skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article you reference actually proposes new syntax:

void foo(char a[..])

for passing an array pointer and length, and to eventually deprecate:

void foo(char a[])

Personally I like this suggestion, but as the article is 12 years old, I'm obviously in a minority.
Of Emotional Machines and Irrational Men
Far from it. After years of promotion, investment and development, wind and solar energy prices dropped 10-20x in the last decades. Same cost reduction can very well happen with nuclear power, and it'll take far less space than solar and wind, will disrupt the nature less, and will be much more reliable and predictable, capable of producing energy on demand and not requiring any storage.
The first M1 MacBook malware has arrived – here's what you need to know
I've been watching and rewatching these videos to try and see why people appear to be pessimistic about this. And... I don't really get it. Yes, I have seen better 3D humans. But... I don't think I can say that is true for any non-AAA title. This will be multiple orders of magnitude better than what I currently have for my hobbyist stuff. This is a huge boon for indie studios. I am super positive about this.
It's really hard for me to understand why and how something fails or succeeds to grab the public's attention.

I've been complaining and refusing to use WhatsApp for years, mostly because it's centralized at the worst possible company. But a boycott of one is not a powerful move and no one cared.

Now, for whatever reason, nothing has effectively changed and millions suddenly care.

I mean, I'm glad they finally do, don't think it will make much of a difference, as network effect is a very strong pull, but I'm flabbergasted nonetheless.
There's an excellent talk from Nick Means (GitHub) called "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?".

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xQeXOz0Ncs

One thing it discusses is how the alerts inside the control hub were so noisy, and were logged via a reasonably slow printer, that the alerts which suggested the reactor was in serious trouble only printed hours after you could do anything.

And the alert light that said "shits fucked" was placed right next to the light about an elevator being out of order.

Human error is rarely intentional, and even if it is, a system that fails in response has missed the mark. The talk explains the amazing finds made by the government committee hired to investigate the incident, once they left the idea of 'human error' at the door.

I do suggest you watch the video, but as a teaser: it turned out that at the time, most US nuclear engineers had been sourced from nuclear subs. Subs have totally different rules on how to manage the reactor, and train their staff inappropriately for a land-based reactor. Pretty significant cultural find...
No, 600 is the total. The propagation delay just to and from the satellite is roughly 500ms. The rest is internet latency and queuing delay.
If this hadn't been such a dangerous threat, I'd have replied like this: "oh i'm sorry, I'll refund you of all the money you paid in licenses for curl specifically".

But, quite frankly, I'd go to the police immediately.
I don't need a ton of historical reporting because I live in Texas and lived through both events. And yes, having seen my apartment drop into the thirties after three days without power, and seeing the effect on my city, I'm well aware that the current situation is much worse.

But a huge reason the situation now is much worse is simply due to the duration of the cold - without power and heat for days there were a ton of second-order effects, primarily burst pipes everywhere. Yet the power system failed very quickly, early on Monday morning. And a huge reason it failed is because none of the recommendations were followed after 2011. And systems that did follow those recommendations (e.g. El Paso, not on Ercot) fared much better.

I have no doubt the historic breadth, severity and length of current cold snap would have caused lots of problems, even if we were well prepared. But on the contrary, I find the misleading ones are the ones claiming this was a "totally unforeseeable" and a "once in a lifetime" event to deflect responsibility for a complete lack of preparation.
One of the tricks is to create an environment that doesn't require willpower to avoid distraction. There are plugins that block distractions on your browser. You could sell, or lend out, or put your X-box into storage, etc.
This 100 times. Hello normal person.
Would anyone have an idea why it's reported unsafe?
> Meh... this was a big multinational so I doubt they are committing fraud.

I actually think that a big multinational is more likely to commit these kinds of frauds. In fact, a full time employee that works only for one company and who's sent by a placement agency sounds a lot like fake self-employment.
Same here, even less technically inclined ones. Whenever someone messages me on WhatsApp, I usually reply with, "Hey, would you mind if we switch to Signal <install link>? I'm in the process of getting off WhatsApp for obvious reasons". At that point, either they install and continue to conversation in Signal, or they reply back asking "Wha? What's wrong with WhatsApp?" at which point, I explain just how much FB's clients can know about you with the metadata they collect.
> I am designing my program for a particular use, by definition.

No; this is bad engineering. You write a program to conform to a specification. In the specification, it says what must happen when a file does not exist, what must happen when there's not enough memory, etc. Then you write the specified behavior into code.
Yes, or Uber could eat the cost over the quoted price. They cant be "just the marketplace" as well as the one that sets the price unless they accept the risk that the actual price charged by the vendor is higher than the quote.
What ever works for you. To return to scroll position I click up then down or left then right.

You can use `ctr + -` to also jump between documents. So if you’ve jumped to a function definition in another document the back shortcut can take you there.
How to Forecast Sales
I used to pay for a WhatsApp subscription. I remember it being a small amount per year. But they did it away with it after Facebook bought them.
I ended up feeling the same thing as you. I only have the room for one desk, and so the screens/ other stuff had to be shared. After 8 plus hours in my bed room working the last thing I want to do is spend the time before I sleep there too, looking at the same screen. In the before times the urge was much more stronger.
>> Is the problem really that Facebook et al are American

Kinda. American's seem to take capitalism to the extreme (honestly I do like America and Americans). I'm all for an open market but there are limits that we should enforce.

>> Say a company based in the UK had the exact same basic business plan of collecting your data and selling it to micro-targeting ad agencies and political campaigns. Would it not have the same prime metric of "engagement" and stimulate the same rage bait and limbic system responses? Would people not end up in ideological rabbit holes?

Yes - but I don't think those companies would end up as oligarchies, as Facebook / Twitter / etc have become, due to the "national" limitation that they would endure. They wouldn't be able to influence the elections in other countries. Competition would be easier (you try starting a company to compete with Twitter, it can sway public opinion to stay top-dog).
Linux and Beowulf Drove Desktop Supercomputing
I have a list of priorities when developing (most to least important):

Reduce Statefulness -> Explicit error handling -> Reduce Dependencies (sometimes even violating DRY if need be) -> Reduce complexity -> Everything else.

Designing systems or software usually has decoupling and complexity as a priority, with everything else in second place.
I think that was only true for the Apple store, not for Android.
Robert Baruch recently re-booted his "Build a RISC-V Processor without using an FPGA" series[1]. His approach is heavily dependent on nmigen and formal verification. Check it out.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgXJf8c5PLo&list=PLEeZWGE3Pw...
It depends on whether that poor person is using the money to fund a business or whether financial insecurity is forcing that person's hand.
This is the sort of magical thinking that can be a symptom of paranoia, the unfortunate combination of extreme anxiety and a disengagement from realistic thinking. The person clearly does not know what Curl does and simply lashed out like a wounded animal at the first thing that caught his attention.

I would take this threat very seriously.
I would agree if the content was being copied over. But links ? What would HN look like ?
I’m fairly sure there were (maybe still are) linkers that, given duplicate symbol names, would happily grab one of them without checking whether they had the same code.

Add in parallel linking, and program behavior can change.
It's a bit of a step back in time reading things like this.

This is stateless HTTP requests hitting a relational database. How is this dead horse still being beaten? The patterns for load balancing, horizontal scalability, caching in this space well documented.

What are we gaining still profiling Django, Flask and Ruby on Rails in 2021.
My understanding was that Uber is profitable in many of its markets. Furthermore that in those markets where they are not yet profitable, this is largely due to spending on incentives, marketing, etc in order to grow the network (on both sides of the market).

That being said, if Uber truly can only be profitable by breaking the law, or by creating its own laws (Prop 22), perhaps it doesn't deserve to do so.
Why are you going after the one-data-point anecdote instead of the broader picture?
Strongly disagree with your disagreement.
Programming features help you organize your code. The fact that you actually have a robust software or not with what the language offers is another problem.

When people say "errors are values", I say: yes, but they are a special kind of values. The same way floats are special (signaling NaNs), or that bools are special (short-circuit operators). It is great to have special support for values which need to be used in a certain way (here: don't lose any error, bubble up by default).

It is great to have the opportunity (not the obligation) to use features for separation of concerns. This makes it a bit like an aspect-oriented approach where normal code emits errors and error handling code elsewhere knows how to handle/restart them. If you language allows it, it makes also sense also to decouple logging (tracing functions) or data-access permissions (postgresql row level security).

In the C code I maintain at work, everything is here in plain view, logging, error handling, etc., and I am not complaining, but more recently we tend to use other languages or code generation a lot (think of something like protobuf) because it makes code a lot easier to maintain.
> But distributed systems is a well understood thing in the industry.

Wait, what?

Distributed systems are one of the most active areas on CS currently. That's the opposite of "well understood".

It's true that most systems people create are required to be distributed. But they are coordinated by a single database layer that satisfies approximately all the requirements. What remains is an atomic facade that developers can write as if their clients were the only one. There is a huge difference between that and a microservices architecture.
No I'm saying the notion of illegality does not apply, and in fact leads to absurd consequences.

For instance, if you make it illegal for the accused to lack representation in court, you can then sue them for not having representation, a suit from which they cannot defend themselves, lacking representation, which then opens them up to another suit, ad infinitum!

I think there's some conflation of "regulating" and "making illegal" going on here. Mandating that the state must provide everyone with a public defender is not equivalent to "making lacking representation illegal".
This surfaces an important point that our communities (online, offline, families, etc) have no easy solution for: if indeed some one does have a mental illness* how do you factor that in and make allowances for it? How do you quantify that the actions come from someone who is mentally unwell? And without diagnostic tooling, how do you know they are mentally ill?

* In this case there is no way to comfirm if the sender/s are mentally ill because all you have is inference to play against the words written and the images sent to Daniel.
There are some really crappy low-end mechanical disc brakes around, but the TRP Spyke and Avid BB7 are solid and commonly found on touring bikes. If you plan to cycle 30,000 km through lots of remote terrain (e.g. Alaska–Ushuaia or Europe to Cape Town via West Africa), then they are as trivial to maintain as rim brakes, without however destroying your rim.

I have cycled down some of the world's great mountain ranges, and I have never had complaints about my Spyke's stopping power.
Yes it would be nice if free software could get rid of all the "multimillion dollar defense projects".
I have never seen anyone, even the ORM "experts" in my jobs, save time with an ORM over what a junior engineer couldn't do faster with plain SQL.

The reason is that sure, for your first 10 basic select queries, the ORM saved you half an hour. Then you got to that complicated join and had to resort to looking up archane syntaxes and prototyping attribute quirks for an hour, when the junior guy got the whole thing written in 15 minutes of trial/stackoverflow/error in a SQL prompt.

Then, even when the "expert" did get it working, guess who is going to be the one looking at it again when trying to figure out production support issues? The junior guy, who is now clueless and has to spend two hours to figure out what this crazy ORM mess does here. The better alternative was just to have the SQL there ready to go so it is well understood and can be ran against the production database or a test database to reproduce the issue. No questions whatsoever.

I have seen this over and over again, more than a statistically relevant number of times.
While I'll avoid the political nature, I do find the terms are misused. In Firefox extensions, for security it's more intuitive (based on prior usage) for security-related extensions like an ad block. Anything on a whitelist is allowed (to include ads), and on the blacklist, it is not allowed (ads are blocked).

But I have another extension that just modifies the format of some pages to make them easier on my eyes. It took experimentation for me to realize that items on the whitelist are modified, while those on the blacklist are not. My intuition told me whitelists are for sites that are good the way there are, and sites that are hard on the eyes should be put on the blacklist.

It's not the worst mix-up in the world, and perhaps many smarter than myself would have no such confusion, but I think it could be avoid with words that mean what they do. There's plenty of room in the extension configuration to put "apply to these sites" or "transformed", as well as "allow original format" or "unchanged."
You're allowed to use trademarks to factually describe what a product is.

Your linked law suit is about something entirely different to what's being discussed in this thread - that's about describing restaurants as shut when they aren't.
CPI inflation is the measure of how much slack is in the system. The scary thing is that there is too much slack since inflation is too low.
Possibly exposure radiation created additional mutations, some that proved to 'catch on' evolution wise? That's interesting.
Did you try Aces for VScode? What do you think?
Also see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25868742 (53 comments)

and:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051370 (81 comments)
What an interesting take. Go, Python, Ruby and countless other languages only have one implementation and real community. I don’t think this is a real concern for most developers. As long as the language solves their problems and is well maintained with a community that trusts the language maintainers.
Like it does now? With some content paywalled and some not, and perhaps some links rejected from the submission form if the link has attributes indicating a payment is required. I will concede that adaption would be required, but I disagree with the idea that this model is entirely unreasonable.

When Hacker News users link to paywalled content, some of us consume it without issue because we pay those sites (Bloomberg, WSJ, Economist, etc).
I have a hard time believing that they only spent $15k on a prototype for a multimillion dollar defense project.
Did it ever actually charge anyone? I remember agreeing to something like $1 per year but never being charged.
As a frequent user of each of these languages this appears quite cool

The thing putting me off is both PHP and Clojure have mature/maturing tooling that I suspect would be unusable here

On the PHP side there's LSP servers, xdebug 3, PHPStorm
(the only reliable client for xdebug I've found)
xhprof, phan etc

On the Clojure side there's Cider, Cursive, Structural editing tools, Clj-kondo, Clojure-lsp

I love dynamic languages but I wouldn't use a new one without a few good static analysers and deep debuggers
I deleted my account, although a big part of it was how Whatsapp was able to automatically add lots of my contacts (from my phone number I believe?) to my friends list automatically. I wasn't really excited about myself possibly being on other people's contact list without my knowledge!
This is one hell of a truth.

I think the customers I met are mid size. The number of current reservations they get over the phone and site contact form are between 100 and 300 per month (20-21 working days).

A way to convert these customers from phone to the web app is to include a link to the app and let them check the details (I'll think of something...).
And what if Twitter registered themselves as a news company in Australia? Would newspapers using links to tweets (or images of tweets) have to pay twitter? This would be really funny.
So we will not talk about "other" sites right? :D Only educational :)
Isn't per capita a more equalizing metric? If you go off raw numbers the data will be skewed even more heavily. Though there are certainly other methods to compare, such as per km^2, that you could use to perform other comparisons, depending.
I would say give it time, you can't measure Rust with this yardstick (yet), Rust is a baby in terms of age.

Let's not forget that C is ~50 years old and yet having reliable, open-source, high-quality compilers is a thing of the past 20 years or so. Clang was born in the 2000's, GCC is much older but it wasn't that great of a compiler for some time. Same with VS.
If we were to ignore the mechanism part of microservices, we could say that qmail and postfix have a microservices architecture. Both of them have fared much better than monilithic Sendmail. And, their track records for resilience and reliability are very encouraging too.

There exist other ways of designing 'microservices' that are not necessarily conventional monoliths!
Except this kind of trademark abuse absolutely does happen. There was a post on HN about it yesterday [1].

Uber successfully had an app taken down that helped drivers determine whether Uber had cheated them out of wages they were owed. The important thing is that unless the people of UberCheats have a lot of money and time to burn they can't really challenge Uber's actions here.

Hell, a few weeks ago Apple forced a company to change their logo of a green pear because they claimed it was infringing on the Apple logo[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26184352

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26084387
It was $1 / year
That's not surprising. It's Apple, after all.

I get downvoted a lot for saying this, but I'll say it anyway: I'm getting increasingly convinced that the purpose of this whole "safe languages" push is ultimately to the benefit of companies who want to deepen and their control over users. If you look at who the biggest proponents are, it's pretty obvious what their motivations are. They don't want you jailbreaking or rooting, they want to force you into their walled garden and keep you there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7883026
The universe is best modeled with substructural linear logic, so makes sense.
That is a very odd definition of culture hero. "Whose name does everyone know?" seems a better headline.
The ARPU that Facebook can make is higher than the average price people are willing to pay to get access to whatsapp. That's all, dont look further
Actually, afaik uuids are pseudo-random and can thus absolutely collide in theory. Collision is solved by every db backend out there.
CC Academy (Free Fellowship) opens its doors to the 3rd cohort of ML/FE/UX folks
It is this one single spark. An journalist writing a story. A user complaining to his right buddies. The one executive of a big company making an announcement.

It is a spark. Or a butterfly ;)
In some sense it seems fair that small players can group together, so that when they negotiate with a big company they have a block of comparable size. Otherwise small companies have no choice but to merge into a large company to negiotate together.

But the proof is in the pudding I suppose, and there may certainly be unexpected or undesirable consequences.
M$ killed Atom??

It ostensibly seems fine, updated today. https://github.com/atom/atom
This person clearly doesn’t understand what software is and how it works. If he really lost a multi million dollar defense project to a hack it’s not a bad thing at all.

Of course this has nothing to do with curl or any other software, one can only get hacked because of their ineptitude.
I don't think that would benefit gamers at all.

Maybe it will offset the days it takes for a graphics card to pay itself by a few weeks? (e.g. previously RTX 3070 took x weeks to pay itself by mining 24/7, maybe it will change to x + 2 weeks?)
2% inflation is a policy goal, not some trickery to mess with debts. Debt is one way to drive inflation to the 2% goal. As long as there are productive investments it would be foolish to just let your money sit around instead of investing it. Unfortunately central bank money isn't driving any investments, just a stock market bubble.
You seem to be interpreting it the opposite of how I interpreted it.

You wouldn't take action against the person without money. You'd do something to fix the situation, like provide them with a lawyer for free.

Note I don't necessarily think that's a good idea (really haven't thought it through), but that's how I interpreted th comment.
But look at the message presented to users [1]. It is almost threatening... The deadline date at the bottom... The scary sounding phrase "partner with Facebook" without even giving an example...

The simple text in bold at the top saying "Facebook never gets the contents of your messages to friends, and it never will" would have gone a long way to making most users happy.

It's almost as if someone deliberately chose the text of this to make users upset...

[1]: https://images.indianexpress.com/2021/01/WhatsApp_NEW_1.jpg
My guy, this is Epic Games. They make Fortnite, one of the most popular pieces of media ever, with billions of dollars of revenue a year from selling avatar hats to hundreds of millions of users. You don't have to worry about their investors.
TBH, I find it pretty amazing that anyone with a semblance of a kitchen hasn't been cooking over the past year. I admittedly don't have a lot of good options around where I live but I haven't gotten delivery in years and don't get takeout--from my local pizza place--very often.