skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Im not into ruby and wasn’t familiar with _why until this post. From others’ comments, it sounds like he’s largely credited with the birth of the “fun” programming language tutorial. How horrible. Even as an absolute beginner, I always found those style of tutorials to be massive time wasters and tone-deaf. Your audience’s primary goal is to learn the language. Sure they might be more engaged if it has lighthearted quips here and there, but they quickly become way too dominant in most tutorials of this style and are only good for people that have a lot of free time to spend reading bad puns or hyper-contrived examples.[1]

I also skimmed his pdfs, which legitimately seem like a great piece of postmodern literature. In my hasty estimation, _why should have been focusing on literary pursuits from the start, so all in all, not a bad outcome.

I don’t have any opinion on his software for precisely the sort of reasons that seem to have driven him away from the profession of programmer. I have no need to know about ruby, and from a quick look all the tools are irrelevant to me. Programming (specifically of the OSS variety) is thankless and yes all the glories it tempts one with are dust. This is why people taking pride in being programmers has always confused me. Computer scientists, sure. Domain experts, sure. System designer, sure. But programmer? It’s essentially an overpaid but (currently) high demand job that’s not too hard about 90% of the time and is completely unglamorous. I never understood the appeal. If you code, you should only do it (like pretty much anything) because the activity itself stirs a sort of joy in you or because there’s some ulterior utility (money, you need the tool you're writing, etc.) in doing it.

[1] for a book that actually balances this style well, I’d suggest Deep C Secrets—part of the reason why it works is because much of the “fun” content is in asides and secondary to the main text, something a lot of other language tutorial writers have not figured out how to accomplish.
Could you please point to “strange things” that people do with “exports” AND how it prevents static analyzers from doing their job? Why they can do it for:

var x = strange_thing()

but suddenly can not when “x” is renamed to “exports”?
Anything below Bluetooth 5 is barely usable. The 2.4Ghz freq gets interfered by anything from fluorescent lamps, old Wi-Fi hotspots, old laptops and phones to microwave ovens, and if it's not yours, it's somebody else's. You basically have no control over whether your bluetooth devices get interfered.
Also applies to other SmartCards, they sometimes even run Java applets

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-basic-architecture-o...
This is a really important point. Many of the best programmers I've worked with are extremely conscientious people, and I think interview anxiety goes naturally with that.

When I'm interviewing people, I work very hard to put them at their ease and discount interview anxiety when I see it. Too many interview processes are tuned for confidence, not actual skill.
Is that an X issue or a GTK issue? Haven't heard of this before and it sounds scary
Hah, it is actually the same in Australia. It helps to know that the bigger spiders are usually more friendly. The problem then is more that they can be quite quick. Which can be terrifying when trying to capture them to move them outside.
With humans, it depends on the level of play and the time controls. You are sacrificing positional soundness and initiative to neutralize opening preparation (assuming your opponent hasn't prepped for the Bongcloud specifically). Taking your opponent out of book is a greater advantage with short time controls.

I don't play crappy openings to win, though. I just want to play a wide variety of novel middle games, and if I have to sacrifice 100 rating points to get people out of book, that's a bargain. Because otherwise loss-aversion takes over and chess is all about playing for the draw.
I certainly check the "new" page more than I check the Front Page. FP is a twice a day affair and new is several times through out the day.
Flounder, a Site Builder for Gemini
In a software is eating everything world, I want to retrain to learn all skills needed in IT/Programming to remain relevant.
Not to be negative, but change the name. Don't know how to say it and has nothing going for it.
What is _why?
I wouldn't touch software development with a ten foot pole if it wasn't fun. It's fine to enforce a code style in your own projects, but proselytizing them truth from on high is a bit presumptuous.
Peter Thiel has mentioned the works and ideas of philosopher René Girard repeatedly. I think that's what he's referring to.
Personally I think we are turning discoveries into products pretty fast, at the least faster than any time in history. My thought was that we need more fundamental discoveries (e.g. like understanding gravity or theories that predict and unlock high temperature superconductors), but the people who discover those things needn't be teaching staff.
Of course it's fine and often helpful to post about specific problems you've encountered, but please don't do it in a generic dismissive way.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Celebrating 20 Years of Cube: An in-depth interview with Aardappel
You're welcome! I think akka has been making great strides in polishing the rough edges. (Along with the rest of the Scala ecosystem TBH). Unfortunately that doesn't seem to generate the hype I'd argue akka deserves shrug
Thanks for this tip. I’ve had a similar problem occasionally and this gives me an idea for some things to check.
I remember reading about this a long time ago. I don't really remember the details, but the interesting part of was that China was developing / already developed space based missiles which reenter the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds to destroy carriers. Apparently many believed that this technology would completely negate the usefulness of aircraft carriers, and severely hamper the US advantage that comes from their lead in this area.
> Weeds are getting harder to kill as herbicide-resistant varieties survive

Surely it won't take long for camera-resistant weeds to evolve? They will learn to avoid detection via camoflage and mimicry. Still, I guess it's a better problem to have than a chemical arms race.
Doesn’t 1. f3 serve that purpose without the king move?
I’m the same way. You don’t need notes when you understand the underlying concepts. For me it is better to spend 100% of my concentration on the prof and ask questions when something doesn’t make sense.
>but it's not too much to ask to prove that you can think on your feet and solve hard problems if that's what the job is.

Because the most common say to day issue is needing to think of an algorithm on the spot...

You hate it because you know that's not true. Yet you're using it.
In Spain, everyone has two surnames. Your first surname is your father's first surname, and your second surname is your mother's first surname. What this means is that in a family of mum, dad and kids, only the kids will share the same surname.

We had a German friend who married a Spanish man, and she insisted on changing her surname to his when they got married since that was traditional for her. But for Spanish people this was really weird, since it sounded like they were siblings. I actually haven't asked them since they had kids, but I guess their kids must have his first surname doubled (which is not unusual - María Sanchez Sanchez just means that the first surname of both parents was Sanchez).
Looks like we broke it, a shame!
LASR, you seem to be shadowbanned, but your history doesn’t show anything weird. I vouched for this post to make it visible to everyone, but I don’t know if vouching lifts the shadowban entirely or just makes visible this particular post. You might want to reach out to dang just in case to figure this out.
I agree on the first half but not the second. Most things a carpenter builds aren't going to last a century, but I wouldn't find it strange at all for him to take pride in them.
Actually it’s a 4 way split ! With the 4th being Software Engineering that addresses things such as Methodologies. This is most undergrads are really seeking.
Demo of a free application for organizing work on home projects
There used to be a time, long ago, when neural networks had 2 layers: the input layer and the output layer, with full connections between the two. There's an old proof that, if you don't have nonlinearities there's an equivalent 2-layer net for any arbitrarily deep neural net.

So the real difference between modern "deep neural networks" and "neural networks" is not actually the depth, even though it is. It's just that neural networks, old definition, a 2 layer net can match any depth net, so you wouldn't use more. The real difference isn't the depth, but the nonlinearity (the tanh/sigmoid/relu operation).
There's a lot you'd have to understand. Not technically, but culturally. In particular:

- Most houses had one phone line. The phone line was shared by the household. Without email, text messages, social media, instant messages, basically the only thing faster than mailing a physical was using the phone. Hence the single phone line could be a point of connection.

- Long distance calling was very expensive compared to now. If your mom was calling your aunt in another state, they'd be paying attention to the time on the call. If you were told to say hi to your aunt, you'd be told "hurry up, it's long distance"

- There was no stack overflow. If you had a question, you were limited to asking those you need in person or maybe a computer magazine.

- The common person didn't interact much with a computer. They would know what it was, but it was novel.

Of course, there were exceptions. I'm sure in the bay area, it was much easier to find someone who understand BBSes, or to get a 2nd phone line just for your modem, but for most of America the above was true.

Hence, BBS action would often happen when other family members wouldn't use the phone. Late at night was great, because that was when it was socially unacceptable to call.

And BBSes would tend to have a local community. Local both in the sense of the board, but also physical distance. The combination of technical proficiency + locality led to it tending to be less like NextDoor & more a cluster of local nerds.

Most BBSes I remember tended to focus on some combination of 3 things: warez, message boards, & games. The games would be similar to what you might get pre-installed on a flip phone, with the advantage of a shared score board.

For warez, the community hated leeches, and often would impose an upload ratio. (You can upload so much stolen software before you could download anything.) As the Internet became more common, FTP servers would replace most warez boards. Likewise Usenet would suck up a lot of message board activity.

My brother ran a popular board in our area. e did a fundraiser to buy an external drive to host more software, and raised just over $1,000. The thing that stuck with me was he used that to buy a massive drive for time -- one gig. As disk prices have fallen, that data point $1,000/gig, has stuck me as a benchmark.
>> I would challenge you to name any (non-simple) problem where traditional AI methods are still state of the art.

Theorem proving, classical planning, SAT solving, robotics, search, in particular adversarial search, program induction, knowledge representation.

Plus all the stuff that used to be considered "AI" but aren't anymore, like rule-based systems (e.g. for fraud detection) etc.

Sorry, I know you asked for only one.
> OpenBSD `yes` doesn't look very useful if your language isn't English, or you're dealing with any other kind of prompt than y/n

Not sure what you mean - you can get it to print whatever you want by passing that on the command line?

puts(argv[1]);
excellent take on why programmers prefer one way of doing things over the other. i am adding it to my ever growing list of possible explanations.

another common one is: that's what we have been taught in school.

python has mostly replaced java in schools now but java used to be the introductory language of choice. one can even say that it was like a feedback loop, i.e., the industry dictating what students should learn...
One thing you might point out to your father is that his choice of dirty obsolete technology is exposing himself and his workers to dangerous levels of carcinogenic crap all day long, taking years off their lives. Not to mention the hearing loss.

If he wants to keep using them he should at the least be requiring his employees to wear high quality gas masks and hearing protection.

Otherwise, the health effects are comparable to mandating all of his employees take up smoking cigarettes while on the job.

If individual home owners want to take a risk with their lives while doing occasional lawn care that is one thing, but this kind of unnecessary occupational hazard should be strictly banned, and should open employers to criminal/financial liability.
I love cryptography and read up everything that Bruce Schneier writes. It feels too far fetched in making a career starting now though.
Okay, I think I understand your idea - essentially to impose nonlinear costs to consumption of "carbon-heavy" goods and services, so that someone who flies 10xN miles pays much more than 10x of tax.

It would be interesting and useful if it worked, however, I'm sceptical of this working - in essence, while "linear" taxes can be relatively easily (there still are difficulties, especially internationally) levied at any point e.g. manufacture, import, sale or use, anonymously, no matter who or how consumes the product. However, having such a "nonlinear" tax is quite hard to administer effectively since it requires taxing at the point of use, tracking all points of sale to the specific individuals, aggregating them (if the person flies N miles per year from many different companies), and preventing transfers of that thing between people and/or using proxies.

I don't think that I have seen nonlinear consumption taxes implemented in practice anywhere; the largest nonlinearity I have seen is exemptions where some ways of circumventing the tax are explicitly permitted for small, limited quantities. For core aspects of carbon emissions - namely, emissions from burning fossil fuels either in cars or heating homes - that would essentially require individual registration of fuel purchases; IMHO that would be treated as quite invasive; for the airline example you mention, this would require shifting the airline pricing so that the price is dependent on which person will be flying (beyond mere name, since names are not unique), which would be a major change in all the process of how airline tickets are booked worldwide.
What's the big deal whose GDP is bigger? You think China's going to invade us?

Maybe it's good that other groups of people besides Americans and Europeans can make leading contributions to economic growth, science and technology.

Maybe America's dominance is mainly good for the rich and those who like to invade countries on a whim. I don't care about either of those groups.
Tossing my hat in for Passerine [1]. Gorgeous ML inspired syntax. Written in Rust, and I suspect scripting Rust libraries is in the cards.

Dreaming here: Lua is a fantastic scripting language, but the Rust FFI isn’t as ergonomic as it could be. Enter Luster [2], which is basically LuaJIT rewritten in Rust.

Embedding a scripting language in a Rust application gives you tons of power (e.g. scripting Rust structs from Lua [3]), and setting this up isn’t terribly difficult.

[1]: https://github.com/vrtbl/passerine

[2]: https://github.com/kyren/luster

[3]: https://git.sr.ht/~ioiojo/kiwi
I'm a very mission-oriented person, so I understand where you're coming from. But there are a lot of places where people don't care very much, and people who work in those circumstances long enough tend to pick up those values.

The most obviously mercenary industry is finance. I did that for a few years and then got the fuck out. But I've met plenty of mercenary people in tech, especially in startups and BigCos. For plenty of people programming is a job like any other; they're going to come in, do whatever the boss wants (however little sense it makes), and go home. I would die from that, but a lot of people either find their meaning elsewhere or just don't care much about meaning.
He said Peter "popularized" it, not invented.
Nice. I was thinking of an earlier post involving cloud storage buckets with no index.
> What makes you certain that they weren’t suggesting exactly that?

Stop it stop it stop it.

Stop it.
> I would challenge you to name any (non-simple) problem where traditional AI methods are still state of the art.

Did ML methods best classic AI in dialog comprehension, say to the level of SHRDLU? I'm curious, can ML system do that - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU ?
Realize that looks aren't everything.
What do you mean by a Pipewire UI? It's a background daemon (or three: pipewire, a session manager, and pipewire-pulse).

EDIT: Perhaps the parent means Helvum, which ldd says links to libgtk-4.so.1 => /usr/lib/libgtk-4.so.1. However, I can't figure out how to open a popover (https://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/popov...) in the app; all I can do is drag to create or break connections.
Why what? I don't understand what you are asking.
>I don't really get why you seem to believe there are just two extremes and that's it.

Well, we’re only discussing a specific dimension of software development here. In reality there are a whole bunch of things not even related to software that will cause problems.
What is surprising about people wanting to fit in with one another? There is nothing new about monkey see monkey do.
Now if only something could be done about its schizophrenic standard library and built-in functions.
I basically just run an install script which does a few different things. I start by updating the repos and regenerating my mirrors so I get the fastest downloads possible. After that, I install shell utilities (my editor, shell of choice, base-devel, etc.) and then I enable the AUR so I can grab the rest of my desired apps. The rest of it is decidedly basic, it just copies my tracked config files to ~/.config/ and moves my wallpaper to /usr/share/wallpapers. I run a few rain dances automatically too, like `sudo chmod a+wr /opt/spotify` (which lets me automate my Spotify theming process) and installing/unzipping a Steam theme.

To install, I run `git clone https:github.com/username/repo && ./repo/install.sh`, and I'm off to the races. I really reccommend writing one for yourself, as it's a great way to learn shell scripts.
When porting our audio plug-ins to Big Sur we had to avoid some APIs that were running fine for years, because of new memory leaks.
I happen to have attended a very good school for undergrad in mechanical engineering. And have many of my classmates from Computer Science working in FAANGs and other leading SaaS.
I'm always envious of people who have vim/emacs setups that appear so clean and functional.

I just think to my cobbled-together vim setup which both had a long startup and was riddled with idiosyncrasies (both I'm sure caused by my own misconfiguration).

I since have migrated to spacemacs, thinking that I could let people more competent than I do the brunt of configuration, but still I have managed to make the startup long and the experience janky.

I guess I should either spend more or less time configuring my setups...
Great essay, although the essay describes the author as much as his subject.

But I don’t understand from the essay how his uncle was “ruined”, much less “ruined by LA”. “Ruin” is a strong word. I’d guess if his uncle was still around he would call such a characterization “horseshit”.
Does it handle headsets correctly?
Franz Kafka famously asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his unpublished manuscripts after Kafka's death. Brod did not honor this request, which is why we can now read "The Trial" and "The Castle".

So yeah. Preserving someone's work against their wishes is probably a faux pas - thankfully, someone else committed it, and you, me, and humanity at large can just enjoy the results.
It is really hard to predict when research will become valuable- the most valuable US Government grant ever just might turn out to be the NSF/DARPA grants for information science management that funded Brin and Page in their initial work on the PageRank algorithm.

But my favorite example of how research flows into a better world is the Sagnac effect. In 1913, French Physicist Georges Sagnac built a circular interferomter and found interference bands. He thought that this disproved Relativity and showed that an aether existed, but it turned out that German Physicist Max von Laue had predicted the existence of those interference bands under relativity two years earlier, so 10 points for Einstein.

For the next 50 years Sagnac interferometery was a dead end, a minor curiosity in the history of physics. Then in 1963, Macek and Davis at the Sperry Gyroscope Co. figured out how to build this in a laboratory environment with the recently invented lasers. The coherent beam of a laser unlocked the usefulness of the Sagnac effect. Meaning that just another 30-odd years of work by hundreds of people around the world got to a situation where ring-laser and fiber-optic gyros are superior to mechanical gyroscopes and capable of things that mechanical gyros could never do.

So, the Sagnac effect itself was worth nothing, and for a long time afterwards was just something that a few scientists even knew about. But a century later the world depends on it.
It’s a very unhelpful project unless you already know what you’re doing, as feedback.
This is quite interesting. An About page would be nice though.
libinput with Wayland on a MacBook Pro puts its trackpad handling on par with macOS.
In LA and TX at least, you get a "homestead exemption" on property taxes on your primary residence.
Apple has few and long-lived product identifiers; as such it is possible for specific problems to become well known.

It's extraordinary to find more than a handful of anecdotes about any particular model number of consumer Windows laptop that happens to be on sale at Best Buy today. There are so many, and they cycle so rapidly.
Is there much point in optimising this as opposed to keeping it in strings, at what QPS do you think it would matter and how much?
looks really promising. I usually hate apps and phones and and this is the first time in years I thought I have a reason to not "forget" my phone when I go out. can't wait until it hits android:

> The Hewell beta is for iOS users only.

> You must also have Testflight installed.

> This beta isn't accepting any new testers right now.
Colleagues of mine are really hyped about this, but I don't understand why it's necessary. QKDS requires classical symmetric key crypto still, so this is only for key exchange. There are a number of quantum-resistant public key algos on the horizon (e.g. lattice-based.) Even if public key were completely broken, you could ship hard drives full of one-time pads and cycle through keys every 15 minutes. Not to mention, a sophisticated adversary could still take advantage of a fiber cut to MitM the traffic (splice into the cable on both sides, negotiate keys separately between each side and yourself and then decrypt/re-encrypt/relay data.)