skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it's unfair to say that 1 man-hour equates to many machine-hours (in terms of dollar cost). Then in terms of per-core performance, modern JavaScript runtimes are nearly competitive with Go and per-core performance is ultimately what matters at scale since you'll load-balance between cores or VMs to saturate your compute.
I don't think pizzas or the artisan rolls (which are what I've seen) are loss leaders. Even at $10 a pie, they're probably making a buck or two. Pizza is cheap to make, so is bread.

I'd be surprised to see them hawking chickens or hot dogs in the line but who knows. Costco goes hard on customer satisfaction, that's why they offer regularly-stocked loss-leader items like that in the first place.
Jars got that big too. At some point the Java team had to patch Hotspot to accept JARs larger than 2GB.

My project weighed in as a jar of about 350MB. At one point I had look inside and it was like 60% protobuf-generated code.
Any chance you're going to have an API? I'd love to have a random Dune quote in my email signature. =)
I've spent a little time wondering if it is acceptable to push emacs as a runtime lately. For example, I've convinced a few co-workers to use magit, and they're comfortable with it when using a shell wrapper to start emacs and call magit-status.

Honestly, I'm kinda convinced that if there was a more locked down "kiosk mode" that didn't let you use the other functionality it could be a good runtime for generic apps.
Thank you for taking the time to share your first-hand perspective!
A regex can be difficult to parse, especially if it is very involved, but in Perl at least, there are ways to make it much easier ( using the /x modifier, for example : https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre#%2Fx-and-%2Fxx ). Comments and and having the regex itself be multiline can make things better, especially if you are creating a particularly complicated one.

Damian Conway highly recommends using the combo of 'xms' his Perl Best Practices Book ( https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/perl-best-practices/059... ).

The revised and considerably newer "Modern Perl Best Practices" video series on O'Reilly's learning platform is particularly good also ( https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/modern-perl-best/978149... ) - with lots of discussion of regexes.
p.s. This is fun. So what constitutes a Brutalist programming language?

It should be something that:

- Exposes the construction materials

- Implies mass and permanence

- Is usually institutional, e.g. libraries, government buildings, public housing. Only rarely shopping centres or company head offices (which were usually done in the "International" style when Brutalism was a thing).

What fits that bill? How about SQL?
Regarding "random process": (and sorry for commenting to myself)

I'm not taking a position on what a "random process" is; for these purposes, a PRNG, a LFSR or even the last three bits of the system-clock would do as well as radioactive decay.
Is that really masculinity? When women do it are they being masculine? It sounds like you're replacing "being a narcissist" with "toxic masculinity".
> fwiw I think this world needs less "it's too hard for me" and more "let me roll up my sleeves and dig into this"

I’m gonna need a hell of a lot more of my time back for that.
> If you have a team, you need to "justify" their existence. Is not enough to keep the lights on or slowly polish the product, you need grand roadmaps to keep yourself busy the next year or two. Ideally you want to justify that you need extra headcount to keep the product expanding.

This. It generates the Bullshit Jobs that David Graeber talked about. As a middle manager or tech lead (Taskmaster) you hire people (Flunkies) to make yourself seem more important as well as for roles (Box Ticker) that you might not need but that any "important" project will retain. In the end, this generates duplicate effort and needless work that requires fixing (Duct-Tapers). The only one of the five Graeber categories not represented is the Goon, and that's because those get moved to MTV and fast tracked to the executive suite.
Finicity has a subpar UX compared to Plaid, especially considering reliability of the connections. Unless Stripe builds its own screen scraping, this imo is a worse product.
Then the Great Emu War is gonna blow your mind.
I think it is more like somebody wrote a blog post that said "FP rules, OO drools" and then other people thought "I'll write a blog post like that!"

Or maybe it is easy to find fault with programming languages you actually use and to idealize programming languages you don't use.

I imagine a world where Common LISP won and reddit/programming would be kvetching all the details CL got wrong while asking "How can I get a COBOL Job?", "Did you know that PHP syntax is based on Chomsky's generative grammar?"

I worked on a project that involved building a stream processing engine in Scala that heavily used Monads.

I remember being told by the manager what the error handling strategy was and thinking "This is like that Amway presentation where they 'draw circles' showing how 8 people get a cut of the $7 tube of toothpaste they sell you and then ask 'How can we beat the prices in the supermarket?', they strike the presentation board with a pointer and say 'By eliminating the middleman!'"

Now, they could have handled errors correctly with monads just as they could have handled errors correctly with exceptions, except that they didn't. That manager approved code review after code review where error handling was absent.
Sounds like a good time to donate to sci-hub to cover attorney fees. They are able to accept several popular cryptocurrencies.
I'm not an apologist for music notation as it exists today, but it doesn't seem obvious that this is a net improvement. I watched the Blue Danube video. Apparently, I still don't understand the notation. There are some notes in the bottom staff that are sitting on the middle ledger line in a group of three. I don't see a thing where it's explained what that means. I don't get it.
I could see a market for that guy, and he takes 10 jobs like that Reddit thread.
As I recall, PHP just seemed blazing fast compared to Perl, and most web hosts already had it installed in Apache. Further, many web hosts didn't even allow CGI due to security issues.
110% agree on microsoft's straight fucking of the minecraft experience. Being the designated household minecraft sysadmin is an intensely miserable experience. Just for example, we decided to pay for their bedrock edition realms hosting thing. Getting that account nonsense sorted was a saga on all its own, but at least they reliably ding our checking account. Oh but wait, every now and then it just loses license auth or something and throws prompts at my kids about "buy this now!" when we've already bought the fucking thing, leading to confused whining that I can do nothing about. Whoever wrote this fucking system should be slapped.
> Can you name a company that has actually been doing this better?

No. But that doesn't mean that Apple hasn't fallen prey to this phenomenon. It just means that they set the bar incredibly high to begin with.

My first Apple was an Apple II, and I have never been without an Apple product since then. I currently own three Apple phones and eight Apple laptops. But for me the overall usability and quality of Apple products has been in decline over the last decade or so. I still run Mavericks on many of my machines because it was the last version of MacOS that Just Worked.
Should avoid hiring people from big companies that are used to promotions every year.
I believe only the dimmer switches are non-neutral, since it actually piggybacks off dimming to provide neutral capability (i.e. it actually is always on but dimmed _verrrrrrry_ low to get the bare minimum power required to run its chips without being visible at the appliance).
I'm surprised by how hacky the whole process is and how it's mostly just about tuning different hyperparameters
Edwin from Stripe here. Stripe does integrate directly with banks. In our beta period, most volume we’ve seen has been over bank APIs. Some banks do not have APIs—we use financial partners to connect with them, and we’re talking with many banks in hopes that they will enable direct API access soon.

Our pricing is upfront: https://stripe.com/en-us/financial-connections#pricing. We’ve worked with a large beta group of users to make sure the pricing is in line with what they see in the market.
And he is completely utterly off base with that. It just doesn’t match reality.

Anyone can run a LN node; you are free to open channels and interact with the network without any centralized controller. For any definition of centralized I know (say, 1 big api provider, or a collection of PoS stake nodes), this does not apply to LN.

There is no censorship possible in this construction — indeed the peers routing the payments don’t even know the originator, just liquidity levels between their channels. Analogous to onion routing — how can a peer censor a circuit if they don’t know the originating and destination endpoints?

Calling Lightning centralized is something an ignorant precoiner would say. Really, rvz doesn’t know what they are talking about.
A problem I've noticed working at larger companies is complexity simply for the sake of demonstrating complexity. In order to demonstrate technical prowess or importance, engineers will push a project in terms of headcount, solution, etc.

Good engineering can look simple. The best engineers I've worked with will make things look easy. This can be at odds with promo driven culture.
I am absolutely astounded. This is incredible craftsmanship, on par with mechanical watches themselves.

This creator is absolutely among the best at his craft. I lack the words to properly describe my admiration.
I should probably just stand up a Minetest server alongside Minecraft and try it out. I've been on Minecraft since the really early days, so I hate to move away from it, but it's becoming such a damn chore, entirely due to how they've handled the account transition and how purchasing works.
This is always the result of someone looking at productivity as zero sum, some management practices encourage zero sum behavior. If management doesn't actively incentivize non-zero sum behavior - then zero sum behavior rules. Consider the following list of highly effective zero sum behaviors.

Effective Zero Sum behaviors that management should avoid:

0) I can ship faster than all of my team mates if I nitpick their CRs and get mine quickly approved by our easier reviews.

1) I can make sure my CR reviews are always faster if I am the nitpicky a-hole on every other CR

2) I can ship faster if I don't add as many tests as my peers. I'll promise to add them in a later CR and forget about it.

3) I can ship faster if I write software that is difficult for others to work on.

4) I can seem like a smarter engineer than everyone else by using jargon and writing difficult to understand code.

5) I can convince management to look at my X,Y,Z productivity metrics, while the team remains ignorant. (Code Review iterations is a dangerous example of this)

Big thing is to recognize signs of zero sum behavior, and investigate if it's being done intentionally or unintentionally. Even if its intentional, it may simply be a bad reaction to the surrounding incentive model of the organization.
The economics of writing a technical book for a publisher are very poor, even with better royalty rates. There's an adverse selection problem: many of the people most qualified to write a book bill out at rates that make sinking time into a book project irrational.

It's a reason I take self-published technical books more seriously than "major" publisher books; the incentives are better lined up. 20 years ago, you could make an argument that working with a publisher would get your book on shelves at brick and mortar stores. But it's 2022 and to a first approximation 0% of technical book readers shop at Barnes and Noble.

The other reason you can imagine someone writing a "major" publisher book is that they lead a project they want to generate attention for. An O'Reilly book about your web framework has the benefit of implicitly endorsing the framework as something mainstream. That's a valid reason to do it --- for the author. But the incentives aren't lined up well for the reader!
GIP/GLP-1 Receptor Agonist Slashes Body Weight by More Than 20%
"Easy, no one gets promoted for fixing anything, but creating the next broken thing? That's vision." -- svachalek

THIS IS A GREAT QUOTE! UPVOTE FOR REAL INSIGHT.
Larry Wall said once that he added sigils in Perl so he could freely add features to the language without conflicting with other's peoples variable names. It's a language design choice that makes sense for Perl's maximalism approach to features.

Perl is very well thought out, in a way that I don't think gets enough credit. For example, the three loop controls (next, last, redo) are four letters long, which makes remembering them easier. In a world where I sometimes have to jump between languages I haven't used in a while, and I'm always forgetting what arbitrary word choice this particular language used for a feature, it's nice to come back to Perl and have a language where the grammar is a little bit less arbitrary.
I host WordPress, Vaultwarden, Emby, Matomo, Bookstack, Adguard, nextcloud to name a few using Cloudron
Assuming the worst possible interpretation of someone's comment is also toxic.
> I'm more than two decades away from being gen-z, and I still agree with that sentiment.

Can’t really be a comment without a aside-from-the-point slurring
Fair enough as well, but the internet seems full of people who’ve used php decades ago, and spread falsehoods based on that as fact. Your REPL complaint specifically is void these days - you can do exactly the same with a php interpreter, there’s kernels for Jupyter, tracebacks, repl locally and in any production environment (readline is baked in).

It’s incredibly frustrating to see people discuss the language without any actual knowledge of it. Modern php involves one of the most stable package managers of any language, an extremely fast runtime with a JIT compiler and opcode cache, asynchronous code and coroutines (well, native green threads at least, but proper coroutines via an extension), mature frameworks, stateful application servers, solid standards among frameworks, containerised stacks,… it’s a joy to work with, yet people complain about standard library function names and form handling in templates from 1999.
Can we predict if DALL-E 2 will create a good image or not for a given text?
I have done a small experiment to see if we can predict when DALL-E 2 will generate a good image. Details about the experiment are at https://twitter.com/nutanc/status/1521906864589393920

Tl;Dr;

I think by mixing and matching we can see when Dalle 2 works.

1. Test sentence embedding on a QnA model.

2. Search Google for images on that sentence.

If both 1 and 2 work then Dalle2 will give a good result.
Replying to myself, because after reviewing other comments I realized I didn't read the linked post thoroughly enough. Near the end he proposes a format called "usv", basically using the control codes (unit separator \u001f and record separator \u001e) built into ASCII and now Unicode for their intended purpose, which is actually a really good idea! Apparently this had been noted earlier as a format called "adt"[0].

[0]https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-form...
Thoughts on the following idea? I think Google's incentives have a problem similar to the incentives of any other company: It's open-ended, and possible to game everything. Whether promotions are based on the "hard problems" solved by your work, or the revenue it generates for the company -- or hell, even the software quality/performance -- this will always cause drama, people will get mad and leave. Any choice will lead to some positives and negatives for the whole company.

You might hate Google's choice, maybe enough to leave, but you might end up joining Microsoft/MANA and hate their incentives too. Basically, you're back to square one.
If you wouldn’t mind answering a question, how difficult is it to swap a dial/handset/movement set into a different case?

I saw a custom mod watch that paired the face/movement of a Marathon navigator with an O&W diver case*. Is a combination I find desirable (as the Marathon bezel is too chunky for my use), but the maker won’t respond to emails.

Is it possible that the combination could be “ drop in” or is it likely to require significant modification?

*https://westcoastime.com/m16typidivbe.html
Making the Clubhouse hallway more relevant with machine learning
Well, he just got one more. What an absolute treasure.
We know that's false though, just through polling. The majority of Americans support abortion with restrictions. Very few people support non-medically necessary abortions at 39 weeks for instance. So to prevent that, you need regulations to draw the line somewhere, wherever that line is being up for debate.
> It doesn't have in-built immutable data structures

Immutable data structures by default would involve avoidable overhead, so that's why they aren't a built in. There are well-known crates that do provide persistent data structures in Rust.

> Struct fields being private by default is a dead giveaway (unnecessary in an FP language).

Data hiding is just as useful in functional programming; in particular, it enables you to expose an interface to data that stays valid under any isomorphism, while preserving desired invariants. Structs with generally accessible and updatable fields are a special case.
> Put very simply, the problem is that Google promotes people for "solving hard problems" not for solving USEFUL problems.

Playing the devil's advocate here, but shouldn't one position in the technical career ladder be correlated with technical expertise? Furthermore, technical ability is something that the employee has some control over: whereas impact to the business has more external factors.

The incentive problem to align people with the needs of the users is difficult. I imagine the best way to handle that would be through bonuses/profit sharing for high impact work, whereas promotions focus on difficulty of work.
GNU project does not write manual pages, they use info. Most of these manual pages have been written for Debian because in Debian the rules say there should be no program without a man page. But typically these man pages are just summaries of available options without much explanation of concepts.

Personally I have no problem to navigate info because I learned that before HTML was invented. Of course today many people don't accept the idea that one would need to learn such tool. Well, luckily they can read the same content on the Web in various layouts. Working offline is not a very common requirement.
> Also perhaps ironically, this style of mixing code and HTML has generally come to be regarded as an antipattern.

Tell that to the React world :P
More evidence that those who know how to make money do not know what do with it.
That was certainly part of the convenience out of the box. But you could have done something similar with mod_perl since it had filters that could act on every page. Then embperl started to gain popularity some time in 1996, which was decidedly even more like a templating engine, and after that came Mason.

PHP really exploded in popularity when web hosting took off. It had a safe mode that made it possible to for several customers to co-exist in the same web server, without having the ability to read each other's files.
Parts rarely fail on watches from the 50's on, especially the better made watches that are sealed. Even those that arn't sealed very well, the parts seem to last.

If a part does fail, it's usually the old blue steel mainsprings.

They can be replaced with modern White-Alloy springs. (That is just a brand name.)

Watches are my thing. I don't know why I like them so much, but do.

Servicing does take awhile to learn though. That whole 10,000 hrs probally. Servicing a watch does not take that long to learn. I'm talking about making parts with a Jeweler's lathe. And getting to the point where you know those parts well enough to visualize exactly what's wrong with a timepiece by looking at it.

If you did learn to clean/oil your mechanical watch, it's something that will be passed down to loved ones.

Oh yea, Service a mechanical watch when it stops keeping good time. That is unless you take it in the water.

I know a watchmaker who told his father he needed to Service his gifted wristwatch. His father got it 30 years ago as a present, and just wore it daily. The watchmaker was expecting dried up oil, but to his astonishment, the oil was still there. It was hermetically sealed. Oils do breakdown, but he couldn't find any damage to parts using a 40x stereoscope.
Why does stanford need a billion dollars to do something. Whats the purpose of their endowment?
... the Lisa, the Apple III, firewire, calling wifi "Airport" for way too long, that home speaker boombox thing, the weird round mouse that came with the iMac, ...

But seriously, I remember reading on here a comment from a previous Apple employee that all of their products are designed with the primary goal of looking good in a keynote presentation, which makes sense for their image, but results in underdeveloped products that "disappear" after a few years.
I don't think you're disagreeing with the parent poster, you just re-framed it terms that gloss over the downsides.
First of all, the destruction of property, the deaths and the displacement of millions of people that Ukraine’s suffering is certainly not winning. They’re also not punishing Russia, as they lack the capability of doing so. They’re fighting for survival.

The US is contrary to what you’ve said essential to this conflict. Without the US, Ukraine would already have a new pro-Russia president and the EU would have folded like a wet towel.

Finally, “everyone” is not really everyone: it’s the US and allies. Countries that are bordering Russia like China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan or Belarus don’t necessarily share those interests or have opposite interests.
Brew vs macports in a nutshell.
Ask HN: Does FAANG innovate anymore? If not, where to go?
I’m about to graduate and it seemed obvious to aim for google or one of the other faangs until my classmate asked me, do any of them really innovate anymore?

I want to work somewhere where they are doing something new and exciting. Which companies do you think still embody this?

Some that come to mind are SpaceX, Tesla, Waymo, Meta and Microsoft are trying hard, maybe Intel
Why could any of those countries not make the same argument, saying all other countries + the US pollute a lot more than them therefore thats not really their business ?
It's prestigious, and arguably the value of the prestige is worth more than the projected cash.

How much money is there in "Game Programming for Haskell", really? You release with O'Reilly and you get 10% or $1,000. You self-publish and you make more per sale, much more, but make much fewer sales - so, let's say $3,000.

But publishing with O'Reilly, you get accepted on the speaker's circuit and start getting asked to do contract work; publishing on your own, you don't (as much). It's arguably worth losing out on a one-time gain of $2,000 for that.