skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an ex-programmer, now bicycle mechanic working mostly on e-bikes I'd like to add a few things:

People love ebikes not because of barely having to pedal, but because they can reach places with the bicycles that are out of their reach with a regular bike. It can be long weekend rides for some, but it can also be living/working on a hill. It's like owning a horse in olden times when all you had before were your own two legs.

No idea what the author means with "lacking a Toyota Corolla equivalent". (E-)Bikes come in wide range of price and range, often from the same manufacturer. It's the components that dictate the final price, barely the frame, motor or battery where less choice exists than with the other components.

Drive by wire will be exotic for a long time, I can see it taking over certain niches like recumbent bike where you have an extremely long drive train. Everybody else will run on cheap mechanical drive trains for a long time to come.

Never ever will we see electronic or even wireless braking, it's just madness and illegal everywhere. We will though see ABS from Bosch soon, not sure if that's such a good idea or even necessary at the low speeds of a <20mph ebike.

>> Most bikes are sold as toys or as overcomplicated hobbyist contraptions.

This is probably the US-centric view, but with a certain threshold of cyclists the wide middle of bike sales is practical bikes for short rides in the city with a hub dynamo a basket or rack for you shopping. Certainly not toys or sporty bikes.

The author shortly mentions removing batteries as optional, I must insist that removing and replacing a battery is a must-have to ensure the bike to be usable for a long time as many decent bikes do get ridden for 10, 20 or even 30 years.
> With generics you get a performance boost from annihilating the run-time overhead. Yes?

I don't know whether creating an interface{} has a runtime cost (though it may if the type pointer has to be looked up at runtime?), however there's also a memory overhead: I didn't look at everything but the first two benches (pushfront and pushbach) use `int` values, which are 32 bits. But interface{} is 2 words (128 bits).

This quadruples the memory requirements, meaning the backing buffer may well need either more reallocations, or to make larger allocations & have to span multiple cache lines.
It didn't go up for any fundamental reason either, the big rise was funded by (highly leveraged) speculation. Crypto has no inherent incoming cashflows from an underlying asset like stocks or bonds, and it has consistent selling pressure because miners need to pay electricity bills (and usually sell part of their mining rewards to fund that). Neither does it have a few millennia of cultural heritage like gold.

I don't even disagree with your worst case scenario in that some people might stay interested no matter how low it goes, but if prices fall back to the ~5 USD per bitcoin range I don't see how that would be anything other than a collapse.
Excellent, and I am happy to see a well-presented criticism of the enormous waste of energy bitcoin has become.

And in full disclosure, I used to really like bitcoin, but my first time reading about the energy consumption was in 2020 which is when I started looking at other projects. Despite many other valid criticisms of the crypto space, there is something unique and interesting in decentralized technology. I knew bitcoin mining has an associated energy cost, but it never occurred to me prior to reading about it that it could consume as much energy globally as it does.

There are many people who still won't concede defeat for bitcoin/proof-of-work (likely because they have become emotionally invested), and I think a call to action for governments and the developers is really important.

For context though, the developers working on the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap have acknowledged the problem (years ago, before the energy consumption was even so extreme) and are planning to complete their years-in-the-making transition to proof of stake this year.
Anecdata, but I had no side effects from 2x Pfizer, then ~24h flu/hangover symptoms from a Moderna booster. Friends’ experiences equally unpredictable. So… you may get no symptoms at all from a booster - and may be worth switching the manufacturer?

Bigger picture, while it’s totally your choice, I’d dispute your logic RE: not accepting a booster. COVID is mostly somewhere between minimal and a week or two of unpleasant symptoms in most cases, but more rarely can obviously cause major symptoms including death, and also ‘long COVID’. This is what you’re hedging against with a vaccine. As unpleasant as 24-72hrs of feeling crappy is, I’d take it over months of ‘long COVID’, and obviously over anything worse.
Heh, I'll bet the makers of Photoshop never saw this usecase of their software coming. What a great project.

The registration headaches must be considerable, he needs to re-place the die in exactly the same spot for every pass of exposure.
Fascinating, but what does it mean?
Drag and Drop is fiddly on touch screens and even on touchpads.
> I should have written "no one wants to use third-party versions of these packages", and I don't think that small semantic issue changes my comment meaningfully.

No, they don't. But if performance becomes an issue, they can!

> Do you take issue with the way I'm presenting the go ecosystem other than that small pedantic point?

Well, yes, a little. The comparison you're making is presented as "The Java ecosystem has a better outcome than the Go ecosystem". TBH, that's only for performance, and is basically a non-issue if the performance poor.

IOW, you're doing the ultimate in premature optimisation. In the real world, people who run into performance problems will a) run into them sooner with Java, and b) solve them the same way in Go.
> 1200 transistors is way beyond what I thought is possible in a garage

what (prior) breakthroughs enabled Zeloof to achieve this?
Two hours long, but it's definitely worth to watch till the end.
Hopefully you’re not looping over all the elements in your deques super often, or there wouldn’t be much point in using a deque!

We’re talking past each other here. Yes, unboxing will sometimes give a performance improvement. But I’m skeptical that any realistic code using the deque structure in the blog post would see much of a gain. To repeat, even in the micro benchmark in the blog post, the performance gains are only around 3x. In most realistic application-level code, the code paths that lead to insertion of a new element will also do some allocation, so that the cost of boxing is lost in the noise.

Vectorization strikes me as a fairly niche case. It’s revealing that you use Vec as an example. In any case where autovectorization is going to give a useful performance improvement, you probably can just use a Vec. And of course, the Go equivalent of an unboxed Vec in Rust doesn’t require generics anyway. So I doubt that there is a large body of existing Go code that will suddenly become ripe for autovectorization once data structure libraries switch over to generics.
Well, the _real_ problem isn't just that they've been raised in a way that leads to entitlement, but that what they have been taught to feel entitled to was actually a pipe dream.

While the boomers were all busy buying property and starting businesses, they were also unwittingly making it impossible for their descendants to do the same (or to the same extent) whilst in the same breath telling them (perhaps in honest belief) that they too could have anything they wanted.

Setting the bar so high makes even slight failures hit that much harder.
They can promote negative article so the price go down, they buy, then they promote positively and sell.
I think I would feel the same if I had grown up in America, because I do find suburban sprawl depressing and from what I've seen in most American cities I've visited, there's hardly any middle ground between that and the skyscrapers. So given that choice, I would greatly prefer the skyscrapers too.

But note that in other places there is plenty of middle ground. I live in a city where most buildings are in the range of 4 to 12 stories (someone actually computed the average height of a building and it's 5.15 stories) and it's enough for streets to be bustling with activity, and for being able to live without a car.

I do like the skyscraper aesthetic, but I also feel that once you go beyond a certain threshold, buildings start becoming soulless, and it also starts becoming harder to have regular, non-luxury shops at the street level due to that space being incredibly scarce, so the level of "boringness" goes up again (although not to the levels of suburbs, of course). So to me, mid-rise buildings (maybe with a few skyscrapers here are an there) are a good equilibrium. YMMV, of course.
Everything Wrong with Olympus DAO
Not sure either, I guess that's for the scientists to find out and explain.
You're quite right but as a customer I frankly don't care about how do they it as long as management and deployment are easier from my side.

At one point you do hit a limit on what you can do by cold-starting (almost) everything anyway, right? Let them optimize so they are competitive, and now they've given me a good reason to evaluate them.
It's possible to profit from the price going down via various short positions etc.
>> That is the compiler's job: emit the code that the programmer wrote.

> Why bother with optimizations, then?

Why not?

If you can optimise without compromising the intended semantics of the code, go ahead. If you cannot, do not.

Note: you will have to apply judgement, because the C standard in particular happens to be incomplete.
>Over the last 12 years, it is hard to have lived and not notice the poster child of blockchains: Bitcoin

The funny thing is, it's actually pretty easy if you're not in the tech bubble. Despite the fact that the Bitcoin whitepaper carries the title "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" I still have not paid for a single actual thing in my life with Bitcoin or crypto, neither has almost anyone else except for maybe heroin on the internet.

The transaction costs and the bizarre price swings from one day to the next render it entirely useless. If the central bank is too unreliable because inflation goes up to 7% over a year, what does that make bitcoin where one stupid tweet from Elon Musk at three in the morning wipes out 15% of your net worth or purchasing power.

When someone makes a crypto currency that I can get a paycheck in that's roughly worth the same thing at the end of the month as it was at the beginning, and I can pay for a coffee faster than with Venmo, Alipay, or cash consider me excited
Yes, given that is an approximate price for Piaggio and Honda models when one shops around for dealer deals.

Additionally, maybe up that price for a proper quality e-bike.

E-Bikes also require maintenance by specialized shops and after a certain speed limit constraints similar to motorbikes anyway.
Yes, I do think that "software companies" are aiming to make money off of software (by definition). That aside, I do not understand what point you're trying to make. Sure, software development is likely not the most expensive part of medical devices (although I wouldn't be so sure that's generally true). Free software could still speed up R&D and therefore help save lives.
How solving solar’s aluminium problem is key to keeping its climate credentials
GET supposed to be nullipotent[1] and safe[2].

It can also be implemented as a pure function without side-effects if you provide current time as a query parameter.

Reliable communication over the network and availability issues are different concerns.
Though request idempotency can help with retries for command/mutations.
Queries are usually nullipotent, so they're can be simply retried.

--

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nullipotent

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Safe/HTTP
You can run unsigned software on an M1 Mac, clicking “run anyway” isn’t that hard lol
Definitely nothing bad can ever happen with complicated programming techniques.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6l_OwSXAAA_Fmo.jpg:large
With larger structs it’s a double-edged sword. Unboxing them also means that the deque implementation has to copy a lot more memory when extending the underlying slices.

Unboxing is typically an optimization, for sure. I guess I disagree that it’s a ‘huge’ one except maybe in the case of arrays/slices (where you can do it anyway in Go without generics).
That's an incredible memory you have. Word sized values can be inline, but they still have the type overhead. I only know this since I just checked
The FAA publishes the number of reported incidents: https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/lasers/laws
A more revealing symmetry is what happened in Astronomy when a powerful political force didn't like the answer the scientists were coming up with, Galileo vs the Church. (More recent examples are climate change and COVID, but let's not get too controversial).

So when we criticize "economists" are we criticizing the scientists like Galileo and Copernicus that were right and got their books banned, or are we criticizing the ones that supported the political power of the day?

Note that some of those scientist would have genuinely believed their 'church-approved' theories. Just their opponents couldn't challenge them openly without incurring wrath.

And would generic criticism of "scientists" have benefitted science or the established political power at that time?
It wouldn’t surprise me if this was because Apple apparently is the only manufacturer who can actually deliver larger amounts of devices while their competitors have 6 months lead times due to the chip shortage.
> Does snark like this work other places you post? Like, I can continue explaining concepts like[...]

No, see, that's the thing; there is no continuous throughline to your comments here. You keep jumping around, and never to a place that actually makes any sense.

Someone said, very simply, that executive pay has "ballooned", and it was suggested that this should probably maybe not be the case. This would mean wealth can increase for both workers and those who are currently extracting most of it from the system, rather than payouts growing disproportionately for the latter. (It was framed as taking a "cut", but that's too generous of a description for a concept that comes down to "stop consolidating wealth to take it for oneself"—a slice of pie that grows by continually taking small bites from elsewhere. It's a "cut" only in the sense of someone backing off their notions of the size of their expected returns.) You didn't engage with this. Instead, you argued against an argument that no one was making—that employees should be paid in securities "instead of" cash. Called out on this, you made another jump to argue against something else that no one was arguing—to pay executives nothing and possibly work through the consequences of having no executives at all.

Dealing with this kind of monkey business is tiresome. To spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy dismissing nonsense arguments that someone keeps peeling off without any care put into them on their end is not economical for me or anyone else.

If you want people to engage with you, you need to knock off the bullshit. (And, please, keep the theatrics to a minimum.)
>I would respect flat earthers if they published in peer-reviewed journals.

Except their peers would reinforce the anti-scientific superstitions rather than reject them.

Not altogether differently than the way some recognized journals publish less-scientifically-sound output due to the credentials of the contributors rather than any conclusive results to report.

Or more commonly than ever, complete non-progress being wildly exaggerated as if it was an actual finding.

Even though there's more PhDs each year, you have to be more careful than ever what you want to regard as a science any more.
Investors See New Sparkle in Europe’s Tech Scene
Might be good to disclose you're promoting your own company
Miniaturization: ant pedometers.
I could see a socks or underwear manufacturer called MicroSoft. Aren't trademarks domain specific anyway? Unless Nadella suddenly decides to branch into fashion of course.
But telling your goals to the people who care about you is actually a good thing. They'd give you honest feedback, point out (any) mistakes, and support you along the way.
Or just use one of the hundreds of newer, more secure, CMS alternatives out there.
Being pragmatic could also mean using generics when appropriate.

Not having generics isn't a pragmatic choice per se
you should do a https://longbets.org/
Storefront... you have Shopify. The most valuable use case, people are building those. The problem is people want a million different things for lots of other stuff. Shopify now has its own ecosystem too. It's the nature of creating popular platforms that businesses rely on.
You could also allow some labels to be negative. For instances, dice (3, 4, 4, 9, 10, 10) and (-1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2) result in all numbers from 2 to 12 without 7, but obviously not with the same outcome distribution.
It's also not possible without repeating some labels.
> My take is that rust is near the breaking point where it becomes so commonly used that more teams and organizations will just start to use it.

You would have said the same thing about PHP or Ruby (or even that they're past their breaking point), and yet companies that are stuck with either one today aren't too happy about it. The problem is that these days, there are a lot of people who can switch languages without much risk. They switch to X, and tomorrow they switch to Y. While it's very good to have low-risk early adopters, having so many of them can really give a false impression about long-term risk. At some point, you need to see many "long-term committers" making a switch.

Some people ask, but how can you have many long-term committers if these risk-averse people also look around for others like them? The answer is that usually this isn't the main factor. If some technology indeed makes a big bottom-line impact, there's a competitive risk in not adopting it (because your competitors will and then beat you in the market), which is why big-benefit technologies spread quickly.
The Cold War That Wasn't
The audiences are fundamentally different and that is your job in product management, aligning those interests
> Not if the compiler is run at some (hopefully available) "absolute vanilla"

Not this straw man again, please!

You can optimise, as long as you keep the semantics of the code.

When what the programmer wrote conflicts with an optimisation the compiler would like to perform:

"- Trust the programmer."

http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c89/rationale/a.html

So if the compiler wanted to put a 4 element array in registers as an optimisation, but the programmer wrote code that accesses element 6, guess what? You can't do that optimisation!

[You can also emit a warning/error if you want]

Also, if your fantastic optimisation breaks tons of existing code, it's no good.

"Existing code is important, existing implementations are not. A large body of C code exists of considerable commercial value. "

http://port70.net/~nsz/c/c89/rationale/a.html

>> "Ignoring the situation completely" means ignoring the fact that this is UB and just carrying on.
>Q: How?
>A: In an undefined way. (Right, since this is "Undefined Behaviour"?)

Nope. There are bounds. Again, this isn't hard, it says so right there.
> Pick and Plop

^^^ this is genius
> Hmm it's not known for that, is it?

It’s a hugely generalised statement so the real answer is “it really depends on your context”

Is it fast compared to other easy to learn languages? Definitely. Is it fast compared to other systems languages? Lol no. But is it fast to compile compared to other systems languages? Generally, yeah.

Is it easy to learn compared to other systems languages? Very much so. Is it easy to write complex low level systems logic? No. Is it easy to write dynamic code? No.

The problem with generalised statements against general purpose languages is that the scope is so wide that people will cherry whatever context they want to suit whatever argument (for or against) they choose.
> decent society

We don't live in one.
The primary function of finance is to enable economic agents to trade future consumption for present consumption, by means of debt. And debt requires a trusted third-party that has the capacity to re-allocate assets. Otherwise the borrower can simply walk away with the money, and never repay the debt. Now, blockchains, not only lack a trusted third-party that can re-allocate assets, but they are designed with the explicit goal of preventing such re-allocations. Therefore my question is how can this technology be the "future of finance" when it's designed from the ground up to be incompatible with finance?
Same with xemu, using QEMU to emulate the original Xbox.
The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
> Servers are cheap compared to devs

Yeah to a point, but Python is so much slower than fast languages that your devs will spend longer trying to optimise it and write parts in C++ that you may as well have just written it in Rust or Go or Java or C# or whatever in the first place.

And I don't buy "development in Python is faster" even ignoring performance. Maybe for tiny programs but once you get to reasonably sized ones the lack of good static typing makes all changes extremely tedious and error-prone. Plus you have to spend a mountain of time writing tests that you wouldn't even have had to think about with stronger typed languages.

I can definitely fix bugs in Typescript or even C++ way quicker than I can in Python.
Where do you need a vaccine card to leave the house? There may be private business premises that you can't enter without a vaccine card, but entering those premises isn't a constitutional right, whereas voting is, so restricting one but not the other makes sense.

In any case, the resistance isn't against voter ID itself, it's against the policies that are inevitably put in place to make those IDs harder to obtain for supporters of one party in comparison to another. If there weren't so many recent examples of states selectively closing down polling places[0][1] then maybe you could claim with a straight face that the ID requirements won't be abused, but there is no excuse for such naivety now.

[0] https://civilrights.org/democracy-diverted/

[1] https://texasyds.org/texas-republicans-plan-to-reduce-pollin...
Yes, because Netflix was unsustainable at that price. Look at how Netflix just raised prices again this week!

Imagine how much more expensive it would be if they still paid for "almost all content"