skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All of my friends who work in crypto loathe PGP. None of them mention the implementation as their primary area of concern. Some of them mention the implementation as an unsurprising sequela to the kitchen sink of “capabilities” PGP attempts to cover. It has, by design, a nearly fractal surface area for users to compromise their security and for developers to make subtle implementation errors.
Do we ever say, for the code we write, that no such test exists for it? Why is this different for the jobs we hire for? What is this ineffable thing that can't be tested for?
I think you mean fat pointer. And yea, that’s nice for people that don’t care their 4bit array has 64bits of native type reserved... I think other people would care.

So, I go back to the idea that it seems unlikely this would ever be an official C change.
Today they update everything until the end of life. Google has made no announcement about extending life with only browser updates - that would be great but I'd be surprised. They could just use this change to make faster updates by separating the browser and OS, that's the obvious thing.

It would be really great for google to extend support and make the browser updateable later - the browser must be the vast majority of attacks. I think they have to keep old hardware around and they want to use more power, it's hard to keep things working on weaker, older systems.

My guess is google doesn't add chrome-only updates to existing end-of-lifed units, it will only be for new ones. But I hope I'm wrong.
On the other side, those people you want to see in person all the time might not be enjoying that.
I quickly realized variations of:

│ │
└--┤
│

Weren't going to work so I switched to the style in the font:

╱│
∠--┼
│

And it really liked to give 7, 6, or 2 if I went in the left,upRight,down pattern.

I think I found out the trick though: if you make a sharp 4 like the font you get random results but if you just make smooth loop of it (almost looks like a tilted roller coaster) it gets it every time.
I'm new to entrepreneurship. Well, sorta. I'm a physician by training. I know how to build up a clinical practice from nothing based on outcomes and patient satisfaction, reputation and referrals.

This whole new world of digital marketing, backlinks, B2B/B2C marketplaces, SaaS, SEO optimization, churn, etc. is a brand new language to me. It's illuminating and humbling.

Healthcare is incredibly, horribly inefficient. At nearly all levels. There are so many issues and gross inefficiencies that have been in place since the 1960s and 1970s.

I've been involved in telemedicine for several years now. Most of my friends/colleagues come to me when they're looking for assistance finding telemedicine jobs or reputable companies to work for. I started a website to help facilitate that process more efficiently without taking too much of my time. Also, I wanted to take 0% of any sort of recruiting fee from healthcare providers.

Despite having many physicians and colleagues that I can refer to any number of telemedicine companies, I can't quite turn this into a self-sustaining business model. My roots run deep on the physician side, but trying to convince a reputable telemedicine company to hire us to find their physicians has been a far more difficult sell. My successes are sporadic at best with only 2 companies hiring us in 6 months. There have been a few "pill mills" of ill-repute looking to hire a few people, but I would like to make sure our providers are protecting their licenses.

I've tried google ads to get us more traction and attention and it was great for as long as I ran the ads but died as soon as we stopped running them. I can't seem to get any organic traffic or traction.

It's a service that I think is needed and one that I know I can do well.

Help?
Google talked about Piper (its home-built Perforce replacement) in 2015. See:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W71BTkUbdqE

- https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...
Heh. Tell them that their field should be moved to the theology department.
> honestly even mentioning statistics around a social issue is risky

That illustrates that in america, mentionning truth instead of ideology is risky.
It completely depends on what your company does and how it does it. My past jobs never did algo interviews because we don't do algo work. It's certainly relevant to ask CS topics for a job that will require you to apply CS topics. Short answer, ask things that are relevant to the job function. Both in terms of core competencies, but also personality, teamwork and communication.
It's almost as if they are saying that their 'real physics' isn't science, because in real science observation is first and foremost.

I'm really looking forward to what XFEL can do for material science. Perhaps we can finally replace plastics with something like eutectic systems, bulk metallic glass, or the classic transparent aluminum.
...spending their Friday nights eating mozzarella sticks at Applebee's.

One won't be surprised by the spike in suicides a few years later...
The time for another Einstein will only be after there has been another Michelson–Morley experiment.
The proposal does not suggest removing normal pointers from C. D has these dynamic arrays, and normal pointers too. Although one sees pointers used less and less in D code.
That’s where i was heading with my question. I’m wondering if these folks have a plan B if asked to go back to the office.

If so, that’s great and we could see some pretty interesting changes to the demographics of small cities.

If they don’t have a plan B, well... that’s not good.
C's pointers wouldn't be an issue if the world had used the Intel iAPX 432 processor instead of the 8086. The iAPX 432 included bounds checking for every array in hardware (among many other features), so it was impossible to make an out-of-bounds access.

Unfortunately the iPAX 432 was delayed, so Intel introduced the 8086 as a stopgap processor and computers have been using the x86 architecture ever since. It's interesting to think that if history had gone a bit differently, whole classes of security problems would not exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432
I wonder if this could be repurposed to kite sail large cargo ships.
The comments here are repeatedly suggesting a compromise between fully remote and fully on-site: "Just have employees come into the office X days a week instead of every day."

This is my preferred outcome, but the main benefit of remote work, for me, has been the opportunity to leave the Bay Area. I can't really stand the idea that I'd be forced back into the Bay Area housing/rental market, just so that I can attend a few days of meetings per month. It would be the worst of all worlds.

So I'm hoping that the reported techie exodus from SF leads to a diaspora, with attractive tech job opportunities cropping up in more U.S. cities.
Young programmers seem to prefer learning Rust than C. Generational replacement will take care of making Rust prevalent, no matter what existing programmers think.
I didn't cut and paste any tunneling instructions, or indeed any instructions at all.
I once did an interview where I described some software I had designed and built that was deployed around the world.

At the end of it the biggest burning question they had was "where are the unit tests". I was like ... you see this circle here with this label inside it? This was critical to the entire system and therefore had unit tests surrounding it.

didn't get the job, they seemed kind of annoyed that I didn't get into great detail about things like unit tests and instead talked mostly about the architectural problems I solved.

I wish companies actually valued that level of knowledge.
>Gates claims now (and then) the Government will stifle innovation,

"Innovation" when used by Gates in this context means "profits."

And I think Bill's dislike for Java was only because it was a threat to the Windows OS monopoly. The appeal of Java, as I recall, was that you could run the same application on multiple platforms.
The "nuclear family" is an extremely modern concept.The extended family is what is old as civilization itself.Sure, nuclear families existed 5000 years ago. But, it was far more common to live with your extended family.
> For those that live five minutes from the office — now you can move and save a pile of money in the process.

No thanks, I like my kids to be able to walk from school to home.
I have a 5 minute commute.

I make it 30 min by walking through a park to have a coffee in the morning and unwind before going home in the afternoon.
Why this failed? I would love to learn more if anyone has more insider knowledge
Wow, that article had nothing to do with the title, for a normal person reading it.

It should really get a much more technical title, befitting the dissertation it leads to.
The Google Books API might be a good starting place.

https://developers.google.com/books/
There is a proposal for a "stateless command-line interface for dealing with OpenPGP messages" that Daniel Kahn Gillmor brought to the IETF:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-dkg-openpgp-stat...
Frankly I never would have made the proposal if I didn't love C. I've made proposals to add D features to C++, too.
I would be shocked if one could find a liveable single family home in Palo Alto or Mountain View for $1.5M.

Last I looked empty lots went for that much.
An area in London was also amusingly called Silicon Roundabout.
Since they just get gamed by shills, yeah, take it away. Same with the pretend anonymity we're granted as bait. It's just an excuse to demonize and scrutinize internet users who believe in a right to privacy. It's all a big lie, so just take it away from the demons who benefit.
I got it. Thank you.
For some great examples, in pictures: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vauban+citadelle&iar=images&iax=im...
> The duds were people who for one reason or other did not want to do what was assigned, yet took some time to say so. Personal issues for sure.

If there's one thing I don't want to do, it's work by assignment. I'm not a school kid, I'm a professional software developer. I'll tell you what needs to be done. You can inform me of the goals you have for the company, and I'll make sure that happens.

What I'm saying is that despite all my successes, you would consider me a 'dud'.
My solution is different: Don't use dynamically-allocated variable-sized buffers unless you have to.

C++ gives you more tools for avoiding them than C, BTW.
> "Laws are the source code of society; built up over dozens of generations by thousands of people who all had a different idea of what the finished product should look like and what algorithms to use."

you just described technical debt
>What do you call linux distro's package managers then?

If you want to count them as package managers, they're by far the worst ones of all the well known languages (with some notable exceptions e.g. guix's and nixos's).

They're not portable between distributions or even different versions of the same distribution (!), since it's non-trivial to install older versions of libraries (or, hell, different versions of the same library at the same time). Not to mention that it's a very manual and tedious process in comparison to all the other language specific package manager. 'Dependency hell' is a problem virtually limited to distro package managers (and languages like C and C++ that depend on them).

Getting older, unmaintained C programs to run on Linux is an incredibly frustrating experience and I think a perfect demonstration of how the current distro package manager approach is wholly insufficient.
yeah cs has always been pretty toxic. I think the culture of the game matters a lot more than the genre. though it is an MMO, I've always found EVE players to be very polite ingame. won't stop them from scamming you out of every last isk in your wallet, of course.
> You demand that scientists be honest, then accuse them of all-out fraud when they admit they have questions, secure in your ignorance of the things they actually have figured out and tried to tell you over and over again.

Because everybody thinks they can "intuit" their way to knowledge.

No. No you can't. We KNOW you can't. We have experiments and statistics and double-blind trials for exactly this reason.

"Intuition" only works when coupled with huge amounts of knowledge and effort.

Part of the problem is that too many people never suffer the consequences of "truth" in modern society. Consequently, far too many people get the idea that "truth" is negotiable.

But, this is not new:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

― Issac Asimov
> but I doubt we'd see 128 bit pointers (aka a 128 bit address space) any time soon.

I can see 128-bit pointers being a thing: not because of 128-bits of address space, but for the ability to embed type information directly in the pointer - which could improve performance for dynamic-dispatch scenarios or runtime type-safety built-in to the hardware itself.

> Having a native uint128_t would make dealing with IPv6 addresses a lot nicer though :)

[We're already there](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34234407/is-there-hardwa...)
I was guessing you lived in an apartment complex but am pleasantly surprised by the sensible solution for single family homes. Thanks for sharing.
i love how Larry Sanger's name is cheekily crossed out :p
These kinda of “unbiased” exams only work if people can’t cheat (either directly, by learning the questions from someone who already took the exam, or indirectly by preparing in a way that helps them score more on the exam, while not actually improving the skills the exam is supposed to be a proxy of).

Creating such an exam is an unsolved problem.
Scary when you consider that "winning" this game means you get to control the interpretation of facts.
This has always bugged me as well. I've generally solved this by wrapping things in a struct. Type checking will use the (incompatible) wrappers and a modern compiler should optimize them away. To avoid strict aliasing violations when converting between equivalent wrapped types you can use a union and employ a function to hide the verbosity.

I have no idea if this is the "right" way to do things, but it seems to work.
it's tragic that people think merit-based promotions and hiring actually exist. Meritocracy is flawed and extremely biased -- because people that enforce meritocracy are biased.

Martin himself shows himself to be a biased person which he shows time and time again on Twitter. What if he were to decide who got promoted or hired for companies?

There are literally studies on this.
The party's over because we've done all the easy things and now we need mind boggling machines to test our theories.
The JVM chose to compress object pointers instead, which I think is a quite elegant optimization: https://stackoverflow.com/a/25120926/432354
Yes, you can always pass a pointer and a length explicitly. And that's what the "safe" versions of e.g. string functions do. But it's still incumbent on you as the programmer to use them properly. It would still be beneficial to have a compiler mode where all that was done for you automatically and it was impossible to have a buffer overrun.
It might be a net positive if they enjoy the walk more than 40 minutes of other activity.
> mostly
Developers working on building adtech are just as unscrupulous and complicit in undermining our privacy as Zuckerberg and Mosseri are in defending their money-printing social media spyware platforms.

Change my view if you disagree.
Climate change is probably the only environmental existential threat we have any control over, put it that way.
That doesn't preclude Apple owning it but operating it as an independent subsidiary.

Even if it wasn't a subsidiary Apple already operates some divisions and teams differently, such as its Webkit team (one of the few teams where employees are allowed to have Github.com user accounts...)
Q: Okay. Let me ask you to look at Trial Exhibit 560. This is a message from you to Mr. Ballmer and Mr. Chase with a copy to Mr. Maritz and some other people also given copies dated August 15, 1997 at 4:07 p.m. on the subject of IBM and Netscape; correct?
A: Uh-huh

Q: BY MR. BOIES: And you type in here Importance: High."
A: No.

Q: No?
A: No, I didn't type that.

Q: Who typed in "High"?
A: A computer.

Q: A computer. Why did the computer type in "High"?
A: It's an attribute of the e-mail.

Q: And who set the attribute of the e-mail?
A: Usually the sender sends that attribute.

Q: Who is the sender here, Mr. Gates?
A: In this case it appears I'm the sender.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/micr...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE&t=38m07s
I think covid lock downs make it hard for people to realize there normally are other opportunities for socialization and community too.
> Why do we focus so much on data structures and algorithms?

1. Those are the building blocks of software, and

2. They don't stop being useful when you move from domain A to domain B
Αστέρας Τρίπολης-Παναθηναϊκός, ανοικτή πρεμιέρα στην Αρκαδία
maybe they just need to believe that dark matter is god's poop?
I'd like a view of the ocean from my home office window, however I don't want it enough to pay market rates for it. You may feel otherwise and are free to spend your money as you wish.
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted, it's technically correct (tho I'm not sure if it was in good faith) the observations don't explicitly require Dark Matter, it's just currently the most likely answer given the theoretical frameworks and observational evidence we have.

There are essentially 3 (or 2.5) explanations, that we have (a lot of) missing mass, that we don't understand gravity or that we don't understand spacetime.

Most theories revolve around the missing mass part this includes all possible theoretical candidates for Dark Matter from both within and beyond the standard model, overall a single candidate or a combination of a few likely ones seems to fit our observations the most.

Modified Gravity; these theories actually have gotten plenty of attention in the 80's and 90's but the problem is that most of them don't fit observations especially modern ones like the bullet cluster and gravitational waves, most of them aren't relativistic (or don't have a relativistic formulation) and they overall suck at predicting everything else including the formation of galaxies and stars in the first place.

"Modified Spacetime"; mostly relegated to the dark corners of the web and to pseudo scientific forums technically possible but I haven't seen anything that comes close to being an actual theory as in having an actual mathematical basis.
They basically revolve around various possible ways of affecting spacetime curvature, basically if you could curve spacetime without out mass to the same extent as say the earth's mass does you'll technically will end up with the same gravity well. The more "serious" of these tend to revolve around various attempts at gauge gravity.

I usually consider the "Modified Spacetime" as being an offshoot of Modified Gravity theories.
Home – Yimby Action
The criticisms in this thread of Dyson’s wrongthink on climate science show us a lot about the current moment and how hard it is to have an opinion outside of the mainstream.

Sure, he appears to be quite incorrect now, but dismissing a mind of the caliber of Dyson’s because he got this one thing wrong is pedantic. And yes, he did appear to get this one extremely wrong, but that should not overshadow his amazing ideas and all of the things he got right. Ideas like Dyson Spheres, nuclear explosion based space travel, and many other Dyson ideas were just as outside of the standard deviations of thought as climate change denial at the time he came up with them.

It appears extremely popular right now to disregard an entire human’s work over an apparently incorrect opinion. Freeman Dyson is a great example of why this is probably a bad idea.
Progress: Fluke or Trend?
That's because of the way modern CPU's are optimized.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQs6IC-vgmo
C-the-language has no concept of size-tagged arrays at runtime, and I guess it's baked in deeply due to the various guarantees made about sizeof(array), &array[0], and ability to cast &array[0] back to the original array. The iAPX hardware would have gone unused
Definitely this. My employer is allowing for this flexibility / lifestyle choice by having offices for those who prefer to work from an office, as well as for those times when it would be easier to get together to collaborate. They’re still working through the details, but I think it’s a good balance.

As someone with a comfortable WFH situation, and a 1h commute, I’ll definitely be staying at home most of the time once offices re-open - and maybe even consider moving a bit further out for a bit more space.
This setup sounds like the "judge" would just end up judging how well, and how much, the proctor helped the candidate with their task.

As an interviewee, get a strict proctor that doesn't want to give out information? Well you're not going to appear as competent as the interviewee who got the proctor that wanted the interview to be fun
Usage of C in new projects has fallen dramatically in the latest decades. It used to be the case that C was considered a general purpose programming language and applications such as Evolution were written in it. Today big applications in C are increasingly rare, and Rust is only accelerating this trend - nobody wants to have buffer overflows anymore.
Blog post from February when Alphabet withdrew funding: https://blog.x.company/a-long-and-windy-road-f8e09d02c9e1

(Disclosure: I work for Google)
It is unreasonable. We over weigh the risk based on the exposure an accident gets, not the death toll . History shows the highest kwh per human life of any energy source.
Inverting hash functions isn’t in NP, except that it’s constant time, so it’s also trivially in P. Thus P=NP is irrelevant. It’s just the constant is large. Since each common hash function is fixed size, inverting them is fixed size.

For a problem to be of interest regarding the P=NP question, the problem needs to have arbitrarily large size. 3-SAT can be arbitrary sized, thus is a candidate to ask if it’s NP hard, complete, etc. If we consider 3-SAT with fixed, bounded size, then 3-SAT is constant time.

For example, inverting SHA-512 requires at most on order of 2^512 ops to invert. This is constant time, not even polynomial time.

So no, hashing is not generally affected by P=NP.
> this was before video conferencing, slack or FB Workplace so maybe things are better now.

I do think things must be a lot better now. I started a new job after COVID began, so I still have never met my team in person. I’m on video calls with them multiple times a day though, and slack with them all day. Sure, it probably isn’t quite as good as in person contact, but I’ve been shocked how well it has worked and how well I feel like I know most of them.
In my opinion, the problem is everyone thinks these things apply to others but not to themselves. There isn’t enough honest introspection.
Government always fails to think in second order consequences, let alone third-order consequences.
Not all, LCDM does or can at least predict distribution, primordial/micro black holes, MACHO's CBM etc. don't but then most of them rely on the same distribution as normal matter (because for the most part they are just that, as anything that falls within the existing standard model is well normal matter).
> In my experience with language design, a little bit of syntactic sugar can have transformative results.

I agree 100%. This also reminds me of this article:

https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/03/its-not-what-program...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22696229