skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In the meantime, it’s almost embarrassing for the rest of the industry just how far ahead Apple’s chips are.

How well is this chip suited for development? E.g. how fast can it do a full parallel compile of (say) gcc, compared to an Intel/AMD machine?
Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: Flat Earth “Science”: Wrong, but Not Stupid
Huh? Kqueue is nice, but I don't think you'll get anywhere near the performance of io_uring out of kqueue:

- kqueue only tells you there's data to read (/space in the write buffer). You still need to call read() or write(), including paying the cost of the syscall. io_uring lets you batch a lot of read/write calls together and either issue a single syscall to the kernel for all calls, or have the kernel poll and never syscall at all.

- kqueue doesn't let you issue fsync, or any of the other syscalls now in io_uring. fsync is essential on the write path for correctness in lots of cases, and for that you still need to dispatch to a local thread pool or something.

So yeah, I prefer kqueue over linux's epoll. But io_uring seems like the new king.
Thanks for the etymology lesson, I didn't even know they were two different words.
If this prevents a new generation of absolute trash electronics designed to end up in a landfill I’m all for it.
I agree separating the domain knowledge (CMake, Meson, etc.) from the build plan executor (ninja) is extremely good too, but one must be fair this isn't itself end-benefit to users.

If good architecture was an immediate end-user benefit, we'd get a lot less bad architecture from short-sighted institutions writing code!
I use it as a backend for markdown tables in my markdown notes. I have a script that runs on every commit that exports the tables as markdown tables. It's amazing!
Sabine Hossenfelder: Backreaction: Is faster-than-light travel possible?
Absolutely. They were reportedly the largest player in the server space around 2012 [1] (and consumed the entirety of their own production). Since then they've had multiple high-sellers across multiple product categories. The Google home devices ship tens of millions of devices a year on their own. Google may be better known for software and it's not all on the leading edge nodes, but they produce a lot of HW.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-server-manufacturing/
> Is there anything stopping MS from copying Apple's approach?

One thing I don't completely understand about Rosetta2 is when it performs static recompilation and when it's doing dynamic recompilation. I'm under the impression that a lot of Rosetta2's magic is in static recompilation. I don't know in which cases it statically recompiles and in which cases it dynamically recompiles though. If anyone knows anything about this I'd really like to understand this better.

If my hunch about Rosetta2 focusing largely on static recompilation is correct, Microsoft can't copy this approach easily. Static recompilation is very hard to make reliable. It's probably doable in Apple's use case (doable, definitely not easy), where their only aim was probably to make everything that runs on Intel-based Catalina or Big Sur on Apple Silicon. However, Intel-based 64-bit Windows 10 can (attempt to) run all 32-bit Windows software made since Windows 95. That's a much wider and diverse range of software, and the only approach to make that reliable is to depend on the slower dynamic recompilation.

If my hunch about Rosetta2 is not correct, and it's achieving these performance numbers on pure dynamic recompilation, all I can say is hats off to Apple. Microsoft would do good to pay them a large amount of money to license their tech in that case (or to copy as much of their approach anyway).
CCNE MCSD MCSE and the dozens of other corporate certifications.

It is very funny when aws came up with their own.

I think this happens when a company engineers something so complex you need to train people how to use it.
Rephrased as when a company fails to make their products easily understandable.

Having said this there is a place for such complexity and with market share comes the right to do so.

The aws product line is quite comprehensive and they have broken new ground trying to offer this.

Of course if this was a google company I would imagine product creation and sunsets. Meaning they shouldn’t be doing this.
To add my own example: I use SQLite for the backend of my blog. (https://jlelse.blog/)
My idea is, that the type of IT knowledge is often of a particular trivia quiz kind. You may "learn" the next trivia quiz, but you'll not be necessarily any more wiser after 20 years (due to forgetting and obsolence) than after 5 years. I guess a painter, sculptor, doctor or lawyer might be significantly better with 20y exp than 5y.
These “dihedrons” (which you might as well just call “2x2 matrices with real entries”) are isomorphic to the geometric algebra of the 2-dimensional Euclidean vector plane with signature (+, +), with 1 scalar component, 2 vector components, and 1 bivector component. Personally I find the basis 1, e₁, e₂, e₁e₂ and the notation of GA to be conceptually much clearer than the matrix entries and standard matrix sum/product to work with, but sometimes using a matrix representation is convenient in a computer.

(2x2 real matrices are also isomorphic to the geometric algebra of the 2-dimensional pseudo-Euclidean vector plane with signature (+, -), under a different interpretation.)

By comparison the quaternions are the even subalgebra of the geometric algebra of 3-dimensional Euclidean vector space with signature (+,+,+), consisting of only the 1 scalar and 3 bivector components. Or under a different interpretation are isomorphic to the full geometric algebra of the 2-dimensional vector plane with signature (-, -). They can be represented as Pauli matrices.

For more on this see the papers and books of Garret Sobczyk, https://garretstar.com/secciones/publications/publications.h... ; for example the recent https://www.garretstar.com/sobczyk09-mar-2020.pdf
I give a shit and it's my weakness. I usually don't take days off until I really need them (and even then it usually takes others to actually force me to take them). I try to only work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, having a healthy balance of work and non-work etc., but I often fail and it then more often than not devolves into periods of ultra-focus and periods where it's hard for me to even do the simplest tasks - even though I really want to. I give a shit, so I need to take care of myself because when I'm unable to work, I feel really bad about it. Because I give a shit, you know - I currently work on stuff that I used to do in my spare time for years out of passion.

I went through way too many voluntary crunches (both for work and personal stuff, like game jams) to not see how they deteriorate my health. And occasionally I'm still putting myself into more, it's somewhat addicting. I need to finally get myself tested for ADHD.

In this light, I'm not sure if my answers to the posed questions would satisfy the recruiter looking for someone who "gives a shit". I used to think it was worth it, I'm not so sure anymore.

I completely understand the need for people who "give a shit". I don't really understand people who are able to work without "giving a shit". I can't. But remember that if you're looking for people who "give a shit", it's now your responsibility to not abuse them for it. They will often put their work over their health. You shouldn't let them, otherwise your company is not worth giving a shit for.
They want to be an employee of a company in California, while living and working in Canada. This sounds like it's going to be complicated, and a blanket answer of "you don't pay US taxes" seems unlikely to be correct. They're also going to face issues like on day 1 when they walk into the office and they're going to have to go through the whole I-9 thing (https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central) - waving hands and saying I'm going to live in Canada seems like it's not a solution.
> But it's okay for 10 year olds to kill combatants?

An adult should understand that killing civilians is morally/ethically wrong. Where as a child might not. So while you probably don't want any child to simulate killing combatants, you can morally justify it from the perspective of the character in video game.

> Given that the above comment says that killing civilians is what would make this game inappropriate for a ten year old it implies that the rest of the game is appropriate.

I did not mean to imply that the rest of the game is appropriate, rather that there are certain moral principles that game developers will not cross because they would lose a large audience or break regulations.
Well. It's been 30+ years. Meta: It's weird when you assume some arcane tidbit you know is widely known. Been struggling with that my entire life / career.

Now I'm gonna ask my bro, doctor, and nutritionist bestie, make sure I remember correctly. IIRC, insulin response for Type 1 and Type 2 are totally different. So advice does not transfer. (My bestie is a severe Type 1. They get upset about generalizations. Stuff that works for Type 2 is life threatening for them.)
Am I the only one is getting pretty bored of "formula for success" content?

This essay and other's like it, without evidence or data, implies that some of us know the formula for success. I get it, the things that change convention are unconventional at first. This is the definition of unconventional. I agree with the general vector of his essay but this is just boring to me.

Here is my formula for success (in case anyone cares): Enjoy life, try to make the world better, be a good person, go towards your passions (whether for hobby or career) and cultivate relationships because that seems to be the thing people regret most when they die.

Now, let's move on to to the actual unconventional ideas and observations.
Shorter and at a level the simple masses of programmers will likely work at -

https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/floatingpoint.html#tut-fp...
Ive never heard that. I've always heard zebra crossing
The staff at the Mexican border had absolutely no idea what 'NAFTA TN Visa' was, there was no response of "We don't have a NAFTA officer on duty now, come back later or go to XYZ border crossing" it was "What are you talking about? We have no idea, go away."
How is that only 3-5 mbs? The assets alone have to be at least 10 times that.
Digital nomads living on a boat for 4 years
> specialized instructions for x86 translation

That sounds absolutely fascinating. Do you have any references I could read further on that?
A few days ago, there was a story showing that it was twice as fast to compile Rust compared to the 2019 Macbook Pro: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25126394

Since Rust is LLVM-based, there should be a substantial performance improvement for Clang as well.
That's why I ask how to formally describe this problem. It's too 'squishy' to say two 3d spaces intersecting at an angle in a 4d space. I thought perhaps I could use time to untangle this visualization-defining a solid as the result of taking a plane and sweeping it through space. So, envisioning the 'growth' of a solid from a moving plane and imagining the intersection of the growing solid with the another growing solid from a different plane.
It was mine. An opening appeared in the service department and I applied for it.
M1 has instruction-level x86 emulation, so MS would need to convince Qualcomm and MediaTek it was in their interest to add that complexity, and embrace all the legal/technical pitfalls along the way.
Kind of reminds of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
Unproved Formulas of Ramanujan?
A student asked me if any of Ramanujan's formulas remain unproved. I had to ask around. Here's the answer:

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2020/11/27/ramanujans-last-formula/
> ... apple tried to ditch all GPL software so that they wouldn't have to upstream anything if they don't want to.

A side point: it was the patent clause of the GPL v3 that frightened them off. The GPL doesn’t require “upstreaming” of anything — you merely have to release the source code you used; any use of that code by another person is that person’s responsibility.

More generally on Apple: they just treat open / proprietary as another tactical tool. When they were on the ropes (e.g. late 90s) they happily embraced open standards like mp3 and jpeg, yet also happily purchased a license to .rtf. They quickly realized the ipod needed Windows support. Then as (and where) they became stronger they stoped caring.
Thank you for the sharing, I didn't know about it
If a website is low-value, you won't be specifically targeting it in particular.
Not sure what coffee you are consuming. But if you are making it yourself - hopefully you can find a local coffee roaster. Any semi-good Arabica is not bitter (but it can be more on the acidic side)
Unless your assange, snowden, goldamns sachs ceo turned regulator or retired military general gone into the private sphere or fbi agent turned security consultant or blackwater pmc agent.

I get the value of the myth, people instinctively acheive what they believe is doable. It's just a myth though.
...and learn Italian as well.
I think the issue is because you're running on 125%-ish DPI scaling, and the program doesn't handle it well.
I was a warehouse clerk which meant I was responsible for picking stowing, receiving, shipping and organizing the warehouse.
> Prior to Instacart, the conventional wisdom was that grocery delivery doesn't work

Is Instacart profitable?
The newest passively cooled super thin notebook ARM chips are not usually faster than Intels flagship chips, no.

But this is.
No pictures of the failed joint or even an expert saying "they used the wrong type of metal"?

To me this seems like an article missing the relevant details...
The best way to not see bad news is not read bad news. Slashdots is typically the worst that I see. Fark is bad news in a funny way, or basically /r/nottheonion but without the peanut gallery redditors that just post about conservatives who made a faux pas.
Interestingly, they're doing unnecessary work here. In this case, the algorithm has already checked 32, so there's no need to check again.

In fact, if you're checking N, it's guaranteed that N/2 has already been checked, and the next best step should be (3/4)N; in this case 48.
Oracle secures Australian whole-of-government deal
Interesting read! I'm not a particularly good writer, but I do find it useful to explore my thoughts through the written word.

I just finished an experiment where I wrote a blog article every day for 30 days (a more detailed summary is here https://www.philnewton.net/blog/30-day-blogging-summary/). I normally only write a few posts every year, so it was a pretty big increase for me. I don't think it improved my writing skills in any significant way, but it did bring out a lot of ideas that had been floating around in the back of my mind.
> if you are anyway going to do remote dev, why still bother buying a new Apple device??

For me it'd be because of the User Interface.
Are you serious?

"Can you give concrete examples for how you use a knife in the kitchen?" It's an absurd question.
Around 2012ish-2014ish, Google was producing massive amounts of hardware for their own internal infrastructure. They didn't stop (and actually added popular consumer devices), but the overall market has simply exploded in size even faster.
This is the Hacker News site you are posting on and the only thing that I see is crap is your comment.
> Adobe suite, Fusion

Funny thing is that those are both products that many are reaching for alternatives to whenever viable. As powerful as they may be as tools, there's quite a lot that's throughly mediocre or even bad about them.

There are examples of truly great apps that use their own look and feel, but I don't think either of those are among them.
> UIs are not UX

Do you know the difference? Tog gave a definition but I don't think UI people know what that is. They just call it UX cos it's the latest sexy term.

> Also most programs have terrible UX (and bad UIs).

And it's easy to cure. It involves a) testing and b) admitting your great idea isn't so great. That's most of it.

> but there are not many people having the correct blend of skill, personality

I've a pretty good feel for UIs and plenty of people can do it with a bit of training and a decent amount of practice. It takes that training, and a personality that is considerate of other's needs, and who's ego accepts they're wrong (the main thing). The rest follows.

> and motivation out there

Just like any other job.

UIs are not hard. They just aren't. It's a skill like any other.
> with time you get accustomed to the taste, to me sweet coffee tastes weird.

Yes, sugar in coffee tastes disgusting to me. Coffee is supposed to be bitter.

I think part of the reason why – my mother has always been very health-conscious (she is a doctor), and growing up she didn't allow us to have sugar in tea or coffee. She would hide the sugar at the back of the pantry, she'd bring it out when guests came over but then it would disappear again as soon as they left. And she only ever bought reduced fat milk. So make me a coffee with full cream milk and sugar, and it just tastes wrong.
We are way, way past the point where anything that you're talking about has any relevance to the real world. How would you feed 10 billion people without these tools and GMOs? Are there any alternatives?

We can feel cool and eat grass-finished beef or whatever we fancy, but the reality is we can't feed the whole planet on it.
Cerebral Overgrowth Persists in Autism, Suggests Biased Adult Autism Samples
> It depends on what you’re using zoom for and how.

No, it really doesn't. Zoom has had so many incidents at this point where the client would compromise endpoint security that the only reasonable approach is to consider any computer that has ever had the client installed to be infected.

Yes, there are precautions you can take to reduce the risk (burner VMs, and so on), but as a security professional you have a responsibility to lead by example. You yourself might be safe, but you're effectively telling everyone that Zoom is an acceptable platform to use, and that's just completely irresponsible.
They did. Every single Windows on Arm64 system since release allowed Secure Boot to be off.

That limitation only applied on 32-bit Arm systems (Windows RT & Windows 10 Mobile, ARM != ARM64)
Paperless-ng is here (almost)
A lot of Mac users still care, as is evidenced by the continued existence of the likes of Panic and OmniGroup.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand" - What he meant by this was re-implement more than re-invent... re-invent is an oxymoron I just realized; you cannot re- something that needs to be new.
If you want the macOS user interface, just buy an Intel Mac — new, used, or refurbished; they are still on sale, they still work (and they support all the tools you want perfectly).
Disclosure: I am the first author. Please AMA.
Probably not, at least as a proportion of the population, given that by the 1930s the entire reading public of the USA and UK knew about arsenic eaters. Probably most famously in Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers (1930)[0].

Also taught in schools across the British Empire in the early 1900s would have been the stories of King Mithridates[1], or of the Arsenic eaters of Styria (see this 1869 Scientific American Article [2]).

0: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/may/09/chilean...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridates_VI#Mithridates'_an...

2: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-arsenic-eater...
The Scarlet E: Unmasking America’s Eviction Crisis

Two years ago, the Federal Reserve found that 44 percent of us couldn't cover a sudden 400 dollar expense without borrowing or selling something. And so if you don't have family or friends you can tap, anything unexpected–health issues, accidents, car trouble, reduced work hours–can trigger calamity cascades....

When we first got these national data and we mapped it on the United States, I don't really know what I was expecting. But I spent a lot of time in Milwaukee, I thought evictions were incredibly high there. One in 14 renter homes in the inner city of Milwaukee's evicted every year formerly. Right? Huge amount you walk down any inner city block, look on your left look on your right, one of those families is not gonna be there by the end of the year. You crunch the numbers and you look and Milwaukee isn't even in the top 50 highest evicting cities in the country. You see South Carolina exploding, North Carolina exploding, Georgia–up the Mississippi to Detroit. Tulsa, Oklahoma is in the top 20. Albuquerque, New Mexico, I think one in twenty-one renter homes is evicted.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/scarlet-e-unmasking...

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.

https://www.evictedbook.com/books/evicted-tr
If the (quantum-metrology) key fits
If you want to fit in and get along with most people, it's best not to think for yourself.
Gravity travels at the speed of Causality, and that isn't changed in water
Can you elaborate why you suggest we did not?
In addition to this I’ve found if its something too big for my current capabilities and I don't mind not owning it, just putting it out into the world and being patient yields wonders! Its almost a super power.
For instance if you want a new material or something fabricated and it doesn't exist but is physically capable of being manufactured just steamrolling alibaba, ebay and other chinese manufacturers with searches from different IP addresses will convince the powers at be that a sufficient market potential exists for what ever you want. Do this enough, sit back, wait... and voila! Dichroic fabric, holographic fabric, weird whatever you want will magically appear on your store shelves in just a matter of a year. Wait another year and it’ll be 40% off!
> When I’m browsing HN I tend to automatically ignore submissions based on their sources

In a world of infinite choices, I believe that making deliberate choices is a good exercise, whether you do it via a strict whitelist/blacklist domain filter or some other means.

Many times, I don't actually read the article and just read some of the comments. Instead of filtering by the domain where the article is hosted, I use the title and its underlying theme or subject as the filter for which article comments I will read. I'm not interested in every single subject posted on HN so I just look for the subjects that I am interested in. Reading the actual article can take time. For me, I find skimming some of the discussion in the comments as a quick proxy on what the article is actually saying or the value of the article.

With all filtering, there is always the risk of false negatives where you skip something that you would have found of value or really interesting.

I agree that some of the most interesting articles are from non-mainstream sources. For example, the recent article about weaving.
A Calendar for Mars in the Browswer
Also her explanation of how general relativity works, the equations specifically, is too simplified and not even conceptually correct to be of any use to the reader who wants to understand this deeper . The right hand side is the parametric representation in matrix form of the manifold used. The 'R' is the curvature tensor, which is a in terms of the metric and its derivatives of the entries. Because there are 4 dimensions, a 4x4 metric tensor is used to describe the manifold, and because it is symmetric, there are 10 unique entries and hence 10 equations. These entries are not integers but are parametric equations themselves.
How is issuing a crypto currency backed 1 to 1 to USD with reserves acting as a pseudo central bank?