skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we say that "safe" code is "memory-safe" code, now the question is: what is memory-safe code? If memory-safe code is code that doesn't access the memory in unintended ways, then who knows what is unintended? Only the programmer does; it's impossible to write a compiler that knows what the programmer intends.

Like if you only want to access the data inside the bounds of the array, that's one intention that the compiler will help you to check. If you never intend to access the first element in the array, that's an intention that the compiler doesn't help you to check.

So, there is no memory-safe code or language. I think the only way you could define memory-safe code is that memory-safe code can't contain any code that breaks some rules that the compiler checks for. The problem with that is that those rules could be just about anything, so that definition is pretty useless.
You could but Kobo devices expected you to log in with a Kobo or other partner account (Rakuten, FNAC, etc.) on first setup. This allows you to bypass the need for any account and just sideload books on. You could previously hack around this but it sometimes caused issues.
Most jobs - especially in software - produce very little or no value.

There are a couple things you can do:

- Accept it, do as little work as you can get away with, and find fulfillment outside your job. Maybe get a stand-up desk and do some light exercise while working, to ease the feeling of wasting your time.

- Find a useful job. Non-profits, government services, and research organizations are good places to look, but there are lots of private sector jobs that produce useful things even while squeezing out profit.

I work at a public research organization, creating tools to collect, process, and share climate data. All of my co-workers are fairly happy and motivated, because the work we do is useful. I'm currently working on a CRUD app to make it easier for researchers to submit reports to the grant organization. The product is dull, but I'm happy to work on it because it will let our researchers spend less time on administration and more time on climate science.
I think running a vintage DOS system is popular because there is a lot of DOS games. Linux doesn't have as much hardware/OS-dependent nostalgic software.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that all SWE positions are high-paying soulless FAANG jobs - those jobs get a lot of attention and are very appealing to a lot of people.

But there are tons of other kinds of SWE jobs out there that aren't about squeezing another fraction of a percent of profit out of some process - positions with non-profits, development jobs in medical research of all kinds, or even early stage startups where you get to play a bigger role in the product development. You probably won't make FAANG money, but you can do just fine for yourself in a position where you feel like you're doing something more meaningful.
This story is a perfect preliminary scene for a dystopian film.
Here is a thread about what you mentioned.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26143779
On the contrary. Every engineer is able to learn the process when it matters. And it often does. The type of steel used, the treatment and the orientation is imporant to the outcome. You can not hand wave them away as "implementation details".
Just because it’s not tech doesn’t mean it’s not hard.

Are you concerned Nike might steal Apple’s computer design know-how?
Same here. I bought a Kobo H2O last Feb. I've only ever loaded books from Calibre over USB mass storage.

I chose the Kobo for the device being easily root-able. My daughter reads on it but I reasoned that if she got tired of it I could do "cool Linux stuff" with it.
My wife actually buys her clothes from places like Aloria or Celtic Web Merchant, where you can get good, solid cotton and linen dresses. These can keep going for many, many years. But the medieval style doesn't suit me. I want to show off my legs :P

(The first dress my wife gave me was one of those, a large, red early medieval style dress. It is incredibly solid, but it makes me feel like an extra from Handmaid's Tale.)
That's only half of the story.

Elm prohibits glue code. You can't take well tested JS library, write FFI definitions (like Rescript/Purescript) or typings (like TypeScript) and publish it. You can only publish pure Elm packages. That also means that you can't use WebAPIs if they are not wrapped in packages whitelisted by Elm core team.

There are only two methods to interop with javascript and they both have massive downsides. WebComponents are WebComponents and even then Elm is very picky how you can write those. Ports are nice for heavy/async work but are unusable with small functional-ish APIs like Intl.
No, we evolved to consume prepared food, including meat. Our mouths, jaws, and digestive system have been coevolving for past few tens-to-hundreds of thousands of years with our diets and food preparation methods. Certainly, vegetables have not been a major source of calories for humans in many tens of thousands of years now (because they don’t have a lot of calories in them in the first place, but also because they are only available in narrow window of the growing season.
Carbon isn't nitrogen. The nitrogen needed for agriculture comes from the Haber process. What I'm saying is we can't just give up on the Haber process and go back to "natural" farming without figuring out how we're going to feed everybody.
I would say it's not just you, 99% of jobs are totally pointless or actively harmful to the world, if you ask me. Like you say, squeezing profit out of people and absolutely nothing else. But it's not really relevant to wanting to off yourself.

Even if you get to a job with a point, like doing something meaningful or for the good of society, it's not necessarily going to feel great from day-to-day, and might be even more disillusioning (speaking from experience here). I find that I just care about it less when other things in my life are going well.
Would you be open to sharing what you did with strings?

My central argument in the response there is that writing buf[len] = ‘\0’; is almost always a sign that you either don't know libc functions, aren't willing to use them, are trying to outperform them (the performance of libc functions is a legitimate complaint for some use cases), or what you're dealing with is not a string but some arbitrary binary blobs that you're trying to make strings out of (in that case, you can't blame the string representation or string handling functions for not knowing what the extent of your binary is; yes, you'll have to first create a string, knowing the length).

To put it more explicitly, if you always provide a valid buffer and size, snprintf() will always terminate your string. strlcat() and strlcpy() will always terminate your string. If you need formatted catenation, you can make a trivial wrapper around snprintf that takes a pointer to the end of your string and updates the "head"; this can be called successively without ever having to compute a length outside the wrapper. asprintf() will allocate and terminate your string. Things that need the length of your string (strspn, strchr, etcetra) will figure it out since it is implied by the already-present nul byte. strtok & co (they have their issues) also work without requiring you to do any manual termination.

What this means in practice is that you can have thousands of lines of string handling code that never manually terminates a string and only deals with lengths to the extent that your "business logic" needs to. Unless you're actually trying to use the string representation to your benefit by manually splicing it any which way, inserting nul bytes based on arcane computations.. in that case, it sounds like you got what you wanted. Yes, people actually do that sometimes: they figure out how easy it is to manipulate the string representation by hand and thus avoid library functions, and then they complain about doing it by hand.

There are always exceptions of course, so I'm giving you benefit of the doubt. That's why I'm curious to see what you were doing. Having to point out library functions however is a regular thing as people seem to always start out by hand-rolling it for some reason.

As for the question about string libraries.. well, I gotta point out that "small" wasn't a qualifier in the previous discussion. Popular libraries include sds, bstring, glib strings. Plan9port also has the extensible string library. There's icu for fancy unicode stuff but I have no experience with it and it probably isn't "small." There are plenty more if you look around, and I'll let you judge the size of the choices for yourself. I'm pretty sure one of these choices is always mentioned in these HN threads when someone asks for recommendations, including sds in the bchs thread.
We have this wonderful organ called a "brain". It appears to be the center of reasoning. We apply that to the situation and end up drawing a line where we say, "Beyond this point, I will not look. I may learn what it does, but I will not dwell on how it does it, neither in principle (conceptual model) nor in fact (actual code). Because if I were to investigate this, and every other such system, I would find that it is turtles all the way down and I will never actually complete my objective. Unless I choose to freeze all these dependencies at this one moment in time and never permit them to change. If, in the course of my work, I find that this particular area is a source of trouble or a possible source of solution, then I will investigate further. On my own, with my team, directing a team member, or contacting the responsible party."

It's a noble goal to make systems that are comprehensible, and one that should be striven for more often. It's also a noble goal to try to fully understand the stack of dependencies. But short of freezing time (this subsystem will never be permitted to change after I have studied it, except by my own hand), spending a lifetime on a more narrow field, being in the top 0.0001% of intellects, or working on relatively simple systems, it's infeasible in the general case. Once you try and do something even as "simple" as build out an avionics system for an aircraft, it will quickly explode into too many domains for any one person to truly comprehend every detail.
If rich people decide to throw away their TVs every six months and get a new one, this may affect our ability to make sure everyone in the world has a TV without beginning to sacrifice other things like bread or clothing.

But this analogy sucks because a TV is a luxury purchase and there's no network effect whereby I become safer if everyone in the world has a TV.
> Many people ran Linux on 486 machines. Other than the nostalgia of seeing the old boot loaders and boot screens, there's nothing special about this "feat"

Many people ran Windows on 486. But it was Windows 3.x, or 95 at most. If you managed to get Windows 10 to boot on one, surely that would be a feat...
That might explain why one of the shirts from my last order wasn't even stitched up properly on the left seam.

Although I must say the quality of their products had been on a sharp decline since even before the pandemic. The fit remained scary consistent though.
Braille may also work, and has the benefit of being more compact. If two dots represents a point, an example might be ⣤⣀⣀⣀⡤⠴⠚⠛⠒⠒⠲⣀ (usually terminal fonts hide the white dots). You only get 4 horizontal ticks, but also can do a "interpolation" (like ⠑) that gets you an extra 3.
It's not just you. I don't know what the solution is, since I'm also looking for it, but what may help is taking more time to think. I've opted for working part-time (80% load) to have more time to spend on writing and taking my mind off of things.

Think about what are the problems that are actually worth fixing in the world and make your way up from there. Give it time, don't force it. It might also be worth checking out techniques that can help generate ideas: https://medium.com/ideas-into-action/ikigai-the-perfect-care...

And even in situations where the job itself is not that meaningful, there are lots of other areas you may be able to focus on. Building relationships, learning about how software is built...
I want to hook up a small e ink screen to a pi and use it with my mechanical keyboard as a modern typewriter of sorts but the prices on eink are so prohibitive it doesn’t seem worth it.
Worker ownership of the means of production (i.e. democracy at work) is an alternative and that's most certainly not what you lived through, nor did you live through a stateless, classless and moneyless society. What you lived through was fascism with red flags.

If you check the sidebar of that subreddit you'll find anarchism and mutualism as the solutions to the problems it identifies.
Seriously, fuck fast fashion and the like. It’s insane how so much of modern consumerism is propped up by what is either literally or almost literally slavery.
Refreshing perspective, thanks.
Big Repair Project
So these people are trying to do some good, and your criticism of them is that they're not perfect? Tell me how much good are you doing?

It's not possible to live completely off the grid. Is that a reason not to try at all?
I guess I do vaguely remember creating an account. Hmm... It must have been painless because I don't remember it. I know that it's not on any Wi-Fi network now so it has functioned for about a year with no network connectivity, at least.

Edit: I remember now. Looking down in the comments here dislodged the memory that I did the "add a row to an SQLite database" hack to prevent the need for account creation.
The control group is out of control (2014)
The fact that the borrower can renegotiate lower only increases the premium charged for fixed rate loans. It's not free money or free insurance.
very interesting observation. I live in Toronto and it's the first time hearing about this. Can you point to any articles about farmland preventing urban sprawl?

It's interesting because back in the 2000's that was the main talk about how Urban Sprawl was going to ruin everything!
No. Marketing fluff cannot be explained.
This article looks like it was mangled by a translator.

It mentions
> its headquarters had about 1,600 employees, mostly midcareer hires... The average pay is about 9.6 million yen.

Also the job description does not mention software engineers, but "logistics" and such.

I think it is 8.8 million yen for non-tech salaries.
The UK is importing human waste from the Netherlands to be used as fertilizer. I guess they don't eat enough in the UK to produce what they need locally? Odd thing to need to import!

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/02/sewage-s...
> but it just seems that almost every job out there is about squeezing more profit out of people

That is by definition the relationship of an employee and and employer. If they didn't make money off of you they wouldn't hire you (exceptions exist as always).

Edit: making sure i didn't missinterpret this sentence - if by people you meant customers then it's also what companies do.

> People who have really great jobs(not talking about money ofc), how did you find them

Try to abstract away the company. Raise your own bar, strive to be a great professional for your own sake, because you love your field of work. Progress your knowledge and skills for your own joy, not for your employers. Now, if you get into that mindset, even the worst company is a training ground to help you become better. It's a new level in a game. See how well you can manage in the worst possible conditions, making sure it is not taxing your mental health though.
I was in a Uniqlo in Manhattan a few months ago and my guess is that they've deployed some kind of computer vision tool for identifying purchases. I went to the checkout kiosk and my purchases were already on screen, no need to scan barcodes, no visible RFID tags. It was incredibly friction free and if it got deployed universally at all major retailers would eliminate hundreds of thousands, if not millions of retail jobs.
You might be slightly depressed but that's not everything. The truth is that most software companies are...pointless. They're sales driven body shops talking about "mission".

I really like my job - work on innovative product lines with a small close knit team. I got here by just working on ideas/probelms that interested me and selling that company to the current one.

Go do something you like. Also go to a therapist.
If we just had flash that was write protected unless a jumper was moved, this kind of thing just would not happen.

"Oh, but the average user is incapable of that" and "Corporate IT are unwilling to do that" are the two biggest excuses I hear to not make it so.

Here's a crazy idea: you connect said jumper to a front panel key switch. The 'average' consumer could probably sort that out. And corporate IT could just leave it enabled, or require you to turn the key for them, or have IT interns on site that run around with the keys or whatever.

A Key. A literal physical key. But I guess that's too low tech for the crypto obsessed purveyors of TPMs and the like.
But this response begs the question. You still have to stay home because you still got it and could spread it. I'm asking if we have to accept that we can't make a vaccine that does better, or if there is still room for a better one. I feel like the whole discussion gets sidetracked because so many people refuse to admit that the vaccines we have are anything but perfect. I think that's part of the articles point.
I'd recommend pivoting into security engineering. Security engineering, even at big tech companies, can be fulfilling as you are often protecting dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists from surveillance. Even at companies like facebook, you can work on protecting dissidents [2] while contributing very little to the company's ad business. There are also opportunities that pay well at non-profits like Amnesty Tech as well [1]. The challenges are surprisingly technical and your adversaries and coworkers are some of the most talented computer scientists in the world [3]. It also surprisingly comes with around a ~25% pay raise from SWE (I make $750k TC as an L6) as there are so few people interested in it. Switching into security engineering was the best decision I made and I now work with an almost completely clean conscious.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/tech/

[2] https://citizenlab.ca/2019/11/whatsapp-attributes-hack-of-14...

[3] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...
50%+ of Canadians live south of the 45th parallel. However, that's only a minute fraction of Canada's land area. I've driven the road between Baie-Comeau, Quebec, and Labrador City, NL/Labrador. Seven hours at 100km/h, at least 5 hours of which the only signs of human life you see are the occasional vehicle driving in the opposite direction. Not much different if you drive around Northern Ontario, or start heading north from Edmonton or Prince George.

So yes, Canada has 37 million people and may or may not rank up there with the lowest densities in the world. But if you actually drive around Canada you'll quickly realize that the entire family is packed into one tiny closet when the rest of the house is completely empty.
Can you elaborate a bit more on how the automatic helm upgrades are performed?
Millions out of us.
> It goes to the extend to not try that but too create a similar to natural hand writing "code" that is very easy to learn for people that knows hand writing.

The “graffiti” system developed by Palm was an example of this. It was so convenient and easy to use (for those used to Latin scripts) that it was common to see it appear on whiteboards in meetings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)
Before artificial fertilizer, world famines were commonplace and the base rate of starvation was very high compared to today. I hope that anyone truly advocating for a return to that world has studied history and understands the consequences.
If I'm reading this right, it's not actually saying anything about tech hires. Given the outrageous compensation, this is probably for management roles?
In 1995, I was stationed at an Army base about 10 miles from the DMZ in Korea, and for the first time in my life I saved up enough money to build a computer from modern parts instead of scavenging them from thrift stores and dumpsters. So I went AWOL for a day and went down to a place in Seoul called the Yongsan Electronics Market. To my young American mind, this was a place straight out of a William Gibson novel. Imagine a multi-storey sprawling mall covering about three blocks, with modern stores selling the latest LG stuff at the center, but in the alleys and passageways you might run into a pile of cases being scrapped, or an old man pulling a cart full of dead hard drives, or turn a corner and find someone hand building 20 video cards on a plastic table. But I knew what I was there for, and I bought the parts for a 486DX4/100mhz, plus a used monitor and keyboard, and brought them back on the train. Somewhere I acquired a Slackware Linux CD, and when I got it all put together it was like a dream. I count that era as when CPUs got powerful enough that we just had extra processing power for the little details. But I digress. On the first night I had it, I decided to leave it running overnight and set up a cron job to wake me up for morning formation. Of course, it froze up in the middle of the night and I woke up late and got yelled at.
It’s not only you. I worked in a non profit research organisation for a few years and it was great, but I switched to a for profit health care company to change environment and have experience outside the research world. It was not challenging but stressful, and I couldn’t care less about the talks about profitability and shareholders. I looked at the job market for a year and everything was the same or worse than my company. So I got in contact with my non profit research organisation again and they hired me a second time. Work is fun again.

Research is not for everyone but you could consider it.
this trigged an avalanche of selling!
I know a bunch of people who work at FB. They explain that Zuck would love to be as evil as Google or Microsoft, but is just nowhere near their league.

Putin would love to be as evil as the US or even China, but hasn't got the scratch. Russia has its billionaire oligarchs, but the US has probably a hundred times as many. China murders more innocents every day than Putin does rabble rousers in a year.

Zuck isn't Putin. He isn't Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. He isn't even Bolsanaro, or Duterte. He would like to be.
"Division of labor is an extremely mature state for a society. Aiming prematurely for it is counterproductive. Rather than try to imitate more mature domains, start from scratch and see what this domain ends up needing."

This is more the gist of the article than "lets not have libraries or abstractions at all", its pointing more towards "lets defer those questions until the right time rather than from the jump".

I think Enterprise Java and the insane complexity of modern web dev are indicative of a consequence.

>Because... whenever someone tries an alternative approach, there usually seems to be the hidden unspoken assumptions that they actually don't want software to be as big as it is.

I really don't think that OP is making this assumption
We Know by Freeman Dyson (2011)
I feel like this is common among non-tech companies. I went to college near a large grocery chain, a trucking company, and a meat processor. All three of them had the same tagline of "we're like a tech company that sells X".
An ecommerce company might, or any large company in general can likely use more than a few.
I wouldn't even go into the office for 8.8 million.
Subscriptions as a vehicle of some sort?
Oh boy... smh
and also for first time home buyers