skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
thread tl;dr:

it doesn't look like there will be language support for things like codepoints or grapheme indexing or treatment of strings as anything but byte arrays, so ddevault is sad.

there is intention from andrewrk and jecolon to provide such features in the standard library before 1.0 release.

downside to library vs lang support that is you can expect a good chunk of programmers to ignore the less-ergonomic library features, use the language features at hand, and handle strings incorrectly as byte arrays.
I recently put my Dad on Linux. Elementary was a disaster- compatibility and app issues did us in. I'm so happy we moved on because I did not realize that we would have had upgrade issues too.
What is it with Americans and extremism? We're moving (slowly) out of the situation where we had the most unequal healthcare system in the developed world, now we have calls (echoed by actual Presidential candidates) to create what would be the most restricted healthcare system in the developed world.

Can't we just be normal for a few years and see how that goes?
I understand that the good jobs are generally only in Milan and that the cost of living there is not good in comparison to local salaries. Not an issue for me personally, though I understand it’s a major issue in the country.
I had this argument once -- I also believe Brainfuck is more of a machine than a language. Whereas Lisp is a language.

The main reason is that Brainfuck lacks composition, so what happens in practice is that people GENERATE Brainfuck code rather than writing it. When you write code, you rely heavily on your programming language's mechanisms for composition in order to make something that works.

Someone pointed me to people who DO actually program by hand in Brainfuck. There are some pretty big programs that are hand-written, not generated. Still I'm not entirely convinced, as they seem to be have been constructed through mental feats, not compositional language.

It's a curious fact that human languages and programming languages compose in a way that can be leveraged to build very large things that "work". I guess there is some equivalence between building up a large body of knowledge through language and making a program that works. Brainfuck doesn't seem to have this property.

The demonstrations of arithmetic and calculus in the post are nice examples of this in Lisp, and from there you have the rest of the world as your disposal (which is well documented in many books). With Brainfuck you're left crawling on your hands and knees, occasionally finding something that works, so to speak.
The Case for Leaving FAANG Companies for Crypto
Same goes for conventional therapy. "Failure to Measure" is #1 on the list:

https://feelinggood.com/2018/12/24/120-ten-worst-errors-ther...
> the actual correct thing to do is intentionally avoid string handling,

That sounds nice and all, but wr have 50+ years of protocols and formats and APIs built up around strings. Unless you're just writing code to run on a small microcontroller, you need to be able to parse and generate strings. So its going to be pretty frustrating not to have good support for them, or to have every codebase use its own libraries and idioms for working with strings.
Milan being the exception, tech jobs in Italy are generally bad and low paid. Large consultancies tend to work on government projects (often useless or extremely boring), smaller companies still make websites for the baker down the road for 500€. If you are lucky, at the end of your career you may earn more or less what a 23 year old German or Briton earn on their first job. It is totally normal to look for experienced developers and offer 20K euros per annum.
I like most of this, but I do think that requiring the occasional week-long travel for remote employees is a pretty big burden for parents. Single parents especially. Maybe that's just the breaks and those people have to think hard before they accept such a job, but do give this some consideration. I worked at a fully-remote company that had occasional one-week on-site gatherings and when my kids were small, it was really hard on my wife. I don't know what I would have done if I were a single parent.
Direct video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDjzL_fKQDE

edited out my comment.
People in leadership positions - especially in more conservative and traditional companies/industries - often derive their status and sense of worth (both personal and on the job) by exerting and enforcing control on their underlings. So of course they prefer the environment where they can do just that - working from the office.
Tvg is a binary format? It's not really human readable. Compiling to it is a natural thing to be doing.
Not sure if this is the kind of reply you're hoping for, but I've been super encouraged by the defensive stance that Scandinavian authorities took with regards to the AstraZeneca and J&J vaccines once observations of rare side effects became available.

These decisions were mired in a whole lot of suspicious and unnecessary controversy. Rare and specific blood clots on the order of 1 per 20,000 vaccinations turned the ethical consideration of the vaccines from "obviously good" to "obviously bad" overnight, and they were removed from the program immediately. A single-digit number of unnecessary deaths were caused, but the buck stopped there.

I'm not as encouraged by the international response to this research and operative decision. It could be argued at the time that the Scandinavian decisions were made in the light of populations that had sufficiently low mortality from covid that the ethical consideration was different than in Europe at large.

But to my eyes, the European decision to keep using the AZ and J&J vaccines had an air of "let's not look too closely, or maybe we'll see something bad". Norwegian case studies indicated that the rare blood clots were pretty frickin' hard to distinguish from conditions caused by common lifestyle diseases. Two cases were specifically diagnosed only because they happened in doctors who ran themselves through a battery of expensive tests few normal patients would have qualified for. My qualified guess: There are rare but deadly and persistent side effects with these vaccines, that won't be discovered in healthcare environments that aren't finely tuned.

I suppose my point is that if there (God forbid) happen to exist bad but rare and non-obvious side effects of the new RNA vaccines, the truth can be uncovered. I'm not sure that a deliberate control group would be any good regardless; the AZ/J&J side effects were rare enough not to be seen in the control group. But they were still bad enough to disqualify the vaccines.

The whole thing is a super interesting subject, and it's obviously so political and subject to propaganda that you'd need a very critical eye to navigate it. Unless again, heaven forbid, the effect is so bad that it's obvious. Different health authorities do have different degrees of honesty and principled handling of these questions. There are control groups available; the large population of people who decide skip vaccination.
>Great, so now even cars, one of the few things that if maintained properly you could expect to last more than few years, will now be the same cheap, disposable, Chinese made landfill-fodder everything else is quickly becoming.

Have you tried driving a Ferrari/Lamborghini after putting 15-25k miles on it? This is not new, westerners have been producing very expensive throwaway cars for a very long time.
In JavaScript we have a lint for this, so I can run code with unused variables, but I can’t commit code with unused variables (and CI will enforce that for everyone on the team if they bypass the precommit hook). That seems best of both worlds to me.
> it's a problem of your car brand, not the EV's. My EV still has neutral.

True that I bought a brand that doesn't have a long history of EV tech. However it does indeed have a neutral button. It's just that after throwing itself into some exception state, "shifting" into it by hitting the button on the console would highlight the "N" letter as if it acknowledged my "request," but some logic in the car simply refused to actually fully execute my "request" to shift into neutral. There was no "STFU and do what I say; I don't care what your logic thinks about the situation" because the product managers and/or engineers who built it had the hubris to believe they had thought of everything and there would never be any need for that mode of operation.

If I can physically pull a manual transmission stick into the neutral position and release a brake cable, my car will roll. After my experience on the ferry, I no longer want any software logic at all being able to prevent my car from moving when I want it to move. "Just find a car brand that has better logic that you can probably rely on" isn't the solution I'm looking for. Software systems in cars are way too complicated, and there will always be corner cases. I demand a failsafe manual override. I am the one driving the vehicle, and I make the ultimate judgement call on what it does and doesn't do.

One car I found that has manual transmission and a pull-lever emergency brake is the 2021 Subaru Crosstrek. The manual transmission Crosstrek reportedly doesn't have EyeSight, and hence there's no automatic emergency braking (AEB).

https://www.subaru.ca/content/7907/media/General/download/C1...
I've been on a list for so so long now that this one is just another. No big deal.
There's no such thing as "a good thing". There are only goals, security is just a goal among other that not everyone have.
> Why shame them in "get a life" if all they want to do is to socialize a bit at work where they spend so much time.

The people who don't want to socialize at work will find themselves being socialized with. I understand the feeling somewhat, and I imagine a lot of others might, as well. Everyone's had situations where they've felt compelled to feign friendliness with others who they had no interest speaking with.
This is still the case today. See for example this military base in France: https://goo.gl/maps/gRLEBcCQB9CCx8Au6
Not sure if this is exactly what you mean, and haven't fully dove into it, but if anyone is looking for a "programming based" accounting solution this one if very cool - https://hledger.org

Simple input format that reminds me of a markdown for finances, and then you can slice and dice the raw data in a bunch of ways for reports
Why should people's lack of social skills ruin it for the rest of us (and the environment)?
Why wouldn't we just get SonarQube to do this kind of stuff? I see no reason to pay a human to be fallible and context-free.
Language/writing question

At the very end:

> Now, when people ask me what my parents do for a living, I tell them not with embarrassment or shame, but with pride.

In this context, is "pride" appropriate, or would "dignity" (or something else) be better?

My mother tongue is italian. I understand "pride" as referring to something exceptional that was done (which doesn't seem to be the case in this article), "dignity" on the other hand as something <appropriate? something not to be ashamed of?>?

Thx :)
Real security. Maybe whole new architectures. Would be a huge leap forward.
The Pantheon is maintained but the Colosseum is not and it shows. The interior of the Colosseum is a pile of rocks. However there is a plan to restore the floor https://www.stirworld.com/see-news-rome-announces-plans-for-...
Even for reasons other than Rome's history, this is one of the best talks I've ever seen. IMO every software engineer should watch it and I recommend it to colleagues all the time.
The self-hosted compiler is the compiler. It has an LLVM backend. The bootstrap compiler will be used only to bootstrap the self-hosted compiler.

The self-hosted LLVM backend is not done. Zig 0.9.0 is the self-hosted compiler, you are using the self-hosted compiler when you use Zig today. But it relies on the bootstrap compiler for the LLVM backend.

I know it is weird to say "self-hosted LLVM backend" but I don't know what else to call it. It's the .zig code that lowers Zig IR to LLVM IR.

It's possible to build Zig without an LLVM dependency by not passing `-Denable-llvm` to `zig build`. In this case the LLVM backend is not available (neither the self-hosted one or the bootstrap one).
CoreGraphics and the associated screen capture APIs have been around for a very long time. However they aren't particularly easy to use and do require your app to be trusted (reasonably so). You can't have just any old Mac app start capturing the screen and doing things with the pixels.
And here I am with my 10+ years old Mikrotik router, still receiving frequent updates and new functionality.
I am not sure I fully agree, but the quality of the job really depends on the employer.

Italy is characterized by _lots_ of small/medium sized businesses (not startups, actual profitable businesses often decades old). Some of them producing state-of-the-art tech in many different industries (Aerospace, Defense, Pharma, etc). The issue with this highly fragmented industrial environment is that it might be difficult to know what it is like to actually work somewhere before spending some time there. Companies tends to be unique.

There are also offices from all the well known names (Google etc...), but usually these are sales oriented. I'd still call them "tech jobs" though.

About Visas, as an Italian citizen I don't have direct experience. I suspect it might be difficult to get one. Of course EU citizens can do what they want.

There might be (relatively) easy paths to citizenship for people with italian ancestry though.
To answer my own question, maybe you could massively overcharge and put a bounty on each review item that gets paid back when they get completed? Is it right to make something like this about money? Would the company or dev see the cash?

Could be an interesting way to make it work and try make a higher/more valuable company from this, i.e. the CRAAS company could keep the bounties if not fixed after say 6 months...
Of course he's doing well, he has the best son-in-law ever ;)

Jokes aside, he's doing fine. They got by on my mother-in-law's teacher salary and were lucky enough to get in on the California housing game in the early '80s. They mostly don't have to worry about the bills, and all their kids live within 15 minutes of them - we see them around 1-2x per week. And if they ever did run into issues, one of us could take them in.

I just like to keep it in mind because I've been subject to fairly good fortunes when it comes to career. Same thing with all my relatives. But my wife's family has had more bumps along the way.
This is actually just like... aesthetically pleasing to watch. As someone who loves watching/reading about Game of Life lifeforms, I'd love to see some sort of gallery where people can share their creations and/or build upon other people's
>> not just management sitting up in their high castle and issuing a decree

That's great to hear.

>> In remote-only setting, everything requires setting up a meeting. That often formalizes everything, and less things end up being discussed.

That is something that can be worked on though, don't you think? We should be able to improve that bit of the "remote working" thing, I feel.

I'm currently with a client that has the type of problems that pretty much demands of me that I, or the PM in my team, responds to their chats within the minute. That means I have to keep an eye on the notifications all the time. That takes a bit of a toll on me, I have to say. But it's manageable.

Perhaps a devastating failure happens in production that we need to resolve as quickly as possible. First the client chats me up. Then we realize we need more info so we invite another person into the chat. Then we go video. We all turn our cameras on and we talk freely until we realize, we need top dog to approve emergency deployment of Very Important Patch, so we invite them and get their clearance and then we rock'n'roll.

I think we just simply need to become very good at remote communication, for this new world (that I day dream about) to become reality.

And that's not easy. But just because it's not easy shouldn't be enough to scare us away from it.
Told in Stone is a fantastic channel. Really interesting without ever trying too hard to be entertaining or dumbing it down
That's not a good example at all. You have to compare starting a company in the US (as a US citizen) vs starting a company in the EU (as an European).

Doing international business is always difficult and the additional hassle when you deal with American customers says absolutely nothing about the overhead of starting a domestic company.
Hm, I respect your perspective.

I don't understand your point about FTEs. Again, how's that different to the US? If you're in the NY office it's not the same as SV HQ or you work remote from Idaho. And whether you work for a salary locally with your own LLC or contrast that against fewer taxes vs. cost of living in the city of your employer + moving seems to be a fairly reasonable tradeoff.

I haven't moved around the US personally, but know a great deal of people who do in Europe. Schengen must be 35 years old or so? Everyone can move where they want. And yes, there is, I guess, more cultural diversity in Europe, but that hasn't stopped most people. In fact, many find it freaking awesome. It makes for much more diverse discussions, food, music, opera, everything. Europe is Europe. And the US is the US. To me, neither cultural concept is per se better or worse. You get to enjoy slightly different things.

I can also tell you, from personal experience having lived in Berlin for many years now that there are tons of people from all around the world who disagree with you on not moving here.

And your last point... How would you feel at home moving to the US or Singapore if you can't even stomach moving from Warsaw to Berlin which is literally only a 6 hour drive by car???
Chrome OS devices have a fixed "kill" date when they will stop getting updates. Google Chrome OS devices do not have an AUE date beyond 5-6 years. I will not recommend Chrome devices to friends until they change this wasteful practice.

https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9367166?hl=en

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?#zippy=%2...
hey, author here

thanks for the valid feedback -- I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with my blog and definitely got carried away with SEO/Growth Marketing tips I've incorporated towards the end of the article. I'm not sure whether to go down mtlynch.io 's path of being a solopreneur or Daniel Vasello's deconstructing his career in SWE or a more pure scott aaronson or star slate codex blog.

I'll change it to something less 'fishing' and rather more open if people want be notified of posts. In retrospect, I'd rather just share my stories, guiding principles, and tacit knowledge I've developed than try to sell a course or a guide at the moment

With regards to the title, I hope the story I shared about the uber driver and my experience with the mismatch between my degree and what I had to learn on my own to become employable speaks to why I believe the title is true. I'll consider changing my essay's point of view from 3rd person-ish -- but again I'm still trying to find my voice so it's a work in progress

thanks for reading! I thought the discussion here was pretty cool too
I don't plan on competing ;) I just take an interest in how systems like these are built. If you could direct me to some of the original repositories and forums you've used, that's good enough for me.

Also, you might want to consider making your situation known on https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence

There are very helpful people there who might be able to help you.
The granularity of computing seems to become finer by the day and with it comes ever faster and more fluid tooling and creativity.

What would once be a metal machine onto which you load executable code has become a thing that you can run virtually. Containers, serverless lambdas, dynamic language runtimes. Everything becomes faster, more fungible (a zeitgeist word but I mean it in the old way) and easier to work with.

We’ve known for a long time that software will eat the world — the comings and going’s of everyday life, once they are expressed as code, become infinitely easier to patch and improve using only a keyboard and display.

What’s new and ongoing is that software is eating itself. Another comment here expresses this as code becoming a data structure but that’s too pure for me. The practical improvements we’ll see don’t need to go that far and won’t be as zealous but we’ll reap the same rewards.

I’m personally looking forward to the next generations of infrastructure as code, where all the useful parts are factored out of the current monolithic ecosystems and become as composable as actual code is. It feels like, to draw an analogy with version control systems, we are at that 2005 boundary of CVS to SVN, and git is still around the corner.
No, it was more like 10 days.
Yep, that was the first thing I noticed after visiting churches in Rome. All the columns were random.
From what little insight I could gain, I agree about the hardware problem. The customer I was talking about was nervously trying to find a reliable supplier of motherboards with ISA slots and parallel ports.

I really love the nostalgia this kind of hardware stirs in me, but I am glad I do not have to deal with that kind of trouble. (A few years ago, I read on another forum about an IT guy getting a call on the weekend from a desparate customer looking for an HDD using some standard that predates non-S-ATA... MFM, I think?)
I do not understand why this solution is dismissed.

A carbon tax results in:

- encouraging development of carbon capture and storage

- encouraging development of carbon neutral fuel synthesis (Elon needs this for Mars)

- the two above encourage an economy of carbon credits

- this enables us to relieve some of the pressure on replacing fuel based locomotion (no viable alternative for planes yet)

- all of this creates jobs on all levels
Yes, I enjoy lisp the language and its constructs but I don't enjoy the parenthesis or the syntax. What's hilarious about that? I'm sure you could list some aspects of lisp that you don't like if you have a lot of experience with it.

>YAML is a shitshow, JSON is yuck and let's not talk about XML.

My issue with S-expressions as a data exchange format is that they're actually just the worst aspects of all three of those combined. If you're frustrated by XML having really deep trees and only having strings and elements as datatypes, then S-expressions are just as bad, reliably they only really have strings and lists as datatypes and the trees tend to have even deeper nesting than XML. For JSON the formats are equivalent if you remove everything from JSON except lists and strings, so S-expressions are strictly a worse subset, they're just as yuck. YAML is bad because it's complex and badly specified but S-expressions are still worse of a shitshow because there is no spec. You just have to hope the format you used is compatible with your Lisp implementation. And yes this has caused me problems where using "read" on S-expressions with certain characters in them or in certain encodings completely breaks on some Lisp implementations. If you're using some other language that isn't Lisp and you're rolling your own parser then good luck having that be compatible with anything, most parsers I see just pick a random Lisp implementation and aim for compatibility with it which is still not reliable.

The only good thing I can say about S-expressions is that they're quite easy to spit out from a bash script, but for this problem domain (vector graphics) there is an even easier option: use a very simple command-based format like postscript.
Is Zig going strong in community, or it's likely to remain as a niche / fans language? I like the idea, but anybody knows how community / companies react to it in a more wider "looking to use in production" environment?