skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My impression is that programming language design for single-threaded, CPU-based algorithmic programs is basically a solved problem. There's a bunch of innovative ideas sitting around in research projects, but most bare little resemblance to actual pain points of programmers in industry. A more complex, expressive type system is not going to make an average SWE's day job significantly easier.

Rather, I think that PL design headroom is largely in new programming domains, including:

Distributed systems. Right now, these are cobbled together between single processes written in conventional programming languages; RPC & serialization frameworks; container or cloud orchestration mini-languages; and a lot of proprietary tooling. There's no unified way of expressing "this computation occurs on this box", while abstracting away the details of communication & provisioning and still providing robust handling for debugging and the complex failure modes that distributed systems introduce.

Machine-learning. This is handled through frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, JAX) that basically provide EDSLs in a host language, usually Python. But a lot of them would really benefit from language-level support; for example, differentiability is an important concept for SGD, and yet is bolted on with a bunch of kludges in these frameworks. There's also the whole issue of how to store & version training data; how to collect it; how to easily support feature extraction and labeling as part of a developer's workflow; how to run in development vs. production mode; and so on.

GPGPU. Your options here are basically CUDA, Futhark, and a few other niche languages. Yet the underlying hardware and computing model is fundamentally different from single-process CPU code, or even multithreaded concurrent CPU code. It seems like there's a lot of headroom by thinking in terms of the operations a GPU provides and then exploring the space of problems that could be solved with that much computing capacity.

Smart contracts. Solidity paves the way here, but Solidity is still pretty kludgey, and makes it easy to shoot your foot off in a far more expensive way than C++. A single vulnerability can cost literally billions of dollars, and often in a very public (and permanent) manner. They're also (by default) immutable, so you can't fix bugs after the fact, and introducing mutability to them also often introduces gaping security holes. You have to worry about gas costs, and each computation operation is a lot more expensive than in traditional computer programs.

Basically, headroom for improvement in programming languages comes from handling things that are not handled in languages right now, where solutions get cobbled together from a bunch of libraries or custom code. That's how it's always been with product design: the products that most need to exist are those that cover problems where no existing product exists, not ones that are minor improvements on existing products.
If cutting down forests results in higher CO2 emissions why shouldn’t planting forests reverse it? It is thought to reverse the effect of deforestation and naturally, it is a slow process.
> If you build it right

Which means very heavy, and only designs that can use gravity to hold them together.
I posit that sufficiently advanced "properly integrated intuition through experience" is indistinguishable from a mental model.
Fermi method (1), sometimes called a Fermi estimate, is one of the most useful ways to improve the accuracy of our brains natural reasoning processes for both technical and non technical topics. It's actually a form of Bayesian estimation (2) and habituating the problem solving method helps enhance our brains in built inference systems.

We all get an intuition of how things work and "feel", and by decomposing those feelings and intuitions into smaller pieces and rationally considering the likelihoods of those pieces we can improve them. By habitually doing this we can improve the brains natural estimation processes which improves our decision making ability.

Lastly but importantly, the detail that separates the Fermi method from regular reasoning/socratic method/etc is estimation of the uncertainty of various assumptions. This can be used to figure out how to quickly get specific knowledge to drastically improve the estimation with minimal effort/time.

Fermi used that last bit at the first nuclear explosion test to realize that dropping a few pieces of paper and seeing the distance they blew would give him enough info to get an accurate order of magnitude estimate of the yield onsite (3). He got 10 kilotons of tnt vs the official 21.

1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PsEppdvgRisz5xAHG/fermi-esti...
2: https://www.roma1.infn.it/~dagos/history/FermiBayes.pdf
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem#Historical_backg...
I imagine you're someone who finds honor in the truth. If you are, then you would benefit from writing. Here are two things you get from writing: 1) it forces you to clarify your thoughts, and 2) it enables you to create new thoughts. Writing is a very effective means to discovering powerful truths.

I think you understand the power of the truth, which is why you're uncomfortable being exposed to it too regularly.
Wouldn't you say this about Go before Rust?
I dunno, I think iPads are much more a laptop-lite/smartphone-plus than they are an improved e-reader. The promise of e-readers was a comfortable ebook reading experience, and tablets deliver more of a web-browsing and social media experience, like a laptop sans keyboard. E-readers are still the best e-readers, and Kindle is still dominant there.
Great to see this catalogue of language features, thought provoking. The thing that makes a language good (instead of just usable) is how well its various features fit together. All that I can think of, fail with this - their usability damaged by special cases, edges, and forcing the use of various contortions.
It should be everywhere in the world, not just in Australia. But that ship has quite literally sailed and we buy stuff from all over the world for a fraction of what it would cost to produce locally. If you want to reverse that expect to pay a very large multiple of what you are paying today for goods.
> replaced a perfectly good electronics parts wholesaler

David Reid? Radio Spares? (There was another with a name that started with T, but it's slipped my mind.)
That was based on the assumption that a capable multi-purpose tablet could only have a few hours of battery life. The iPad’s ～10 hour endurance was a huge game changer.
Neat, reminds me a bit of the "lego style" construction method of this company:

https://gablok.com/en/
I'm still angry about browsers hiding the http:// and https:// part of URLs. That is part of the URL.
That someone is likely to provide biased sources when asked for them isn't a reason to just shrug and allow unsourced claims to go unchallenged. It doesn't matter whether or not djanogo could have found the bill on their own (from their edit, it looks like they did read it), the point is that it was irresponsible for the original poster to have made unsourced claims in such an inflamatory tone.

If the sources they provide are biased and therefore suspect, that is a separate concern that can then be addressed. But having some source for your claims is table stakes for an intelligent discussion.
Watched that and found a video about the people who got mad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDhr5E50Nds

The shovel bit is worth the time.
Nuclear Power and Climate Change
It's certainly not newer than spotify. If you want to compare experiences, think about how hard it would be to shuffle-play vinyl.

Moreover, they're not removing the ability to shuffle and album; they're just making it play in order by default, which is a very sensible default and all but certainly the expected behavior.

> Spotify users could still choose to shuffle an album, but the system would default to playing tracks in the order chosen by the artist.
Los Angeles isn’t seeing massive fires on an annual basis - at least, not the parts of LA that would be affected by this.
> We are already deciding where people can live. It's called zoning

Zoning is done in higher density areas, because it has to be. It's one of the tradeoffs you make when you choose to live in a higher density area.

In rural areas, or even in smaller towns, you won't find much zoning. And people who choose to live in such areas are making different tradeoffs (for example, lack of easy access to many kinds of services that are easily available in higher density areas).

Trying to command people who want to live in either kind of area to live in the other kind does not work out well. It's much better to just make sure that people who choose to live in each kind of area bear their share of the costs, and get their share of the benefits.
They are both worthwhile articles, for different reasons.
Agreed. I like to use opportunity cost to try to frame the trade offs in terms of future developer time that will have to be used to address the trade offs which won’t be focused on other development efforts.
No, `hmac(key=key, message=input) == hmac(key=key, message=secret)` where key is either a static secret key for comparison purposes, or random for each comparison.
A lot better now, thanks.
I would characterize my dyslexia as mild, if we see it through a spectrum, from mild to severe. I understand exactly what you are describing on the attention issues. I'm from the generation that grew up with Social media, primarily Facebook and reddit. For instance, i use facebook on and off since the end of primary school. That's a long time and a lot of brain damage.

Over the last two years i got very tired of the modern internet and i decided to use it as a some kind of library with social functions. I struggle to dump facebook over the last two years and i tried various ways. Currently i installed a extension (stayfocusd with the nuclear option enabled) which blocks the access to websites from a defined list. It's the only extension that i haven't find a way to bypass it (yet).

The only useful feature of facebook for me is the event tab, and that because everyone uses it. If it haven't been for it i would deleted the account years ago.

I'm slowing starting to realize how much time i wasted not reading and learning and instead using addicted some SM website. I've been left feeling horrified and wondering how different would my life had been if i was occupied with different stuff during my teenager years. Studying programming or reading literature and let it influence me. But that's a totally different discussion.
“Tech debt” is the software industry’s way of euphemistically describing their incompetence.

It’s a way to act like one “meant” to implement a shitty architecture instead of admitting one’s lack of ability and experience.

It’s the mantra of the expert beginner of which there are so many.

You think I’m wrong, but you know I’m right because you can’t define it with any precision no matter how hard you try.
Oop's defining feature is having hidden state behind those interfaces.

Pure functions do not have that
Not to mention that even absent immigration, internal populations will rebound due to the high reproductive rate of certain segments(read religious) of the population.

Given current projections, 200 years from now most of the population in the United States will be Amish.
Your numbers do not check out.

>Child support: The minimum guideline is 33% of income for a single child, non-deductible.

Where are you getting the 33% figure from? Using the figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_raising_a_child, see that for the $59,410 to $102,870 before tax income group (Average = $79,940), the average spent per year is 13,050, or 16.3% pre-tax. The percentages for the Less than $59,410 and More than $102,870 groups are 24.7% and 12.0% respectively, which suggests that as your income goes up, the percentage devoted to rasing a child goes down.

> US/CA taxes take ~55%, so that leaves 12%. If you have a great tech salary of $150k,

How are you getting 55%? According to https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator, at $150k salary, your effective rate is 32.3% and your marginal rate is 34.75%. This includes FICA. Playing around with the numbers, even a salary of $500k, your marginal rate is only 48.65%.

>that leaves you with a living budget of $1500/mo.

Using the numbers from the sources I've mentioned, you actually have a budget of $6287, and that's with 2 children.

gross income: $150,000

take home (includes federal, FICA, state): $101,545

cost of 2 children: (234,900 / 18) * 2 = 26100

remaining: $75,445/yr, or $6287/month
Well, hindsight is 20/20. Speaking to my own thought process, many a drug/theory scientists were “sure” about, until it turned out they were wrong. Couple that with the fact I know closely plenty of people who got the Wuhan coronavirus and weren’t vaccinated, and it was like a typical cold for them, with sone slight difference like temporary loss of smell.

But, I also knew a couple family/friends of friends who were older and obese who were hospitalized from it.

I agree that the side effects are overblown. But so is much of the hand wringing over getting the vaccine or not getting it.
That's a typo: it should be https://reddit.com/r/superbowl
as YC says, better to sell a pain-killer than a vitamin
The going theory is, I wouldn't be making that choice, the thief and the people of the state did by passing a law allowing me to use deadly force to stop thief. If I used deadly force without catching them in the act I would be subject to trial and criminal sanction.

These thefts mostly effect poorer people who are least able to absorb the loss, for someone of my income, it's an inconvenience, for a poor person, it may knock them back down the economic ladder.

Something to note, the US existed in a space for much of its existence particularly out here in the West, where the nearest law enforcement might be hours away, where I am in my county, the county seat is a half a days ride by horse - and our county is a PLSS county, so its not particularly large, they get larger - because of that, we have a permissive culture in allowing people to defend themselves and their property from others, because once its gone, you will likely never get it back again. This only changed with the invention of the automobile and the two way radio, but the culture was formed before that, and culture adapts to technology slowly.
Oh whatever, one of the Trask sisters made a blog entry or something? You can’t fart in Hawaii without it somehow meaning that we are genociding Native Hawaiians, who are all literal trust fund babies and have numerous advantages over many of the Asian communities, who end up in shitty public schools because they aren’t eligible for the previously mentioned trust fund that lets you go to a racially segregated private school.
t. Kailua High School ‘91
I find it funny that you'd post this on a site that does exactly this to all displayed URL's.
Sure, but the incentives are still structured the same, towards despoiling the commons. Each individual/org makes more by exploiting the commons and increasing the risk than by spending more and helping clean it up.

This is just like overfishing - every fisherman is motivated to catch more fish himself, rather than to leave the stock to grow, so it gets fished until the population collapses. And, they keep fishing right into the collapse, they don't even stop when their haul declines, just invest more in becoming more efficient at depleting the commons faster.

The likely result is that everyone will keep putting up satellites, making minimal safety measures for Cover-Your-Ass publicity, and then it'll cascade collapse one day soon.
Not sure if you're aware, but America also has high fire standards for wood-framed construction, particularly for multi-family dwellings, which have required firewalls and sprinklers for many decades. Today, all U.S. model building codes now include sprinkler requirements for all one- and two-family homes, but this only became a requirement in the last decade, so many homes still do not have sprinklers. Electrical wiring is also subject to quite strict codes for the same reason.
But.....it’s dynamic.
Thanks, what a horrifying story. Amazingly bad materials/design - "Combustible panels with polyethylene were put up on top of insulation...made from polyisocyanurate, which burns when heated, giving off toxic cyanide fumes. ...the gap between the cladding and the insulation worked like a chimney to spread the fire."
Fantastic! Using api-gateway for this was so annoying.
Ask HN: Nix(OS) for HPC?
Recently I helped a friend getting some scientific software running on an HPC system a little on the smaller side. The software is written in C++ and uses cmake for building. And to be honest, the experience was rather subpar.

All HPC systems I have worked on have been using Lmod [1] to manage the environment and enable building with say Intel's compiler or some specific MPI version.

Now one of the concrete problems I hit was the following: Loading the latest version of cmake using Lmod pulls in the latest version of gcc's libstdc++ as cmake is dynamically linked against that. But if you try to build said software with the Intel toolchain which pulls an older version of libstdc++ into the environment, suddenly cmake breaks with a rather cryptic symbol not found error.

This is what got me thinking: On HPC systems you typically need to have lots of libraries/software with oftentimes many and conflicting versions installed, so your users can use what they need. I have not yet tried Nix(OS) myself, but what I described does very much sound like the problem it is intended to solve.

Thus my question: Has anyone tried Nix(OS) on an HPC system, how did it go? Otherwise, are there (better) alternatives to Lmod?

[1]: https://lmod.readthedocs.io
Time cost is dictated by the clock frequency and timings, not the physical distance itself. Lower distance may help with achieving better specs but Apple is not overclocking the memory, they run JEDEC spec. Maaaybe they train secondary and tertiary timings a little bit tighter, that’s about it.

> despite this being DDR4

It is not! LPDDR IS NOT DDR!! It’s a very very different standard despite the similar name.
Wouldn’t a traditional website be even worse then? Instead of loading some JSON from the API it has to load the entire page, parse all of the CSS and JS again (the “time to first paint” or “time to interactive” benchmarks are all about that) A SPA only has to do that once. A lot of frameworks bundle various parts of the website actually, so the “shell” of the Twitter feed is loaded initially and the content is dynamically added to it when you navigate through tweets (just as the native app would), but then loading the shell of lesser used areas like your account settings would be deferred until needed. (So you aren’t really downloading a huge JS bundle on first load)

Also I think the reason it has to load the tweets again is to not serve stale content. They could have the browser cache it using the same cache control mechanism as a page load if they wanted.
I'll chime in to say all of your points rings true to me. The person flaming you apparently identifies with the GNOME development team.
Which parts?

The points on modules and effect systems are totally in line with creating a shallower learning curve.

My reading of his point on formal specifications was that it was important to design software that works as it behaves (like compilers that compile the languages they say they do, paraphrasing). That's not a burden on users of the language directly, more on the creators.
>The article mentions that the company took investor money for this, and it seems to be a fairly small pharma R&D company, so I doubt they have some pile of other successful drugs that they are offsetting these losses against.

ok but it would seem to me that supposition sort of works against the supposition that they don't want to lower the price because then they would not be taken seriously in future negotiations, unless the company has some other sources of revenue to keep them going it would seem unlikely they would be available in that future.

in fact in the article it says

>In the 2 1/2 years it took to win EMA approval, AMT, which had no other products to sell and no revenue from Glybera, lost millions of dollars. The company was formally liquidated in 2012. Its assets were acquired by a new private company, uniQure.

I doubt they bought those assets for the millions that were lost - when I look at uniQure https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uniqure it looks like they have reasonable money.

from the quotes in the article there are 100s of millions invested in uniQure but I'm not sure if that investment was made because people were like 'whoa, they got this million dollar drug!', if so seems weird that investors would invest for that reason because if I heard a company was selling a million dollar drug my next question would be 'how many billionaires need that drug?'
Maybe you live in new neighborhood. Last Summer a house a couple blocks from me burned, and while the fire dept. arrived quickly it was obvious that all the contents of the house were lost. Most of the neighborhood was built around 100 years ago so the structures have been through several generations of electrical wiring.
Also, when I was 13 my family's house had a fire and I lost all all of my possessions. I saw the remnants of my bedroom, but I don't think I ever got a real accounting of all that was destroyed. To this day I take photos of artwork and other objects and have (obviously) offsite data backups in case something happens. Its a very strange feeling to suddenly just have the clothing and objects on one's person.
I’m not sure that’s true for all forms of writing but I’d love to hear more about it.

Publishing a blog, for example, is pretty likely to be read by at least a small group of people. Same with a book. If I’m writing in a personal notebook, than no, it’s not likely to be read. On the whole, the statement is probably true, but for specific forms, I suspect it’s false.
Technical debt is a euphemism for bad code, bad practices, and bad decisions.

When we use the term tech/technical debt, we are pretending that the real answer isn't "we didn't do it right the first time". The primary reason this phrase even exists is because if we told our superiors the truth then heads might roll. Non-technical people don't really understand what "technical debt" means, but the word debt at least makes some sense to them.

"We need this thing done pronto. How soon can you get it done?"

"Well, sir, it's gonna take at least a month. Maybe 3 weeks if we get cracking at it."

"A month? But we want it ASAP. Why a month?"

"Um, because there's a lot of technical debt we've got to deal with."

"Uh huh... I see. OK, well, carry on then."

walks away

"I think he bought it, Fred."
Seventy Year history of Bikini Atoll resident relocations by the US Government
Thanks =) I suspect my post was penalized down from the top once I edited in those link citations. HN works in mysterious ways!

I've mostly been in the https://reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages subreddit and its discord server, and chat with these folks a lot, about interesting innovations.

It's a fascinating time to be into programming languages!
Free tier Spotify accounts can only use shuffle play.
Except that's how normal scrap often works. We save old cats at the shop and drop them off every six or twelve months to get that cash. Got a big pile of them now.