skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Thanks! Glad you didn't think I was in bad faith after the semi-rhetorical question and disengage.

You are welcome! Considering the karma I got from that answer, I don't think I'm the only one who misread you. If you want a piece of advice: starting a question like that with "Genuinely curious: ..." is my strategy to prevent this kind of misunderstanding.

> * I share some of Drew DeVault's frustration in https://drewdevault.com/2020/09/25/A-story-of-two-libcs.html. I've viscerally felt the immediate sense of disempowerment he describes when cracking open an open source package. _However_ I vehemently oppose his cavalier lack of concern for locales. Internationalization is important. ASCII is just as effective at disempowering others.

As Drew DeVault's says, it was his code which was broken. I know glic code is complex, but it is battle tested, mature and highly robust. I'd bet there are good reasons for that complexity. If I was really curious as to why, I'd try asking devs directly to avoid making them look bad by making public statements about it.

Now, I looked in scdoc code. The solution was to cast the parameters to "unsigned char". Considering the code

uint32_t ch;
isalnum(ch);

compiles without warning (even with -Wall -Wextra) on my machine, I'd consider this a potential vulnerability for programs using this function. I can't see why glibc developers don't turn isalnum into a macro that automatically casts its parameter (when its address is not taken). I'll consider asking them this weekend.

EDIT: possible nice finding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24597461

EDIT2: part of the reason: "unsigned char" can't hold EOF.
Lotus Carlton.
Interesting design choice to have the website not be scrollable while showing content outside the fold.

edit: Apparently this happens when running the "I don't care about cookies" browser extension, which is necessary to make the web somewhat usable after the EU's ridiculous ruling.
It's open source. _You're_ supposed to provide the UI.
Debian 9 can't be updated to use the new root CA?
Agreed. Seems like the definition might actually be wide enough to count the vast majority of software developers as engineers.
Ten-Year-Old Maths Whizz Gets Highest Grade GCSE
The thing that prevents awk from being a major part of my daily routine is that it (amazingly) has poor CSV support. Consider the following:

col1,col2,col3

1,2,3

4,"hello, \"world\"",6

"7 buckets",,9

To get the usual awk experience with this very common file format, exactly the type of thing you want to parse with awk, you first need to install gawk, then use a big FPAT regex that needs to be adjusted for any new CSV variant.

I would love to see awk with "CSV mode", where it intelligently handles formats like this if you just pass a flag. I think awk would do well to differentiate itself with excellent 2d dataset parsing functionality, but at least catchup up to the average scripting language would be great.

I'm half expecting someone to say "just pass -csv it does what you want" and if so I'll be very excited.
No way, more companies need to do this. Yeah kinda rude in industry but comparisons like this are vital for the customer. Way too few products actually get this type of comparison.
"Some 1,300 workers employed at the plant will be temporarily laid off, Opel said, with a separate plant in France picking up some of the production."

Perhaps a very convenient chip shortage? Anyhow, why not build a car without electronics, gps, g4, microphones, voice control, tracking and screens. Because that is exactly what I want.
This sound great! Unfortunately many companies would rather exert influence over an open source project by writing a cheque with conditions. Letting each of their SEs pick and choose means it's less likely they get their company specific obscure feature added.
I hope a lot of car industry supply chain managers are losing their jobs now. Worst people ever. Hurt their suppliers, hurt their own company, out of sheet arrogance and ignorance.

On the other hand, good for us, any ICE car or car in general that is not produced is good for the environment.
> I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making software better.

Can you give 1(one) example of a program which was improved by using telemetry ? And no, trashing the UI in the name of change or modernism does not count.

Thank you.
A great example of counter-positioning. Cloudflare is positioning itself in the market in a way that its competitor (AWS) cannot replicate — their lock-in is predicated on egress fees.
It's very generic phrasing, and some products do hide nefarious behaviour behind it, but it's also just an accurate description of the most innocent, straightforward use of telemetry out there. I, for one, can't think of a way to monetise Firebase stack traces.

This is a game, so let's use other games as examples. Here's two pretty damn good talks from GDC about what the value telemetry brings to the table (the StS one goes into a whole bunch of other stuff that's sort of irrelevant but also serves to motivate the telemetry topic):

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Urx7WQE6NY0
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rqfbvnO_H0
So you read one article about a early study of vaccine efficacy that clearly states it's limitations and then decided that was good enough and stopped following any of the data that has come out since then.

You keep asking for "data to update you priors", but it is easy to find such data if you were actually interested.
> It's ok to think that things have flaws or could be improved. But it's a trap to believe that solutions are trivial and everyone else is just too enfeebled of character to push the miracle button.

I feel this so much. I've worked on products which many people insist could be done just as well by spreadsheets. I've worked in areas which people believe are overcomplicated - which they are - and therefore could be replaced with something simple. It is never that easy.

I see it all the time in other fields and I just shake my head. If you ever find yourself saying "Why don't they just..?" you almost certainly don't understand the problem.
Yes, simply look at the latest release which contains three bugfixes related to footnotes:

https://github.com/github/cmark-gfm/releases/tag/0.29.0.gfm....
When I was bitten by a dog around 7 or 8 my doctor just said it was no big deal.

Granted it was a domesticated dog (that I liked to pet on my way to school) but still they probably should have been a bit more careful!
I Tried the the Dalgona Candy Challenge to See If I Would Survive 'Squid Game'
Are you still doing PEP? I feel like betting your life on a $100 test of a frozen, shipped bat is really risky.
I don't think every job has to be so terrible. There's definitely places out there that value transparency and offer opportunities for growth. Especially in this market.

Where I work now, I'm actively hiring for a Senior Android dev role. We're very open to candidates who demonstrate potential for all our engineering positions. Building a couple small apps definitely counts in that regard. If you're interested in hearing more feel free to reach out! My work email is in my profile.
Great article, I was nodding my head with almost every point! Although I think you also have to consider that the author has a strong math background, which both improves and warps your view of programming. If you don't know any math, then this post is probably less relevant to you (e.g. learning a bit Haskell or ML is probably a good idea in that case).

------

As a nitpick about the theory of automata, I would draw a big red line between regular languages and context free grammars.

Regular languages have very useful engineering properties: they have predictable (linear) performance and give you "free" lookahead. (That is, nondeterminism is a math-y idea that many programmers are not comfortable with, but it's useful for engineering.)

They are better than Perl-style regexes for building reliable and understandable systems, which "blow up" on a regular basis.

In contrast, context-free grammars have almost no useful engineering properties by themselves. (There are subsets like LALR(1) that do, but they come with a bunch of tradeoffs.) As the article mentions, learning about recursive descent parsing first is probably more practical.

Also, you're MUCH more likely to encounter a regular expression in real code than a context free grammar. In 15 years of professional programming I probably dealt with regexes on a weekly or monthly basis, but had to write or modify a grammar exactly zero times. It does help to be more familiar with regexes and regular languages.

This post/sketch elaborates on related points:

Comments on Eggex and Regular Languages http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/07/eggex-theory.html
tire pressure sensor, gps and e-call is needed by law.
"vacuum during the times when I want instead of randomly at peak traffic"
Wow, that pricing and the amount of hype around the co really makes me want to short it, looks very asymmetric (good case already priced in with a huuuge range of possible outcomes). Not gonna do it though, learned my lesson with Tesla, there is always a better than best case waiting to get priced in.
Love the idea but the cost is just too prohibitive.
You just did it with this comment though. Now find how you did it and apply it somewhere else
I (like most here) have personally benefitted from extensive software telemetry but am generally against it in my personal life. But I also write business software where the expectation of privacy is already moot.

Gaming is a weird point though, telemetrics are already in heavy use, the privacy risk is indeed minimal, and gamers don't seem to care anyway though. I can't tell you how many GDC talks I've watched that discussed player heatmaps, incident (like death) reports, and whatnot used to fine-tune game balance.

There are numerous places where telemetry is completely inappropriate, like one's operating system. An idle computer should indeed be 100% idle, internal housekeeping exempted. (I recently installed freebsd on a new server, did some setup, and basked in the glory of htop showing 32 cores at 0.0% and a root process list that was under a page long. I wish other operating systems could follow that example)
Also, remember the title of this post "First Human Case of Rabies in Illinois Since 1954" and ask yourself if giving 1 billion shots in the United states every 2 years is worth it. Not to mention the cost for the full series for each person is north of $10K, we're talking about $10 Trillion dollars every 2 years. Of course the price would probably come down.
Well Windows is a little bigger than most apps, wouldn't you say?
Precomputation on a huge cluster for a long time
Is the _market_ begging, or a few folks on the internet? The only folks I know that complain about technology in cars are a couple posters on internet forums.
most things you mention are mandated by the government, you can't sell a car in any western market without tire pressure monitoring, stability control, back up camera etc.

the manufacturers have no choice, it would be like suggesting they sell cars without seatbelts.
UPenn uses 3rd party to scan and rewrite all URLs in emails
I think Dacia addresses this market pretty well already. However many of the things you’ve listed (cameras, TPMS, telemetry) are mandated by law in most regions.
We got hit with gRPC considering the LE certs as expired: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/27532

Luckily this was quick to fix by just renewing the server cert without the DST root.
Hi John

Since you're here, would love for Cloudflare to disrupt the DBaaS marketplace.

I already run my entire business on Cloudflare (for services you have) but there is a significant portion of my infrastructure (>50%) I haven't moved over that is dependent upon needing a DBaaS offering. With a DBaaS offering, I could run near 100% of my infrastructure on Cloudflare.

(Workers KV is great btw, but there are so many times where just a traditional RDMS is needed that a key-value store doesn't fill).
https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/postgresql-zheap-curr... The last status update is from July, so seems like things are progressing.
Tire pressure sensors, ABS, ESP, airbags, etc. are compulsory in new cars in most countries.
Well a buddy of mine found a bat in the backyard here in Portland. Went to dispose of it and the thing was still alive!

He called the Audubon Society – they wanted him to bring it in for rehab, which meant no rabies test. The animal can only be tested if dead.

The bad had an accident, died, and he sent it to Oregon State to be tested. It was positive!

Lesson, do not handle bats without extreme care, make sure your pets are vaccinated, and get the creature tested.

https://www.multco.us/multnomah-county/news/rabid-bat-found-...
> the dome, the ancillary domes, the proportions of major details.

I mean, 5 domed churches are pretty common. Domed buildings with a similar proportion are pretty common. Here's an example that pre-dates the Taj Mahal by 100 years: https://www.advantour.com/russia/rostov/assumption-cathedral...

Similar proportions albeit slightly smaller and taller main dome (and slightly larger ancillary domes), but the curvature of the main dome is slightly more similar to the Taj Mahal's main dome. Christ the Saviour Cathedral is probably somewhere between this and the Taj Mahal for proportions.

> Famous Russian painter Vereshchagin (of the Apotheosis of War [1] fame) openly criticized the project for being a 'direct recreation of a Taj Mahal church from Acra'

Self-hating Russians (Slavs in general actually) has always been a thing. Self-hating Russian artists and writers in the 19th century was definitely a thing.

IMO, Slavs' self-hating nature and distrust of, well, everyone, is a mostly good trait but sometimes prevents them from seeing the positive side of things (my family is Ukrainian but I grew up in the west).
How we improved app performance by upgrading React Navigation
Marketing Analysts Newzoo and Adjust: Mobile Gaming $116 Bn by 2024
I regret not investing back when durable objects was announced. From a technical perspective, it’s a very unique capability.

I had a similar experience with Shopify. I had interactions with them in a company I worked at back in 2015 and regarded them very highly among the e-commerce platforms but didn’t buy the stock…
It might, but that's a bit like saying "fixing security holes will just make hackers resort to trickier tricks to crack systems."

Quite possibly. And we want to put the burden of labor on them to do so, instead of operate in a world where the rule is "Don't use the internet; hackers will steal all your data."
As it turns out, yes!
Minimum $25 per month is not a good deal for many customers like me. Sometimes clients send $9-15 per month emails from their sites, sometimes $50 worth (with mailgun). I don't want to pay a fixed price like $25 when I may only use 1/5 of it.
Virtual servers are a thing since ... forever on the Internet. At least since mid-nineties you had not to think about getting hard drives into servers, if you would not wanted to.
But we want our search strategy to limit us to the infinitesimal fraction of programs that does useful work.

99.99% of possible bit arrangements in that 10TB will not do anything good, or useful, or even anything at all.
And rear view cameras
The article links to several sites that all make the same claim that "women only earn X cents for every dollar a man earns." My understanding is that this statistic is calculated by looking at all full-time working men and women across all jobs, and I just keep wondering why they never do any comparisons of men/women who do the same job? How is that a meaningful statistic?

I think the people who wrote freakonomics did adjust for gender pay gaps between men/women who have the same job and found that the gap is much smaller[0], and I understand how that is a problem if a man gets paid more than a woman for doing the same job. But I do not get why we all pretend that it makes any sense at all to claim that women are "losing wages" because women as a whole make less than men as a whole, because men and women tend to work different jobs. What kind of legislation can we possibly write that addresses the issue that men tend to pursue higher paying jobs than women?

I say this as a male software developer who makes good money and is dating a female social worker who does not. Is she "losing wages" because she doesn't make as much as I do?

[0]: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gende...
Have you never been tired?
Rom sites are going the way of dinosaurs while nostalgia 8-bit retro machines are offered at 700 euros. Meanwhile cheap chinense portable emulators are 10 dollars on Amazon and archive.org keep some of this jewels online until the next dmca notice.

This is very confusing.

Rip pleasuredome, should have used my free tickets !
And I'm not sure what kinds of pressure sensors cars use, but I can tell you the ones I need have been impossible to source for months.
PlayStation to Acquire Bluepoint Games
It's also possible the suggestion is based on the concept of a country where 'filing taxes' is some optional or culturally odd thing so people need to be incentivised to do it at all. Or perhaps it's more thinking along the lines of 'someone who is a citizen' and measuring that by using tax filing as proof.
I have had co-founders to my businesses and I've done businesses solo. Solo always works better. Pretty much anyone who wants a technical co-founder is someone who won't pull their weight.

Plus you lose half your equity right off the bat and you are dependent on someone and you aren't really sure what they're going to do for you.

VCs and investors are the only ones who like co-founders because then they can fire one of you that will later on if you're not doing what they want.
96-year-old went on the run to skip Nazi war crimes trial arrested in Germany
Mostly yes. But also the feeling that FSF is "out of touch" or that RMS is a weirdo is much less prevalent in Latin America, where (in general, the people/organizations I know of at least) view them with more admiration than in the English-speaking world.
> What about your body only making limited, synthetic antigen antibodies instead of the better, more flexible natural ones in response to even more out of band gamma or mu strains? These are entirely unknown problems we're in the process of researching and for better or worse, we're the guinea pigs.

well, scores and scores of people not dying from a virus that's killed millions is why. those "limited" (and not synthetic those are real antibodies against real antigens) are working very well unless you believe that the current world wide vaccine drive is ineffectual against all data to the contrary... the vaccines have been a huge success against the coronavirus.

and you are the guinea pig already... just in the control group that's dying left and right at a very high pace and also leaving lots of people with "long covid" that is also giving them long term, yet unknown side effects.

> It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.

it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.

mind you that 2% number includes people that never are face to face with people dying of the disease on a daily basis in all likelihood. it is very telling when the smartest people in the room are all taking the vaccine.

finally, that Israeli study is misinterpreted... it doesn't matter if you get infected as much after being vaccinated. what matters is if you get very sick after you get infected and to that end the vaccines are wildly successful. and even then the absolute numbers of people getting sick from the strain is very small; over 650,000 people in america have died from covid and the vast majority of them are unvaccinated. full stop.
"At a large scale, it starts to be pretty difficult to maneuver if each dept of 30-50 people has built or contracted all their own infra & services."

This is one of the biggest risks I've seen, for both large organizations and small ones.

Large organizations are built of small organizations, and a bunch of effective small organizations will each be moving and shaking, and building or buying things that become part of their infrastructure. Then one day you wake up and discover that your overall organization is paying for 27 different solutions to the same problem.

Then, any attempt to collapse that down to something reasonable results in zero productivity for quite a while and whole lot of pissed off people.
I think you’re vastly a) underestimating the time it takes to bring a new product line all the way into production in the auto industry, and b) overestimating the true demand for such a product, Hacker News and adjacent crowds notwithstanding – peoples broadly have come to expect those simple features at practically every price point, as evidenced by the ubiquity of said features in the market.
> Most fundamentally, they take their computing freedom for granted. There are powerful forces who want to take it away from us. There are powerful and rich people out there who think it's too dangerous for mere citizens to have access to unrestricted computers.

To an extent, I agree. I wonder whether the general move in the open source community will turn out to be a Faustian bargain. Are open source developers just a bunch of suckers being taken advantage of to provide building blocks for various proprietary business models? OTOH I'm thinking that more open source code out there is a public good, and we should rejoice in that regardless of 'proprietary free riders'.

> People ignore the big picture: computing freedom. It's not just important, it's fundamental.

No. What's fundamental is freedom for people. Computing freedom matters only as a means to that end.
Yeah, I don't like how overcomplicated many products are becoming but even then wouldn't buy a car without at least AC and Bluetooth.
Email me your desired functionality. jgc@cloudflare.
It's not like the supply chain managers had much choice in this. For years they would have been fired for keeping too much stock around.
DownDetector shows Slack having a problem [1]

[1] - https://downdetector.com/status/slack/
These guys just announced a version of the mister hardware trying to make it more accessible to use for end users https://rmcretro.store/mister-multisystem/
Back up cameras are not mandatory until May 2022 in the EU.
I've never gone further than thinking about it, but I've always been curious as to how simple it would be to use Awk as an interpreter for a really simple Tcl-like language:

set a 1
set b 2

define add (n,m) $n + $m

set result [add a b]

I think it would be simple enough to come up with some Awk pattern/actions to parse the above and execute the commands.
I know skunks are one of the biggest carriers of rabies, and they are found even in big cities. A housecat that roams outside and has a scuffle with one could easily bring it home if the cat has not had its shots.
As an alternative to techniques like "broken link building" and "the skyscraper technique" have you considered jumping into a hole and never coming out? I am sick to the back teeth of cold emails from these SEO chowderheads fishing for backlinks.

How about, instead, you contribute to relevant communities (no, that doesn't mean spamming your keyword soup into them, it means making actual meaningful contributions) and promoting your work organically through real connections to real people.
Seems that rage is justified, no?
It's not productive to be hyperbolic or reductive. There's a huge difference between telemetry and spyware, especially in this context.