skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi,
I think I have mentioned this before in HN too. I am not from CS background and just learnt the trade as I was doing the job, I mean even the normal stuff.

We have a project that tries reify live objects into human readable form. Final representation is so complicated with lot of types and the initial representation is less complicated.

In order to make it readable, if there is any common or similar data nodes, we have to compare and try to combine them i.e. find places that can be made into methods and find the relevant arguments for all the calls (kind of).

Initial implementation did the transformation into the final form first, and then started the comparison. So, the comparison have to deal with all the different combinations of the types we have in final representation now, which made the whole thing so complex and has been maintained by generation of engineers that nobody had clear idea how it was working.

Then, I read about hashmap implementation later (yep, I am that dumb) and it was a revelation. So, we did following things:

1. We created a hash for skeleton that has to remain the same through all the set of comparisons and transformation of the "common nodes", (it can be considered as something similar to methods or arguments) and doing the comparison for nodes with matching skeletal hashes and

2. created a separate layer that does the comparison and creating common nodes on initial primitive form and then doing the transformation as the second layer (so you don't have to deal with all types in final representation) and

3. Don't type. Yes. Data is simplest abstraction and if your logic can made into data or some properties, please do yourself a favor and make them so. We found lot of places, where weird class hierarchies can be converted into data properties.

That did not just speed up the process, but resulted in much more readable and understandable abstractions and code. I do not know, if this is widely useful but it helped in one project. There is no silver bullet, but types were actual problem for us and so we solved it this way.

Edit : new lines and some typos
At least 50% of the difference is pocket grime.

Take a little wet'n'dry screen cleaning wipes to the lens cover and you'll suddenly get way way better photos.

Until you put the phone in your pocket just once, and suddenly you'll be back to the not so great photos.
But if you were looking for unswerving, leak-proof compliance, what better place...

CCP can easily enforce that compliance, they have done so and continue to do so all the time. They even have a government controlled internet, to make sure.
No, this approach is more common and successful than you might think.

We're not talking about making an entirely new language which is incompatible with C. You adopt a style guide, an accompanying static analysis tool, and maybe add some annotations to your source code. Your code is still C-compatible and you can still use the same compilers.

Static analysis of general C programs is quite difficult, and turning on an analyzer for an existing codebase typically results in obscene numbers of false positives. However, if you pair a static analyzer with a strict style guide which restricts the language, you can make the static analyzer much more powerful and useful.

This could be MISRA, it could be a formal verification system, or it could be something else entirely.
Honestly, the only thing that I felt as being off was how they portrayed Earth as being overpopulated. If there were multiple planets/settlements to move to, and an increased overall HDI, you would expect there to be less people on Earth just due to shifting demographic trends. But, other than that it seems really realistic.
Cellular Automata in Distributed Consensus
You identified the problem, but not the solution. The Hoover institution, of course, is basically a safe-space for right-wing ideologues in America now.

The problem is Stanford and similarly exclusive institutions. You get more diversity of thought out of greater diversities of backgrounds, like at SJSU, CSULA, Ohio State, NC A&T, and Virginia Commonwealth University (to name a handful of non-elite schools).
It's been a while since I read the book, but this seems like a stretch. One country imposing implicit/vague economic penalty on a citizen of another country, doesn't seem right relevant to me.

When 1984 and "Orwellian" are used as a catch-all for any type of oppression or even any type of propaganda, I think it does a great disservice.
> Some problems though, like healthcare and homelessness don't get better if you spend more money on them. The prices of healthcare just go up, because there is limited supply of doctors and drug companies charge whatever they want, and more homeless people show up to take advantage of the great services.

If you spend the healthcare money on training more doctors (including making available more residencies), or researching more things that are safe and effective for specialty nurses to do without needing a doctor, you can reduce the bottleneck there and maybe get better results.

Even things like making sure residents have safe transportation home after (overlong) shifts would help. I've heard a lot of unsafe driving anecdotes from my cousin who is currently a resident.
> That is a fairly significant list of conditions.

It is, but it's a list of things that could fail even if there was only one kind of cable. The added risk from having a bunch of different kinds of cable with varying capability is quite small.

> I find it a bit disconcerting that we're talking about delivering 240 W over a cable that consumers are unlikely to differentiate from a 15 W cable (i.e. USB-C specification) or even from a 2.5 W cable (e.g a USB cable they would have used fifteen years ago).

All these voltages are low enough that you can expect any cable to support them. What really matters is the amps, and the difference is much smaller there. Specially marked cables support 5 amps. All other USB C cables support 3 amps. Old USB cables will vary, but it's been standard fare to push 2.4 amps over them for a long time.
My personal version of 1984 is someone smashing random quotes from 1984 into my face, forever. Has nobody seriously read another book in the last few decades?

And Microsoft's president even gives us a stereotypically shoddy reading of the book

>"You know the fundamental story…was about a government who could see everything that everyone did and hear everything that everyone said all the time."

The actually interesting takeaway isn't "government does bad stuff with tech", it's that an atmosphere of reality inversion creates fertile ground for people to accept fiction over truth, even when the lie is obvious. State surveillance doesn't require AI, the Stasi already had the capacity for that 40 years ago.
That is exactly what it is though. If this was 1940 and China was building a nuclear bomb, you wouldn't fight them by disarming yourself and promoting peace. You would build a bigger bomb first.

If USA and others tightly regulate tech, and AI advancements in China continue unchecked, then in a few decades there will be no resisting them from doing literally whatever.
>so the predictions in the article are not based on any kind of evidence

Like the assertions in your comment?
Toxic "non-traditional background in software" leftist ex-girlfriend was put on a PIP at Adobe and subsequently fired for being a worthless bloodsucker starts foaming at the mouth to cover her obvious lack of worth is peak Bay Area/SV leftism.
You may not be interested in culture war, but culture war is interested in you.
I'd argue it's completely unsolvable because devices tend to have different color gamuts. My laptop screen generally covers significantly less of the sRGB gamut than any external monitor I plug into it. Meanwhile the OLED in my phone covers more.
You don’t think AI is a “threat to democracy”?

I think the threat isn’t just AI being used by governments to control citizens. Advertising companies want to influence behavior too, and their customers are mostly private corporations. They already have a lot of power and advertising is a $100+ Billion dollar industry for a reason.. it works.

If you haven’t seen it, I’d encourage you to watch Can’t Get You Out of My Head by Adam Curtis, which talks a lot about the increasing influence corporations have on the masses (by using technology): https://youtu.be/pga0Oi1cZvo
If a subreddit is about a visual creative medium, then the image posts won't be lazy, as they will tend to be people's Original Content; and they will frequently spawn good discussions on how to achieve the effects shown. See:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/origami/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Watercolor/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/MSpaintLikeBobRoss/

DIY hobbies also spawn good subreddits. See e.g.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/

And of course, there's the great and under-explored genre of "hobby X but for old people who aren't interested in the fads of hobby X" subreddits, e.g.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/
a lot of these people specifically come to california because they want to live on the street and do drugd and visit the beach and enjoy it. i’ve seen many of them admit it. losers in iowa or some random state where they could easily get an apartment for 500 bucks a month or live with parents but would rather move to california and not have a job
What's your justification for saying the second printf "should print 00000000ff000000"?
I don't think I implied that multinational conglomerates are the pinnacle of innovation. I implied that they are important to our economy, and by extension (see my other comment), they are important to our way of life, our way of thinking, and our ability to live in a free and democratic society. That doesn't mean that companies get to operate without any regulatory oversight, but I would be careful to constrain domestic companies in ways that we cannot constrain their international competitors.

Somehow this concept might be easier to explain by looking at the analogies from the military world. Of course the world would be a better place if we all destroyed all of our nuclear weapons. Does that mean that the US should lead by example and destroy all of our weapons first with no assurances that others will do the same? Of course not. We do this step by step, and only as much as we can trust and enforce through bilateral agreements. Well, military power is intrinsically linked to economic power, so it should be clear that we wouldn't want to cap our economic power by implementing rules that others don't have to follow. Of course, two notable exceptions are environmental concerns, and in the future likely also mental health concerns. But you can't just go crazy with imposing unreasonable limitations in those two areas (eg: requesting that every factory is only powered by renewable energy, while allowing Chinese companies to use whatever energy they want). The same thinking should apply to any limitations we want to invoke on protecting our mental health - we have to approach this step by step, rather than killing our domestic companies and handing over the market share to the foreign ones.
Unfortunately, the cult of "meritocracy" is a bipartisan issue (though somewhat slanted towards the Democrats now because of cultural realignment over the last decade).

In my opinion, "meritocracy", where "meritocracy" is defined by a narrow scope of skills the dream-hoarder class possesses and the rest don't know about, is the problem.
> 1. It allows people to do nothing. People who are able should work. People who can't, we can help. But it shouldn't be an abusable system where one can simply say "I can't work" and no questions are asked. Everybody in society can't just say "I don't want to work" -- everything would fall apart if we did that.

This is GP's entire point. Given the freedom to choose what to do, "do nothing" is not a common choice. In a world where everyone has the option to say, "I don't want to work", most won't actually say that, especially in the long term.

> In the interest of fairness, then, all who are able should contribute.

Why fairness? The system we have now is incredibly unfair. UBI would at least provide more fairness by removing wage slavery.

Points 2 and 3 are about trivial implementation details:

2. Addictions are already putting people in poverty, and the best solution is recovery from those addictions. That recovery requires access to healthcare.

3. Children are people who can't really manage finances yet, so it's pretty obvious that their caretakers would be recipient to their income. People aren't having that many children, and wealthier parents tend to have significantly fewer children than parents who experience poverty. Remember you were a child once, too.

4. Of course people who are working will earn more than they have to pay in taxes. It will look like less than they make today if you don't include their universal basic income, but it will be entirely (by definition) disposable income.

4. There's no need to keep people honest in the first place. That's a key feature. You can only cheat social security if you aren't entitled to it, and literally everyone is entitled to UBI.

> I don't think UBI would result in mass unemployment but I do think we'd have a good number of people at the bottom doing absolutely nothing productive with their lives.

Prove it. I don't see any evidence to support that conclusion, and I see a wealth of evidence that contradicts it.

The reality is that most people don't need to be working in the first place. Right now, half of the wealth in the US is concentrated to only 50 individuals, yet most of the rest of us aren't experiencing scarcity. Those who are don't choose to out of laziness.
> Your analysis didn't touch on the fundamental need of any democratic society to sustain strong economic growth

The need of the society is to defend property rights and sustain the rule of law. Economic growth is good, but you can’t make it the top of your list. Besides, we are already awash in too much regulation as it is, we should be heading the other direction towards more liberty. I’m not saying there’s never a time for regulation, just that we are waaaay past the point of reason in many areas.
Both are correctable in software. You just need to reproject and simulate a different type of camera lens.
All micro-USB cables are cursed shit.
Enkidu-3 NEW on Substack
That is SUCH a good point. This is exactly why I get all my news from HN. (not a good idea)

Possibly related Noam Chimpsky paraphrased superaccuratequote - "Look at all the conflicts China is involved in, they're regional. They don't venture anywhere close to our territory. It's all posturing to coerce the obedience of their own population. Ultimately they represent no real threat and are being cast as a boogieman possibly to coerce our obedience. My name is Noam Chomsky. I teach at Arizona Community College now for some reason and Im probably a millionaire."

Seriously though the most Orwellian part of this whole thing might (might) be Big Tech Brother casting China as the perpetual Eurasian superenemy.

Or not? Idunno I wouldn't take a job in China.
> If your startup plans to push the boundaries of today’s artificial intelligence by building with our API, we want to hear from you.

How about just giving me access to your API so I can start tinkering with it, and who knows, maybe it becomes a startup that you can fund?
This.

I am no longer willing to mentor female coders one on one after witnessing a friend get fired from allegations from a mentally unstable female peer. She ended up getting a second dude fired, until on her third attempt the claims fell apart, and it became clear she had fabricated all 3 claims. Too late for the first two.

This victimization cult has now caused me to adopt the "billy graham rule" that I used to make fun of fundamentalist Christians about.
Building Regex.help
The Leg at the Bottom of the Sea
Sorry, I’m not a complete shitheel.
Very cool, and feel more real than I expected. A raindrop often ends up to the real "river" and goes down to the sea with it. It revived my appreciation to the physics.
But you can make a smarter (ie. Dewarping) crop... In the same way there are better map projections for exploring Antarctica...
We need people to start making the hard decision to forgo the convenient option.

> "Dr Lan Xue, who advises the Chinese Government, said facial recognition could prove "tremendously helpful" in identifying people in mass gatherings if there is a "major accident"."

People need to follow their gut and say no to things like this.

It's hard to pick out the reasonable interventions from the ones that are being promoted for surveillance purposes. It's probably best at this point to be conservative with the civil liberties we compromise on. Unfortunately, certainly language has been co-opted, and that's confusing. "Greater good" and "public health" are hard to argue against.
More surveillance is a good thing. With more data, the government can make better decisions and be more efficient. I don't think this is anything to be scared about.
This is highly misleading on a key proof: Microsoft was never venture backed in the common meaning. They did accept VC investment from David F. Marquardt to get him as an advisor while they restructured to go public. His firm owned 6% and was never a major investor. Microsoft was profitable pretty much from the start and didn’t need the money.
I don't know about The WELL these days, but yes it came out of the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Truck Store culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I remembered the Truck Store was in Menlo Park near the train station, got curious and looked it up. This MoMA page has some fun facts:

https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/AccesstoT...

In more recent years it was a flower shop:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/558+Santa+Cruz+Ave,+Menlo+...

And now it is torn down for new construction. Somewhat fittingly, the current Google Street View has a truck driving by in front of the vacant lot:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/558+Santa+Cruz+Ave,+Menlo+...

Pop quiz! (Actually I'm genuinely curious.) Can anyone name the typeface used in the FUNCTION and Whole Earth Truck Store headings in the MoMA page? I used to know it well (pun intended) but have forgotten its name.

Back in those days, you used to buy fonts by the sheet. A sheet of rub-on lettering that is. The sheet had characters that were slightly sticky underneath. These were on the back side of the sheet. I mostly used Letraset and Mecanorma sheets.

You would place the sheet so the next letter you wanted was lined up where it should be over the page you were making, and then rub over the letter with a burnishing tool until it came loose from the font sheet and stuck to the paper underneath.

Update! I found these newfangled things called "Google" and "Wikipedia". (Well - pun intended again - I guess I already blew my cover with those Street View links.) Anyway, the typeface was called Windsor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_(typeface)

One more thing... Here's a great photo of Stewart Brand and the gang at the Truck Store:

https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1058035963354583041/photo...
I dunno, I do see "luxury" apartments being built rather often around here, but starting at $2K/mn for a 1 bedroom isn't really affordable.

Political NIMBYism probably does play some part along with the pandemic, but again, that doesn't mean these investors are paying attention to that. There is a gold rush on at the moment.
People are sometimes kind of down on that approach in software, considering it sloppy. Especially in comparison to other engineering disciplines it just looks kinda bad sure.

But really I'm pretty sure if for example civil engineers could build a bridge in an hour and load it up consequence-free they'd do it too.

The fact that we do it isn't bad at all, but yeah it's easy to not realize when you've exited the realm of consequence-free testing.
I agree it's a scary thought. Really, it's not much different than what happened with the military industrial complex. We'd be better off without it assuming every other country got rid of theirs, but since that's not happening, it has become effectively untouchable. I am not happy about it, but you won't see me advocating for destroying all of our weapons without other countries following suit. The same applies to my thinking around the tech companies, which are increasingly becoming important drivers of our economic growth.
You could skim a PDF of it +7$5 to get up to scratch with RISC-V, and it is more of a reference.

FWIW I think H&P books are extremely important references but basically rubbish pedagogically.
First thoughts: Nobody will give this company a chance in that top-dollar, high stakes enterprise space without a track record.

Second thoughts: Oh it's former SUN/joyent guys, nvm.

Will the console have fancy ncurses reporting and analytics like then product page?
Personally I want to listen to the music I like in the best quality available.

Call me a snob, but usually I'd rather listen to a totally different Band C's song in at least 320k mp3 (preferably FLAC) than either Band A or B's in less quality.

But I enjoy music on a technical level as well. I find it very difficult to enjoy bad mastering or audio quality. There is enough well-mastered and recorded music out there nowadays that I don't feel I need to be subjected to badly-recorded music.

There are some recordings where I really wish they were done better, but very few that are really badly recorded that I can enjoy, no matter how good the music itself might be.
I think this must be true of Twitter in specific places (USA) or circles. I find it to be largely positive and can't think of the last time I saw a polarised debate on there. Not on FB so can't comment about that.

Instagram is important for one of my lines of work and I find it a positive place.
Um, clearly it's not undeniable, because I deny it.

What precisely scares you so much about vaccination status being somewhat public? There's precisely zero threat to any real liberties there. And it's laughable to call this "hard totalitarianism".

As an aside, this didn't even happen, of course; we didn't "grant the play store our vaccination status". Never happened.
That same argument would prevent the right to privacy.
I saw that too but I wouldn't spread it as a fact without a better source.
I feel the same way.sdf.org includes web hosting and email for free, and if you want to support them recurring. It's only $36 annually. So it's significantly cheaper.
The guy that did the Long Now Foundation and Whole Earth Catalog started The Well in 1985.

It's now run by a group of longtime members.

It's a different way to do things. Intentionally high barriers to entry protect against eternal Septembers and spam.

At a low enough fee, counterintuitively, money is a fairly decent unbiased barrier. It's unbiased in that you don't need to know someone or have specialized knowledge, just the commodity of cash. It's not perfect but it's more blind than most other artificial barriers.
> Laws which are inconsistent with promoting the extension of human life can be ruled to be unjust.

So outlawing theft, rape, fraud, kidnapping, false imprisonment, etc. - that's all unjust?
The Fracking Lottery
Sure there's even a story about that called Hell is the Absence of God.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL
This reads like a bit piece meant to scare people into backing government funding for aggressive applications of AI.