skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But is is changing, the standards committee keeps adding things. Some of those are reasonable (stdbool.h, atomics), others are head scratchers (VLAs, now deprecated).
It might have been better for C to have stayed frozen in time.

But look how many libraries are written in C, such that they can be made available everywhere. Look at how many are written in C++/Rust but with C wrappers with plenty of pointers and bad error handling.

Any improvements to the C standard would have meant a safer surface area for those languages to use to talk to other languages, since C is the english of programming.

There's no reason why C couldn't have namespacing, out-of-band errors, fat pointers, minimal reflection (typeof), standardized attributes, etc. ages ago. None of that would have screwed with the ABI or with optimization, but would have made language interoperability a lot easier.
I think you're getting voted down for confusing wording but you're right. This article says "well, we accept that we're not gonna do anything about climate change, but here's why actually that might not be so bad!"
Probably depends on which time zones are in daylight when you visit.
The Histories by Herodotus was life changing for me (see my handle!). But, be aware that it has to be a good translation: the online free ones are not the ones you should read.

Why? Because until I read it my only other experience with writing of that era was the bible readings from when I attended synagogue (before I realized that there was no god). I always found the bible stuff strange, but I forgave it, because I thought that people were just like that at that time in human history. Well, Herodotus changed my mind. He is brilliant, skeptical, humorous, and inquisitive. Attributes that, until I read the book, I somehow thought belonged to we moderns. Now I know how wrong I was, and I think about things differently.
Open source can either mean "publish the source" or "run it as a community project".

Most of the benefits of open source (for the company) would come from running it as a community project, which would imply giving up some of the control. Simply throwing the code over the wall without accepting contributions doesn't meaningfully benefit the company. There are of course graduations between "don't accept any contributions" and "let the community run it", but that's just different levels of giving up control.

I think "11. It takes steady income to sustain long-term R&D" is still the key aspect. Without money, software doesn't get maintained to a high level. Some projects work because many companies depend on it and contribute (but they wouldn't do it - or at least not nearly as much - if the project was strictly centrally controlled), but many other projects are basically one company running and publishing it and many others using it for free.
In my last trip to South Asia I was surprised banks using WhatsApp to request identification documents.
I think they're still trying to figure out a replacement that gives the channel/network/platform leverage over content producers, much like control over "prime time" and fall marketing blitzes did.
It depends. I have seen some algorithms (the example that comes to mind was a clustering) become worse solely due to numerical error.

When that happens, if you are not equiped to measure the numerical error or at least trained to suspect it, you might think that it is just the algorithm that is not working.
> I think they’re confusing source licensing with a development methodology.

Which is why as nitpicky as it sounds, we should really be making an effort not to use the term "open source" to refer to both.
There’s no evidence that they are doing that intentionally or deliberately. Sure some creators do that.
It is not the compiler per se, it is mostly down to the design of the language itself. D language based numerical library has already beaten popular Fortran based numerical library OpenBLAS/Lapack for several years now [1].

[1]Numeric age for D: Mir GLAS is faster than OpenBLAS and Eigen:

http://blog.mir.dlang.io/glas/benchmark/openblas/2016/09/23/...
This reminds of this hilarious [1] Cyanide and Happiness Sketch on Youtube.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGWCQvjhHvc
This seems like one of those spots where Smalltalk is a victim of cultural changes that happened around it.

25 years ago, a tight integration between the language and the IDE like that would have sounded great to me. Nowadays, though, it strikes me as a terrible, terrible flaw.

What's changed is the development of a collaborative development across the Internet, and a stronger emphasis on code review. So now, for a great many projects, the most important code reading typically happens outside the code's native environment. It's done in whatever least-common-denominator view you get in your team's code review tool.
Providing Java for free (no matter whether open or closed-source) was a big strategic blunder for Sun: it commoditized CPU architectures by providing an abstraction layer over them. Write once, run anywhere! The problem was, Intel chips were cheaper. So people just ran their Java workloads on their existing x86 PCs instead of buying expensive Sun hardware. Sun should have never written or released Java: it consumed resources, and hastened their demise.
SelfControl is a nicely done, free open source program that does the same thing. https://selfcontrolapp.com/. Code: https://github.com/SelfControlApp/selfcontrol/
> dark matter is pretty solid of an idea

Not really. It is a hypothesized form of matter. There are competing hypotheses. Dark matter came to popularity in order to explain observations of galaxy rotation curves in the late 1930s. But these galaxies were observed in isolation, giving the illusion of gravitational isolation, which doesn't exist. Once accounting for the tidal effects of nearby galaxies, [1] dark matter becomes unnecessary to explain galaxy rotation curves, all that is needed is Newtonian physics. But in the period since dark matter was hypothesized, other observations that could not be readily explained were lumped into dark matter. Dark matter is nothing if not an amalgamation of unexplainable observations. So while dark matter is unnecessary to explain galaxy rotation curves, it is still somehow useful to explain unrelated observations.

> it isn't a band-aide fix

It really sort of seems like that: can't explain an observation, so invent something out of thin air to explain it. Honestly, an hypothesis that elves are causing the observations has just as much validity (or lack thereof). Now, elves have not been proven to be the cause of these unexplained observations, but neither has dark matter.

> the foundations of the concept of dark matter are fairly reasonable.

See above concerning galaxy rotation curves and endnote. Please understand it is quite possible that dark matter does not exist. The reason why it seems like accepted science has to do with scientific paradigms. Once a notion becomes an accepted part of the science paradigm, it takes years if not decades after disproving it beyond all doubt to dislodge it from the paradigm. If science has a problem, it is paradigms.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL0ewiwqoTw&t=6m11s
And facebook also tracks what you browse. (And Amazon lets people die in a storm.)
The power of now by Eckhart Tolle changed my life when I was young. It shifted me from being extremely outwards oriented, to re-discovering the joy of the little things. I had discovered that there is always space between feelings, thoughts and 'you', always available, which was a huge relief since I was living in a torrent of uncertainty and disappointment for years up until then.

The undeniable fact that there is only ever 'now' was also a bombshell of a realization. What a wonderful book that one, for those who have the disposition to grok it.
the other axiom you need is that gravity and acceleration are the same. the speed of light being constant only gets you special relativity.
Books that have changed my life:

- How to win friends and influence people. Helped me understand the dynamics of relationships in a unon manipulative and empathetic way.

- Sapiens. Changed my view on human organizations and religion

- the monk who sold his Ferrari

- meditations by Marcus Aurelius

- the screwtape letters. Letter 15 specifically changed me
Simple math says a winning politician must advocate for unpopular policies
I've thought about this for awhile, and I think it's reasonable to read some books in their entirety to better understand certain things (although I will agree that some books are just fluff and can be condensed into a blog post).

Take for instance the Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. We get it, make checklists because they're good for making sure you don't miss stuff. Got it. But in reading the stories and personal anecdotes, we get a felt sense for why and how we should implement a system of checklists to offload cognitive load so that we can focus on things that require more discursive thinking.

I guess what I'm saying is that you can tell someone to do something, but you may have a better shot at getting them to remember (edit: understand deeply) if you tell them a story. Humans may just be like that.

Not saying these authors aren't trying to hit publisher mandated word counts or whatever, but it may not always be that.
i watched most of a couple/few videos, including most of this one, skimmed a couple others.

seems like she's basically just another conservative science denier, flat-earther, anti-vaxxer, global warming skeptic.

flat earth video: so, is the earth flat? well, maybe not, but yes the flat-earthers have a valid point, so...

plastic video: is plastic bad? eh, not really.

global warming video: well, maybe it is real, maybe not, but the scientists were all wrong, even tho they were right, but they haven't been perfect about predicting the future precisely, they didn't even predict donald trump winning the presidency, so can these 'scientists' or 'science' itself _really_ be trusted?? nah.
> but for a browser company, isn't a browser extension better than some other way to opt out? otherwise they would have to associate you to an account.

Well the better way would have been to honour the browsers 'Do Not Track' headers, but Google pretty much ignored these, presumably because it would have caused too much impact, which is one of the reasons it failed.

But now, Google could support 'Global Privacy Control' by implementing it in Chrome and honouring GPC headers across Google! That's the obvious way to support an opt-out considering there is an emerging standard and that they own a browser. But... again, it's probably better for them to ignore this from a commercial perspective and in their best interests if GPC fails, so better to implement some shitty add-in that discourages people from opting out (if you want to opt out of tracking from 100 companies, are you expected to have 100 different plugins?).
True, but if I activate the extension, can it steal passwords from any domain I visit?
The irony certainly is that wolfram uses open source libraries (and there were some twitter threads that they might be aying a bit fast and loose with the acknowledgement of LGPL licenses)
You'd basically have to read the code every single time it updates, or at least hope someone does that and would publicly raise the issue (and that you're getting the same version as everyone else).

That said, the analytics scripts can also do all of that. They can only do it on pages where they're embedded, of course, but especially for Google's scripts, that's probably most (not all) web sites (either in the form of Analytics, Tag Manager, or Ads).
> "This is unnecessary"

You mean, like kreeben crapping on the work of hundreds of log4j contributors over the years by dismissing it as "worth nothing"?
As per Betteridge's Law, the answer is "no" and the article takes its time getting there. This is really an article about how athletes can have lower resting heart rates with some notes on how one might try to actively reduce their own resting heart rate.

The final paragraph gives a reasonable summary:

> There’s far more to performance and longevity than your RHR. Take stock of it, monitor it, celebrate it if you’re trying to nudge it down a bit. But understand that that’s not where your fitness should start (or end). Matthews refers to it as a guidepost. “One of the reasons tracking, comparing, and improving resting heart rate has become popular is simply because it’s easy to measure,” he says. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best touchstone of health, fitness and vitality. Focus on eating right, sleeping right and moving throughout the week. It’ll head where it needs to be in kind. There’s no sense in chasing Lance anyway.
Most centrist Republicans value equality. They've moved further left to capture the moderates. The problem is the Berkeley progressives (the extreme left) has no concession in their sights. They want to tear down institutions and gut it out. Kind of how the cryto currency guys want to start seasteading and destroy the US Federal Gov but entirely on a different axis.

I find race discussion from Columbia University linguist and NYTimes Columnist, John McWhorter, fascinating and profoundly pragmatic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gQj5bkUeAc

I am so worn out from all this. Living here in Oakland, I cannot, absolutely will not raise my children here. Actively seeking jobs in Texas, Florida, Colorado, Georgia and North Carolina.
What's wrong with that comment is that people think it is wrong for some fairly obvious reasons. for example: there is no causal link (which is also the point of the comment originating this thread). Examples of software needing to be open source to succeed, like other languages, the Android OS, etc. are easy to find.

Even your more qualified point has loads of counter-examples, that companies that did not start with their software as open source find it hard to succeed at open source: Google's search engine and much other software is not open source. Many companies mix their approach to open source with proprietary systems and products. As did Sun.

That Wolfram's justifications are weak is not necessarily a knock on their decision. But the specific point that "High-level languages need more design than low-level languages" seems particularly odd. There are high level languages where all the widely used implementations are open source and few cases of them becoming chaotic. I suppose there is survivorship bias in that observation but there are also obvious reasons why no language user community would have a lot of patience for a proliferation of variants.
> - =, +=

It's related to the same problem with = as assignment, note GP's context: Math and engineering majors. They have been taught, assuming they paid attention, that = is not an assignment but a relational statement. If they've never programmed before, having = as a thing that changes the system state is still new to them. This is a common issue I've seen in tutoring over the years, where students' mental model is closer to Excel than to <standard programming languages>. That is, if you do this:

a = 10; b = 20;
c = 3*a+c;
printf("%d\n", c); // prints 50

They aren't surprised, but then they do this:

a = 20; // this demonstrates part of their confusion, they half-get that it is an assignment
printf("%d\n", c); // prints 50 ?!?!?

They expected 80. So they haven't fully internalized that `=` means assignment and is not establishing a relationship between the thing on the left and the formula on the right. One of the key things that helps is teaching them to "read" a program, and to read `a = 10` as "a gets 10" or "10 is assigned to a".

> Why would the symbols mean exactly the same thing in a different context?

When you have one mental model that you've been taught for 12+ years and are 18-20 years old and don't have a ton of experience, this is confusing. That it is not or was not confusing to you is either because you had a learning experience that specifically targeted this confusion, you made the connection more readily (maybe closer to the top of your class than average), or are looking back on your past and neglecting how far you've come since you were that age and had that level of understanding.
I think Go's log package, and similar, have the best take on this:

log.Print(fixed_string)
log.Printf(format_string, args...)

Simple, unambiguous.
Wolfram et al can't think their way out of a paper bag anymore because they're abstracted away the world and now live in their own fantastical fabrication. No pressure to go open source but this is easy to take apart:

1) A coherent vision requires centralized design »
-- You can do that with FOSS

2) High-level languages need more design than low-level languages »
-- You can do that with FOSS

3) You need multidisciplinary teams to unify disparate fields »
-- You can do that with FOSS

4) Hard cases and boring stuff need to get done too »
-- You can do that with FOSS

5) Crowd-sourced decisions can be bad for you »
-- You can do that with FOSS

... Same for the rest, just saving myself time. These people can create endless content about their rationalizations for obfuscating how things really work. Which is hair-brained abstractions.
If you have a static IP (afaik, I do) it can be used for fingerprinting.
You've continued well after you prompted a CPSC report. I'd hope that one purpose of further discussion is benefit to the rest of the community, rather than being solely for your enjoyment. I'm sorry that's disappointing to you.
That’s like being a grammar Nazi even when someone writes something otherwise totally clear.

And it’s obvious in this case that the magnitude of c was in metric units.

And how do you know if he was even referring to the speed of light by “c”? I could call that a dumb assumption. Because it’s obvious he was using it in a non standard way “magnitude of the speed of light in m/s”.
How to Be an Imperfectionist: The New Way to Self-Acceptance, Fearless Living, and Freedom from Perfectionism

I've listened to dozens of self help type books, and this one had an immediate and permanent effect on me. It changed my life. I don't think it will do the same for everyone, but it did for me. I think most time spent listening to these self help type books goes to waste, but there is the occasional book or insight that resonates with a person and makes it all worth it. This was one of those book for me.
To keep it from grinding your hard drives scanning for viruses (obstnsibly to protect you, but really o protect them from clickfraud) you have to use administrator privileges to blackhole one of its folders. There is no option to turn it off. It will grind your media and backup drives every week, shortening their life.

(Chrome Cleanup Tool)
> the most exceptional are more similar to one another than the average are

Wait, can you elaborate?
Pound for pound they are about 1.5X stronger than humans due to the density of fast-twitch muscle fibers. This also makes them quicker and more nimble.

If they attack from behind they can easily knock down an adult human. They use this tactic to attack motorcycle delivery drivers quite often and steal food. They would have no trouble nabbing a child.
No, just close and re-open the file when you receive a specific signal, generally SIGHUP, from logrotate or any equivalent tool.
Good piece, goes into such depth that probably not all scientists must know all of this :)

That said, my own experience of noticing what people's machines are wasting time on around me is very different.

For scientists at firms (outside of academia) a major bottleneck is downloading, decompressing and shuffling data around. Unfortunately the lessons in the piece are in fact detrimental to this workload: 1. decompression is usually not faster than 500MB/s, which is much slower than SSD or network, but I still see compression everywhere with the idea that "cpu is faster". 2. Standard tools for downloading data, like awscli, are crazy slow compared to the actual ability of the network cards that are attached to the machines we (in big firms) use in the cloud. Specifically awscli caps at about 250MB/s no matter the configuration or network bandwidth, and people think it's normal because "network io is slow". (this of course doesn't apply to scientists who work out of the cloud, with much lower download speeds)

None of this contradicts anything in the piece. It's that the units of work for different sectors are different. Whereas a geoscientist working on modeling the ocean has bottlenecks in computation, scientists at firms often have them in data.
I don't care about one web site doing their analytics. It becomes a problem when one analytics company is building a profile across many sites.

Unfortunately, Cloudflare is in a position to do just that, just like major analytics providers.
I looked up my own site — the one that got this whole mess started — and I hover around number 350,000. I was utterly shocked given that I have a few thousand users, and many fewer active users.

I don’t use GA, or any other third-party trackers, on any of my sites. Given that Tranco doesn’t have access to my web logs or the little Matomo setup that I self-host, I’m not sure how they claim to be analyzing my traffic in the first place.
A sad ending.

But it reminded me of what a wonderful brave new world (and I don't mean that in a negative, ironic way) it was back then. The computer really was become a tool the artist could enthuse about, make new art with.
Here's the actual extension code for those interested:

(function() {
var a = document.createElement("script");
a.type = "text/javascript";
a.innerText = 'window["_gaUserPrefs"] = { ioo : function() { return true; } }';
document.documentElement.insertBefore(a, document.documentElement.firstChild);
})()
Can confirm to some degree as I built this system almost 10 years ago. Back then it was used for rich data in 3 apps that were all turned down years ago. I've been out of Google for a long time, so I don't know if it's still around or what it would be used for anymore.
How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Near magical in how it can teach you to connect better with others in a real, lasting way.