skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29377783 has some relevant comments, here's a copy of mine:

I spent around 5 months in 2019 using a Raspberry Pi 3B+(1GB of RAM) as my sole home computer because my laptop broke. You can browse the web if you aggressively close tabs and block almost all js (and periodically restart the browser). Editing latex was possible as was writing some code (although using a modern editor and the web simultaneously isn't always an option - I grew to love nano). I did have a access to a modern x86 machine in an office.

Github was probably the most painful website (although it's still better than Gitlab which doesn't work at all without js). I think it had recently removed a bunch of functionality for users without js and it's not designed with people who care about every 100MB of RAM in mind.
I was given a DVD of this when I visited Fog Creek one day.
Every programming language needs to confront the fact that it's distribution, not syntax, that matters, and nothing else. And JavaScript won distribution. By a landslide. There are many lovely languages out there, and you can certainly describe your personal processes or even your server processes with them, but ultimately you will be limited by ad hoc and brittle distribution systems, and their adoption will reach some small asymptote.
> Even better would be a way to compare vs methods of "manual" memory management (manual alloc/free, RAII/scope based alloc/free, arena allocation, etc.). Unfortunately, non-GC memory management is very application specific, so I'm not sure if a generalized analysis would be super useful.

I've personally found Rust to be a very difficult language to learn and become productive in.

In contrast, I was able to jump into Swift and become productive very quickly.

Swift isn't GC, but is reference counted. Reference cycles will lead to leaked memory.

So what's interesting is to know GC's overhead relative to what: Reference counted languages like Swift? Or languages like Rust?

More importantly: Is the overhead worth it? Developer time is valuable; thus leading to the critical question: What's cheaper, extra developer time or a more powerful computer?
Many tech workers were thriving (making and spending money) until their RSU’s crashed 75% or more
http://sprig.ch/
> Did I hurt you personally for you to be so toxic with me ? Chill.

I'm sorry you feel that way, however challenging your incredible claims and asking that you provide some evidence before we believe you is not the same "be so toxic with me".
It's a good article, and I think it's right that things could get much worse here. But it's missing the point, or avoiding it, that things are going to get much much worse in some other places, in particular the US and Canadian west. Record forest fires followed by record floods in BC last year were a bit of a taste of the future, unfortunately.
The existence of Copilot is detrimental to GPL-licensed projects that it steals code from.
I think every economic migrant I've ever met (myself included) talks about moving home realtively soon "I'm only here for 2/5/ < 10 years", but very few of us do because we become established, make new friends, acquire lots of possessions. Some DO move home for major life events like kids arriving (or leaving) but I don't think it's as many as you assume, it's just very notable.

I'm lucky enough to have two sets of family still back home, close enough to visit easily but far enough to make it meaningful and intentional. The desire to move back has weakened every year.
As ashrodan mentioned: the Garmin Forerunners do this.

What they didn't mention is that you can also attach it to a Mac or PC via USB and copy over your own music to it.

IIRC (but it's been a while) there are also tools to do this on Linux in the repos.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/general/which-garmin-smart...

And...

Page 47 of https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/forerunner245/EN-US/... as an example.
I find it's often useful to analyze the extreme endpoints of something to get a feel for an issue.

Making a language too simple makes using it difficult. Too much of the inherent complexity of real problems ends up needing to be written by the users, and re-written every time (or results in massive dependency trees). For the extremes of simplicity, the Binary Lambda Calculus[1], [2] Brainfuck, and similar "Turing tarpits" show that the simplest of languages are extremely difficult to use.

Making a language too complex makes using it difficult. When there are lots of ways to do any given thing, you need to know all the ways to be able to read code "in the wild". You end up with languages like C++ that are really 3 or more nice languages standing on each other's shoulders in a trench coat. Or PERL, where "There Is More Than One Way To Do It" makes it into a write-only language.

Go errs towards simpilicity, and IMO goes too far. Rust gets things reasonably towards the middle, but there are unfortunately a few areas where "There Is More Than One Way To Do It" is rearing its ugly head. The edition system helps to keep this in check: while the compiler will always compile older code, and you can link older code to newer, a new edition can deprecate old syntax/functions/etc for files written in that edition.

[1] https://tromp.github.io/cl/Binary_lambda_calculus.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck
This argument is not useful. #1 and #2 differ based on the disposition of the CEO. A stupid, or not good at thinking about statistics and risks, CEO will happily get on a plane to get a bigger bonus, even if it's not that safe.
Why are you so eager to take Pfizer's own statements at face value? Don't you think there's a bit of a conflict of interest here? And suddenly regulatory capture doesn't exist either? The clinical data is effectively a secret between the FDA and Pfizer, both orgs which have their own pressures to approve of the vaccine and possibly downplay adverse events. Not to mention Pfizer has been preemptively absolved of legal responsibility for any harm.

People are right to be suspicious.
Nanofabricators: A “Star Trek” vision of the future
Nice. A few suggestions:

* support markdown format in a reduced functionality
* use rsync to publish
- Most Node code I encounter that uses “streams” gets something wrong. Usually minor, sometimes major stuff like forgetting errors exist altogether, or to reject a promise wrapper when an error occurs.

- Incorrect use of concurrency stuff like process.nextTick. This function probably doesn’t do what you think it does based on the function name - it won’t “yield to the event loop”.

- for years Buffer and friends was totally busted, these days Buffer has deprecated insecure APIs and uses an internal object pool to avoid the worst of performance issues.

- until Node 12, async stack traces didn’t work and needed to be copied manually for understandable errors.

- anecdotally, whenever I review a popular library I often find some issue where the library papers over incorrectness in order to expose a simpler, more appealing API. For example when I reviewed the popular NPM package execa for executing subprocesses, it put a NodeJS stream based on a Unix pipe into the subprocesses stderr with no way out, even when you request it to connect the parent process stderr directly. This will break with EPIPE if the subprocess writes too much data. But who cares, we get to see stderr in the exception thrown if the command fails, so that’s a nice choice for adoption.

For a taste of how easy and common it is to get this kind of thing wrong, look at this issue in execa from 2019 - stream error handling leads to unresolved promise that hangs forever. Very hard to blame a programmer for using this API wrong. It is so easy to use wrong, and so hard to use correctly.
https://github.com/sindresorhus/execa/issues/350
> I feel like shadowbanning is a contract violation. The social media company takes our words and promises to distribute them. But for some people it doesn't follow through.

Could you cite such a contract or terms and conditions that states that the platform agrees to distribute whatever content that we as users want to distribute. I am not aware of any mainstream ones that does. There are however crypto based platforms that make censorship impossible or hard, but they are not mainstream
"stopped building new homes" is clearly an exaggeration, but the spirit of the comment is spot on. Housing starts did collapse around '08, and only returned to the historical average in ~2021. Even so, we're still producing fewer units than we were producing in the 70's--when the population was ~60% of what it is now!

How can there be any doubt that this production glut has played a huge role in the rise of housing prices?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
I sometimes play the Metal Detector station on my SomaFM app, and I’ll save the songs I like on Spotify. I agree with some other sentiments on here of Doom/Stoner/Sludge metal being good background music. I still don’t know why Sleep’s Dopesmoker album was removed from Spotify. Minimal lyrics. Was my favorite background album for work.
> Keynes was right: he's dead. Unfortunately, we, and our children, are not.

That's the opposite of Keynes' meaning. Keynes was satirizing economists who say, 'it might be bad now, but things will work out in the long run'.
I think you should do some primary research. This threads article argues that calculus is impossible, but the actual reality is [0]:

The draft Mathematics Framework includes calculus in the possible high school pathways, and also suggests ways to enable more students to get access to calculus. It notes that many high schools currently organize their coursework in a manner that requires eighth grade acceleration in order to reach calculus or other advanced mathematics courses by senior year. While some students succeed with this approach, acceleration has proved a problematic option for other students who could reach higher level math courses but would benefit from a stronger foundation in middle school mathematics.

There is nothing in this about actually removing calculus for high achievers, and this there’s an argument against it, it’s what I laid out: “is it better to push more kids into calculus at all costs or should we focus on raising the floor?”

It’s honestly a very similar argument to the (popular on HN) argument of “not everyone needs college”

And to be quite frank, this isn’t coming from nowhere, this is modeled on the success of other western countries with higher math scores across the board.

[0] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp
Our App Engine instances are failing as well
Github Copilot violates the licenses of the open source code that it uses as its source material. I, for one, am pissed off about that.

If you don't care about those authors, or don't care about copyright in general, or you agree with Microsoft's sketchy reasoning that copyright violation never occurs in Github Copilot (even though Github Copilot is perfectly capable of regurgitating big verbatim chunks of code from its training corpus)... then you won't get the hate.
I don't think there's a reason for you to feel dumb: there are a lot of candidates that are the opposite of the grandparent, and want to do "it" for the rest of their lives.

However, a lot of times the "want to do it forever" part could be a sign that the candidates doesn't want to learn anything new, which is indeed a very bad sign.

On the other hand there are people who want to want to keep doing tasks so they get a deeper understanding of the domain, as mentioned elsewhere in the comments... and you can't afford to say no to those people.
Share price is wildly disconnected from day to day business realities, see Tesla.

Facebook's numbers are great: https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...

They will probably slow down, but that's a few years in the future. Meta is #34 on the Fortune500, by the time they slow down they could be #20, who knows, #10.

That's more than enough to live on for decades. And there's more than enough time to get a new CEO, etc.
That's literally what the vaccine clinical trials addressed.. It's a very easy calculation when you assume the virus is endemic and eventually everyone will catch it.
Erie is the worst of it because a) it's shallow b) it's warmest c) it is surrounded by intensive agriculture with underregulated fertilizer run-off. But there are actually some nice places along it.

Long Point on its north shore in southern Ontario is a fantastic beautiful beach.
Doesn't look very native to me, you have to convert them. Could one jailbreak it and simply install the Kindle app?
Couple that with the massive drawdown in Chinese imports and no wonder inflation is blowing up.

United States Imports from China: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports-from-chin...
I use three Pi’s. I have two realtime dashboards with one running Homebridge. I also have on specifically for running a VPN. I’m very satisfied with them but I would never ever consider them for general usage computing.
>> But I also believe in some basic level of 'holding each other accountable'.

I agree. There are certainly climate-related things I try to hold my extended family to account over (e.g. basics like recycling). I guess where we disagree is where the line is and how much criticism we’re willing to accept and impart :)

Thanks for discussing it with me so pleasantly.
That is better, but apologies that I overloaded the word "static" -- I meant the non-assume-role flavor, "aws iam create-access-key", static style credentials. Static in that from AWS's perspective, once issued they don't expire, unlike session credentials that have a finite lifespan

I can now see how my wording was confusing, I'll try to be more precise in the future
I've had two website ideas for similar products: basically mixing facial recognition and OSINT collection to build dossiers and relationship graphs of people, allowing users to search the databases for a cryptocurrency fee. The hard part is hitting the critical mass of submitted and vetted dossiers to make it worth the while for people to search it.
Thank-you for not titling the post 'Our incredible journey'.
Some of it is from greed. Inflation is 8.5% but almost all the major food producers have raised prices by ~15%.
Seeing lots of errors on gcloud currently. Certainly an uptick here too: https://downdetector.co.uk/status/google-cloud/
> pretty clear the primary driver was demand driven.

Perhaps after the sharp downward in 2020. But it isn't clear what is the primary driver after the 1st qtr of 2020.

That chart doesn't necessarily imply consumer consumption is driving the increase. It could be inflation that's driving the uptick in the chart.

If last year it cost $1 to buy a dozen eggs. And now it costs $2 to buy a dozen eggs, it would cause a spike in the chart. Same amount of purchases, but different prices.

It's hard to tell from that chart whether the rise to $600 billion in consumption is due to more consumption or higher prices. Is it 2 * $1/dozen = $2 or 1 * $2/dozen = $2. We end up at $2, but one is via greater consumption and the other via inflation.
I once demo'ed Terraform to one of my old teams using the Dominos Pizza provider as an example. I ended up inadvertently ordering a Hawaiian style pizza to my house. It was....fine.
I think they mean "deterministic," not "immutable"
would a self-host option make sense for some communities that wanted to remain "closed" but still take advantage of the search/archive neatness?
In NYC, ads for jobs will have to say what they pay
I would guess that doing the +1 and +2 is mentally and emotionally easier and more satisfying if it's during a hellish 60 hour work week than in a relaxed 10 hours you freed up by getting more pay and a 30 hour week to do something easy.

Like doing programming problems is fun for a bit, but doing work that actually does something, even if it's simpler in complexity is more satisfying. IMO of course.

I think the recruiters could be pitching better if they went with, do 'it' here and think about what +1 could be and when you figure what that could be, pitch it to us.
This of course assumes the organization sees IT as a value multiplier and not a cost center / plumbing job.
That's excellent news, thanks so much for taking the time to put that together!
Who are automatic theorem provers aimed at? Computer scientists with an interest in maths or mathematicians with an interest in CS? If you are a mathematician starting off with something like Coq is a nightmare. Nobody learns OCamel in college, math majors usually learn R, Python and maybe Java or C.

Making formal proving simple and intuitive is the first step to have it heavily adopted. It should look as close as possible to writing a proof in pure first order logic.
Why does that matter? Kotlin has interop with other JVM languages.
> Awhile back the Founder of Visionect refuted this idea that patents are holding things back on hacker news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25067824

Thank you for providing the link. I agree in general with that opinion as well.
Pulleys.

Visible, physical, simple math... and magical when scrawny little me can lift Big Thing.

Hydraulics / Pneumatics are not as old and aren't as open to inspection while operating, usually; so the magic seems stronger there.

Today's digital systems are still built atop quantization of analog effects; the edge cases and errors (and the techniques used to avoid and correct those errors) might actually be magic, if you want to get into metaphysical wanking about definitions. The lovely maths of signalling systems even resemble those of pulleys, some ways: it's the same magic.
I couldn’t help noticing that as well! While reading it I was pining for lakes I’ve never seen in a country I’ve never been to.
Unless they moved into a van down by the river, a bigger even more expensive home. Ya gotta live somewhere!
> stocks don't have a positive return because GDP increases over time. They have a positive expected return over time because they have a risk premium

You’re both right. The equity risk premium [1] is real. But it’s a premium over something. That something is, approximately, production. (It’s precisely the risk-free rate of return. Which, in the long run, is base-rate production.)

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/equityriskpremium.asp
I've done so as a trial for a week, and then while traveling. It's not something I'd want to do unless the tiny form factor and price were strict requirements. I found it perfectly adequate for my style of programming (vim + command line), and occasional web browsing (limited when traveling, just to assist in doing stuff off the computer, like buying tickets, but even then, I'd mostly use my phone).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30783775

> I spent some time traveling where my only computer was a Raspberry Pi 4 running 64 bit mode, and the only sensible graphics performance I could get in wayland was with “foot”. https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot

> I was really only using it while staying with family and friends where I was always able to use an old monitor or a tiny "bedroom/kitchen" TV, but a hotel TV would be fine too (I'm assuming ports aren't blocked). I brought a Logitech K400 which is small, wireless, and has a builtin trackpad. Was also only using it for programming and basic web browsing. I don't recommend the keyboard (keys are a bit wobbly, some odd key positioning and shapes, definitely takes some getting used to, and the trackpad is relatively poor), but I just wanted something I could use for an hour or two a day, and it was perfectly acceptable for that. If I had to use it for a few more hours, I'd just bring a proper keyboard and mouse (weight permitting).

> I was confident I'd be fine though, I set it up in advance and used it briefly on the couch with a tiny monitor for about a week.

> I strongly recommend taking advantage of the USB HDD boot that's now supported on Pi 4 -- even some 15 year old 60GB spinning platter you have lying around from a long dead laptop is in my experience going to be faster than an SD card. USB3 to SATA connectors are cheap and reliable.

> The reason I did it was just trying not to be wasteful. My laptop died and I have no problem getting a new one, but I'm pretty sure I'll need a new one in a year for work -- the problem is I won't know the specifications (even OS, architecture, etc.) that I'll need until then, so I just wanted to see if I could get away without having to guess in advance. Generally I like to buy only when I need to, and to buy the best thing available at that time (within reason), and use that for a long time.

My uses that are not as a main computer, are that I use a Raspberry Pi 3B+ primarily as a Plex server (streaming content from two big USB3 connected WD HDDs to a PS4 via DLNA), but also a few other things (gitea, Time Machine (though my Macbook is now defunct), tunneling to a supercheap VPS elsewhere). I also use that same RPi3B+ and a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB, running in 64-bit mode) for occasional ARM dev (armv7h and aarch64, respectively), but it's purely educational (assembly, etc.)
It's an interesting idea; not having to stash messages in the actor implementation when doing an async call. I did a little experiment what that could look like using Akka and kotlin suspend functions https://github.com/joost-de-vries/akka-kotlin
There are many others. Kobo for example doesn't lock you to anything and you can pretty much do whatever you want with the Linux on them.
A good question, might be a good time to make a clean break, will give it some thought.
past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300672
Engineering students develop cart to help vendors keep vegetables, fruits fresh
The $23/hr that guy makes at a retailer is more than the starting salary of a public school teacher where I live, even with a masters.
I love nuclear in the abstract (loved the LFTR presentations and other new gen), and I agree strongly that new nuclear is dumb with current economic development curves / LCOE of solar/wind and storage.

What I REALLY like about alternative energy "destroying" nuclear is that the nuclear industry it is destroying is the old PWR / Solid Rod / regulatory / proliferation regimes.

Because what nuclear REALLY needs a clean slate. When the solar/wind/battery markets and technologies stabilize, it should then provide a target for modular reactors, LFTR, etc.
Catskills comedian!! lolll Didn’t expect to see that in a HN comment
> On the other hand, Elon Musk Twitter purchase: $44bn. There's plenty of money out there still.

The money is concentrated in the hands of a very few.
The issue is the problematic usage of the word "legacy" by the author. It is disparaging, almost like trolling.

Being "legacy" or not has nothing to do with the number of users. There are many cutting-edge distributions that (gasp!) do not even use systemd. Would you call those, "legacy"?

Look at the definition of the word, in the context of computing, according to the Oxford dictionary: "denoting or relating to software or hardware that has been superseded but is difficult to replace because of its wide use".

If anything, the most "legacy" distributions should be redhat and debian, and their respective derivatives.
Given their previous track record of rampant IP theft (from EU + Japan in addition to US), it's rather likely that these Chinese companies "developed" this technology through IP theft, rather than greenfield development.

That's also a contributing factor to their products being affordable - because they don't have any R&D costs to recoup, just those associated with espionage.
Ha! You’re right. I forgot about timers, it’s definitely mostly timers - multiple, undifferentiated, timers running simultaneously.

Revised: 50% timers 28% weather, 10% public radio, 10% Spotify, 2% random google searches / trivia