skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
C's pre/post-increment is from B which was designed for an older arch, not PDP, and B still had the pre/post increment and decrement. It's now a well known misconception that C was based on the PDP's instructions, it doesn't hold water with the facts. C did redesign for one thing on the PDP and that's byte addressing... and we're still using byte addressing most places, and frankly if you don't then C isn't incapable with that.
Blindness by Jose Saramago under History?
*Vulkan... Sorry, this always bothers me.
You need to enable magic-space: https://relentlesscoding.com/posts/bash-magic-space/ # this will automatically expand any variables and history when you hit the spacebar after them, so you can eyeball before running.

Someone tell me what the zsh equivalent is?
Highly related:

"[N]ot every argument or idea you disagree with has to be shouted down loudly. If a proposal (or a counter-argument to it) demonstrates value to enough people then it will gain support and can be refined into something that can reach consensus. If not, then it won't. Critiques of early-stage proposals in particular should be done with a goal of improving them, better understanding their motivation, or comparing them to alternatives. Comments that are closer to just 'voting no' on a proposal aren't really necessary.

In disagreements, responding with new information is great, but try not to get in a mode where you are trying to convince specific people (or all people) that you are right and they are wrong. Focus on presenting your own ideas/needs/etc. as clearly as possible. Then people reading the thread (not just the person you are responding to) can judge competing arguments on their merits.

For anyone who wants to [design new features], remember that the bulk of the work is not in coming up with ideas, but in building consensus for them. To succeed, you'll need to spend a lot of time on understanding other people's viewpoints and tweaking your designs and communication based on what you learn. (This includes any concerns from the people who would need to implement and maintain your feature.) This 'listening' is the part of the process you'll need to focus most of your time and energy on. If you don't invest in it, then the rest of your effort is likely to be wasted."

From the brilliant mbrubeck at https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/aliasing-other-things/1228...
This didn't exist 10 years ago as a github project for anyone to download. How is it from a century in the distant past?

Also, email and phone numbers are LITERALLY standard methods of 2FA. So what are you expecting bank employees to use?
I'm in the same boat. I found that becoming a regular in a coffee shop and working from there kinda works for me. I take my breaks with the baristas, have chats with other regulars, and I have access to good coffee. Sure, it's not the same as having colleagues but there's still human contact and you meet interesting people from different industries. Alternatively, I was thinking of joining a co-working space but for now the coffee shop works well.
`sudo !!` is just very useful, just as most other things you can do with history substitution. Ctrl-R has its own usefulness but it only does a fraction of what history substitution can do.
> I am lost here, the mentioned bugs are a result of optimizations like speculative execution, branch prediction, prefetching etc.

>

> These are language independent optimizations. For example, any language (that allow for loop like constructs) compiled to intel machine code and executed on intel processor will be exposed to these bugs, it is not C specific. Am I missing anything?

1. There's machine code that is exposed to the ISA (public machine code that compilers generate) and there's machine code that exists and is used but is not exposed.

2. The author is making the argument that the machine code that is exposed is designed around the memory model of the C programming language, which itself was designed around the memory model of the PDP.

Put the above two together and (if you squint really hard, and ignore things like logic and reason) the conclusion is that the modern x86/X64 ISA is suboptimal because of the PDP.

The actual reality is that all the popular programming languages are imperative, have the concepts of stack, heap and in-order execution of instructions.

Because all languages appear to converge on the same basic concepts in order to be commonly accepted, I think that it is doubtful that any alternative machine and memory model would have arose in the absence of a language like C or a machine like the PDP.

I think this because of the existence of other languages that offer alternative machine and/or memory models, and those languages have existed for decades without being popular.
Is the quality that good? It seemed to me that text to speech was not a particularly hard problem when you can get someone to read out all the sounds of the language. And that the new advancement we have now is just being able to dump our normal speech audio and build a model based on that.
Paper is made from (once) living organisms.

It should be treated as such and not taken for granted.
In zsh you just type !1234<tab> and it expands to the full command so you can review and edit :D
I've used build-in browser for years, but I highly recommend switching to https://github.com/junegunn/fzf for C-r in shell. Night and day boost.
I've heard many people, often project managers, mention 'fit' and filtering out assholes, but my definition of an asshole is one who's mean, uncaring, and arrogant. But I've never seen that kind of person in the 10 years I've worked in software development.

What do you define as and asshole, and do you run across many of them?
> Are those days just over?

Depending on your job function and industry. For tech, yes, those days are over for at least for another 5 to 10 years, is my guess. COVID has generally proven to both employers and employees that productivity doesn't drop that much. It will also weed out bad people managers who need to "see" people physically who need to "get a feel" as a management metric.

The only major factor that would swing the pendulum back into offices, is when future diseases get under control much more quickly - whether that's corona virus or the next version of it, H1N1, avian flu, MERS, covid-19, etc. When the population is smart enough to win those battles quickly, and that there's a company where in-person teams outperform remote teams by a large margin, that's when in-person will be back and the pendulum swing again.
I never actually used Popcorn Time. What made it so great?
Thats a dumb question. Why look for problem if there isnt.

Plus its the basics of medicine: no symptoms, no disease.
I'm not on mobile and I also cannot figure out where the action button is. One can get as far as finding the sword, but I have to idea how to pick it up.
Yeah, smells of low effort. Make the list shorter and explain why those books are so good.
I'm not going to argue with you. You haven't earned it. Go and study.
And legitimate Disney DVDs are unplayable without installing all sorts of extra packages.

So much friction added to something that I own. Certainly was the last legitimate purchase I will make of any Disney content.
Yeah, it’s a lot of very small things but they add up, especially in such a game where there is often a fine line between surviving and dying.
I think fridges have gotten worse since they stopped using CFCs and reduced the mass. They are more efficient, but almost all make constant annoying noises instead of the occasional steady hum of good old ones.

I tried several high end models and even ammonia absorption before ending up building a sound insulating box instead.
Immudb: A Lightweight, Performant Immutable Database [pdf]
The team reasoned that, if sensors showed a constant, unchanging value of oxygen in a continuous, vertical section of the ocean, regardless of the true value, then it would likely be a sign that oxygen had bottomed out, and that the section was part of an oxygen-deficient zone.

Did they bother testing this idea at all? It's a hypothesis absolutely essential to their study. There must be some method of accurately measuring oxygen at various depths, even if it isn't practical to deploy it across the ocean. You could for example spectrographically analyze a set of sample bottles for oxygen content, take a series of measurements of the water column, and then analyze the bottles afterward to determine how much oxygen leached out of them.
You may be interested in Mahaney's Theorem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahaney%27s_theorem), which 'answers' a special case of this: If by vanishingly small you mean polynomial size, and you also assume Alice has an algorithm that can distinguish the two subclasses of graph isomorphism, then P=NP if Alice has these facts. By 'distinguish', I specifically mean that Alice has a polynomial time algorithm that will tell you, for an input of graph isomorphism, is it part of a subclass of graph isomorphism which is NP-complete, and which has polynomial size.
This list has Blindness by Saramago as a history book. Is this a joke going over my head?
Whoa. Had no idea!
I had to laugh a little bit when I looked at the philosophy section and it seems like with few exceptions it's books from the 2000s including such gems as

>Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!

I'm not overly conservative or classically leaning when it comes to education but I think people who really want to expand their minds would benefit from trying some of the classics first.

Mill, On Liberty. Accessible and incredibly important book for people who live in liberal democracies and want to understand where a lot of their own ideas come from. Plato's Republic. Not as accessible, but very important. Girard has become popular again and has some very unique ideas, so people will probably get a lot out of it. Same for Chesterton.

Kafka's Metamorphosis deserves to be in the Lit section. Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series is a must read for science fiction fans, the sci-fi section has some genuinely horrible recommendations in it. Also given that it's supposed to be a mind-expanding list, throw in Blindsight by Peter Watts. The fantasy section needs Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. (and throw Harry Potter out)

Sexual Personae by Paglia deserves to be named in the Gender/sexuality section.

And an off-beat recommendation. Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud is a truly smart book on comics, in the form of a graphic novel.
It looks like much of the web has been edited and gutted so many times to be useless and conflated with theological-noncognitivism. I do have some older books somewhere that go into more detail, but tbh it looks like the argument over sources will apply there.

The word god has referents. In fact it has many, very different, referents.

An ignostic has no issue with the (varied) concepts of gods. An ignostic says "I am ignorant of a (consistently/well defined) god which is both worth and deserving of worship".

This does not mean any or many of the various gods do not exist.

A typical example would be that the Christian god is ill defined (testament collisions being the most blaring), but if I in good faith take the 'good' Christian god of many street Christians I am left with a god that I do not need to worship (as I am a good person). If I take a more vengeful god definition (everything from you must worship me or go to hell to worship me or be struck by the pox) then I'm left with one that isn't worth my worship.

Many definitions do not require anything from me or describe an inconsequential god, true or not, so can be ignored.

In these ways an ignostic is not denying the concepts, is not even claiming to not believe a god exists, yet has rejected the religions they do know about. To engage with a ignostic you would need to lay out a consostent definition, then show the value of the active belief vs the life they currently live (or an adjustment to that).
Been wondering lately about "books that everyone should read". I used to go to Amazon search a category and then get the most popular / highly rated book. But is that really what I need or want? As I start to appreciate the value of uniqueness I wonder more about obscure books, books less read and have found these often contain gems.
Those are tangents that someone might want to ponder about but i wouldn't want neuroscientists wasting their time looking for mythical quantum qualia.

The biggest question is why people object to a materialist theory of the mind
And if it’s automated, all dos games, please!
There was a time where Amazon was great to explore books: "users who bought also bought". Good old collaborative filtering.

I feel bad for giving useless advice so as someone who read several times the whole foundation series as a teen may I suggest: A deepness in the sky, a fire upon the deep, the forever war, gateway (Frederick Pohl). If you like fantasy, or even if not: the blade itself. If you have an enemy recommend him/her "the name of the wind". It's a great book but it's the first of an unfinished trilogy.

Edit: how could I forget the cryptonomicon?
I'm curious: how much do you end up spending on coffee while at the coffee shop, and in how many hours? I find sitting in a coffee shop with a laptop comes with the expectation that you'll keep buying coffee, food, _something_ at regular intervals (which of course makes sense). The accepted intervals tend to vary between coffee shops. I was also thinking of working from coffee shops more at some point, but then I wonder how much I'll end up paying for the privilege..
HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and Hi-Fi Speech Synth
For some nice science-fiction on that topic, read Permutation City by Greg Egan.
I like fish shell's approach: [Alt]+[E] prepends the command with `sudo`.

So you hit arrow up to bring up the last command, then [Alt]+[E] to sudo-ify it.
Are you sincerely blaming the parents for this? Amazon markets these devices as futuristic intelligent assistants. If they are not actually intelligent then they are deceiving their customers and exposing their children to harm. Nobody reasonably expects Google to intelligently censor search results by detecting if a child is running the search.
Gotta wait for web 4.0 for that
> we need processors that can do high throughput on many execution units, and languages that support that well.

Language support is very difficult for this, for a whole bunch of reasons - and it often requires redesigning the entire program and its data structures. It is still the case that most code the end-user is waiting for is JITted Javascript, which is why Apple focused so much effort into making that fast. Which is forced to be single-threaded. Hence all the big/little CPU designs; you get one or two high-speed high-power cores, and some low-speed low-power cores.
Regarding `rm`, I usually have something like this setup in my bashrc/zshrc:

rm () {
mv "$@" ~/.trash
}

So any time I use rm, it actually just moves it to ~/.trash instead. Not fool-proof nor perfect, but have saved me at least once so found it to be good enough for now.
Ask HN: Should I join a startup that has a probation period for new employees.
Hi HN community,
Need some help in a predicament I am facing in my job hunting. I have on-site interviews ongoing with 6-7 companies but I have received an offer from a startup, bit unsure what to do here.

1. The startup offer is good compensation wise but it has a rider that I have to undergo a 6-month probation period (I am working in India). I honestly don't know what to do here. When I was employed at my previous employer, I had no such condition. And from some Google-fu, I can only see that this is common in IT services based companies (TCS, Infosys etc). The startup is paying good money but its this probation period clause that is ringing alarm bells for me. Also, the tech interview process for the startup was a breeze for me. Didn't get grilled technically that much, compared to some FAANG companies. Also, said startup is paying me what I was getting at my earlier employer, none of the fringe benefits though, its all cold-hard cash.

2. I really don't want to do this but what If I take the startup's offer since I can join a bit late and by that time I should have some onsites over so I could pick then best employer for me. I feel that with the probation period clause they are giving both of us a "parachute" in that either one of us can exit if it doesn't work out for us.

3. Anyone working at a tech startup (helps if you are an Indian one!), can you please explain the rationale behind having a probation period clause. Is it common amongs Indian startups or startups in general ? This startup is <100 person and couple of years old. The employment contract is suspiciusly mum on any details about the probation period. Just says, that the probation period is 6 months from joining.

Right now, I am not working but was previously employed as an SDE in BigTech. So I am aggressively looking to be employed.
I just bought some things from them. Great experience! Not sure what international shipping is though, but give them a shot.
That’s low
Since 2000, we have been building new stuff on top of the already established OS and system-level abstractions, without ever questioning their adequacy in these new configurations. Virtualization and containerization have certainly developed and enabled new modes of deployment and maintenance, but they still play with the decades-old x86 ISA and spin up a Unix-like OS with a decades-old process state model and everything-is-a-byte-stream-mindset. Fundamental computing research should start from the ground up without any concerns for portability and industrial viability. It should demonstrate new abstractions for new classes of problems, without carrying the burden of legacy.
I disagree.

The point this article is making is that DRM, as it works, is highly conducive to "platform" power. Whether or not this is the "true purpose" is a rather meaningless question, beyond casual rhetorical usage.

The language of the legislation, legislators, perhaps judges will likely refer to protecting the moral rights of creators. IRL, "creator" can be whoever owns the Beatles catalogue. IRL, the who and how of controlling "playback and distribution," dictates what kind of a company will make the commercial gains.

Those irl concerns exist, effect legislation and its details a lot. You could call those the "true purpose," but IMO there ain't no such thing as a generally true purpose. Different actors have different purposes.
DRM is a requirement of the insurance providers who insure distributors and pay out if the distributor leads to the content being leaked.

In reality the DRM technology isn't that important its more akin to the questionnaire you get for car insurance that says do you have a thatcham alarm.

Too much analysis looks at this from technical angle when it's really an insurers tool to lower their risk (only to lower it!).

It's not a big deal when a device/content is compromised merely a policy pays out in the background to the provider to the effect of % lost revenue. All normal insurance ruled apply, payout decided by expert witness, higher premiums for less secure devices etc.
you might enjoy this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKgLfqOVHco
And the biggest "hmm" is why/for what reason do we have a specific neuronal circuit/capability to tell us that some god/presence is near us[0]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet
Third-party recruiters are the ones who always waste my time. Before Covid, many would insist on meeting in person at their office. I even had one that wanted to meet me at 4:30pm in downtown Dallas. That was an easy 'no' for me.

In-house recruiters are totally different. They represent the actual hiring company and aren't just submitting your resume to a job posting.
Another fun fact: $!-x goes x commands back in history. Highly more useful I suppose :D
Police crack mafia's sheep-farming code
If it supports very little life then there's very little life to die there and sink.
> we want Lua to be the language we want it to be, not to be the most popular language in the world

I don’t agree with all the design decisions made by the Lua team, but I deeply respect this philosophy.

It’s clear that Lua has certain guiding principles and that its design team sticks to them, leading to a cohesive and predictable language. Compare this to Python, JavaScript etc, whose designers just seem to add as many features as possible, with no regard to how well they mesh with the rest of the language.
Ask HN: What technology has changed your life that is relatively underused?
Interesting... Care to share what was overall approach? I. E. More bottom up in literally translating instructions and assuming it will lead to same results if translated accurately enough ; or top down looking to code specific results / behaviour and using original code more as a reference... Or some other approach :)
Changing carriers, mostly.
If you want to start simply tracking few things and you are on Android, I highly recommend https://loophabits.org/ (FOSS, F-Droid, Play Store). It is sleek and very usable.
> "X value is good."

Thinking that this can be true or false is itself a category error - values are more like the axioms you put into a system, and can only be "good" or "bad" with respect to .. other values.
> The idea of having an always-on surveillance device owned by Big Tech in one's home has always felt incredibly dystopian.

The layman’s capacity for embracing dystopia cannot be underestimated.
I never liked talking to technology, and I’m not elderly either. I don’t know why people find this better than just pulling out their phone and tapping a couple of buttons.
Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
If you want to learn a non-fiction subject, university reading lists are a great place to start. It's a very different experience reading a textbook when you don't have to take an exam -- or even re-reading one that you read when you did. For me, the dry wit of the authors comes out more and you can focus on stuff that really interests you.

The other nice thing about this approach is that some textbooks are commonly recommended by different universities for the same courses -- and they're more likely to be good. For some random examples, Horrowitz and Hill, the art of electronics (for electronics!); Riley Hobson and Bence: mathematical methods for the physical sciences (for vector calculus); or David Mackay's book on information theory (legally freely available online, published by CUP and contains lots of Bayesian stuff the average HN reader would probably love).
Damn! Stripe seems to be really dropping the ball recently.
In this case "decentralization" means drastically less overhead in terms of simply taking your dirty clothes to the other room instead of dealing with the hassle of traveling somewhere with it and potentially paying money per load and/or dealing with other tenants that might be using all the machines.

People in the US don't use communal laundry because they want to, they use it because they (most likely) have to because they are in a large urban center or can't afford the appliance.

This is basically the reverse of the internet centralization/decentralization example, where centralized services on the internet are much easier to use than their decentralized counterparts.
When I visited Paris a few months ago, I found a coffee shop that was specifically targeting people who wanted a place to work, and turned the business model upside down: instead of selling you drinks, and you getting the place for free, they would bill you by the hour, and the drinks were free (and good!). Of course, that means you get to stay as long as you want, no questions asked. The prices were 5€/h or 24€/day, which was totally OK for me as I just needed to work for one day.
So what reason did they give for not wanting to do business with you any more?
Interesting, what’s the upstream? Must’ve missed the link.