skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not having to care about performance (because hardware is fast) allows us to build more software than ever before. Although optimized software saves on computing resources, it is wasteful on the most important resource of all: Software Engineers' Time. Not to say it's not important, but saying we are wasting computing resources for "no real reason" is not fair. There are a lot of delicate trade-offs involved.
A few packages are effectively rolling even in the stable distribution, because they have a high volume of security fixes and it's a high-impact application. We just don't have the resources to backport all the fixes. This isn't completely unlike debian's treatment of e.g. firefox which keeps even its `oldstable` distribution up to date with "latest" ESR (correct me if I'm wrong).

There are still debates in the community over what the stable distribution is "for", so you may occasionally see some inconsistencies in what gets bumped and what doesn't.
What you describe reminds me of my time with the Pixelbook. Nothing since has come close to comfort and peace of mind that brought me.
0. Linux support, specifically with the option to purchase without paying the Windows tax for an OS I'll never boot. This is a deal-breaker for me, meaning Dell are one of the few main-stream manufacturers I'd go with.

1. No touchscreen (I'd rather have a higher quality, low glare non-touch display).

That's about it, actually. Practically all modern laptops seem to meet my expectations on battery life and performance in a way which corresponds well with their cost. Weight is mostly a non-issue since I'd only consider a 13" chassis anyway. Screen resolution can be traded for battery life without concerning me.

An M1 Mac with a non-apple keyboard and full Linux support would probably be great, but I don't hold out any hope for another manufacturer matching the M1 without ruining it somehow (looking at you, Chromebooks).
Restor is a science-based open data platform to support the restoration movement
Thank you.

I was fearing/expecting someone to mention ADHD. I have never been formally diagnosed but everything I read about it feels suspiciously similar to the way my brain is wired. I might have to look into it more seriously. I’m currently 33.
Early Blockchain Inventors Celebrate 30 Years Since Inception
For the File Explorer it's HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced Value PersistBrowsers set to 1.
I always give a look to anything 13-14" in 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio.

Right now that's Framework, Pixelbook, and Surfacebook. I'm tempted by mobile M1[X], but I'll be buying a Framework as soon as the non-Intel mainboards appear.
> Preference of thin&light vs upgradeability/cooling.

I recently watched something[0] about the Macbook cooling (Intel, at least) and you seem to be right.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlOPPuNv4Ec&t=0
> I mean a theoretically absurdly large/wide network can approximate almost any function

Yes. But chances are that the network size scales exponentially with the number of e.g. input bits. Good luck building/training/storing a model with 2^128 neurons in the hidden layer.
An Apple logo tbh.
The article mentions crypto being a leader in this return to style.

Some examples:

- https://apeboard.finance

- https://curve.fi/

- https://opensea.io/

- https://www.trufflesuite.com/ganache
How is it even possible to write a kernel in Common Lisp? I thought kernels didn’t have enough to support the run time environment of languages that weren’t C, C++, or Rust?

Even Rust C++, and C require special compilation without parts of the Stdlib to running in the kernel.
The M1 Apple lineup has thunderbolt support, so I don’t see why an AMD laptop couldn’t do the same?
Seems like it's intending to replace key cloak, or at least some of it.
I went from one XPS15 (2017) version to the next (2020) and found that in the interrim the S3 sleep has disappeared.
Same, my ideal laptop is an M1
MacBook Air but with a bigger screen and more user serviceability. The M1 Air I have now is the first laptop since probably the 2012 15” Pro that truly feels like a generational upgrade instead of just an increment. For several months now I have not once had to think about performance, heat, volume, or battery life. And even though multi core performance benchmarks slower than some high end x86 devices, the M1 _feels_ faster. It’s a game changer.

I hope everyone else catches up soon, I’d love to buy the Lenovo (or whatever) equivalent of this and run Linux on it.
I've heard they're good, but Macbooks tick almost none of the boxes in the list, so I am not very interested in them.
C neckbeard here. I do fully hope and expect and assume the compiler to fold constants and figure out as much at compile time as it can. This is the kind of optimization that doesn't make the code harder to reason about, even when coding with ed, since the logic and ultimate result of these expressions does not change.

Heavy type inference, overloading, and inheritance are a completely different beast and they make the code a lot more opaque.
I know tons of people speculating in Ethereum. I know nobody using it as a database.
For example you really don't need to enforce a 200ms turn rate, and their notion of what makes a 'communications turn' is unclear given the terms gamedevs use nowadays.
...so why is it that the world of "decentralized database transactions" is being used near exclusively for speculative assets like the various cryotocoins and, err, NFTs containing alleged artwork?

Also, what real world usage do you actually see for "decentralized database transactions"?

Beyond massive speculation and pictures of apes?
"a16z" must have an entire team dedicated to generating and promoting clickbait articles for HN.
That sounds like a nice way to do it, too. I heard about it before, but don't know R, so I didn't really consider it.

The reason I chose lmt is that it correctly keeps the markdown language syntax of the code blocks. That means I can put my literate config into my Zettelkasten [1] or [2] and watch it pretty-print in the browser.

There are also literate [3] and org-babel [4], but I don't think they are future proof. .lit is a random format and .org basically requires Emacs+orgmode.

1: https://github.com/srid/emanote

2: https://wiki.dendron.so/

3: https://github.com/zyedidia/Literate

4: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html
For game design, any or all of these will easily be in most top lists:

- Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop

- Jesse Schell's Art of Game Design A Book of Lenses

- Steve Swink's Game Feel

- Scott Rogers' Level Up

- Skaff & others' Characteristics of Games

- Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun

- Joris Dormans & Ernest Adams' Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design

This one was just published but I'll happily bet on it:

- Richard LeMarchand's A Playful Production Process
This is mostly correct, but not the whole picture. They experimented with minimum wage levels in East Germany after re-unification, and found that they have barely any effect on unemployment levels if they are not too high. Turns out lot of demand is not that elastic.

But agree its a very dangerous tool in the hands of politicians, and better not to have it than have it be abused.
So, they’re doing this because the images constantly get flagged and reported on other social media. It doesn’t seem that hard to let users set a NSFW flag that determines whether they’re ok with nsfw content in their feed. Doesn’t Reddit do this?
No, you have it backwards. The original claim about “10×” engineers is in the book Peopleware. The author specifically claimed that they had observed at least an order of magnitude difference between the best and the worst software engineers. This is very much talking about variation between individuals, not comparing the extremes to the average. The average engineer is I guess somewhere around 3×, but note that this was a qualitative statement rather than a quantitative one; I chose the geometric mean because we are talking about multiples, but we shouldn’t forget that this isn’t based on concrete numbers. The average could be 2× or 5× or anything else.

Note that they are referring to the worst software engineers that could keep their jobs; these people probably still had net positive productivity for their companies. Note also that this was across many companies that the author had consulted for; any individual company likely had a narrower range of ability. Because of company policies, management styles (aka manglement), mistakes, cost–cutting, or whatever, there are companies that absolutely fill up with 1× programmers. Also, the best and worst programmers are not necessarily at the same stage of their career; the 10× engineer is much more likely to be a greybeard who has seen it all and knows how to get results, while the 1× engineers are much more likely to be fresh out of college.

The whole point of the book is that we can deliberately set up an environment where engineers are allowed to grow and succeed, or we can set up an environment that drives away anyone with skill. If management can do the former, then the company can succeed. Too often management sets up a system that is actively hostile to success, and then has to hire consultants to come and tell them how to fix it.
None of this indicates the vaccines increase asymptomatic transmission. Yes, breakthrough cases can still transmit. Keyword can.
Bernie Madoff was able to do that for decades, too. Until he couldn’t.
I don't want to know how much money was paid for these logos

https://future.a16z.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Logo-Tran...
Funny how experiences change between systems. I stopped using Arch because it kept breaking every other day for months. On the other hand I’ve updated Ubuntu every 6 months for the last 8 years and it never broke.
Google warns of surge in activity by state-backed hackers
Oh, I use Nix because it does provide less complication in my life. It's just necessary to wrap your head around a few core principles first, which can be a little mind-bending when you start out (no fixed /usr locations? huh?)
(UK based) About 18 months ago, poor promotion prospects and minimal yearly wage increases brought me to the point where I realised I was punishing myself waiting for things to improve.

So I polished my LinkedIn profile and made myself visible to recruiters.

I'll soon start a new job with double my current salary and none of the daily grind of the current one. The Great Resignation has served me well.
Oh i figured it out. I had the almost identical 6210 (2000). Which was reused in 2008:

https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_6210-12.php
https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_6210_navigator-2255.php

Ok, so far they're only using a number twice.
AMD and Nvidia's encoding engines can handle more load, do it in lower latency, and also be higher quality in less bits. The last time Intel impressed me with Quicksync was in the Haswell days.
Believe me, before reaching for this stuff there was several passes of staring at the code trying to find something by “thinking it through” as you say. But at the end of the day, we’re human, and fixing bugs by inspection is just not always a realistic strategy.
My job involves mainly writing, not coding. I go with 16” so I can have a thin notes window next to a main document window. 13-14” also works if I just use the main document window.

In my view if you are going to travel and use the laptop on a plane regularly, the 13-14” size is better. Otherwise the 16” is preferable.
Elon Musk is now worth $230Bn; as much as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined
Much of what Mao did was murderously stupid - because he was a superb exemplar of the flaws he is describing here.

Not a good man to follow if you want to get useful things done.
"Constexpr" is possibly the most hideous keyword in any programming language. My eyes vomit a little each time I read it.

They could have just used "pure" like in D, but this is C++, so that would be too sane and obvious.
1. Get rid of all the crap as fast as possible: delete spam, unsubscribe from mailing lists that you don't need.
2. Setup folders and filter rules to have mails sorted automatically. For example, you could have one folder per project or one folder per client. How you structure your folders depends on your work process.
3. Use the Eisenhower Method when going through new mail. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower...)
What happens to people who didn’t graduate college but still had loans taken out for it?
I think you're severely underestimating the task and the level of detail required, but happy to leave it at that.
> that works for any non-parallel process

No, it doesn't. Only for those processes, where you can trivially split the input and concatenate the outputs. Try using GNU parallel to sort a list of numbers, or to compute their prefix sum – it's not possible, and those are even simpler use cases than most of what you'll encounter in practice.
If machine learning is ultimately pattern recognition, then, is random number generation the antithesis of machine learning?
I don't believe that would achieve the goal of removing rent-seeking behaviour from rich house owners and corporations.
What are the potential implications of this?
Constrained by, yes. Defined by, no.
Sort of. A few were (Philip the Arab, for example), but many also conflate "not being born in Rome/Italy" with not having latin ethnicity.

There were sizable pockets or latin ethnicity (including governors, nobility, and lots of commoners) established in different areas of the empire. Hispania for example was conquested and settled by romans (plus roman soldiers being send there, given land), so a "spanish" emperor is not exactly a non-roman emperor. Even Septimius Severus, which was born in Libya, had latin roman ancestry (albeit mixed with Phoenician).
Thank you, this gave me a very good introduction to the work!
I'm quite happy with my Librem 15, no problems. AFAIK they fixed their hinge in the latest model.

Which problems did you have with the chargers? Never heard about that on their forums.
As a Mac user with the same gripe of the ctrl key placement: Remapping it to the caps lock works wonders :)
Sorry for the off topic question:
Do you think specialising in one type of baked good e.g. coconut cake and offering delivery of handmade,high quality goods to a small subscriber base would work?
I estimated would need to ship several cakes per day, so it does seem hard to make a living of it
The tool that you want is probably Jsonnet. Take a look at Tanka or one of the other Jsonnet options. There is also Dhaal and a few others but Jsonnet has a lot more traction.
I’d like to read the article that includes tape and glues in printing (paper) and industrial (plastic) applications, also.
Same here. My guess is that they constantly AB test/explore captchas to push the envelope of genuine humans users in order to make it as hard as possible for the bots.
Even if there's nothing in the cortical organization itself to suggest cortical columns, is it still true that there are "cortical column sized" regions of non-overlapping sensory receptive fields in the cortex ?
They need to try this out on one those natural RNGs. Electron-noise or lava lamp.

Maybe they'll discover something.
Monopoly means one seller in the same way that a spherical cow has no friction.

When modelling monopolies economists posit one seller that can set the price because it's simple. Similarly, perfectly competitive markets have an infinite number of competeing firms.

In the real world, monopoly has never been as black and white as that e.g. if someone was granted a monopoly on selling salt, that didn't immediately strike anyone selling salt with a lightning bolt, it just meant you couldn't build an actual business on it since you could hit legal issues.

Similarly, people accused of being monopolies argue that the "market" is bigger (do planes and trains compete for long distance travel?) in a way that is fuzzy and human.

But the bigger issue is how do you tell the difference between someone who doesn't understand something, and someone who refuses to understand something? People pretended that climate change wasn't happening for 3 decades and counting to protect big corporations, so really there's no limit to what their influence can buy.
i have installed a variety of such kiosks systems, i think my preference goes to a lightweight linux where i install just an x server with no window manager, then a simple flask web app and a startx chromium. simple and reliable. i looked at the previous iteration of their snap thing but added a lot of complexity for little added benefit.

also had a raspberry pi controlling an escape room with several video streams, dmx and sound. worked for 4 years flawlessly with zero maintenance. it's nice when things work.

i always searched for off the shelf solutions like these but always end up building my own, namely a minimal linux install and add the bare minimum.
> Modern software’s humdrum lack of identity has resulted in users craving more interesting, opinionated tools, tools that feel like us — or a better, more interesting, wackier version of us.

The above is the kind of sentence that you'll see in almost any fashion or arts magazine.

Pretty fluffy stuff. Not really the kind of thing we're used to, in the engineering community.

That said, I firmly believe that there's always a place for good graphic and interaction design, in technology.

I don't feel that it's a problem. Some companies will stick to "the classics," while some will go overboard with the "chrome"[0], so to speak.

[0] https://www.mprove.de/script/99/kai/2Software.html
M1 has very fast memory and BUS access. It takes money and is not so sexy for marketing, but it works.
And yet this advice is not necessarily wrong. We spend a significant fraction of the calories we eat operating our brain. I have personally measured a significant increase in my ability after a good lunch compared to just an hour or two prior.
There is a video about the story background, where a group of kids play the role of the committee voting down Circle.
Thanks for this info. This will help with future job searches!
It’s really frustrating that the only quality build is incompatible with Linux. The XPS is flimsy compared to the MacBook it replaced. That said, I’m never going back to Apple’s ecosystem, if I can help it. My next laptop will be the 15” Framework when it’s out.
Politics, check the outcome of the networking vote.
I worked on a project using Revel, which uses Go templates. As the pages got more complex, we ran into the same problem. Eventually (most of) that app got replaced by a Go server and React front end.

My takeaway was that it seems to me like Go templates work well for simpler stuff; displaying simple content, debug info, etc. But as soon as you want to edit something you should start thinking about moving to a more appropriate stack.
Oh so brave! Another hackernews commenter who hates bitcoin and thinks the price is too high! You're going to get so many upvotes!
Don't waste your time reading this.
The vast majority of dollars are created by private banks, not the US government.
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/elon-r-musk/

he seems to have no cash or other assets, it's just SpaceX/Tesla Shares and billions of dollars of loans on those shares

Not having a yatch or even a mansion, does this make his wealth more or less palatable?
Nice work! I maintain a library, cpp-readline [1], with a very similar API. The main difference is that relegates the REPL part to GNU readline. You do have the additional dependency, but on the other hand it automatically adds history and other nice-to-have features.

[1]: https://github.com/Svalorzen/cpp-readline
My criteria for a laptop:

1. Display

2. Price

3. Ports

4. Repair-ability / expand-ability

5. Thermals (especially if high-end GPU)

6. Keyboard + build quality
Great, thanks for the detailed clarification — I wasn't aware of the book reference: it was my impression that everybody compares to an "average engineer" when talking about 10x, so perhaps it has entered "common knowledge" as a misinterpretation (or maybe it's just my misinterpretation, which is most likely).
We didn't evolve to sit and focus for hours per day, some people can still do it but others need medicine. The main thing the medicine does is tell your brain "now is the time to focus, don't look for something else!". If being able to do that would feel life changing to you rather than just helpful then you should go get tested.
Jetpack Compose: Drag-and-drop reorder for lists
Flimsy? MacBooks? Are we in different universes?

Keyboard is/was a valid concern. But flimsy, I’m not seeing.

Pretty sure I could murder someone with my M1 MacBook Air, clean it, and then write code.
As this seems to be about productivity from a respected person, I want to make sure I get the important ideas and I have tried. Is there a context in which this article must be read? Is it a commentary to another? Neither its introduction nor its conclusion seems to capture all of its ideas it is about. I know it is not meant to be readable but I'll appreciate any help.
SpaceRyde’s Mission to Create the Cheapest Satellite Launch Ever
I took ToC about a year ago, as the final required course in my PhD studies, and we used Sipser’s text although the professor also wandered off into the arithmetic hierarchy which he doesn’t cover.

I will absolutely credit the course with igniting an intense curiosity in the foundations of computing (and of mathematics in general) but I agree that it’s time for a more modern approach.
Perhaps the machine is hallucinating.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
Just one anecdote, but one that might temper expectations: A friend of mine with two decades of experience who'd already proven herself indispensable at a famous (and completely dysfunctional) NYC French restaurant looked around for the next step in her career. She interviewed at a highly competitive Michelen star restaurant in Manhattan and got the offer: minimum wage and an expected 60 hours a week. While they charge a typical customer 200-300 a dinner. That was before the pandemic.

She wondered what the point of striving in the field was if that's what it was like at the top. She's since moved to a state where recreational use of cannabis is legal and makes more money healing people with chocolate than she ever did baking. Has weekends again. No sociopathic or sexual abuse from coworkers. Consistent peaceful workload. Creative and high craft output instead of crank-out-that-coconut-cake-again.

This is just one story and it may not last once the industry consolidates, but now is an excellent moment for bakers' mental health to shift to producing edibles.

Edit: Beware the expensive culinary schools. They can be a lot of money and don't necessarily help finding employment. Akin to bootcamps and art institutes.
> I don't want a 'journey' to use my OS. I don't want to learn a whole new language and set of overengineered abstractions to [do development work]

This is pragmatic.

Nix somewhat reminds me of the kinds of mindsets that enjoy learning Vim/Emacs, or learning how to use 40%-sized keyboards like the Planck. -- I think it takes curiosity to be interested in that kindof stuff.
Ooo you just shutdown all the reasons for bitcoin existing by calling us maxis! So brave!

Enjoy your printed dollars and decimated savings, ph4gut