skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If I have an byte-array, I can do none of these things short of implementing a good chunk of Unicode. If I truncate, I risk ending up with an invalid UTF-8 string.

Yes, and? You can have an invalid sequence of Unicode code points too, such as an unpaired surrogate (something Python's text model actually abuses to store "invalid Unicode" in a special, non-standard way).

If you truncate at the byte level, you are just truncating "between code points"; it's a closer granularity than at the code point layer, so you can also convert to NFC, truncate on word boundaries, etc. You just need to ignore the parts of the UTF-8 string that are invalid; which isn't difficult, because UTF-8 is self-synchronizing.
> I grew up in a village in France: the neighbor has a rooster and the house is next to a church.

To be fair, I grew up into one of the most rural part of France as did my parents and my grand parents before them and I have a vivid memory of my father killing the neighbor rooster while he was crowning at three in the morning. Roosters are dumb animals. Keeping them in settled area is asking for troubles.
An engineer that's being logical and thinking from first principles should come to the same solution, but the vast majority of the population base their viewpoints on what's "true" based on what the internet / mass media has told them for years is true, not by what actually makes logical sense in objective reality.

The news has been spamming PR pieces for years about self-driving cars, with absolutely no technical merit to them. Twitter/Reddit/Etc have been absolutely spammed by echo chambers that all assure themselves that self-driving cars have been invented and will be released soon.

The population is awash with the viral idea that they're possible, exist, and are on the way, because that's just what they've been told for years. The average person repeats the idea because that's what the internet told them is true, which makes it even more "true", since now there's another person repeating it.

What percentage of the population that goes online and talks about how self-driving cars are coming soon actually have the engineering background / technical knowledge to come to that conclusion?
I was thinking of the person reading about something on the U-Bahn on their way home.
More or less that’s right. They’re a good step toward seeing pictographs as phonetic characters.

When I first starting learning Japanese I took an intensive 7 week course. We learned Hiragana and Katakana in one week, though it took longer to really make that knowledge long term available. I forgot a lot of it after completing the course, but my first year living in Japan helped restore it all!

Now my kids are learning kana and my oldest kanji. The state of the art here is still drilling and repetition. FWIW this website is cute, but without learning the characters you have to rely on verbal instruction, so as an experiment it only works after learning the Kana.
It is objectively bad when not-very-literate people guess that a rarer word means the same as a more familiar word that it sounds a bit like and drown out the people who made a distinction.

That's because it is destroying useful tools for no gain. The word used to mean X, not Y, whereas now it's just a pretentious version of Y.

"Decimate" may not be a terribly significant word to use/lose, but that's not a refutation of the pattern of loss that's degrading the language. Claiming it's just an arbitrary point of view is not correct.

On the other hand, a lot of people don't grasp that when you Google a word, you likely do not find all the definitions that are in a decent dictionary, so it seems like the misinformation is fairly balanced between ignoring distinctions and making up distinctions/restrictions that didn't exist in the first place.
The affiliate autocomplete problem was acknowledged as a mistake and removed. More info at https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
"Bombay Beach (2011)" is a documentary that depicts life in a once-bustling settlement by the Salton Sea, can recommend:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1758576/
Very interesting. Could you share more about your experience of sensory processing disorders?
The Silicon Valley quest to preserve Stephen Hawking’s voice
It's hard to say. Surveying people is not useful as what people actually buy is often different from their stated preferences. Right now there's so much government intervention against dense cities that there is no choice in many areas (e.g. non single family homes are banned).
Wow, I haven't seen anyone reference Stumble Upon in a very long time.

I'm going to check this out.
Also concur, XPS 9560 that randomly refuses to start and needed service three times for a defective screen. Entirely unimpressed for the cost and what I thought the brand was.
The term "open source" has a well-known definition, and the "novel licenses", like Mongo's, do not match it. They are more like the "source available" licenses, as practiced by MS in 1990s, and by IBM, much earlier.
Retail traders have done absurdly well in the last year, and it's not clear why
I have an XPS 9300 (the 13" 2020 version). I've had a great experience running Ubuntu on it.

I don't doubt that some people have issues with it, but I wonder what percentage of people have issues with it, and how that percentage compares to other laptops.

The only issue I had was with the power adapter, it made a very high pitched noise (the laptop does not make a noise and does not have "coil whine"). Customer service replaced the power adapter without hassle and the new one is fine.

Mine came with a year of Pro Support which was free, I don't know if that made any difference on the ease of replacement.
Indeed. Surprisingly my competitors don't get their fruit from its native soil like I do. Just like wine or coffee, soil matters a lot to the quality of fruit.
That does not justify needlessly medicating the entire tap water-drinking population.
Experimental one-shot benchmark framework using Cachegrind
It's more an indication of how (irrationally) intent companies are on staying private well into their days as a global empire.
As an engineer you should care about cost and other tradeoffs. At this point Waymo is not much more than an exorbitantly expensive tech demo. I sure hope that one day it is more than that.

Tesla has a million cars on the road. It is a technology people can use and afford and it is working.

comma.ai sells a device for $1000 that can be installed on the majority of cars sold in America.

It's still too early to say much about Waymo.
Musk's propensity for risk tolerance, projected into the consumer market, with some weird hubris about this, might just end up killing a few people and a few lawsuits.

It may not impeded Tesla in any way though.
What would be your ideal Twitter architecture today?
If you are building Twitter today, given it's scale, what would your stack/architecture be?
By the time he was confirmed as chairman in 1979, inflation was already high.

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SA0?output_view=pct_... (see: 1969 - 1985)

The Fed had twiddled it's thumbs with half measures to let it get that way. So while not hyperinflation, I'd say it supports the Fed usually being cautious.
You said in your original comment:

> using Discourse for a private group and Twitter/Facebook for public groups

Even if what freeone3000 said about Mastodon is also all true about Discourse (I know nothing about Discourse, but I'll take your word for it), it's not true about Twitter/Facebook. And since Mastodon is aimed more at the public group use case, Mastodon is a useful replacement of Twitter/Facebook even by your own logic.
One is forced to wonder if making millions and being surrounded by tent cities is somehow correlated. Almost like wealth is being concentrated in the hands of a relative few or something.
It's not instant, of course it relies on the smtp servers in between, but for a Gmail to Gmail test it was nearly instant, for my own mail relay to Gmail it was probably 10 seconds delay which is fine for me.
Latvia went approximately -30% in 30 years, from 2.6610^6 in 1990 to 1.89410^6 in 2020. Further decreases are expected to bring this to under 1.5*10^6 in 2050.

These numbers are massive, _and_ they underestimate the change in the countryside and smaller cities. Many don't even bother unregistering from their native country when emigrating. There is also massive internal migration of youth to the capital Riga. That's the main reason the capital's population is more or less stable...
Unfortunately this means it’s difficult to handle HTTP caching without having something in the URL, and at the same time you want to make sure search engines index the version without the indicator in the URL.
I guess part of it depends on the teams/people you work with. I agree - that it would be nice in the python world if we all just agreed, "virtualenv + requirements.txt - Done." - Instead, as you noted, the python ecosystem has split into venv, pyenv, pipenv, Poetry, Conda, ....

Where I work - life is simple. You build your project in a virtualenv so it only has the libraries it needs, generate a clean requirements.txt, check it into git with a requirements.txt - everyone can run it, and, because we have day-1 onboarding to teach everyone virtualenv/virtualenvwrapper - the first thing a person does before installing the application is mkvirtualenv.

I see a lot of references to Poetry here - but I've never been able to interest any of our senior developers into looking at it - they are pretty happy with our existing system.
> I did think about having correct dates and authors, but then I got lazy and in fact got more focussed on getting all the amendments in place. Now that the core work is done, I'll add corrected dates (perhaps real date + 100 years), authors and committers in one of the later commits. Thanks for reminding!

How would you even do authorship? These amendments are basically institutional works, with sometimes convoluted histories (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...).
Musk has degrees in economics and physics. My undergrad is in physics and my dad is an engineer. They are definitely different skillsets.

When I decided to build a treehouse for my kids, I came up with a clean sheet design. My dad saw my drift and walked me through a redesign the preserved the core idea. And then my neighbor, a general contractor, supervised the build (and pretty much doubled every safety margin along the way). My other neighbor (a self-employed roofer) did the crazy bits.

I would be inclined to credit Musk with broad outlines and I would give him credit for being able to participate in the engineering process by asking some sensible questions. I would not be inclined to credit him with imposing tried-and-true design methods and constraints. Similarly, I would give him credit for broad outline path-to-profitability. I would not give him credit for day-to-day diligence of double-entry accounting that the CFO worries about or the contract negotiations his PMs answer to the CFO's staff for.
TRUMP 2024!
Article is 100% paywalled, so no idea what this post is about, but I have a friend with property out there and I've spent some time there for the Bombay Beach Bienalle.

It could be a great place if the lake was rehabilitated, but nobody wants to spend the money (or water) to make it happen. The place is below sea level, and it might be possible to simple dig a canal to the ocean and fill it with seawater. It would instantly create some extremely valuable real estate if the lake wasn't so horrifically disgusting and toxic.
Good advice. My dad has a barely used thinkpad he wanted me to buy because he bought it for stock trading but his wife forced him to give that hobby up. But it’s heavier than a lead brick.
It's a Lisp, in the Scheme subset. It's original design was primarily around Programming Language Theory education - formerly it was PLT Scheme. Much of it was designed for educational uses, but it's a really well-rounded system with plenty of packages, a decent package management system, better performance than most interpreted languages. It comes with an IDE easier to pick up for newbies than Emacs (the usual Lisp/Scheme environment), but also runs fine as a command line REPL and compiler.

It's kind of an oddball. While the development focus is mostly educational, specifically Programming Language theory, it's also very usable in the real world. There's a few tutorials on writing your own domain specific language in it. You can specify a language other than the default Racket, so one compiler/interpreter environment actually supports many Lisps and DSLs.

I'm a long time dev who recently picked up SICP to learn why everyone says learning Lisp/Scheme will make you a better programmer, and Racket is by far the most interesting environment I've worked in. I haven't even touched Python, which was my money-maker, in months.
This data must exist as this is how parliamentary systems work and (MP's Senators, Congress Persons) should in theory have this data.

Might be very good to allow civilians to look at the data but it does require that you really understand your particular country does things.

Having said that the Executive can "Get away with Naughty Shit" and that's a quote from one on the MP's that lost out to John Bercow for speaker of the HOC.
Most of the points they elaborated on are People problems, not Mastodon problems. The genuine critiques of Mastodon they listed are migration issues, updating posts (it makes sense 'edited' posts lose their clout), and character limit (already way bigger than twitter's).

Also, aren't they falling into their own "Us vs. Them" argument by complaining about general Mastodon users?
The core point is you can't go smoothly from a driver assist to fully autonomous. They're just completely different from the point of view of the reliability of the software you need. A huge amount of things with driver assist you can write off as 'the driver will take over'. There's not a specific part of you can point to and say 'that's what will stop them', so much as the entire design of the system needs a different level of consideration because it becomes so safety critical, as opposed to safety-enhancing (autonomous driving is probably the most complex safety critical design ever attempted, by at least an order of magnitude. Driver assist is way easier by comparison). It affects the attributes of the sensors, the design of the neural networks interpreting those sensors, the high level design of the decision making of the whole vehicle, the low-level design of the electronics, basically everything.

Tesla hasn't put forward a plan which indicates their full autonomous development is going to be anything other than a continuation of their driver assist work (and it's certainly frequently and incorrectly stated that the state of their driver assist puts them ahead in the race to full autonomy), and if they want to be credible to those familiar with the challenges involved, they need to actually show something more than that.
Just keep it in the fridge, should still be fine in 3 to 5 days
Thats a great link

I think it's inportant to note that a traditional 3 ton sattelite and a cubesat will have totally different lifetimes, and that articles appears to assume a larger satellite
Intel also blatantly stole patented technology from DEC. The Pentium onward, IIRC, ripped off entire designs. When Compaq eventually acquired DEC, they cancelled all of the lawsuits and gave Intel complete access to DEC’s patents. They also gave Intel DEC’s raced out ARM chip that they built for Apple.
Same. I've very wary of investing or getting involved with any company that has an open source strategy. I worked for one (Sendmail) and it did not go well. We talked about how it's hard to compete when your number one competitor is your own software for $0. If you look at successful public companies with open source, they are all fairly small successes compared to their public closed source peers.

When I worked at reddit, we open sourced our code. It didn't gain us much. We got a few contributions, and we also got a few competitors. The biggest benefit was being able to show people the code when they suspected shenanigans.

At Netflix our ethos was "if it's involved in infrastructure, open source it, if it's related to movies, keep it closed." That actually worked pretty well. But the open source code was difficult to use unless you invested in the entire ecosystem. The main benefit was recruiting.

For my own company, I try to support open source by donating to the people who make it.
> No amount of stop-the-rat-race mentality gets me a house for $300,000.

Many many houses, including mine, cost less than that. Some of them cost an order of magnitude less. If you're not considering moving out of a city with fancy tech career prospects a viable option, then you are possibly not understanding the concept of a rat-race.
There is another aspect to these plateaus most people forget: privilege of the rich in paying for better deals.

Don't need to rent when you can buy and break even within a few years. Meanwhile, the poor are perpetually derived from their opportunity of cutting down their monthly expenses. Similar cases exist for first-hand purchases vs second-hand purchases, higher quality goods that will cost less over their entire duration than low quality goods, etc.

It can be that once you get past one income plateau and obtain enough wealth, you can drop down an income plateau and still reap most of the benefits thanks to your reduced costs compared to your peers.
I worked with a self-driving product team a couple of years ago. Tesla's approach was looked upon with suspicion and often openly mocked.

Tesla's entire self-driving strategy is led by Karpathy, who while brilliant, is an under-experienced researcher with a narrow expertise in large scale 2D CNNs. Tesla (and Comma.ai ?) seem to be the only groups that find Lidar unnecessary for L5 self-driving.

I completely agree with this article. I avoid using cruise control and auto-lane-keep for the same reasons. Either I am in control or I am not. Anything in between is a recipe for distraction, and by proxy, disaster.

On the other hand, I can see Tesla's strategy paying off as a low probability win but no lose situation. If 3d lidar is necessary, then I think Waymo (Alphabet) is closest to self-driving success. If they 'win', I see them licensing their tech to every other manufacturer. In such an outcome, Tesla ends up no worse than all of its competitors. It is a no-lose scenario. However, in the unlikely scenario that 2D videos are sufficient for L5 self-driving, Tesla wins BIG. No one will be even close, especially due to the scale of 2D data that they have gathered.
> There will be a tremendous amount of cultural difference between a black Senegalese who is a first generation immigrant and someone from the Reunion whose great grand parents were already all French citizens.

To which I will also add that there can be great cultural, social and/or economic differences between two first-generation black immigrants from two different african countries, or even from the same country, that it does not make real sense to lump them under the same category.
Choose Exciting Technology
This seems like great news. In the face of our collective inability to do anything about climate change, if we could cut our current population by 2100 it might help with the crop failures and such.
For me, one of the virtues of pencil and paper is that I can go outside, sit under a tree, and think. I think differently there than I do in my cube. I can't describe exactly how I think differently, but I do. Some problems are easier to think about there (and some aren't).
The argument is that they are not even in the same category of technology complexity.

Which is very reasonable.

Tesla's real-world deployment of autopilot is frankly probably an advantage of sorts. And maybe starting with those realities is 'good path'.

But it doesn't change the nature of the fact the gap is quite big.
Yep, that is the long term agenda of the project. Most (all?) amendments have certain socio-economic/political context which gets lost over time. Amendments (and laws in-general) are better understood when the context is well laid-out.

I'll add all such contexts to all these amendments, including who tabled the bill, how did the debates go, were there any following judicial reviews: all that data.
The essential problem is gatekeeping. Any commercial business uses money as a means of getkeeping what it uses (buys). This works well to reduce and so control the purchases of chairs, desks, external consultancies and proprietary software.

We all know the horrors and pain of trying to raise a PO to get a license for a really useful / necessary piece of software.

I fundamentally guarantee that if React needed a 0.01 cent license for every internal and external installation it would have four users globally.

FOSS short circuits this gatekeeping function - and it is only popular because it is hard to keep track of and easy to load up npm and grab 900 libraries.

Imagine there was a FOSS plug-in everyone used, call it mothership that on every install (and indeed invocation) it routed back a simple packet to say "i am alive and used on this machine in this domain in this company" (let's call it a common piece of config like git email config)

Immediately every legal department would soil their pants and internal software development would grind to a halt - or FOSS developers would be able to charge decent value for their work - or some ecosystem of foss-aggregators would spring up providing licensed, limited installs and support and legal protection.

Personally I am in favour of the last option - for each product a series of (local) companies could club together and provide support for each other's code bases, (if you use my react-foobar I will license company X to indemnify you - sort of approved vendors schemes)

I struggle to see many better ways

Edit:

Andressen was slightly wrong - FOSS is going to eat the world. And as such it's production will be a public good - paid for out of taxpayer money and directed as such - either as a utility through regulation or as science through funding only the brightest.

And the big question remains - if we could see the whole stack easily, and if it all was priced at the minimum wage for every developer in the stack how much would it be?

Would anyone pay it? Or worse, would they realise they did not need all those in-house developers anymore as they are all running "libBusiness.py" and it all kind of fits together.

Or as is more likely - will we see lots of companies like redhat, that produce a "bank/airline/retailer in a box" - and the internal teams are focused on that 5% of USP?

I am not sure I understand that world - but I also do not think I currently could select correctly all the FOSS packages needed to build that stack that can just run a business.

Trust me it does not look like the openERP style stacks. at all.
I'm in a similar boat, and I am loving both Racket and Chicken Scheme
Quality is inherently subjective, but there are widely adopted rating systems
Is there a conspiracy against nuclear energy? (2020)
The whole point is they aren't actually doing what waymo is setting out to do, and it doesn't matter how many cars tesla has with driver assist it won't really help them get to full autonomy.
I learned this the hard way when engineering microwave links to withstand rain rates based on historical data.

Many of my links that the calculators said would have >99.999% availability saw a cumulative downtime in 2020 over 1hr due to much higher peak rain rates than historically measured.

I now engineer the links to handle double the historically measured rain rates.