directly).

void *arg_ptr = va_ptr(last);

More out there would be a parameter that would be implicitly passed to a variadic function to indicate the number of arguments.

void variadic(..., va_size count) {

}

variadic(10, 20, 30); // count would be three
We've been discussing a paper on this (http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2466.pdf) at recent meetings and it's been fairly well-received each time, but not adopted for C2x as of yet.
I’ll give this to My Sharona: buried in that song is one of the best guitar solos in pop rock of those years.
That's Stephen Wolfram for you.

He's genuinely smart and genuinely looking into an underexplored branch of theory with tons of upside potential, but he also does... this sort of thing, all the time.
"Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity", emphasis on _limited_.
Scarcity does not mean shortage. It means you do not have infinite of something.
I did not know that, after spending years on HN.

while(1) fork();
Thanks for the AMA

1. Will the Apple's Blocks extension, which allows creation of Closures and Lambda functions, be included in C2X?

2. Are there any plans to improve the _Generic interface (to make it easy to switch on multiple arguements, etc.)?
“indefinitely” is a huge loophole, not a lifetime guarantee. If that word was used by Google at the time, there is no case here.
Huh, it also needed an extra line break before the first line of code. I didn't realize that! I've fixed it now.
Was there something about the sandworms having been deliberately introduced for spice production? The desertification being collateral damage. I think this might come in a later book.

But yes, the planet was maintained as a desert against the wishes of the inhabitants.
He was smart enough to package up a Lisp computer algebra system (CAS) and sell it all over the place.
Casting between the three character types is safe and doesn't violate aliasing rules. In addition, objects of all types can be accessed by lvalues of any of the three character types (though unsigned char is recommended), so there's no problem there either.

I/O functions that take a plain char* are designed to interoperate with char arrays and strings, so passing in unsigned or signed char is a sign that they aren't being used as intended. (Functions that traffic in binary data like fread/fwrite should take void*).
Sounds like a good use of standardization. If there is existing implementation practice, please go ahead and submit a proposal. I would be happy to champion such a proposal if you can't attend in person.
I remember the Wall Street Journal's tablet apps having a layout just like this, so it resembled their broadsheet look. It was a pleasure to read, as clicking on individual stories took you to the full story, still laid out like a newspaper, and not to their website inside of a web wrapper view.

For whatever reason, they changed that and now the app looks like their website, except with more ads and tracking.
I'm in my 50s, and I have struggled to keep commute times to a minimal my entire life. I currently am working for less than I am accustomed to simply because I have a private office and a 20 minute commute (or a reasonable 30 min. bike/scooter ride). A little less money won't kill me, but one more rush-hour commute across that WA-520 bridge just might.

I can't say that my parents differ on this topic. I'll note that your comment was not the easiest to parse, so perhaps I misunderstand you.
The compiler assumes that the loop will alwasy terminate and that assumption is wrong, because in reality there is the possibility that the loop will not terminate, since the hardware WILL overflow.

So it's not the best solution. If we want to make this behaviour for optimizations (that are to me not worthed, giving the risk of potentially critical bugs) we must make that behavior explicit, not implicit: thus is the programmer that has to say to the compiler, I guarantee you that this operation will never overflow, if it does it's my fault.

We can agree that having a number that wraps around is not a particularly good choice. But unless we convince Intel in some way that this is bad and make the CPU trap on an overflow, so we can catch that bug, this is the behaviour that we have because is the behaviour of the hardware.
That's the old problem that those who call themselves, and between them, keynesians ignore the first part of fiscal responsibility on good times.

According to tome better read than me it doesn't help that Keynes ideas floated during his writings so many contradictory ideas can be read and/or inferred from it.
I remember hearing it on the radio when "Ice" was big but neither the style or the voice sounded like Al so I didn't realize people attributed it to him. I guess my long-ago Napster days should lead me to know better though...every crappy radio station parody had his name on it.

Looking it up now I just learned that "Rice" was done by the guy who also does the "Richard Cheese" act.