skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The next time I learn something I might do that actually. With books I learned programming and Linux. Also it doesn't have to be read at once but can be stretched over months. Now it seems much harder for me to learn something I'm not familiar with at all.

Learning with video series/online courses rarely works for me also. Although I do like good Getting started tutorials for topics with flat learning curve
(author here)

You are absolutely right! If your use case demands storage of CJK strings, UTF-8 is probably not your best bet.

But our data (mostly stringly typed, think product descriptions or links) is >99% Basic Latin characters and we are getting to a point where memory is actually becoming an issue. So it's neat that Haskell allows us to "upgrade" to UTF-8. With the data being in memory I think compression would not be very helpful either.

Edit: I also kind of agree that UTF-16 gets to much hate :D
I've been thinking that the problem can only begin to be addressed when security becomes a first class citizen in the complete tech stack.

I don't know of many developers, that in their day job, who pro- actively consider security. It's always "it's behind a firewall", or "it's for internal purposes", etc. Security practices need to be built in.

The best way I can think of to remedy this is to make university lecturers care as much about full stack security as say using goto or raw pointers or serverless or <insert flavour of the month>.
I don't think a class on security would do it either.

A good way to fast track security practices in the universities would be to have actual hackathons that attempt to breach cs and it department computers... with extra points if you can make a clown of the head of the it dept or professor of security.

It'll take a few years, I admit, but things would eventually change. I can't see any other way, other than the general populace getting so sick of this stuff that legislation would be written to heavily penalise companies that are breached.

2c
You sort of need a total city redesign. I am amazed at how much we rely on cars in the USA. We drive 300 miles for a $40 hotel room
In Vegas.
For traditional publishing the publisher is a suit magnet; Stephen King's lawyers would have a field day. Bette Midler won big damages against Ford when they asked her to endorse a product, she turned them down, so they hired an impersonator:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-03-24-ca-4461-s...

You really don't want to try this kind of fakery, it could be costly if you have assets to go after.
>IT systems that they have to use were designed by people who have not talked with the workers who use them.

Interesting thread because this is my current $dayjob! I work for an organization that is both a tech company, and a medical services provider, so we can optimize away the boundary between vendor and customer as far as the software is concerned. My particular area of interest is in providing system programmability that can be exploited by tech-capable clinicians to provide both better patient outcomes and more pleasant provider experience. Basically don't try to have software developers understand every last detail of the practice of medicine. Instead provide a programable platform that's usable by a subset of clinicians.
I'm surprised that anyone is surprised by this.

A bit more than a decade ago, in a meeting at Lab126 where we were discussing a then secret future product with voice recognition -- in particular "keyword spotting", so that it could wake up on command -- I said something like: "I doubt this will work, to get high enough accuracy we'd have to stream data constantly for analysis, and consumers would have to expect this. No one would buy it."

I've since learned never to underestimate the naivete of others.
>I think talking about micro-optimizations like this misses the forest through the trees.

It may be different in practice than you are imagining. It's been years so I don't have the exact numbers, but something on the order of 10-20% increased patient throughput in radiology of a major metropolitan hospital that provides for an underserved community. (Keep in mind, it's not just nurses who have to traverse hospitals but patients. Many of them are old or lack mobility, so the changes are compounded.) I don't consider that "micro" but you may have different expectations. As a comparison, I don't think nurses would think a 20% increase in staffing is trivial, but my preference is to measure at the patient level, because that is the outcome I'm most concerned with.

>Showing that they were better than modern day automated shift planning.

Can you explain? I'm not following this statement. I was involved because it wasn't working.

>you want surge capacity in healthcare.

I agree. But like all complicated systems, you rarely get something for nothing. The trope in healthcare is you can choose between quality, cost, and access, but you only get to choose two. Lots of slack in the provider supply side is great for surge capacity, but it generally comes at the expense of cost. That's difficult when many of the same people who complain about the lack of providers also like to point out the cost of healthcare. I would prefer to take system-level view so we aren't essentially just shifting the waste around in the system and instead work to cut it out completely. In this case, excess capacity isn't waste but a desired measure of resilience. But I do think it needs to be measured and managed. My experience has been that nurse managers will just constantly increase the slack in the system rather than address the other issues.

And I absolutely agree there are issues, across many industries, where JIT thought-processes are short-sighted. COVID, and prior to that, Fukashima, has demonstrated this error. There are certain critical systems that we do not want operating at maximum input/output efficiency. If the staffing issues I've referenced were consciously framed in that sort of pragmatic, data-driven argument, I would be the first to stand behind it. But often they were really coming from a "we're-overwhelmed-and-don't-know-what-else-to-do-so-just-hire-more-people" perspective.
I have no doubt that kids (and the young at heart) are having a ball playing VR games, but the real question is whether there's compelling use cases outside of that, of the sort that Meta is constantly trying to highlight. Meta is banking that there is.

So far I haven't seen a compelling mass market use case outside of games (which is a relatively niche market), but if you open up development tools well I suppose the hope is that someone will come up with something.
More accurately, they collaborate on chassis and powertrain development and share the result. More so than many other manufacturers, true, but sharing component development isn't uncommon even between manufacturers without any ownership interest in each other.
Mate did you even read my comment before replying?

> yet none of those competitors get dinged for their device lifetimes. It’s complete dislocation from reality.

I literally said that if Apple is the best the rest (the "standard" or bar) is underground. To paraphrase/reiterate: I think other companies are doing an even shittier job.

> It’s complete dislocation from reality.

I must concur.
Who will do the maintaining on the closed website though? One company has a monopoly on the support
I once had to do a screen replacement (dropped phone).

They did the swap out. I was on applecare if that matters.

It was something like $30 which seemed very reasonable. I walked out in maybe 15 minutes? This was a long time ago, and I lived a few blocks from an apple store.

My GF was amazed though (her family was on android) because at the time their approved / store repair options were pretty much nonexistent so they often would tape a screen with a crack etc.

I've gone years now without a cracked screen, so they are definitely tougher than they used to be (I don't always use a case etc).
Long before the Internet I spent a lot of time in libraries and bookstores, and it was difficult back then to find much beyond basic information about almost anything unless it was somewhat mainstream.

When you did find something unusual or highly detailed, it was cause for celebration.

So no, I don’t feel overwhelmed. It’s a welcome feeling that I can get better answers than ever.
I've always thought Ada's syntax was the clearest as to what's being defined and accessed[1]. That being said, it's Ada...so good luck finding a use case.

1 - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58493193/ada-how-to-expl...
Facebook grew in an environment where people were starting to get used to be spied and measured permanently, and it dialed it to eleven and greedily went for your parent's neighbor's cousin's kid's data too. All for ads.
Yep. I believe that's really the core of the article - overhead like regulation and liability on top of working conditions have people looking to other professions.
If the entire chain of command is responsible, but only one person responsible for the poor result pays a real price, then is it really justice at all?
I didn't say you can't put engineers on-call. But if you do that there are labor laws you need to comply with regarding overtime and suchlike. You can't just pay someone a salary then say "oh yeah you need to wear this pager at the weekend".

I also acknowledge that failure to comply with labor laws and other regulations is widespread in the US, whether knowingly or though ignorance.
Yeah, my thing is, I don't so much care about free coffee in and of itself. I can afford coffee. But it's the signal that it sends. To me, eliminating free coffee (and sodas, etc., per the @sgblank essay that @compiler-guy linked to) communicates that one or both of two things is true:

1. We're in really dire financial straits and you should all probably start looking for an exit while you can.

2. The company doesn't give a shit about the morale of the staff, and will therefore soon be in dire financial straits if it is not already, and you should all probably start looking for an exit while you can.

It's just a really, really bad look, IMO. As managers are so fond of saying... "it's bad optics."
Imagine being this mad over… marketing copy.

I thought it was well written.
> Makes me wonder how much of a programming language can be hotswappable.

For a research language that can make a lot of sense, not so much for a language to be used in industry.

The downside is that different libraries will have different string representations, so you can end up being forced to do a lot of conversion if you're using different libraries that have made different choices from each other, or from your own code.

There are at least 5 commonly used string types - String (linked list of Char), ByteString lazy & strict, and Text lazy and strict. The latter two have a good rationale for being different - byte strings are not necessarily text - but, for various reasons, they're often used to represent text anyway.

These five also have corresponding `readFile` functions - see https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2016/12/beware-of-readfile/ . As Snoyman recommends in that post, it's probably best to "Stick with Data.ByteString.readFile for known-small data, use a streaming package (e.g, conduit) if your choice for large data, and handle the character encoding yourself. And apply this to writeFile and other file-related functions as well."

The first comment on that post starts out with "This problem extends well beyond readFile." Having the string handling more standardized at the language level can make life quite a bit simpler for developers.
Reminds me of this article on how to pack an XML DOM node into 8 bytes:
https://blog.grijjy.com/2020/10/07/an-xml-dom-with-just-8-by...

Each element node has 6 pointers, so a naive struct would need at least 48 bytes, but you can do it with 8
I think it was the year or so after Time Machine launched that a bunch of banners up in Moscone Center had us convinced of a grand Sun / Apple tech marriage.

Re Scheme: It was the first choice of Javascript’s inventor, Brenden Eich, but the suits didn’t go for it. If you want to have a good cry, look up DSSSL and imagine the alternate timeline with S-expressions instead of HTML, DSSSL instead of CSS, and Scheme instead of Javascript.

Pretty sure there’s also a robust open source OpenStep or NeWS ecosystem instead of X11, Al Gore was a two termer, and 9/11 never happened.
> Only senders which send a large volume of legit traffic are allowed. It's ridiculous but sadly true.

That’s the thing I’ll never understand: why would one have to spam email to be considered not spam?

I wonder at which point it is legitimate to go full conspiracy theory, and suspect they’re just trying to block the little players so they can keep their relative monopoly. Maybe they don’t do it on purpose, but the way their anti-spam measures make life real hard for the little ones sure looks convenient.
Does that mean we also have speakers the size of sesame seeds?
120 BPM heart rate is calm? That seems really high.
Integer keys are not uncommon. It's just that they are usually combined as key/value map entry, like the BTreeMap in Rust, such as BTreeMap[int, *myObj] or BTreeMap[string, string]. Another interesting use is ordered set like BTreeSet[int].
The first two paragraphs of Neuromancer:

> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

> “It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deﬁciency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.

became:

> Dead in the sky, BD. Color.

> "When I use it I haven't heard of someone." He was a spray and a good refuge, not asking two words in the week.
Why not autotune? Sure, it's farts and shit sounds, but at least you could make it more melodious.
I work at Microsoft and yup we use Teams internally.
Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Are on the Rise
Shameless plug — https://github.com/reconquest/zeus

Daemon for automatic incremental backup of your ZFS systems to the another (physically connected right now) pool.
Show HN: Netplot, plot network connections in the terminal
SELinux is a perfect tool in its niche — where that niche is "secure-installation system integrators." It's not a tool for regular people; it's for e.g. defense subcontractors who want to certify their virtual appliance as meeting certain standards demanded by certain customers; where meeting those standards requires them to actually go through their virtual appliance from top to bottom and prove the whole thing secure and sandboxed.

It's not a tool for application developers (who at most can supply SELinux templates to start with); nor is it a tool for sysadmins (who really don't have the time or the incentives to deal with it.) It's a tool to be wielded specifically by people occupying a role that, in most organizations, doesn't exist.
Regulations are short term /high friction solutions even if you had good ones, sooner or later big companies will work around them/regulatory capture , change will only come if people show it by what they buy .

Vote with your pocket , there are phones like fairphone [1] which makes right to repair a central part of their design .

Even if people don’t know or care about right to repair a lot of people care about sustainability , you can’t have one sustainable credentials with unrepairable phones like Apple keeps marketing.

Help others in your life make that informed choice .

[1] https://shop.fairphone.com/en/
I am on the same boat but couple hours is terrible still. The best is probably copying the data directory straight which should cut it down to seconds, but i have yet to automate that + there are production credentials/sensitive data problems that needs to be tackled too...
One company doing a slightly less shitty thing doesn't make it not shitty.

> Just admit you hate Apple

I do. I also hate Google (QC issues), Samsung (too many to type out), Motorola/Lenovo (everything from cost cutting to poor updates), Asus (questionable bootloader relocking restrictions), Sony (bootloader unlocking purposely gimping cameras), modern Nokia (no unlocking at all), Microsoft (everything with Nokia/Steve Ballmer)... does that help? I hate everyone to different degrees for different reasons.

Ohh.. btw there's a good bit of suspicion that Apple's efforts are just greenwashing/its right to repair equivalent. Please see Louis Rossman's channel for more info. He makes a living off repairing Apple hardware (mainly Macs).
It's not actually harm, yes, that's what I have been saying. For the 3rd time, we disagree on the definition of harm. No, that doesn't mean I think you should be allowed to stab people.
The 800?

I've no problem getting in a Boeing airplane. The 737NG, in particular, has one of the best (if not THE best) safety records in history.
Oh god, NYC is probably the worst place on earth to try to find a clean, free, toilet.
Optimization settings should not affect memory layout as that is specified by ABI (and large part of the “art of structure packing” is about manually reordering struct fields because the compiler cannot do that however obvious the optimization would be).

And as for the second part: anything that writes sizeof(struct foo) bytes of struct foo is inherently non-portable. If you portably want to (de)serialize something you want to write the thing explicitly, very often the compiler will optimize it to more direct implementation. (And well, this is only portable to platforms where CHAR_BITS == 8)
Those are just excuses and bad ones. You could change insurers- not everyone has this kind of tracking, there are clearly ways around it. Presumably your company doesn't value employee autonomy very highly so they were fine with whatever calculation led to your particular policy.

Same with the tax filing stuff. You could ask employees to do a time sheet (still shitty but at least transfers trust), or you could look at other solutions.

So I don't think you're evil, but the culture you're in is one that doesn't really care about putting administrative burden on employees or about robbing them of autonomy and privacy. Apathy is not always evil, but its definitely a lame excuse and we should all strive for better.

(As an aside, "the insurance company made us" basically summarizes everything that's wrong with our culture. Making decision based on someone else's profit driven risk aversion is directly responsible for how lame we've all become and will eventually lead to us being conquered by societies that don't have such hangups)
I believe there's studies showing that unlimited PTO policies actually result in people taking less time off, especially in competitive environments. The theory is people don't want to be viewed as "the guy" who takes more time off than anyone else. I'm not sure that's a good thing. There's less of that pressure when it's earned PTO.
I don't trust the mute button that much
or... better yet.... 24 hour staffing. like a functioning 24 hour service should be.

This is just abusing the nurse to save a buck.
> If they're not meant to stay on how come most of them have clocks?

Specifically so that the machine is not on until a set time.

If you wanted the heating pad to be perpetually on, there would be no need for a clock. The clock is so that you can have it start brewing later.
FB user base shrinking, including Instagram. The pandemic rebuttal isn't convincing in the face of continued huge growth of TikTok
Yeah, in the stickyness. Unwashed rice is more clumpy.
If you already know how to code and you’ve already been working, what situations do you find yourself in where you need the piece of paper?

I’m in the same situation, self taught, dropout, been working for a nearly a decade—except no one has ever given a fuck.
In some places that is the case but not in others. Europe is too big and diverse to conclude a trend.
3 credits was a normal lecture, 1 credit was a normal lab; 4 credits for e.g. freshman chemistry which was a lecture plus a lab.
I think most people are severely underestimating how much it will take to build the metaverse Zuckerberg is envisioning. He sees the market cap of the metaverse as much larger than Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. He’s not just saying it, he’s changing the name and direction of the entire company.
Even if the deviation has no effect, the fact remains that the design was not updated.

It's perfectly fine for manufacturing to say, "We can't meet this tolerance, are you sure it has to be this exact?" Then design engineering looks at it, decides it does not need to be that exact, and updates the tolerance.

It's not okay to just ship passenger airplanes that don't meet the build specs.
This is a bit of a tangent, but is there a voting system that is similar to ranked choice voting but would prevent someone who had the second least number of original votes from winning?
No you want the brightest people (I object to the term brightest in general but anyway) making the systems so that people don't die. That's the first priority, it doesn't work to get them to check other people's works, they have to make the best works, actually perform what needs to be performed. Then check.
> Why allow emails without authentication?

Because the people on the 'net were generally not bad actors back in the day, so we would you need to lock things down?
I agree with you. The rational HNer thinks of course streaming services should be the first to go when money gets tight. But people don't behave rationally.

The cord-cutting trend didn't really kick off during the depths of the Great Recession, but in the years after when better online alternatives came around.
> for prices to rise to a point where supply and demand are balanced

Is there a limit to the amount of money you would pay to save your life? Is there a predatry loan you wouldn't take to pay for life-saving surgery for your child?

Has this ever been demonstrated to work in healthcare in the real world, outside free-market fantasy land?
The CIA, maybe not, but the NSA for sure. All the bulk surveillance and so on being done to Americans in america should be completely transparent to its citizens, so they can be clear that their rights are not being stepped on
People already know what bikes are, but until the government starts prioritizing non-car transportation and build convenient cities like the Netherlands, no one will ditch the comfort of a car to ride on a non-protected bike path with nowhere to lock up your bike at the destination.
This is a valid and a main drawback of bitfields but in this context bit-access macros would be even worse since you would have pointers to a random uint32 within a struct and good luck keeping track where's what
Having the battery replaced in a Pixel means Google will wipe your phone. I have better things to do than setup my phone again.
Honestly, I used to hate Apple too. Not sure why, it just seemed like more of a glitzy "fashion statement" than a technical innovation. Maybe this was fueled by my own insecurities (I grew up poor), but boy, was I wrong.

After dealing with PC laptops for more than a decade (my first laptop was when I was 19), I finally switched to a MacBook Pro last year and could not be happier. I've had "top" PC products in the past: Razer, X1 Carbon, etc, etc. None even remotely come close in battery life, performance, ease of use, or support.

I switched to Apple phones around 6 years ago, and it's the same story. I still miss my HTC One, but other than that one phone, nothing compares to my iPhone.
Instagram and WhatsApp were competitors in the making that FB bought out. They can't do that trick anymore.
He'll finance it with credit card debt.
How to stop com.apple.metadata:kMDItemWhereFroms attribute from being saved?