skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The FreeDOS operating system [1], started in 1994 by Jim Hall. Several critical parts of the system (e.g. the kernel) were written by others, but he is still coordinating the project in 2022. They released version 1.3 just recently.

Charles Childers' work on the tiny Retro Forth language [2] is also worth pointing out. It was started by Tom Novelli, but according to interwebs, Childers took over in 2001. Really cool language if you like tiny VM-based systems and forth.

Another tiny one-man language is PicoLisp [3]. Created by Alexander Burger in around 1988, and he's still the maintainer. He has been using it in commercial application development ever since.

Today, I'm wishing a long and healthy life to Virgil Dupras' Collapse OS! [4]

EDIT:

Another project I really like is Willus.com's k2pdfopt [5], a small cross-platform tool that optimizes pdf files for mobile readers. Started in around 2011; judging by the website, very probably a single-person thing.

One more is, edbrowse, a "command line editor browser" with ed-like command language [6]. Originally written in 2002 by Karl Dahlke for blind users, but might be interesting to many others as well because of its scripting abilites.

Ah, and also mhwaveedit [7], Magnus Hjorth's wave editor, developed by him since around 2002. And Mark Tyler's mtpaint [8], which was apparently very much inspired by mhwaveedit.

A fascinating single-person made digital audio workstation is Non DAW by Jonathan Moore Liles [9], started in around 2006. I've used it a lot, great modular design, ran really well on an old Thinkpad T42.

Serenity OS [10] has also been in development for 3 years. Andreas Kling's amazing effort.

Possibly Dwarf Fortress [11] would also almost count as a two-man project, by Tarn and Zach Adams, going on since 2002.

Nils M. Holm's creations also deserve a mention for sure. Scheme 9 From Empty Space, Klong array language, several books, etc [12]. Really inspiring guy.

Not wishing to turn HN into Wikipedia, so I'll stop here. The dedication behind this kind of projects is amazing, really.

1: https://www.freedos.org/

2: http://retroforth.org/

3: https://picolisp.com/

4: http://collapseos.org/

5: https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/

6: http://edbrowse.org/

7: https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit

8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint

9: http://non.tuxfamily.org/

10: http://serenityos.org/

11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress

12: http://t3x.org/s9fes/
I would add that sometimes there are some truly magical food experiences lurking in there if you have an open mind, and Michelin restaurants are a good place to try new things.

A few years ago I ate at the modern in New York. Most of the tasting menu was good, as you might expect, but honestly not particularly memorable.

But they had this one dish, eggs 3 ways or something like that, which was a play on a soft boiled egg with toast, but the egg yolk had caviar and some other stuff in it, and was served with this toasted sourdough…I am salivating 4 years later thinking about it. Truly one of the best things I have ever eaten, and it was something I never would have ordered from a menu.
> How can a country that doesn’t control its own territory, and has some ongoing struggles, join NATO in the first place? It’s against the rules.

No, its not. Its against standards outside of the Washington Treaty that some member countries have suggested for membership, specifically to justify delaying the membership process for Ukraine and Georgia.

The present invasion seems to have shifted EU/NATO opinion among governments against Russia and toward Ukraine (and other states under Russian threat), perhaps most significantly in the places that have been most friendly to Russia and reluctant to support the countries they are threatening (Orbán’s Hungary, for instance), so that non-rule excuse may or may not continue to be operative.
The Zimbu Programming Language
The Pi and Arduino being cheap helped their acceptance for DIY projects I think more than anything. An alternate reality Raspberry Pi identical to our Pi save for a MIPS CPU instead of ARM would have been just as popular. The magic of a Pi isn't the ARM CPU but the $25 price point for a Linux computer and the ability to use memory cards, power supplies, input devices, and monitors people already own.

They're cheap enough to play with yet really flexible. Even if you never finish a "project" using a Pi it can still be a fun little emulation machine, Kodi player, or bang around system for kids. Even the Arduino isn't all that useful outside of "projects". Even when a Pi is vastly overpowered for some DIY project powering some LEDs it's still not much more than doing the same project with much more limited but project-specific hardware.
You argued, specifically, that,

> You're modifying the program whether you've touched any files containing plain text source code or not.

And that is just not how copyright works.

(Separately, if you ever find yourself linking to completely unrelated comments by the person you are replying to in order to construct an attack on them personally, then your own argument is probably nonsense, and you're probably not a fun person to have around.)
Look at German and Russian oil and some will wake up on china
I went freelancer a while back and now just don't worry about it. Let those who enjoy being part of a system with ranks, levels, titles, and politics deal with it. It was rough going at first but I've found steady clients now which I've been able to work with for over a decade and they aren't going anywhere.
People forgot that almost everyone who works in these restaurants also has a "common as muck" background. The fancyness is all an act they've learned. I'd say servers may even prefer customers like the author over another table of rich 60 year olds.
Thanks I need to try the 5pm cutoff. my sleep patterns are horrible. Insomnia multiple nights a week.
It’s also of course in the fundamental nature of Lisp that you can change the language by importing stuff rather than actually editing the core implementation.
> largely due to corruption in the armed forces.

That seems to leave Putin off the hook, unless you're implying that the military is corrupt because of Putin, which I think is obvious because he corrupts everything he touches.

Putin is a bully who likes to pick on smaller enemies. He did it when he was KGB, he did it against Georgia, he did it in Chechnya, he did it in Syria, and of course Crimea. Russia came out on top in those conflicts because they were punching down. They didn't need to have tactics or strategy because their only strategy was completely overpowering and overrunning their opponents, and counting on them not fighting back at all.

Now Ukrainians are fighting back and Russia can't handle it. Why? Because Russia doesn't fight wars, they conduct special operations missions. They are used to rolling over their enemies and them staying down and dead. But here Ukrainians are getting back up to fight, and Russia can't deal with it because they didn't prepare for it.

For instance they brought tanks into Ukraine but they didn't establish supply lines as you say. Is that due to a corrupt military, or because they didn't even comprehend they'd need to establish and defend supply lines? Their previous conflicts didn't necessitate doing so, and they didn't here either.

I think the biggest problem Putin has right now he made for himself: he attacked Crimea and then used the experience to inform his opinion about how the Ukrainian military would fare. What happened was that the Ukrainians learned from Crimea and they prepared. What he's seeing right now from Ukrainians is the antibody response of his invasion in 2014.
I read an interesting counterpoint in the IpFire forum. Among other points

>Now, everybody is looking for a cheap ARM board with performance and loads of features. The Raspberry Foundation is a charity that pays probably no tax at all, but somehow is selling lots and lots of boards at an absolutely “amazing” price.

>Amazing because nobody else in Europe can compete with them. Paying no taxes helps. The second step is that they have almost completely outsourced their software development. They call it Open Source-ed, but that is not the same.

>Over many years, there has never been a release of that piece of hardware that was supported by a mainline kernel. Neither Linux nor any other of the *BSDs. They simply do not care what software runs on it.

https://community.ipfire.org/t/arm-sbc-support-discussion/26... Post number 4
> Still they want the commits to be associated with their current GitHub account

Well, tough luck? I don't think it's that important. Just accept it as a fact of life: you lost access to your email account and can't verify you still own it (you don't, clearly).

GitHub should just show the e-mail address when it can't associate that to an account, maybe show it's unverified and link to a help page explaining anyone could have faked that in the commit. I don't understand why they care so much to put a face (the GH account) on the commit when the address is not verified.
there are at least six adults in the USA with my same first and last name, who are professionals and middle-aged .. one of the others died of a drug overdose, and looks a bit like me!

new world now
Unfortunately, there's no way to turn off comments on a Gist, which makes it not a viable replacement for anyone who doesn't want to spend a lot of time processing and moderating comments.
> (Contrast to python, where I don't know what is going to happen if I add that import...)

I felt that in my bones.
True, it is very early.

What I don't understand at this point is how Russia plans to occupy Ukraine in the long term given its military weakness. Even if Ukraine does fall, the guerilla war is gonna last for quite a while, especially now that the EU is arming Ukraine.
Hybrid PubKey Encryption:My Involvement in DevAndAnalysis of a Cryptographic Std
I believe in some cases (e.g. instagram) the user agreement you sign when using the site makes your copyright over e.g. the pictures you upload be handed over to the site owners (again, to prevent competition). Just to point out that the common sense idea that "you own the data" thing isn't always true. Nevertheless this question has been resolved through other comments on here so it seems not to be the case in this scenario.
> Long ago, I, like many Unix fans, thought that fork(2) and the fork-exec process spawning model were the greatest thing, and the Windows sucked for only having exec() and _spawn(), the last being a Windows-ism.

I appreciate this quite a bit. Vocal Unix proponents tend to believe that anything Unix does is automatically better than Windows, sometimes without even knowing what the Windows analogue is. Programming in both is necessary to have an informed opinion on this subject.

The one thing I miss most on Unix: the unified model of HANDLEs that enables you to WaitOnMultipleObjects() with almost any system primitive you could want, such as an event with a socket (blocking I/O + a shutdown notification) in one call. On Unix, a flavor of select() tends to be the base primitive for waiting on things to happen, which means you end up writing adapter code for file descriptors to other resources, or need something like eventfd.

Things I don't miss from Windows at all: wchar_t everywhere. :)
Definitely! Goodreads import is in the pipeline.

Agree on the author-sentiment too. The long-term vision is this to not just be a site for readers, but a site for authors, publishers, bookstores, etc. A true ecosystem. As a reader, you can follow your favorite authors and bookstores and receive updates, but as an author you can engage with your audience and self-promote. A win-win.

We pull all of our data from Google Books currently (so to avoid needing to maintain an internal database right away), so if it's not on Booqsi it's because it's not on Google Books. It's been fairly broad in scale, but we've certainly seen situations where books don't show up. Thanks for the feedback!
I would take the lightning over the TubroV6 everyday.

I would never buy a Turbo car or truck... but I also would not buy the Lightning today for the same reason. I like to keep my vehicles for a long time. long term reliability of the Turbo V6 is just not there, nor the battery life of the electrics

So until then I will stick with naturally aspirated v8's
The point is that international affairs are complicated enough to make any principled stand difficult, and the world should be commended for rallying behind the idea that unprovoked wars of conquest are enough to get you excluded from global society. The sanctions are going to cause a lot of pain in the countries leveling them, so it is an even less straightforward calculus.

Russia was able to invade Ukraine and annex a big chunk of its territory in 2014, and the idea that Ukraine was less our "friend" then than it is now doesn't hold water to me. What was different about the 2014 invasion if it is strictly realpolitik friends and enemies?
Ask HN: Name of software that auto-decodes strings?
I remember seeing a piece of software on this forum that automatically detects what a string is encoded with (base64, protobuf, etc.) and it will automatically layer decodings to get you back the original string.

Does anyone remember the name of this software?
Just spitballing, it's just a dump of records. They might have records for your arrest, arraignment, charge, plead, whatever (not sure what's in your state). When I was looking through it, it didn't seem like a comprehensive or organized set of documents by case.

You might want to check with a more thorough source, like a criminal background check agency.
China presumably really wishes Russia had set a wargoal of annexing Donbas / Crimea / all of Ukraine to be part of Russia.

Putin instead recognizing the breakaway regions as independent sets a bad precedent from China's point of view.

They're presumably happy about a member of the dictators' club sticking one in the eye of a free country, a (half-)Asian country sticking one in the eye of US hegemony, and the business opportunity to buy stuff at fire sale prices because it's sanctioned everywhere else.

They're probably less happy about how long it's taking -- the Chinese want stability and moneymaking opportunities, war and high oil prices are bad for business. They're probably also been caught flat-footed by how the US / EU seems to be unifying on this issue, they may feel forced to choose sides. China really wants to maintain a balance of power where the US isn't dominant, but they need the US and EU as trading partners more than they need Russia.
GitHub bases the association of commits to user accounts on the list of e-mail addresses configured in the user’s profile: https://github.com/settings/emails
> - Candidate 1 knows .NET but is new to Oracle. They know RDBMS concepts so they can be brought up to speed, but they start closer to the $100K end of the range because they're less valuable to the company initially.

How long would the ramp-up be? Are we talking an increase from $100K to $150K over a year, two, three? I've yet to encounter an employer ramping me up at even a remotely decent market rate, whereas I can give myself tens or sometimes hundreds of % increases every 2 - 3 years by shopping around.
Aren't apps rated for 17+ allowed to contain sexual content?

Apps in this category may also contain frequent and intense offensive language; frequent and intense cartoon, fantasy or realistic violence; and frequent and intense mature, horror and suggestive themes; plus sexual content, nudity, alcohol, tobacco and drugs which may not be suitable for children under the age of 17.

https://apps.apple.com/kh/story/id1440847896
I wish everyone realized this too is a form of worker exploitation. Most of us are working dead end jobs at the end of the day, and not letting you have career progression is almost like a paycut, they absolutely can give you superior roles that you are able to perform they just withhold them.
Thanks! Google Books is our source currently.
I thought DF was written by both Zach and Tarn Adams, and not just Tarn alone.[1]

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xypb5/the-dwarf-fortress-cr...
I have used emails in the past I can no longer verify, so I see a use case for linking unverified emails to profiles if there's only one profile claiming the email address

However, if another profile verified that email address, it definitely shouldn't link to another profile that hasn't verified
At the $dayjob I don't see anyone use ansible or comparable tools (chef, puppet, ...) any more. It's all managed cloud services and containers. Much of the job that ansible or other config management tools might have done is handled by docker build to bake container images, and k8s to manage custom running services. Terraform however gets widely used to wrangle state.
There is no border. It really depends on your reviewer. You can definitely try, like maybe make a wrapper for your webapp, but i wouldn’t bet on succeeding.

There was an article a while back about someone who kept getting rejected trying to submit an app similar to Wordle, despite lots of obvious Wordle clones getting accepted. Also see: lots of garbage on the app store like buggy apps and apps which seemingly violate some of the guidelines.
Got a free Saturday so I entered, wish me luck!

Did pretty well on the actual SAT way back when, curious to see how it changed.

I'll be taking it with a buddy who will go through questions on the computer, answer what they can, and yell out ones for me to calculate or google on my laptop while they go on to do the rest, then come back when I'm done.

A two-way split is probably the most fun/profitable.
You'll feel better when you see some of my other comments. I'll paste it here for you:

> What’s your suggested alternative?
In my experience, any alternative to leetcode provides a better signal-to-noise ratio. You are better off asking trivia questions.

Additionally, this is the common narrative among leetcode advocates - "If no leetcode, then what?" As a hiring manager, you think harder and do better, that's what.

> Please remember that while some of us would do well and prefer some live pair programming or debugging sessions, it stresses the hell out of some folks and penalizes them unfairly.

So does leetcode. And a candidate that is truly a good fit for the role would be more at ease with the interview than if they saw a leetcode question they haven't seen before.

> Take home tests penalizes people with families and other responsibilities...

So does studying for leetcode for hours.

> ...and probably has a racial bias as well in countries where different races have different societal loads.

Share some sources before making a claim this ridiculous.

> In the end, even if these coding challenges might not reflect the actual work you do, they might still be predictive of success in the job, as much as any other method can be when we look for unbiased markers.

In my 6-ish years of experience, this is false. I have actually tested this theory in practice, and through my anecdotal experience, leetcode is a poor signal for job performance.

I can usually usually accurately screen a candidate for success in about 45 mins. And, unlike leetcode, you can't pretend like you haven't seen the question before, bc I can push the candidate to their limit, which is where you will find hire / no-hire signals. I love talking about this stuff, but I find that my peers engineering peers do not give a shit and would prefer to stay in leetcode hel
Typically when a judge says no to a case like this, they have to come up with a definition of something in the law that is not met. For example, they may say "It does not qualify as travel on a railway if the load does not travel from one station to another station. In this case, since the loading and unloading occurred at the same station, this load did not travel by rail, and therefore the Jones Act was violated".

That new decision then becomes part of the law (case law).
I would say that most software doesn't have to be correct to be useful. There are exceptions, like anything to do with cryptography.

You might say that the same can be true of calculations; after all, calculations about the contingent universe (as opposed to, say, number theory) are always based on data incorporating some uncertainty. But there are two key differences:

① I don't put up a slide showing all the intermediate values of the variables in my program in order to make an argument for something. Instead, I try to show my chain of reasoning in enough detail to be convincing and to expose any relevant potentially incorrect assumptions or reasoning steps I've made so that others can find my errors, without including trivial or irrelevant details. Including trivial and irrelevant details makes it harder, not easier, to find relevant incorrect assumptions or reasoning steps.

That's why I question the motivation of people who include those in their slides: it sounds like they're attempting to make their argument so complex that there are no obvious errors, rather than so simple that there are obviously no errors.

② A 10% uncertainty in an input datum can be traced through the calculation from beginning to end and will often result in a 10% or 21% uncertainty in the result, or even less. (And where that's not the case the sensitivity should be called out.) A calculation that's simply incorrect—for example, treating millions as thousands, or forgetting to divide by the relevant denominator—commonly produces results that are off by multiple orders of magnitude.
RFC 9180 – Hybrid Public Key Encryption
One reason I think these meetings are sometimes so boring is because there is a sense that we are looking at numbers that don't matter. That sense is reinforced if you discover that the values of the numbers we are seeing literally don't matter.

I also think there is a difference between software and spreadsheets. At least, in the role I was in, software let us do things and spreadsheets let us reason about the business.

If there was a bug in software, say, 5% of requests to save a configuration failed, and that failure triggered an automatic retry, and the result of this bug was elevated configuration save latency at the 95+ percentile, we might decide to ship that bug (depending on other factors). On discovering the bug we would try to understand its impact and then we would reason about the impact on the software's goals. For example, we might say that people rarely change configurations, and an additional 100ms of latency for 5% of customers is something we can live with until such time as we solve the underlying cause.

What we would not do, in any software org that I've been apart of, is say "Hey, we notice some of our operations are failing sometimes, anyway - let's ship it!" To me, that seems analogous to what you are saying. You know there are errors in the spreadsheets but you ignore them on the assumption they are inconsequential, reasoning that if they were consequential you or your team would have noticed them.

There are ways for bugs to exist in software that don't block what the customer is trying to do. Maybe the bug makes it harder to accomplish a workflow, or makes it take longer, or looks silly, or something like that - and those are bugs it may be okay to ship with (depending on context).

If values are wrong in a spreadsheet, then the only way I could think that doesn't matter is if the values are unimportant. That is, either the values are important and it matters if they are wrong, or it doesn't matter if the values are wrong because they are unimportant. If the values are important, let's correct them. If they are unimportant, let's not discuss them.
LOVE seeing websockets in there already!
That was a great read. Thank you for writing it up; I learned quite a few things!

Especially appreciated the OS minutiae and opinionated commentary (... and the doc vs reality observation in Linux's vfork).

The piece lives up to the great title :)