skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, imagine that your code is serializing and deserializing someone else's type. You probably care more in that context about the underlying type and not the newtype, and the newtype doesn't help you.

Now, I did say this option was worth it. And there are cases of being too conservative (Golang?). But when designing and programming, one should look at the tradeoff. Abstraction is not always worth its costs [EDIT: and sometimes you can have less costs by a better abstraction, but being aware of the costs helps to think about the better abstraction].
In addition to what the sibling comment says about the patents expiring, that’s also not really lock in. You can switch to another vendor anytime - just because you used RR product once doesn’t mean you have to use it forever.
I tend to think of these things in terms of some limit approaching reality, whatever that is, as the benchmarks continue. If you have an open competition, and there's enough editing and revision by enough actors over time, it gives you some idea of how fast something is likely to be in practice. That open scrutiny and process of suggested revision by experts in a language is a rough sampling of what is likely to be encountered in practice, with a bunch of experts chipping away at the problem. If a difference in times exists, that's about as good as you're likely to get, with further time differences decreasing in size and probability as the whole process continues.

I'd even probably argue that even if you have a bunch of naive implementations, it still tells you about what's likely to be encountered in practice, because those naive implementations are often not so naive, and many programmers are more naive than you would like to be the case.

Finally, I think in a lot of cases, it's clearer how to do a certain benchmark in a certain language than the essay assumes. Sure, a complex one probably might require some unusual level of expertise. But many benchmarks are fairly small and circumscribed, for better or worse, and consequently pretty tractable.
What’s your business, what are you working on?
SpaceX plans to launch a satellite that will beam adverts into space
Until the data store you grabbed is written in Ruby too :)
7 Day Free Trial – AI Powered Copywriting Tool for Startups and Indie Hackers
Link to the same text on Doctorow's blog, where it's easier to read: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app
I suppose it depends what you want out of your watch, but to me having a time I can't trust is frustrating. Even the best automatic watch is less accurate than quartz (which itself can eventually drift too...).
Yes, this whole narrative that farmers are idiots and that the agricultural industrial complex is manipulating us is both extremely popular here on HN and highly offensive.

If farmers don't want to grow GMO/glyphosate resistant crops they have options, I personally grow mostly non-GMO crops and make plenty of money doing it. Basic economics applies to GMOs like like it applies to microchips or flip-flops and the capital owners (in this case land owners) have agency in this process.
Sorry, got bit a bit too much by C++ templates and a few other things. Rust views itself as a successor language, and I wouldn't like it to make the same mistakes.
Wooden "bow" hammock. These sell all over the place, and I got the cheapest I could find at NZD ~300 including transport. The "bed" is easily detachable so I can store it out of the weather, and the hammock itself is holding up excellently.
it's much easier for leaders to blame climate change than to acknowledge that decades of poor leadership contributed to the problems

shifting blame is like politics 101
Yeah, the random straw-man divergence in the middle of the article was a bit off putting.

I like framing climate change in a further reaching time context, but if anything I think the author has reached too far. The point I took away was something like “it’s all going to happen anyway, and we’ll all be dead, so why bother”.

I think the sweet spot of forward-thinking is somewhere between next financial year and the next geological epoch; I propose around 5 generations (150 years?).

I think if we spent more time imagining and talking about the world our grandchildren’s grandchildren will inherit, it’s close enough to feel a personal connection, and far enough away we can meaningfully direct our destiny.
How Should I Think About School and Childcare Now?
Yeah, I don't deny there is a certain natural fascination to them.
> The reason Apple can spend so much on UI is because of your willingness to eat whatever they serve you.

No, it's because FOSS has no economic model.
I Need To Stop Scrolling: The diminishing returns of constant Covid news
Corn based ethanol would like a word. Also, it’s ironic to me that subsidized industrial monoculture has a number of insecurity producing effects:

1. Topsoil loss
2. Mismanagement of surface water and subsurface reserves
3. Centralization and consolidation, decimating rural communities which would be producing more labor intensive food in a crisis
4. Lower biodiversity, increased risk of catastrophic loss
5. The whole system relies on global trade to make useful food anyway

If national security were the actual driving force, farm policy would look a lot different.
Since Financial Choice only allows 50% accessible in Instant Access, in your home buying example I would need to have $120K in my account to make a $60K transfer (ignoring the possibility of a market downturn). Is a long term goal of Financial Choice for users to treat this less like a checking account where you hold cash for near term spending and more like a one-stop shop where all your assets are held?
Doing some further research you can make the optimized initialization of the WrappedByte vector by using it as a iterator.

vec![0u8; len]
.into_iter()
.map(|x| WrappedByte(x))
.collect::<Vec<_>>()

which will give you a list of WrappedBytes but initialized with calloc. I assume this is because llvm can see that the map is a identity function in this case and then can optimize it out.

Godbolt: https://godbolt.org/z/hxnnPcjvG
Caveat lector: I'm analysing this as a linguist. Not as a programmer. (Unless you count a bunch of bash scripts as "programming".)

>Let us start first with describing what we call the “missing text phenomenon” (MTP), that we believe is at the heart of all challenges in natural language understanding.

The missing text is not the heart of the challenge; it's just a surface issue. The actual problem is deeper - machines treat words as if they got intrinsic meaning, when the meaning is actually negotiated between speaker and hearer at the moment of the utterance.

This might sound complicated so, as an example, let's say I told you: "I got a cat. That wug sleeps on my bed."

You don't know what's a "wug" (it's a nonsensical word BTW), or why I'm calling my cat a "wug". So you're missing info, just like the machine, right? And yet you're able to parse the second sentence just fine, based on the first. And if we keep chatting about my cats, any mention of the word "wug" will represent the feline from the picture. We effectively negotiated the word "wug" to represent that cat.

A machine does not do that; instead it'll give words intrinsic, non-negotiable meanings. It won't have "wug" in its dataset, so it won't understand that sentence.

I don't believe that machine learning will solve this issue _on its own_, but it could once we're able to simulate that negotiation of meanings.

>Was Aristotle really Aristotle?

If I saw this sentence "in the wild", I'd immediately interpret it as someone questioning the historicity of Aristotle, and claiming his works were made by someone else. It shows that the question is not as redundant as it might look like.

> The trophy did not fit in the suitcase because it was too // 1a. small // 1b. big

This specific example doesn't show it, but that ambiguity is an issue even for human beings, as shown by

"I dropped the trophy on the table. Now it's broken." (What's broken - the trophy, or the table?)

In fact, it's such a big issue that languages often have a bunch of resources to minimise those situations, as gender agreement and distal/proximal pronouns.
Astronomers Go Nuts for Closest Exoplanet Directly Imaged Ever: Coconuts-2b
also clobbers this effort here, too: https://github.com/mikebolt/posh
"The best geologist is he who has seen the most rocks." –
Herbert Harold Read
tangent: one of the more satisfying patches of my programming career was improving system stability and roughly preserving performance while removing the use of parallel processing

the code grew like this:

1. some python tool is written to grab a bunch of data from a SQL DB through an ORM and do some kind of graph analysis on it. the code is annoyingly slow.

2. the problem is embarassingly parallel (tool performs analysis in terms of domain-specific paths, which can be processed independently for each region of the graph), so one of the devs chunks each problem into sub problems, distributes the work to a cluster, then aggregate the results. it's not lighting fast but a good speedup, good enough for now

3. the tool executes work in parallel but is still regarded by the business and the dev team as kind of slow. later on, another dev has time to do some profiling, sees the SQL queries generated are fairly daft and are failing to exploit ways to efficiently search the data, figures out some different queries. the tool is now running pretty fast.

4. there's an unrelated priority to uplift security. TLS is applied to the job queuing system used by the tool to execute work in parallel. the formerly-slow embarrassingly-parallel code is sending rather large volumes of intermediate data through the cluster, and alas, for technical reasons, when TLS is enabled the additional encryption overhead causes the queuing system to fail sometimes (it is so busy doing crypto on large messages that it delays sending heartbeats, which causes its clustered friends to infer a network partition, which causes the cluster to kick into panic-network-partition-recovery mode, which periodically breaks production and requires manual intervention to recover)

5. what's the fix? remember that we fixed the queries in step 3, meaning the original partial speedup from processing all the work in parallel is no longer required, so we delete all the parallel-chunking code to invert step 2, and the resulting system is fast enough when run sequentially, without using the queue to aggregate large intermediate results
Chandler is simply wrong here. Every single line of code has a cost. There's nevertheless massive benefit to that cost not occuring on millions of end user machines and instead only once in the mind of the developer.
To me the observe step is implied. The scientific method is just meant to say it's okay to be wrong by prioritizing hypothesis over the conclusion. It allows you to be wrong and still fact-based in a world where people naturally don't want to be wrong.

It's okay to prefix this with an explicit "observe" step but the absence of that step in teaching doesn't mean we haven't already spent time observing.
LOL why not just ... carry a photo of your actual vaccination record on your phone?
Wrapper types in C++ really are zero cost. Rust is simply broken here, sorry. That happens when you throw away 30 years of work to reinvent the wheel because you like variable names before types or something.
> 2. Okay, so you don't understand how RefCell works? The caller to this function should be holding r, not passing it into the function. Of course that will just correctly Panic, so it's not wonderful. But that is the point of RefCell.

That’s not the interesting part. The point is that rust won’t optimize a lifetime inside a struct the same way it will optimize an actual reference. It can’t assume that the lifetime will be valid for the whole function (as it can with ref). This limits the amount of reordering you can do in the optimizer.

The example you were looking at was explaining why that is the case.
Hey Mike, did you ever make good on that bet that you lost by stubbornly claiming that COVID was just a bad flu and it was never going to kill millions and fill hospitals, when the world was already burning? I'm going to go on the limb and guess not.

In case you forgot, @Lewton suggested that you donate here: https://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly

BTW, did you actually confirm that you had COVID because as I remember it, you just had a feeling that prior sniffles might've been COVID.
Right on. Love the reference to The Three Body Problem and surveillance. SciFi writer David Brin mentioned in conversation (a long time ago) that total surveillance was an unfortunate state of affairs, but people should push back to make sure they also have surveillance on political leaders, heads of corporations, etc. Basically end up with a system where everyone needs to keep their side of the street clean. - I hope I expressed what he said accurately.
So if the farmers didn't grow glysophate resistant corn instead they would grow non-GMO wheat and spray it with "selective" herbicides that kill wild oats and broadleaf plants over those acres and society would be better.. how exactly?

Roundup is a lot cheaper than Axial Extreme + MCPA or Velocity M3 or Tandem or Rexade.. and, TBH, Roundup isn't tha good at killing a lot of the weeds that those other products kill very well. It's just not as simple as you might think.
FWIW it only contains corn syrup because it's cheaper than cane sugar. If corn wasn't so cheap, you'd just eat an equivalent amount of cane sugar instead.
That sounds like a potential nightmare given that end of year is when a lot of spending happens. Add a large market downturn at the same time, and people could in theory end up shooting themselves in the foot financially.
^ not to mention biofuel from corn actually takes more energy to produce than it provides
Mobile Home Parked
How much energy do we have to shed? Are we making the earth fall towards the sun every time we launch a space craft?
> And the handshake time doesn’t compound; there is no need to open a new connection to the server for every resource needed by a webpage. The web browser just keeps reusing the same connection until it runs out of resources to fetch from the server.

Third party analytics and other resources often means it compounds even for handshaking, but dependent resources can compound too even on the same server even if they don't each need a handshake.
Not OP, but I've bought a dozen different blue light blocking glasses, including the fancy $100 ones from Gunnar Optiks. Gunnar had good performance, but no better than the $12 cheapo pair I got off Amazon (no doubt from a reseller of generic Chinese wares). Save yourself the money and go with a cheap pair to see if you like it. You can always invest more later if you find it to be worthwhile, but in this case price did not yield any appreciable difference to me.
And thus, we will spend the next 10 years playing around with building piddling amounts of renewable power generation and storage instead of actually having a solution in 20 years.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
Sorry, what Canadian grain imports have anything to do with glyphosate?

There are no varieties of Wheat, Oats, or Barley registered in Canada that a resistant to glyphosate.
So ... how do you convince a country without money to spend a grand lot of money to clean up their CO2 emissions?

Does a first-world country offer to pay them billions...?

Or perhaps a first-world country should blacklist them from global trade until they become compliant. Perhaps they can't afford it, and it would be seen as a bad act. Either way, what they dump in the atmosphere affects everyone. What they dump in the ocean, too.

Also sad to see Japan on that list. I thought that they were generally more technologically advanced than the other countries on the 'blame list' which tend to be generally 2nd/3rd world. After all, they have pioneered robotics, process engineering, cutting edge trains, and electric/hydrogen/hybrid automotive for several decades now.
UK:

> The Offensive Weapons Act 1996 says, “any article made or adapted for use for causing injury to the person, or intended by the person having it with him for such use by him (or some other person)” (https://www.slingshotworld.co.uk/slingshots-law/)
I have a Brother ADS-2400n[0]. For me the killer feature was wired Ethernet connectivity to upload scans straight to my file server w/o a PC being involved. It's on the counter where I process mail so I can just throw stuff in it, scan, and dump the originals into a box for eventual disposal.

I have been meaning to get around to trying Mayan EDMS[1] to ingest, OCR, and categorize the scans but that still hasn't happened... >sigh<

[0] https://www.brother-usa.com/products/ads2400n

[1] https://www.mayan-edms.com
Okay, thanks for clarifying that.

Ultimately I'm happy for Rust to only be so smart, of course there are going to be limitations. But you are right, the author was making a clear example and my comment doesn't make sense in that context.
Yeah that’s the next step is to start working investor networks!
China is paying countries in Africa to install fossil fuel infrastructure. So, actually the opposite of what you write is already happening.
I would agree but the I think the list is pretty short. Honeywell deserves a mention as well. But I don't think there is anything with the impact of Bell Labs today or even close.

Given the resources that these companies have there should be a dozen research labs with genuine scientific freedom. If you look at the way people describe the atmosphere at Bell Labs it's hard to find something like it today.
> If the top 5 percent of polluters lowered their emission intensity to the global average for fossil fuel plants, the world’s CO2 emissions could drop by 25 percent, the study found. If coal and oil plants in the top 5 percent of polluters switched to natural gas, global emissions would drop by 29.5 percent. Finally, if the top 5 percent of polluters incorporated carbon capture and storage (CCS), global carbon emissions from electricity generation would drop by 48.9 percent,

This is really encouraging news, and good example of why I personally don't like getting distracted by per capita and other similar metrics that draw attention away from raw output.
"Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop" [0] apparently does a good job of explaining exactly how our civilization has regressed in this sense over the past 50ish years. In short, it's the principle of "As Low (risk) As Reasonably Achievable". Well, they minimized nuclear risk, but sure as hell didn't minimize global warming risk in the process.

Roots of Progress has an interesting review here [0], which is what I base that on. (It's on my list to read, just haven't gotten to it yet)

0: https://gordianknotbook.com/

1: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
They could sell carbon offsets to fund the replacement.
Wow It's Been a Year
The plants are being run because they are cheap and have plentiful supply, not because they are the most desirable form of production.

Merely adding a new tax would be the most regressive solution available, as it disproportionately hurts the poorest- the consequences would take longer but could end up just as severe. Maybe they dont have access to plentiful natural gas, or grid storage for renewables. Maybe they simply dont have an economy healthy or government free enough of corruption to invest in the capital required to transition.

A more reasonable approach would be to set up a program that fronts the necessary investments while letting the locals retain control... effectively a free loan. It would certainly meet the criterion of "gentler", at least, and probably cheaper than fuelling the planes and the bombs as well- those things are crazy expensive.
Yes, Minister! is very amusing, full of well crafted witty dialog, but it is also fictional Thatcherite propaganda which bears limited resemblance to any real-world systems, and was grossly misleading about contemporary British government/politics. It should not be taken too seriously for policy analysis. The general ascendance of its worldview in the past few decades of British politics has been fairly disastrous (e.g. Brexit). (Similarly, we shouldn’t uncritically take policy advice from other satirical fiction such as Idiocracy, Robocop, Brazil, or They Live.)
Honestly? Nothing. This might get downvotes, but that's okay. I am in support of what Apple's doing
here, and Apple makes the best laptop, phone, tablet, and over-the-ear headphones out there right
now. Everything else is a compromise; believe me, I've tried so many.
This really explains a lot
Where do you park in the night?
> and I've yet to be unable to make a program go "fast enough" regardless of the programming language or runtime it's in.

That's because you won't even attempt to do things that that can't run that fast, because you know it won't work, from experience.

Let's take an example unrelated to programming languages (but easier to relate maybe?). Git branches. Git branches are fast to create and delete, so how do they get used? People create them all the time, for a million reasons. Remember SVN, or god forbid CVS, or even SourceSafe? You wouldn't create a branch for shits and giggles for those, because it was slow. You only did it when you had a good reason. Fast branches changed the way we even thought about how to use source control systems.

So let's go back to programming languages. Let's take JavaScript for an easy target. I've built real time image processing that happens on mouse over at 60 frames per second even on old android devices. But when all we had was older versions of internet explorer? I wouldn't even attempt it.

The same holds true for any environment, any kind of databases (regular transactional vs column stores) and yeah, C++ vs Python. People are rebuilding much of the JS toolchain in rust, purely for performance reasons. Because it's never fast enough. On the server, you could save money by using cheaper AWS instances if it was faster. And so on and so forth.
I enjoyed this, but this paragraph threw me off:

>In the Hypsithermal, the period of higher-than-present global temperatures that followed the end of the last ice age, the West from the coastal mountains to the Mississippi was far drier than it is today—Nebraska was a desert with sand dunes, for example, and quite a bit ofthe land west of the Rockies was uninhabitable wasteland of the sort you find these days in the Sahara Desert.

From my recent reading on the long term moisture story in the western US, the period after the end of the last ice age was much wetter in the NM/AZ area, because the still-present ice to the north tended to "push" pacific storms in ways that led to precipitation in this area. As the ice receded more and more northwards, this pattern came to an end.
The loss of horses meant immobilisation of the economy.... Really neat article about dependence on horses and their infrastructure.
Sounds familiar. Just as we were talking about emp pulses, how our economy would be destroyed, etc.
Glad I’m not the only one.
Thanks for the correction and update. I had not followed it closely in a while.
Articles 5th and 6th mention genetically modified corn.

>Artículo Quinto.- Las Secretarías de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, de Salud, y de Agricultura y Desarrollo Rural, así como el Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, a más tardar en el primer semestre del año 2023, promoverán las reformas de los ordenamientos jurídicos aplicables para evitar el uso de glifosato como sustancia activa de agroquímicos y de maíz genéticamente modificado en México.

At the end: "...to avoid the use of glyphosate as active substance in agrochemicals and genetically modified corn in Mexico"

In Art. 6:
> revocarán y se abstendrán de otorgar permisos de liberación al ambiente de semillas de maíz genéticamente modificado.

"... will revoke and abstain from granting permits to release into the environment genetically modified corn seeds"