skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The famous red books, paper copy Feynman Lectures, are free online: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

Also, there are LOTS more videos:

Robb Memorial Lectures
http://www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8

Feynman full movie: 1996 "Infinity"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcn4pfFslVE

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS8LbL7GIZiAHmR64oluO...

Take The World From Another Point of View
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2DB73589969D47AB

---

And we can rent Feynman's beach house in Baja: http://casitabarranca.com/

Vid list: http://amasci.com/feynman.html
My point was that the same optimizations that made C fast break down when you need to take into account often intricate dance between CPU caches, memory, I/O bus etc. - so that unless you go into cpu-model-specific assembly tweaks just using C might not bring you as much benefit.

Is it possible to get better? yes. Would it count as "normal C"? I would say not really (if we say yes, then CL code on SBCL with huge custom VOPs counts)
I second this option. In defense I did some interesting things. Everything Thorentis said aligns with my experience as well. It isn't perfect, but has unique positives. It is refreshing to work on unique problems that aren't profit driven. It truly changes the dynamic of what you're doing. The pay isn't as good, but it isn't _bad_.

USAjobs often has ambiguous postings unfortunately. This is sometimes intentional. Networking in the defense department as a STEM guy is pretty easy, and whatever first gig you land can take you to something else in a few years. Recently had a coworker who was on our malware analysis team move positions and now works on software for DoD satellites, for example - something more inline with what he wanted to do.

If you want some more background on my experience or you feel like this is something you'd be interested in feel free to pm me.
Unless people get tired of it too early. Which they will.
Some people would definitely prefer not to travel if their potential destination still had major restrictions on foreigners entering. Forcing arriving travelers to quarantine themselves for two weeks in a hotel would automatically cut out most tourists, because relatively few people have that much holiday and would want to budget for two weeks of accommodation where they can’t go anywhere. Even softer measures like forcing travelers to install the local government’s app like in China might be a turnoff.
You could try to calculate some numbers on savings or "wasted hours because the corporate support is slow and wont fix our problems fast enough" to turn their heads around. Another pointer could be that the students could be involved in running some of the systems.

Usually, in situations like yours, turning complaints or proposed solutions into numbers helps a lot.
Would you say CapRover is 'more complicated' or more suited to bigger projects than Dokku? I gave it a good hard look before deciding on Dokku, as my use case was so simple, but wondering whether it'll scale.
Its terrible how the American system thinks about prison's.

Imagine he could do/learn something good in those 10 years, when he was locked away to protect the public (and that really should be the only point for prisons (protect the public))
Comment Commands Redux
Like many people posting here, I think I share quite a bit of your situation and views.

I think the problem is a more fundamental societal one, namely that we have moved to a highly financialized, business-driven economy that is by its very nature trying to turn all aspects of our lives into tradable goods. In this context engineers (and tech workers in general) are more like factory workers than craftsmen (this is a fact that has yet to sink in for may of us).

There are however niches where you can find some of what you're looking for. Starting your own business is of course a valuable route. I think you can also find smaller companies that have more of a craft ethos, where people are driven by the work itself.

Perhaps one thing that may be required is an acceptance that more meaningful/satisfying work might bring fewer financial rewards. Once you become comfortable with that idea, I think many interesting avenues open up.
They're not willing to invest much, but the required hardware is getting cheaper all the time, and the required software has enormous economies of scale - you can spread the development cost across many thousands of restaurants worldwide.
> tiny living spaces in insufferable cities

Where is this coming from? It may be just anecdotal, but "availability of relevant work" is only one of many reasons the people I know choose to live in cities.
The article is about DuckDuckGo
Yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head here. I'd go so far as to say that the language itself is actually better than C (in the sense that it's more intuitive and less error-prone). C has the excuse of age. But the C community has a culture of carefully designing architectures to minimize pain points and bugs, and avoid other pitfalls--and that was true 20 years ago when I started programming and C was a lot closer to as old as JS is now.

As I've said elsewhere, you can write good code in bad ecosystems, and some people are doing amazing things in JS.
And now I get it. That's all the explanation I needed. Thank you :)
I'm getting over being sick so I'me only working occasionally and only for a few hours but I used to work 5 billable hours a day (anything after that was gravy). I probably spent 7-8 hours a day at my office.

I keep a log. If I was working and you called me, I would stop the meter, talk to you and start the meter again when I started working. If you were another client I would record my hours working for them. I have a log for every client. I did not stop the clock for bathroom breaks.
The carceral state in the US is totally out of control. It is entirely common that people are denied human rights in jail/prison, even prior to trial.

Effectively no one holds prisons or guards or medical staff in the US to account for these incredibly common and widespread human rights abuses. The parallels with US policing are clear (as is the systemic racism: the system is working exactly as designed).

It even happens to innocent people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-citizens-ice-20180...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
Universe is deterministic because the known laws of nature are deterministic to our best knowledge. If you disprove our knowledge of the laws of nature, you will disprove determinism.
This stuff makes my head hurt.

I can choose to have beer for breakfast, or I can restrain myself and eat some eggs & toast instead. I have faced this choice numerous times, and I do not choose the same way every time. I can feel that choice dangling in front of me, and know I have the ability to do either one. Sometimes I can't decide, and I flip a coin.

The idea that free will doesn't exist is not a concept most humans beings are ready to even try to think about-- I like to think I possess at least average intelligence, and despite trying for years I cannot make sense of the world while trying to hold that thought in my mind.

There is a lot of stuff we do 'automatically', but a world where my choices are all deterministic simply does not make sense to me and is not useful.
I might be the same as you, except like 3 years ahead. I too felt the exact same way, so I left my cushy job (which paid pretty well) to start my own thing.

3 years later, and still bootstrapped, I'm starting to see why things are the way they are. Not trying to sound too depressing, but at the end of the day, money is what matters, and the status quo is the most optimized form of money-making there is. Profit-seeking trumps everything; even if you create the next PageRank algorithm, in order to have value it still needs to be monetized.

I also realize the whole "everyone else is a conman" thinking is quite wrong. PMs do provide value (of course, some more than others); it's just harder to see as an engineer, since it feels like we're doing all the hard work.

This might go against the grain here, but my advice: change the attitude, unless you want to remain depressed.
>while they laugh all the way to the bank

Uber has been consistently losing money every single year.
Back End Developer
High Availability Load Balancers with Maglev
Really great article and very helpful, but where does the 8x faster for writes come from? I make it 6.2x.
You can find multiple buyers before you write the software, you know - you don't have to have just one person paying you. If it's consumer software, things like Kickstarter or Patreon are how this is often done - if it's b2b, this is how a lot of software development is done anyway. Examples of software successfully funded via crowdfunding include Spine, Magit, and Diaspora - although Spine appears to be closed-source anyway. You can write an MVP, pitch it to potential clients, and write software that provides value to them. That's what I'm doing.
I believe the Burnside quote comes from the preface of his 1897 book:

> It may then be asked why, in a book which professes to leave all applications on one side, a considerable space is devoted to substitution groups; while other particular modes of representation, such as groups of linear transformations, are not even referred to. My answer to this question is that while, in the present state of our knowledge, many results in the pure theory are arrived at most readily by dealing with properties of substitution groups, it would be difficult to find a result that could be most directly obtained by the consideration of groups of linear transformations.
Does anyone else begin to feel like their role as a software developer is to maintain a mental search index of available techniques, languages, libraries, and metadata properties about each of them?

It's becoming so easy to compose software from available open source components, and migrate functionality (like full-text search) to different layers of the stack (and that's fantastic!).

It's just tricky to keep all the requirements and constraints (and implications) in mind when selecting the appropriate libraries :)
PlantUML supports this https://plantuml.com/handwritten

Add this to any diagram to get the effect you want,

skinparam handwritten true
skinparam monochrome true

Demo: https://tinyurl.com/ycdu7owa
Yeah, start your one thing. I’ve never worked a W2 job and I’ve been able to work on interesting problems my entire career.
> but I am pretty sure that macOS users will tell you that they still prefer macOS, even if they are using Firefox, or JetBrains, or Inkscape, etc., yes?

To an extent, most of my software is cross platform and most runs better on Windows but the only real app keeping me on MacOS is TextMate. If I couldn't use that anymore I'd probably just switch fully to windows.

Ported apps are great for extremely complicated things but then there are other parts where there is a lot of UX benefit if the soul of the OS shines through them.
where can we read the other side talking about the future?

i cant remember how long since reading a future-looking piece from a leftist intellectual
Well, that Dell Inspiron ought to have a BIOS/EFI switch to allow you to deactivate the secure boot features, and there are ways to install ubuntu on secure-boot systems using a shim. Failing that, there's now WSL...

But I guess 10 years is a lot of catching up to do!
The Virtual Garage
I love the block diagram of the thing.
> (This is not an unreasonable belief: The concept of "Free Software" guarantees that the student is able to take the software apart to see what makes it tick. That is obviously a very valuable property when learning how things work!)

And something that resonates very well with the basic attitude and culture of academia/research.
The other two sibling comments are probably better, but a few additional remakes anyway.

I think it's very difficult to make money from a Free Software project. It is somewhat possible from a Source Available project, but not easy.

The elephant in the room is Moodle. Everyone is using Moodle. It is GPL3. It is an pragmatic/opinionated project, so you can find people that don't like it or that want some special feature.

Perhaps you want to read about the AGPL licence, it forces people to share the changes in they servers, even if they don't redistribute them. [I prefer Apache or MIT, but it is even more difficult to make money with them unless your project is huge.]

Some people share the [A]GPL version for free, but charge for the same code under a not viral licence. If you accept contributions, you probably need a ask for a CLA (contributor license agreement) so you can change the licence for the payed version. [I really don't like projects with a CLA. They are not free enough for me.]
So I guess Scientific American also joined political bias? Should have expected that, but it's a bit sad.
I'd say the C++ was wrong/unclear.
If you want all the ints in your array to be a certain number, use std::fill.
If you want all their bits to be 1, use something like ~0 in the memset.
I'm in the same boat. I was already fraying at the edges before this all started, but this past month has been brutal.
CVE-2020-13777: Vulnerability in GnuTLS Hiding for 2 Years
PHP is damn fast now, no joke. And with all of the modern features it's actually not so bad to work in.

I'm becoming increasingly puzzled every time I see PHP hate now, especially when I read tired comments like "just use rails". Laravel is arguably as good or even better than rails at this point, and PHP 7+ is definitely light years faster and lighter.

One thing that still sucks is package management / composer.
They would have to be nested to be in the same scope, so yes. But some languages have nested functions that aren't proper closures.

All closures are not anonymous either.

The reason we use different terms is because there are subtle differences that are important to capture.
Officially there is no support for USB boot on Pi 4 yet.

The current supported solution is boot from read only file system on SD card, overlay file system with writes to the USB drive.

The foundation plan to add support back but for now only supported on Pi 3 and earlier.
> Simply based on a single learning instance.

Did not get this part. I have limited sample of two kids, but I would say it takes at least a year before humans understand "cupness"
WooCommerce Hosting Performance Benchmarks
Welcome to my world. Exactly the same age and situation. Lead developer at this point at a large software company.

The positive side in my case is that I get along extremely well with everyone I work with. But other than that, I can't say I'm really happy. Realistically speaking the only thing that keeps me around is my attachment to my coworkers. Absolutely nothing else. Over the years we've developed a really good and efficient workflow and ever since the lockdown, we've had 2 or 3 major releases, one of which was the largest one we have ever done by a long shot. All went textbook.

The industry is what it is, and it is filled with ass lickers who will get on your nerves no matter where you go. The type of people who make demands, won't listen to why they should re-think and then complain that what you have made doesn't serve them, even if it's word for word what they asked for. And when you confront them, it all ends with "Hehe, OK, can you do it like {{this}} now, sorry I'm not a technical person, hehe."

Starting your own business is a lot of dirty work. Almost all people fail, sooner rather than later( see my thoughts here[1] ). You either have to be extremely lucky and have a secure client(s) lined up or rely on VC(which from what I've seen having helped friends with startups is a lot worse than the ass lickers in big corporations).

I'm somewhat torn on your views on academia. For the most part it is irrelevant, unless you really dig into it. But then you end up into an endless rabbit hole of scientific paper references while new ones pop up every day. That is what I mostly do in my spare time (without the involvement of academia, just as a hobby at this point). It's like swimming through an ocean of seaweed.

So at this point I am where I am unless something dramatic changes. Reading papers, experimenting working on personal projects and see where that takes me. For better or worse that's the only advise I can give.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342537
> "The IA is saying to hell with the owned to loaned rato"

What are you referring to? You mean their Emergency pandemic action?

I borrow things form Archive.org and had to wait (same experience as my public library's e-services). They may have blundered by not realizing how precarious their legal position is with copyright law. Where has Archive made inflammatory statements like you suggest?
> I believe users react better to a loader that takes longer for certain tasks like calculating tax returns because they like to think the computer worked hard to get the best result. It’s not always black and white.

This is a concern with creating the impression that you're serving the user, rather than actually serving the user.

> I have had to implement features that are awful for the users, but are required by law to have. Others to protect the business from liability.

This is basically what you said in the previous post, and remains lacking in concrete examples.
> New research suggests that bird ancestors shrank fast, indicating that the diminutive size was an important and advantageous trait, quite possibly an essential component in bird evolution.

This is making the common mistake regarding evolution. Evolution doesn't select for advantageous things, but against disadvantageous things. It's not survival of the fittest, but death of the inadequate.

It seems nitpicky, but it's very important for diversity. If getting larger or smaller doesn't drastically hinder your survivability, then one ends up with a large range of sizes.
90s hacker culture still exists; it's in a few startups, and particularly ones oriented around decentralized systems and payment; maybe data science stuff also. Probably in other places; embedded systems I'm guessing is good, industrial research labs can also be fun.

If you're working in some horrid "make an app/website which does things" grind, of course it is boring. That was only exciting when nobody knew how to do it.
How the Channel Tunnel Changed Europe Forever (2019)
Wow. Please, explain, how writing a book in Libre Office instead of say, Pages, changes some physicists ability to research, development and furthering our understanding of our world.
And no, free software does not give anything to everyone. A very small percentage of the world population could make use of the benifits it being open cource, and even smaller ever will.
Pgsodium: Modern cryptography for PostgreSQL using libsodium
What ever happened to the PHP-FIG? I noticed in the timeline projects kept dropping from it in the past 2 years. It seemed to have a lot of momentum for a while producing PSRs that were very widely adopted.
Show HN: Serpentine – Windows RAT with multiplatform RESTful server
>“Mathematicians basically know everything there is to know about matrices. It’s one of the few subjects of math that’s thoroughly well understood,” said Jared Weinstein of Boston University.

I'm genuinely curious how such a statement can be made. I've recently been wondering about if it were possible to prove that one's theorems are exhaustive about a 'space' of possible theorems in an axiomatic system (or some subset thereof, since I'd assume such a space might be infinite (perhaps)).

How can we know that there aren't some really surprising properties of matrices that we've previously been unaware of? As far as I can see, we can merely make a statement about that it fits well together with other (limited) findings we've made so far?
Once or twice a year I have to peak at the code of a PHP app that was developed by interns more than 10 years ago. No framework was used, max 3 letters variables are the norm, no blank lines and the only comments are from code copy pasted from examples.

These days I would be more inclined to celebrate the death of PHP than its birthday !

However this app isn't GDPR compliant and I have good hope that it will be gone in about a year.
Ecologic.Yes
Digital.No

For me "ecologic" has to do with durability and practicality, not necessarily that the materials are exotic in origin. Some of my best clothes I bought used; if you are going to wear a shirt 100 times you can afford to spend more on it.
Podhero Wants to Be Patreon for Podcasts
Fine. After 20+ years of PHP development I'm going to give it a shot. Will be attempting to migrate from VSCode. Any tips for that transition in particular, or for setting up PHPStorm in general? I have a subscription to Laracasts and plan on watching that series, but I'm not sure if it's outdated. Thanks!
> Philosophy of that sort offers little insight into correctness in formal software development, just as it offers little insight into the study of mathematics.

I disagree. Knowing the limits of what is possible is important, so that we don't waste our time looking for the impossible.
Side note: one excellent film that Roger Ebert didn't review is Life Itself, the documentary about his life that came out right after he died. It's full of joy and heartbreaking at times, but it really solidified his place of most universally relatable movie critic in my mind.
Composer 2 is coming, and so far it’s shaping up to be vastly improved.

Also, many people are still using that ‘fractal of bad design’ article from years ago to bash on PHP, even though a number of the assertions are no longer applicable.
Unleashing an x86 Design Flaw Allowing Universal Privilege Escalation (2015)
Last year, wind in Iowa surpassed coal. And yes gas is the big supplier here, because of all the grain drying mostly.
Customization.Yes

DigitalClothing.No

A bit confused regarding your formatting requirements there... but basically fitment and quality are most important to me and I'm not sure it's in your list. No, I don't know what Digital Clothing is. This is an engineer centric crowd so your responses would probably differ from other channels..
The one thing I was really wishing they'd demonstrate but that I don't think they did was a functional understanding of hidden information, ie. natural scouting and positioning to catch hidden moving units that you've seen glimpses of. I didn't see anything of that in the games, the AI won afaict largely on a superior understanding of economy.
Well its normal that they denied human right's, maybe the most important of it, it's called 'freedom'.

But i know what you mean.

Having private prisons is also a big NoNo i think, its like every single one state service is corporation driven ;)
Yes, you have to click on the border instead of outside. There are other window managers available that don't have that issue.

I often see this sentiment but I guess I don't get it. You are actually seeing a response from the developer about this, that's a good thing! They have repeatedly acknowledged the usability problem in the bug report I found [1], while explaining that the implementation would be difficult.

I might wonder why in Windows I am not able to resize windows with a hotkey+the mouse instead of fumbling for the border to click on. Personally I find that much more of a usability issue. But I would never get some response from a Windows developer about it. I might make a post asking about it on a Microsoft support forum and get some volunteer unqualified Certified Microsoft Helper explaining to me why my use case is invalid, but you would probably never get any real contact with a developer.

Wasn't it only Windows 10 that finally allowed you to scroll inactive windows under the mouse cursor, something that I'm sure worked fine on Xfree86 in the 90's? Using Windows can be pretty tiring too.

[1] https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11808