skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He discredits himself almost immediately when he asserts that right wing views and capitalism are synonymous. But more importantly, he was only involved in publishing a meme-copy of bitcoin, so who cares at all what he thinks? Especially after he made fortune off of the thing he's denouncing.
Because these companies are pretending to be moral, usually until it affects the financial side of things, after that, anything goes, if people don't find out.
Data Bugs
Nice article! This sort of code is not just used in databases, it's also obviously the "merge" step in mergesort.

The fact that you have to "lure" the compiler into making the hot loop branchless is a little bit weird: you'd think there would be a compiler intrinsic or something which was like `cond_val(condition, val1, val2)` which worked something like `condition ? val1 : val2` but was guaranteed (or close to it) to be free of branches. Shaders have something like that with the `step()` function, seems like a useful thing for this kind of high-performance code.

I mean, obviously you could always write this yourself with inline assembly (or using SSE2 intrinsics or whatever), but that would only work on some platforms and might mess with compiler optimizations, so that seems less optimal.
It's quite complicated. Income Tax is spread over the year as the first £12k or so is not taxed, so they try to use that balance across the 12 months. We also have something called National Insurance through which eligibility for a state pension is calculated and that's calculated weekly/monthly. There are also student loan repayments, and depending on when you studied at University it changes the threshold you repay at.
If only he had oil platforms.
YouTube proposed me an essay on that yesterday, with a sub-title of : An analysis of the dissonance between morality and heroism in stories, and the reality and moral complexities of our modern society.

It raises some points regarding the questions you pose, you may find interesting. I'd love to do the TL;DR but it's slightly more nuanced than that so I'll post the link

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tooiNm9WmkM
Bravo, just amazing. Great detail in the explanation.

I can hardly imagine how much time and effort someone must put into these kinds of things.
I guess there creator of dogecoin always saw it as a joke, so this isn’t surprising.

Cryptocurrency is about choice and voice. Coordination and communication tools. There are American right wingers with their tokens and systems they’ve designed. But there is also things like CirclesUBI which is much more socialist and gaining momentum in the Berlin indie art scene.

Of course if you aren’t engaging with the space you just see speculation and hear about hacks and crime and people who became millionaires. what you will hear about is what Silicon Valley vcs pour millions of dollars into things they want you hearing about.

But actually engaging with devs in the space and the different subcultures you can find people you get along with. You can find communities and daos doing things you are interested in and share your political alignment.
Most people I know working in the space have European left wing leanings.

Also a reminder. You don’t have to spend any money to be involved. Write code, join chat rooms, work on things you enjoy and want to make. That is going to obviously be much more rewarding than gambling on the back of VCs bags.
That link doesn't appear to mention any action taken by the host either.
The problem is two folds:

- Node.js std lib is paper thin. You can't even parse a http request multipart body without bringing in a separate package...

- NPM has always been a mess, but it's seems it was all by design in order to make node.js depend on that (commercial) package manager.

Node.js creator biggest regret was its dependency to NPM.
Completely agree.This is just governments as well as big tech on a power trip trying to censor things by whatever morals are in vogue now. It is quite insulting treating grown adults like "don't see this. we are telling you it is bad for you."
This is still Snapchat mode.
Do you seriously and honestly believe that the market will by itself create better conditions for workers?
Because money can circumvent regulations and hack the system. Using local strawmen as buyers etc.

Nothing more funny then these wealthy elites, believing they can become a island, disconnected from society, by taking refuge on an island.

How can you gain your wealth from a very complex international trading system and not realize, that there is no way to escape a decomplexification event in those systems is beyond me.

Must be some mammal brain part insisting that a burrow is needed.

I miss the post world-war 2 CEOs who instead would have taken that money to a company lab, to solve problems. Aka build a fusion plant, instead of a Global-Collapse-bunkervilla.
Its literally why things like Solar Wind hacks happen with cost cuts. Also products become unfixable, you get locked-in, random shit happens that requires everyone to spend a little extra and so on.

It always amazes me that people who adore the startup f-you mentality are shocked when they go public that this mentality fizzles out pretty quickly. Google & Facebook were adored as leaders in tech and now...
People could stand to be confused a bit. Sort of a, "Get out of the car and find your own way home," moment for a society that is infamously terrible at analyzing The Reasons Things Are. We used to "universally accept" nomenclature like "Nigger" for place names.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_nigger_in_proper_name...
> if users post illegal content

If a platform decides to pick and choose then it's no longer a platform. It's a publisher.

It's not the users that post illegal content. Users only send it privately to the publisher and publishers decides to make it publicly available and should bear full legal and moral responsibility for the act of publishing it.

The whole invention of a term platform is so that tech companies can avoid responsibility of publishers.

> it sounds like you're suggesting any site that removes user content should be pushed into shutting down

It can remove user submitted content but only if the laws requires for such content to be removed or if there are technical reasons to do that (content is too large, to popular, too unpopular, some time have passed, etc).
That's a shame, 95% of users are clearly missing out on the thrill of bending a MSFT product to their will, a rare occurrence in and of itself as well as never needing to rely on someone else for data analysis/transformation for their own work.

I worked at a hedge fund briefly (recently) and the rest of the investments/trading group literally didn't know what they were doing in terms of tooling/analysis/etc and that's a separate story lol (seriously - after the fund went from $30mm AUM to $1.2b before I joined, I immediately suggested hedging at least 50% of the portfolio with some puts 3 months out, and the 'founder' immediately said 'no but we are long')

Anyways so yeah instead of advancing the field with my sexy python backend code, sadly I ended up being tasked with all of the new interim strategy, while also needing to find alpha. So while I was writing a core real time risk web app implementation in Python/C, along with a trading system based on some off the shelf tooling with some custom infra by yours truly, I was also tasked with creating a "temporary solution" that was just based on Google Sheets (The Firm™ decided to strategically adopt Google for everything, even though Sheets is garbage) - INDEX/MATCH don't work, and none of the advanced functions work. Of course, building the functionality into Google's little app is not scalable and probably won't even exist in another 3 years, but Excel is just so great if you have a super small dataset that you need to slice and dice for some quick analytics. Then I'd just port over the functionality to C and write some wrappers to facilitate quick computation in Jupyter Console. Really great reactive stuff. And with xlwings, I could do some quick analysis and then just rip that into my running session and then do whatever analytics I wanted to. Going on a huge tangent here, apologies. But Excel is great and it could be even better if they figure out a more efficient stream-based system to get rid of annoying hangs while you are processing a larger dataset, especially if there are many complex formulas embedded in the sheet (again, obviously this can be handled by constantly dumping the data and then re-performing analysis on the derived dataset without all the insane, nested Excel formulas across a bunch of cells).

Pretty sure a minimal implementation of Excel with INDEX, MATCH, FILTER, ROWS, SEQUENCE ( & and maybe TRANSPOSE for good measure ) would be Turing complete.

EDIT: This went super off-topic. I apologize, but basically moral of the story is... if your requirements are ambiguous, your friend Excel is there waiting to help. Just gotta know your tooling and learn all those weird functions you think you normally wouldn't reach for!

EDIT2: Avoid computers if possible
http://mars.google.com is fun, too!
You say that sarcastically, but wasn’t he though? He clearly convinced Apple he was their best option. Why would Amelio get credit for bringing the company to such dire straits and then picking literally the only viable and mature option in front of him? Compare that to Steve Jobs who unquestionably had the business and technical solution to fix Apple.
To feel better about being inside of one, of course. See, if I criticize the machine then I’m not just a cog in it.

What truly matters isn’t what I wake up and do every day, it’s what’s in my heart that counts. My soul is pure, don’t look at my hands.

He’s a long time employee with a presumably significant amount of equity. Significant at an individual level, I mean. He’s fully imbricated and implicated in what he portrays as so horrible (see the ICE comic if you think I’m exaggerating). Truly acknowledging this would likely be traumatic.

I mean, shit, he’d have to do something about it! He’d have to live a totally different way, for just one thing. He’d have to divest... all of that is not gonna happen.

So, comics.
https://www.umlet.com/ a free offline UML tool
That's up to each individual.

If you have goals and you want to accomplish them, you'll want to be like that. At least for a period of time.

The thing is having the choice to do what you think it's best.
In the UK about 9 million (roughly 1 in 15) people live in the countryside. My nearest supermarket is 7 miles away. There is no public transport to speak of. The nearest railway station is 6 miles away.
>No? it's too 2010?

The issue with blind use of pip is that it will inevitably break something in your system when a dependency upgrades too much. Hence virtualenv, and later pipenv.

And setting up a Python project is more than just dependency management. Do you want an egg/wheel/etc? Do you use setup.py, or is it deprecated? Speaking from experience, the docs for various Python tools simply don't agree on these things, and it's very hard to set up a project "correctly" without someone helping you.
Because we want the application to have a modern look and feel, and this Python developer has a genuine desire to start learning about modern web technologies.
Has anything improved at all since the last time an article like this was posted?
I am a JavaScript / TypeScript / Web developer and I am throwing stones within my own glass house!
Your link goes to this current page, I assumed you were linking to an article about that anecdote.
I don't really see the size of it all, or the dependency count, as a problem considering what Electron+React are doing. It's a modern framework with its bundler, plus a browser engine with a bunch of wrappers for interacting with different OSs, and all the tooling necessary to build apps for Windows, OSX and Linux. That's akin to downloading the salient parts of Xcode, Visual Studio, and gcc and complaining about how many dependencies they're all built on. That probably runs into the tens of thousands. Modern software has many moving parts.

The wall of warnings, deprecations, messages, errors you can apparently ignore (fsevents and iltorb, I'm looking at you) is the real issue for me. I want confidence in what I build, and NPM does not give me very much at all. I'd be fine downloading 1861 packages if they all worked together properly without telling me there might be problems.

PS Colin - I think we've met a few times in the Town Wall long before lockdown. Hello from the other person on HN in the NE. :)
Book banning has a historical tendency to slip towards book burning. People who believe in the principles behind free societies support the fundamental rights of expression of those they disagree with, especially those.

(And no, the paradox of tolerance is ultimately fascist in outcome when it forces censorship onto opposing views)
Here in Asia/Taiwan, the claw machines by-law must display the money required to be spent to Win the prize. These are a good example because they are also skill+gambling.

All claw machines Trigger a win if X dollars a spent in a certain duration. I suspect these key machines are based on a similar logic. AFAIK Poker Machines in Australia at licensed venues aren't required to display winning odds :/
No, my feeling is that it is getting worse. Dependency graphs are getting bigger, our tooling is getting more complex.

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2020/12/22/software-crisis.html
>I wonder how the younger generation is supposed to plan for the future?

Take a few lessons from people who live in 2nd- and 3rd-world countries. They used to not rely on government or expect financial stability for decades ahead. Yet, they survive pretty well and some even thrive.

People didn't always have stable currencies, pension funds, and unemployment benefits over their history.
You can learn what Hemingway actually did in WWI, the Spanish Civil War, and WWII at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#World_War_I
I found it - it's called "Executive MBA" and many of the top business schools offer it.
"the English phrase like looking for a needle in a haystack"

That's not that (particularily) English, you know? As many other expressions that crossed cultures at some point, which (in some cases like this it would) most likely have taken place even before ethnogenesis of what's currently considered English, "the needle in the haystack" has a much broader spread.
This. Also the mention of ‘collaboration’ and ‘cloud’ put me off. “Do one thing and do it well”.
I really appreciate the comment.-

Informative :)
There is a difference between tenacity and doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results when there are no signs of progress.

Ideas like "never give up" and "the power of habit" are not universally true, they are heuristics you can apply to your daily life.

In complex systems there are no absolutes. If you have an idea that can be applied to all things equally you're in a cult.
I think he describes the current crypto landscape accurately, but I'm becoming more and more bullish on the long term decentralized finance vision. Imagine solving open source funding by OSS developers selling insurance for their projects on decentralized programmatic insurance markets.
Pharo 9, the pure object-oriented language and environment is released
... That ... confused me too, must confess.-
I think you're conflating the problem of too many direct dependencies with that of too many transitive dependencies.

We go about the rest of our lives using abstractions through interfaces. Those abstractions use abstractions. e.g. To build and use a pencil there are hundreds or even thousands of transitive dependencies. From the wood and graphite to the rubber and metal, each of the inputs like axes to cut wood or to create those other components, and so on.

With software we just do a better job tracking the “lineage” of these transitive dependencies, so the numbers seem large.

The real problem seems to be the ergonomics of all the direct dependencies. The number of transitive dependencies wouldn’t matter if the direct dependencies were in aggregate ergonomic to work with.
I found that book really useful too, and it led me towards leaning more heavily on Postgres. For a long time using Postgres I just treated it as a ‘dumb’ data store with an ORM in front of it, but learning about CTEs, window functions, user defined functions, views, extensions, etc. has made me reconsider where a lot of application logic should go
Inspiring post! I am sitting here right now working on my side project, which I try to do for an hour or two before work every day. It really is amazing how much I get done in this tiny block of time vs. the 8 hours I spend at my full-time job. Just "plugging away", hoping to go from 1 user to 10 to 100.
One thing I find interesting about this time, and maybe HN specifically, is how the people focus on wealth and success (as a substitute for community and religion I think), and at the same time invest time in things like stoicism.

Part of stoicism is the practice of thinking about (your impending) death, often called memento mori[0], which directly contrasts any focus on ephemeral things such as wealth.

It's not surprising that this very contrast became a rather popular type of painting, called the Vanitas[1]. Two of my personal favorites:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori#/media/File:Still...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanitas#/media/File:1628_Claes...

Memento mori / Vanitas also escalated a bit in the 15th century, when we arrived at the Danse Macabre[2] (these days probably mainly known for that one famous Saint-Saëns composition). My favourite Danse Macabre painting was destroyed in a bombing, but there's still a high resolution photograph of it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Totentan...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanitas
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre
Noted. Should have titled as such ... :(
I don't see you arguing that it's wrong or inaccurate though.
The optimizer will do this anyway.
I previously had a 4-bay Synology and loved the UI but couldn't deal with the price jump to an 8-bay. I discovered xpenology.org which allows you to bootload Synology software on x86 hardware.

I turned an old desktop PC into an 8-bay storage machine with a PCIe SATA card and now have all the flexibility I want, without the price penalty for Synology hardware.

The best place to find hard drives is https://diskprices.com/ which scrapes Amazon and a few other sites to show TB per £/$. It's almost always cheaper to buy a retail packaged external disk and extract the hard drive.

Note: Some hard drives once shucked from external cases won't turn on when attached to regular SATA power adapters due to mismatches in power connector specification. Easily solved by using a SATA power to Molex adapter, and connecting that to a Molex to SATA power adapter (SATA->Molex->SATA) as Molex does not support the 3.3V pin which is the issue.
Indian Govt. Withdrew Letter Seeking Apple's Compliance with New IT Rules
Open-source toolkit for REST API Fuzzing
In a previous life, I remember spending some time optimizing an inner loop almost like this (it was actually a sparse vector inner product). Whether full if-conversion or only partial was optimal depended a lot on the architecture and the data. Fun times.
Throw it in godbolt and see if the assembly is different. I would doubt not.
Yup pointing at hypocrisy and contradictions is much simpler than resolving them.

The more complex problems get, the less likely anyone in the room is going to solve them any time soon(Bounded Rationality) . So beyond a point laughing at that reality becomes counter productivs. It just gets people to spend more time and energy reacting, defending, justifying and hiding things.

Bottom line - if you want to do something about a very complex problem, pick a small sub problem within it to work on. That approach has better odds of producing outcomes than poking fun at people who have bit off more than they can chew.
> In 1964, the reporter of the New York Times would have been hard pressed to find

Yes totally agree. I might have suggested otherwise but I didn't mean to. Ludicrous how easy finding out stuff ... or a certain type of stuff at least ... is by comparison today.
You sound like someone that owns a lot of equity at the place you work at - congratulations!

Bellum omnium contra omnes
The whole point of the article is that the optimizer in GCC did not do this.
AI-Generated Language Is Beginning to Pollute Scientific Literature
I never heard anyone oppose stoicism. Where can one read more about it?
I have not used ORM, but used some basic SQL. Is ORM more performant? Why should I learn SQL if I can do all the things using ORM?
Acknowledging the existence of trans people is not identity politics.
ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox: open-source self-hosted web archiving
It's not dismissed for the political associations; there's just a big overlap in certain politics and crypto billionaires.
Show HN: Ad Astra Per Aspera (A book that might change your life)
I can't disagree more with this sentiment, YouTube has been invaluable for me looking up tutorials of anything that I want to know. My experience of Twitter is that it's a hate-filled cesspit, where the loudest get heard the most, and there is no room for debate (given the character limit).

I've used YouTube to learn how to build a bike from scratch, how to fit tiles, plumbing repairs, how to make 3d games engines, as well as the plethora of maths and science / general interest channels (Veritasium, Tom Scott, etc).
Coreutils are starting to get competitors rewritten in Rust, though.
That's not necessarily a good comparison. Electron comes as a binary, so it already has all its own hundreds of dependencies integrated.

The dependency hell wit JS projects is real, and upgrading can become a major timesink and pain if you are not maintaining and upgrading the project constantly.
We are trying to revive the art in our shop. Just got done building a really clean 3NF model for our problem domain and we are in the process of moving 100% of our custom configuration needs to SQL queries.

From a biz strategy perspective, we can scale up a lot faster if all we need to do is find people who know (or can be taught) SQL.

Consider the amount of time it would take to ramp someone on 1 SQL schema vs the entire C# ecosystem.

For us, the application is quickly turning into a dumb funnel that just gets data and requirements (queries) into SQLite databases for eval. We put a web interface around all this so it can be easily managed on a per-customer basis.

When everything is a SQL query, you can trivially export/import/clone customer configurations to rapidly bootstrap new ones.
It's sloppy of Nature to use the correct nomenclature?
PyXLL (www.pyxll.com) is written using the Excel C API and that’s partly how it achieves its excellent performance. It’s not free software, but it ‘properly’ integrates Python into the Excel process so doesn’t suffer from the performance problems of interacting with Excel from a separate process via COM and VBA.
Most companies would envy this amount of "trouble monetizing": https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/gross...
It turns out lots of systems are subtly broken, and need workarounds. This is where it's handy to have a decent standard library instead of learning all of this the hard way:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/b9197978a90be6f757074...
My initial reaction was similar, but to be fair (commercial) air travel is pretty different globally post vs ante.
From my understanding of the article, the BoE aren't concerned about their own infrastructure.

They're concerned about all the major retail banks using the same cloud provider and then that provider having a major outage.

Individual banks having an outage is an issue but one that can be handled. Three or four of the main banks all going down at once could be catastrophic.