skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is a good explanation of how nix works at a high level, and I'm excited to see nix getting some really prominent support, but for some reason it never tells you what the point of all of this is, so I think many folks might feel turned off by it. In other words, I don't believe it ever compellingly answers the question that constitutes its title. The word "package" doesn't even appear until near the end of the article! This is probably a second or third article to read about nix rather than the very first thing that exposes you to it.

The point of nix is just to create completely reproducible builds and package management, including support for multiple versions of packages side-by-size with no issues. It's sort of a next-generation package management system that tries to avoid most of the pitfalls that OS package managers have fumbled with up to this point. It's really that simple.

"nix" as a term refers to a system of multiple components that work together to achieve that goal. There's the package manager itself (called Nix), the language that build instructions are written in (also called Nix), an existing ecosystem of predefined packages (called nixpkgs), and an optional Linux distro that uses Nix the package manager as its package manager (called NixOS).
I'm interested in hearing more about this setup. What triggers the IFTTT calls and what do the Lambda calls accomplish?
I appreciate your direct testimony, but as someone who lived in the US in the 1970s it is very clear that the "guns and butter" economics of the time included very strong contributions to inflation through rampant war spending. Much of what ripped the US out of Vietnam was the population suffering as the economy started to melt down.
This scene is directly responsible for convincing me to reproduce. I saw this movie, and less than a week later met some old dumb guy that said he had over 90 grandchildren. I was convinced I needed to do my part to shift the balance of the future toward intelligence.

I now have 3 children, and would love to have many many more.
> "Just files" doesn't quite capture the complexity of the situation to me though.

I think that's the root of the issue.

You seem to be somewhat confused about how Linux executes programs. An executable is just a file on the disk. It might be entirely self-sufficient or it might use libraries. Libraries are just files on the disk too (they end in .so.number where number is a version number). To load the libraries, when it starts a program, Linux first runs another executable called a dynamic linker (usually ld). Where the dynamic linker looks for the libraries files depends of its configuration. Ld will notably look into the paths listed in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable.

All of this has nothing to do with distributions. It's just how Linux works and will always be true. As long as you have all the so your executable need in a place where ld can find them, it will run.

Now, what a package manager does when you install a package is just putting all the files contained within it in the correct location, ensuring you will have installed the necessary shared libraries for the executable you want to run and setting up everything that might need to be setup.

You can manually add executables and so files as much as you like. The only issue you might encounter is using a location which is also used by a package. Depending of the package manager you use, that might either overwrite your modification or make the package installation fail.

While I have never used it, apparently Nix is well behaved and only install things into /nix so that shouldn't be an issue.
We'll all be healthier after Capitalism collapses.
While they make a lot of great points in the article I think there is one that is missed. The 172 is CHEAP! You can pick up a Skyhawk for under $30k. That's a big part of why they are the training vehicle of choice (in addition to the other points they make). This makes it the Model-T of aircraft. It really is the plane for the masses.
GuixSD? Only because Guix was build from Nix.

Frankly I don't think there's anything else like it. I don't know Arch enough to compare, but there's something also similar to Gentoo, except Nix knows that if source + dependencies + architecture + configuration is the same it will pull compiled version from cache, if something changes it will recompile it.

The killer NixOS feature is that it has a single configuration file that's declarative which you can use to describe your OS, so it has something like salt/ansible/chef/puppet built in, and unlike them it's also is truly declarative. For example if you have package installed, to remove it, you just remove it from the list, where in those tools you need to create a state that ensures the package must not be present.

Edit: from other comments I see that you meant that packages in arch are not modified, I guess Nix does follow that and only add patches if it absolutely needs them to make application work correctly, but unlike other distros nix also allows user trivially (ignoring the steep curve to learn nix :) to modify a derivation (for example applying patches, changing dependencies, changing ./configure flags) similarly how you would extend a class in OO language. In any other OS to do such customization, you would need to generate a new package, place it in package repo, and worry about your modified package breaking other parts of the system. NixOS will then recompile that package and use it (if you use caching it will pull from cache)
is 'is node.js dying?' the new 'is php dying?' ?
We still use shadowbanning, but only when an account is new and shows signs of spamming or trolling. When an account has an established history then we tell people we're banning them and why.

Past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The trouble with counterfactual history is that it's very easy to come up with one's own version. What if, for example, Newton's parents never had children? Or what if they never had children, but someone other than Newton invented the same, or better, things? And from there it quickly branches out to things that are combinatorially incomprehensible.

At a macro level, fertility ratio below 2 (much more than 2 at the time, actually, since a lot of children died, but 2 is more self-explanatory) in Newton's England, however, would mean that England as we know it today would not exist, and some other nation that procreates better but perhaps doesn't value math and science as much, would take its place. From there: no computers, no United States, no Internet or Moon landings, different outcomes in several large scale wars. Pretty catastrophic, if you ask me.
Well, Ruby and Julia and scheme, I think?) all have those same colons too, so it's not totally crazy. It's the post- colon that's strange (but Ruby has those too)
Sort of. The biggest difference is that it can be a pseudo-datawarehouse for analysts and data scientists over an object store (Eg s3) without needing to manage a complicated ETL process. AWS Athena goes even further by not needing to provision compute so that queries are run on ephemeral VMs over the object store.

Hive makes a terrible data warehouse no matter how SQL compatible it is.
No, that is the illusion.

The primary thing you need is capital. Money, and lots of it. Then a service and manufacturing economy to support and sustain it.

But the most important ingredient, is to be sovereign. And not get invaded for a hundred years, while you build out your economy and institutions.

The last major war on American soil was the Civil War. You can achieve a lot of momentum, when war and invasion is not happening on your territory.

Basically, don’t be poor. And have a lot of nuclear weapons to F! up your opponents, if they dare attempt to invade you.

If you have all that, then everything else will fall into place.
> Some brains are neurologically misconfigured and prone to chemical depletion or lack receptors for it (ex: serotonin or dopamine). All the pushing through and search for answers, triggers, or source of problems won't solve this.

Do you have proof of any of this or are you just regurgitating the bullshit you've been fed? I've been searching for years and all I can find is that this hypothesis is bullshit without any evidence behind it whatsoever. Even psychiatrists and neurologists know it's bullshit. It doesn't help anyone to pretend like this is true and it can be harmful. Encouraging people to take drugs based on what is essentially a fantasy is likely a huge part of the problem. If I'm wrong, I'd like to see the proof I've been trying to find now for over a decade.
Dependencies can take awhile if you can’t used cached versions of the binaries. Building some Haskell tooling from scratch took ~3 hours on my MBP.
The commenter I quoted specifically suggested money toward funeral expenses. That's the context: a recognition and respect of the value the body parts had to the owner rather than an assertion of entitlement. There isn't some weird perverse incentive in that that's going to carve out an underclass of organ growers.
Not sure it's that hard, what about Σ and 𝚷. Branching conditionals are also easy to represent graphically
That is starting to sound a lot like some sort of arms race.
Show HN: ZmURL – Eventbrite for Zoom
Fully agree. It's one of those things which will have terrible unintended consequences, even if the supposed intent is good. It sure will be a boost to the organ trade.
British Startup May Have Solved Urban EV Charging
I left Reddit over a year ago when I was banned unnecessarily from several subreddits that I had never previously known about. Supposedly that was because of my throwaway comment about a photograph in one particular subreddit. When I complained about that, my complaint was censored.

I walked out the door immediately. And that was after I had been 10 years as a Redditor.
If you're applying idiomatic Nix to modern JS, I wouldn't be surprised - modern JS tends to involve installing thousands of packages by just combining them into a directory, but Nix doesn't want you to edit existing directories. So your dependency graph turns into a build-dependency graph, with each JS package requiring a full build of everything it depends on, and the Nix build system is presumably not optimized for fast turnaround times on five-line JS modules that don't even have a compilation step.

(Personally, I wouldn't try to apply idiomatic Nix to modern JS - I'd apply it to the major components like "my web server" and "my database library" and have "all the JS I depend on" as one big Nix package. That's not really a claim about Nix, I wouldn't try to apply idiomatic, say, Debian packaging to modern JS either. In both cases I'd still get about 90% of the benefit of using Nix/Debian as a delivery mechanism.)

The other thing that could be slow is if you start compiling all your dependencies, including gcc and node.js, from scratch. While there's some security benefit in doing so, the reality is that just about nobody actually does that. You'd want to set things up to use the precompiled packages, or at least set up your own cache server and have compiled binaries you trust but only do it once.
Thanks for your comment! The basis for the feature is that it makes the generated URLs a few characters shorter – empirically, savings are on the order of 20-25 characters. Minor for most, but I don't purport to know what users will do with the tool, or if this length will make a difference.

Under the hood, once encryption is performed, the version number, encrypted data, salt and IV (if randomly-generated), and hint (if given) are JSON-stringified and base64-encoded for storage in the URL fragment. There is a hard-coded default salt and IV if the user chooses not to randomize, which means they don't need to be encoded in the object that is eventually stored in the URL, thus making the generated URL shorter.

Based on your comment, it seems hard-coding an IV and giving the user the ability to disable randomization may unnecessarily make unwitting users vulnerable. Would you recommend I remove the ability for users to disable randomization moving forward? Do you think I should just add a big warning if they try to uncheck the box instead? I'm open to suggestions.

In general, I'm very interested in all recommendations for best-practices, as the tool is under active development, and is a learning opportunity for me.
It might actually be better, as you keep changing focus.
Yeah, I think this is an important question. I think some of it will be inevitable, but I don't think we focus much on "decreasing screen time"... when so many companies (facebook, google, et al) get money from people spending more time on screens (advertising). There's no incentive for corporations to spend less time looking at screens.

The few companies that do promote that -- such as REI... are outdoor companies. Which could lead you to a really pessimistic thought that even the co-op companies are really just profit motivated (I don't believe this, but there is the correlation)
I'd say go for it and release just the source code, no assets. If there's enough people with the time and passion to recreate/replace the assets, they will. If not, no harm done :)
It is pretty big in engineering. Labview or VEE. TLDR: the more complex the program becomes, the worse it is to use.

I used it to easily connect to a piece of lab equipment, reset it, set whatever settings I want, run a test, and then log the output to a file. I could setup a test then walk away and return to data. Doing the tests manually would take many months.

Both have labels as remarks/comments and you can easily put in a switch statement to test new code or use highlighting to see exactly where the program is running albeit slowly.

One of the fun things to do was circle a repetitive task then turn it into a function. A large program requires a large screen to see it all. Widescreens are terrible for it.

After basic settings and availability in libraries, it is better to move to a text language. Visual programming is a quick and dirty solution.
I don't see it replacing (or even much augmenting) professional programming any time soon... My predicted use case for this is mostly with non-programmers. They'll be instructed to write in English what they want to be done, and behind the scenes this will attempt to generate code, execute it, and give the results. A fun demo would be writing "Download the recipe on this webpage (paste link) and order the ingredients from Safeway". If it could generate its own billing and shipping storage to remember indefinitely after getting it from the user, then generate the relevant web scraping / web driving or API code for various websites, that'd be pretty sweet.
Purple+Hybrid+Mattress+$400+Savings
Considering that “difficult to audit” overlaps with: difficult to understand, difficult to deploy, difficult to onboard, and a bunch of other things that are also very important to non-auditors, that seems like an entirely reasonable and informative complaint.

If you hire a financial auditor and their report was basically an nicer version of “‘books‘ were written in pencil on napkins, many food stained, some illegible. Attempting to make sense of them took forever. Fix this shit to meet minimum standards for business accounting, it’s entirely unsuitable for its purpose” that’s be great info, if you didn’t already know it.
> That said, the returns on using this weird technology are really high. The short pitch is something like "zero runtime cost, highly repeatable Docker containers for everything". Of course, the technology works nothing like that, but it really hit some of the big position independence value props of Docker in a way that's lightweight enough to use it for everything.

It simply delivers what docker was promising to deliver.
That’s not explicitly true. The rest of the world trusts the Swiss franc more than the USD so much that they had to take explicit steps to prevent their money from becoming too strong.

Monetary policy is all about balance.
US Corporations do not have the power to 'stand up to China'.

People need to start to understand that when it comes to major international players, over $50B, that are related to state actors - then it's a geopolitical question as much as an economic one.

TikTok is not just a company, it's a strategic arm of the Chinese government.

China 'divides and conquers' and pushes ruthlessly on any and all entities in pursuit of its goals. They coordinate student groups on Western Uni campuses to oversee Chinese students, suppress any ideas or policies in their way. They threaten any politician, and the press from publishing or making statements they're not happy with.

They use the 'carrot' of access to their huge market, but often this is a ruse - as they require foreign companies to hand over IP to local companies, this IP filters into the hands of state-backed competitors and the entrant never has an opportunity. All of this is in blatant contradiction to WTO terms.

The Western companies that have made inroads are ones that have a lot of brand value, think McDonald's or Disney, but even then, China can have leverage: Big Hollywood films are made for global audiences, and China is a big market over which the government censors and controls content. China dictate terms to major Hollywood studios - and said studios comply - or are banned. It's that simple.

"If you do not promote our policies, and portray China a certain way, you do not get access to our market. So here is how you are going to portray us: ..."

Only the US President or the leader of the EU with the backing of the German Chancellor has the hope of applying pressure on China in any serious way. The Europeans won't so it's down to the US president.

Trump is blustering, nationalist, and not quite focused on the right things in 'standing up to China' and I think he might be doing it for some of the wrong reasons, nevertheless, he is doing it, and actually it is working. He has mostly a competent team doing it.

China's tactics have made a lot of talk behind closed doors around the world and even Dems, Europeans - everyone - is actually happy about this.

Sadly, it may be that the next administration may not have the wherewithal to continue to push for better terms because it does require a fairly steadfast and aggressive approach inconsistent with the personal manner of say, a guy like Obama, whom I admire quite a lot, but who I don't think will do what is needed.

Assume that anything you say on Zoom or TikTok could be made available fairly readily to the Chinese government and that they will leverage control of TikTok for whatever reason they want, consistent with their overall geopolitical strategy.
You definitely don’t want a $30k Skyhawk. Flight schools snap up the good ones very quickly, and all you will find at that price are ones with run out engines and 10k hours. A $30k 150/152 though... that’s a good deal.
Like the author, I'm really truly loving Elixir. I recently wrote up some of my experiences with Elixir/Phoenix coming from a Ruby/Rails perspective - https://medium.com/swlh/3-months-with-elixir-phoenix-2810f65....

Curiously, unlike most others here, I'm not completely loving Ecto. I appreciate the philosophy and get changesets, but I'm finding the query syntax clumsy.
Microsoft 'Builds' its data story, in the cloud and at the edge
I'm using mouse gestures and I go totally crazy if I get dropped out of an app because I used the "back" gesture not even thinking about it. That's super annoying and a mayor usability bug, imho.
Exactly! Why would a company do these adjustments when its easy enough to game? Or will there be other checks to keep people honest?

Or, with the additional state taxes (pay in CA and pay where you actually live) not anyways worth the drop in salary?
I've become more persuaded by Modern Monetary Theory (which is more descriptive than prescriptive).

In short, a sovereign currency issuer is not like a household, business, or gov't entity lacking this ability; it need not offset expenditures with income (taxes) to spend. In fact, that's a backward way of thinking of it — gov't spends first, then taxes to remove money supply from the economy. Taxes are tools to contain inflation, reduce concentration of wealth (and the power/influence of select few), and incentivize/decentivize targeted economic activities (eg spur solar power adoption, discourage smoking, etc.).

This site is a great primer on MMT: https://modernmoneybasics.com
The article loads [for me] with javascript disabled.
Hi HN! I started working on ZmURL during quarantine since I was tired of sending around ugly Zoom links that don't provide any context.

Curious to hear what you think :)

---

Funny story: my co-founder Dan and I actually met on Zoom a year ago and we've only met in person once.

A year ago, I was raising money. I met with an investor who liked me but didn't like my startup... He said I should chat with Dan and work with him.

Dan was living in Beijing so we set up a Zoom call and hung out for an hour. I liked him but we decided not to work together.

We stayed in touch and COVID derailed our other plans. So we started ZmURL.
Yeah if you have a minor miscode/footgun in blazor you're really not gonna have a good time. If you have a minor miscode in liveview, OTP's got your back.
Node v14.3.0 lands with REPL previews improvements with autocompletion
3D ggplots with rayshader – Data Junk[i.e.]
Battlefield 2 was the last battlefield game I really enjoyed, after that the scale of the game got a lot smaller it seemed. Other than the kinda clunky gunplay it feels like the high point of the series to me still.
Yeah, but that would honestly be an argument for any large company with leverage getting too much leverage, and this would apply to things like Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. and them using their leverage to control markets in similarly unethical ways.

It feels tiring that any time Microsoft does something good, EEE comes up, but times where Amazon or Google are doing massive damage to our industry or standards for their own benefits it's crickets.
Ironically, the main thing that makes Cessnas such badass planes (at least piston Cessnas -- the company makes jets too) is that they are not badass at all. They are docile and forgiving and practical and reliable and easy to fly. They are the Toyota Camrys of airplanes.
Preprint at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.09661

They found evidence of a cold disk galaxy at z = 4.26 using ALMA observations of [C II].
i am sorry but your old brain is not compatible with our current bodies. unfortunately those old style bodies have fallen out of fashion and we no longer have people trained in their creation.
if only you had decided to freeze your whole body, or at least the torso, as we can replace arms and legs with prosthetics.
I've seen a Model S rolled off the back of a flatbed at a charging station. They ran out 10 miles from the next supercharger. Took them a while to figure out how to get power to it just to open the charging door.
What would you prefer then?
The "Hacienda" referenced in the article is on display (suspended from the ceiling) at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. [0]. It's amazing how many people walk by it everyday without any awareness as to its history.

[0] https://news3lv.com/features/video-vault/video-vault-plane-i...
Source doesn't matter. It's not HN material
Whenever I make any kind of attempt at humor on HN, I get downvoted and told that this isn't the place for jokes but serious discussion. Since the quality of the comments on HN are why I come back every day, I don't disagree.
So... statically compiled executables?

Wasn't that tried long ago and it was determined that the user should be able to choose when to upgrade dependencies, such as if a dependency needs an out-of-band update to work on the localhost OS?
FWIW... I read this article as someone who doesn't know what Nix is. Like no idea at all besides the name sounding familiar. After reading the first few paragraphs I feel I'm not the target audience for the article, which it totally fine, but based on the title of the post, I assumed I was.