skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Better ergonomics of error handling is one of the many reasons the author is working on the new shell, Oil. More at https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/01/28.html

I am working on another one, Next Generation Shell. We agree on the problem, including that error handling in bash is subpar.

> good programming requires foreseeing and handling errors

I have many small scripts that don't care about errors. Continuing execution in presence of errors is definitely not desirable in these instances, termination is. Ignoring errors is the wrong default for a language, I completely agree with Andy (the author) here. That's why bash has "set -euo pipefail" afterthought. Unfortunately it can't be made the default because of compatibility. Additionally, it has its own quirks.

In general, when judging decades old technologies, I do this check: if somebody was inventing the thing today, what would be the reaction? For bash, many choices made then would be unacceptable today. We know better now. Error handling is one of these choices.

Another related not stellar thing is the exit code of a Unix process. It was supposed to be enough to convey the status of a program. Non-zero is not always an error (think "test" or "grep"), making generic error handling not possible.

These are the decisions that we are paying for.
The author seems to be violating the GPL with Menuet64? Menuet64 is pretty clearly a derivative work of Menuet32, which is GPL. However, Menuet64 is released under a non-free license.

Originally I believed the author may be the sole author of Menuet32, and thus could relicense to whatever they wanted. However, the release notes (https://www.menuetos.net/relnotes.htm) credit many other authors with their contributions.
> I think these products are mostly poison for my soul.

You spend time on reddit because you want to. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.

You have a cognitive disonance, logical contradiction that you just need to bring to the surface and follow through. When you are about to reddit ask yourself whether you want to or not. Not some idealized version of yourself in your head. Just what do you want right now.

Then debug, introspect. Eliminate wishful thinking and accept reality - more time on reddit less time for other things. Do I want that?

Answer yes is perfectly fine. You do what you want anyway, but in my case simply bringing these contradictions to my conscious mind (and sometimes looking for a moment where it is exactly - like, I know that it's A or B I can't be spending time on both things at the same time, If I want to learn X it requires time) is enough to eliminate them.

I still spend time on reddit (not that much), but I don't think I'm doing anything I don't want to do or that it would be better to do anything else.

We are always doing what we want to. Telling ourselves that we don't is needless suffering.
And once a less technologically advanced civilization meets a more technologically advanced one, game is over soon.

That is true historically, but historically we weren't at a distance of light years. Given the vastness of the universe, it seems quite possible that by the time we detect another alien civilization via their emissions in the radio spectrum, that civilization has already gone extinct.
You broadly have it right, but it's not "shitty" middleware, despite their problems the actual process of launching an app on Heroku is stellar and was especially groundbreaking 10 years ago. It would provision a server, install dependencies, configure, then launch your app just by pushing a git repository to them.

They were the gold standard for rails deployments back in the day when rails was popular—which was important since rails was actually pretty hard to host on a server compared to say PHP.
Well if it's critical yeah I don't see a problem with leaving off the disclaimer.

If it's positive, then leaving off the disclaimer is basically astroturfing.
I believe that Tesla is ahead in the self-driving industry from an overall technology perspective. What they have failed to do, however, is to tackle the problem of when and how much the user can actually trust their system. This leaves users to struggle to build their own mental models of the same ("Oh, it likes this road", "I don't trust it at high speeds", etc.) This is terrible UX.

Mercedes seems to be stepping up to the plate to actually take a stab at this problem. Inevitably the answers to these questions are not super impressive compared to Tesla's 'hey, it might work in any situation, you never know' approach. But I suspect users will really like it, even though the underlying tech is likely far behind Tesla's.
But the level of inequality has been reduced. Obviously the people at the very top are still going to be very rich. But there is an entire spectrum of wealth that is going to get compressed, which was the original point.

When people talk about "inequality increasing" over the past several decades, what they mean is the opposite of that spectrum compressing. In 1980 there were obviously very rich people. They were just less rich, relative to the median person than they are today. The Fed is responsible for a significant chunk of that divergence. That was the point.
Safari.. 15? Seems to have broken silent auto playing looping videos for me :/
I don't think the GP is 100% correct anyway, it depends a great deal on what happened to cause the accident. Brakes fail because you haven't changed the pads? Your fault. Steering shaft u-joint comes loose on your 2020 Ford? You were never expected to maintain that item in that time frame so is it your fault?
GitHub having outages for you, too?
Does Github sometimes respond with "This page is taking too long to load." and is not running any actions, too? Seems like they have outages again to me.
Noto: A Typeface for the World
thats probably because collectively we stopped using even elementary technology like atlatl, bow+arrow or slingshot, and we lost the need to hunt for the most part. A relatively primitive human could kill racoons with the standard tools they had then. If you needed to you could figure it out.
Diminishing returns on productivity is obvious (eg working 80 hours a week outputs productivity somewhere between 1 to 2 times the productivity of 40 hours a week).

However, rewards for work is also highly nonlinear, and usually rank based. For example, Usain Bolt is not twice as fast as the second fastest runner but Bolt is rewarded many multiples more than the second fastest runner.

What is rational is to think of the payoff or reward space, and think how even a tiny incremental increase in productivity (which compounds) can result in disproportionately large payoffs.
It is nice when articles by people I find informed and experienced end up using some technique or pattern I have used previously. The compiler for my ‘toy’ programming language was originally written in JavaScript, simply to see if I could do it and have an HTML based ‘REPL’ for testing with simplified compiler internal structures display options as well. JS is not fast in most cases, but I got a decent increase in memory usage numbers and speed by implementing something similar to the article’s subslice API. I just went to using index into source string and a length to store in the compiler’s various passes instead of making new strings for each token/lexeme/node/IL element.

Not really important revelations or anything, but as a person who does not do development professionally, it is nice to feel like I may be developing decent instincts for the craft.
Definitely,

port install trash

I had not heard of trash! It seemed so strange to me that rmtrash was not named trash that I had aliased it. I'm not sure which came first, but if it was rmtrash.... how did the dev miss that? Probably a story there, unless rmtrash is newer.
That's just a fallacy because we're life and surrounded by life and want to believe it's everywhere.

But the little we've explored of space, it's just dead rocks. There is literally nothing that has suggested a hint of life outside our atmosphere.

I'm not completely discounting alien life, I'm saying all we have now is hope, wishful thinking and not a shred of proof.
We can pick up recognizable signals only from civilizations that have worked out electromagnetic theory but have not yet developed information theory.

Really we are more likely to pick up recognizable signals from civilizations that are intentionally trying to contact us. It's possible we could pick up radio leakage, but the signal would be a lot weaker. So there are orders of magnitude more stars that could be intentionally contacting us, vs accidentally leaking a signal. (At least assuming the ratio of the strength of their intentional vs accidental radio emissions is similar to ours.)
Neat:) I would never use btrfs myself[0], but very happy to see people exploring all variations of these ideas. The one thing that's starting to bug me though, as I read blog posts about installing nixos: why is the install process so imperative/non-declarative? Once the system is up, the whole thing fits in configuration.nix, but to get there we still have to use masses of shell commands. Is anyone working on bridging that last gap and supporting partitions, filesystems, and mounts (I think that's all that's left?) from nix itself?

[0] I lost 2 root filesystems to btrfs, probably because it couldn't handle space exhaustion. I'm paranoid now.
Google wants people to use Chrome so they're not disintermediated like on iOS. If something drives people away they won't do it.

Disagree about Firefox. They'd do a good job.
Olympics is an extremely atypical competition. Cooperative culture amongst humans is why we are where we are technologically. Without the spirit of collaboration, we have no MRIs and modern medicine, no transistors and semiconductors, no airplanes and bridges.

I wish HN wasn’t so damn depressing. Reading some of cynical stuff here is sometimes harmful for my own mental health.
Echo: High performance, extensible, minimalist Go web framework
Even now we've adopted encryption, which appears sufficiently random.

When you pick up an encrypted signal, it's still obvious there's a signal there. Radio telescopes will pick up cell phone signals, for example; that's why there is a radio quiet zone near the Green Bank telescope. You just can't decode the message itself without the encryption keys and algorithm.
I believe Brave uses Tor for their incognito mode on desktops so we're already seeing some advancements on that front. Unfortunately, brave are still unable to provide tor for their users on android.

For overlay networks to be normalized, popular browser makers have to include them in their mobile versions. For better or worse, android and ios are what most normal people use these days.
> You spend time on reddit because you want to. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.

This seems like a mischaracterization of how addiction works.
Funny. I just had this conversation about ennui, probably not an original one, with a colleague who told me she wrote a thesis on ennui in college:

Why did George Jetson go to work every day? Was it just to have a reason get away from his family? Wasn't the goal of that society that no one had to work, and everyone could be creative and leisureful all the time? Did George want to buy a newer robot? Was he cheating on Jane? What's going to happen to everyone when there's a universal basic income and nothing to do but doomscroll... are they really going to become artists?
All memory is O(log(n)) latency for cache misses, though.
You really shouldn't need to worry about B Trees being used instead of hash maps or something like that. For joins, using sorted and even B Tree base data structures can even give asymptotic benefits due to being able to skip keyspace ranges, potentially even at higher levels of the B Tree.
I recommend practicing real world projects. Avoid theory and reading and planning. Try to follow tutorials and repeat them until you can do the tasks from memory on your own.

Learn Django. It’s a solid web app framework and you can practice Python.

Contribute docs and code changes to some open source projects. It’s a process to figure out what you can do and even evaluate if someone will review and merge it.

There are plenty of packages for Django with “easy” languishing issues. Just ask in a comment if it’s still wanted before you put in time.

Learn modern JavaScript. Not react, just write little JS stuff to enable pages.

Get to know IDE, such as a jetbrains product like Pycharm or vscode. Tweak the key map as you learn about different features.

Try to find a community you can post your demos or progress to. Have fun with it.
Any chance they required copyright assignment / CLA?
I remember when the Steele dossier was published by Buzzfeed. They basically said, “We can’t establish if it’s true, and it probably isnt. But it’s been talked about enough you might as well read the darn thing.”

I don’t know if it’s been discredited, as it was never “credited” in the first place.
Yes, the regulators screwed this up. It's the browser that decides to store a cookie or not. And if the browser UI sucks people can switch and go on with their lives.
I have a fork of `justdoit.nix' https://github.com/cleverca22/nix-tests/blob/master/kexec/ju... which generates installer images with an auto-partitioning script and stub "configuration.nix" embedded in it with basically just enough of a system to get nixops or morph to deploy to it. it's
kind of a pain to get that working the first few times since you have to wait for an image to bake and then test it in QEMU, and then make changes for nvme, etc, but it's brought up three systems now.
If your part of a community that meets your social needs your world view changes and you become conservative. The exception is the groups that aren't directly opposed to conservatism but they typically lack the true community adhesion.

This isn't a democrat or republican thing though, you can totally join a Democratic church, with a strong community, but they are largely minority churches.

They are also still generally conservative.
It is great to see more variable fonts landing. They really feel like the next evolution of typography.

The much beloved Inter comes to mind as well, which also has a variable version and is IMHO a little more elegant :
https://rsms.me/inter/
The scientist in this CBC investigative journalism piece on Air Filters believes diffusers destroy the room’s air quality and never uses one.

Perhaps “Olfactive Pyramid” is less harmful than diffusing essential oils, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

https://youtu.be/0uZKBlwLEFs (diffusers at 16:32)
In vim specifically, there are many more powerful and precise movements you can make by chaining motions. But before those can feel natural and fast, you have to keep your hands on home row.
Git-Wip Work in Progress
Web 3 IRL: Seattle’s CafeDAO Tests Brick-and-Mortar DAO Model
Their AI system has something called “shadow mode” where it can make observations without having any effect on the car. When Tesla needs to collect a dataset of something, like short videos of cars that put on their blinker but did not change lanes, or partially obscured stop signs, they can train a net to run in shadow mode on all their cars and collect more of this edge case. I presume that they also collect a lot of data around disengagements. And then they send the data presumably over Wifi when the customer gets home, or otherwise over the car’s 3G connection. But they collect targeted data, not mass dumps of drives.

Andrej Karpathy has described this system in various talks including on Tesla AI day.
Artificial Intelligence is modeled after human intelligence. It's pretty much useless against a true alien mind, unless we imagine aliens as being human-like with a different shaped body.

The beauty of the film Arrival was showing the challenge of interacting with a truly alien language.
Made it. This was a fun game. Seems more large-scale decisions are later stage
DejaVu Sans is also fine, so is Fira Sans, or Railway if you want to add some style in addition to readability.

Honestly if you don’t care about style your system’s sans serifs is probably fine (or DejaVu if it isn’t). And if you care about style go with a font that matches your design.
Couple of comments replied mentioning studies in this area, and you dismiss them completely (i.e. you show no indication of any value assigned on points made). Seems like you have very strong beliefs/faith/stake in using antibiotics as tic toc.
That’s kind of interesting. About 5 years ago I used to stream on Twitch. I did pretty decent at times up to 500 concurrent viewers.

I came to a similar conclusion when asking myself “why do they even watch me?” The same answer came to me “Loneliness”.

Streaming close to 24/7 helps, because it means you are always available when needed. Having a schedule, means people can be there with you in the times when they are alone. Creating a name for your followers, the tribe, being open with people. These things play into it also.

That’s why people connect around specific games I think, to have something in common.
> I would say it is not possible for you to remain independent

Good thing nobody said this, then. They're just making it clear that they're not explicitly relaying company opinion.

> with the implication that they are unbiased.

Nobody's trying to imply this. Obviously if you work at company X, you're gonna have at least some subconscious bias. The point is to make your potential bias transparent, so others can judge for themselves.

> I work at Google so this is biased towards them, but they didn’t tell me to write this

Yes, though of course the amount of bias can vary. I used to work at Amazon, and my opinion of Amazon didn't seem to significantly change when I started working there, or when I left.

(Of course some people develop a more negative opinion of a company after working there, rather than a positive one)
I write PHP, and I was shocked when I have to write WordPress plugin for the first time.

The forms API in WordPress, for example, require you to output HTml directly from the callback function.

Granted, it was a design that make sense 15 years ago, but I would have though there would be newer API.

It work fine, sure, but doesn't mean I have to like it.
Thanks! I'll have to give it a spin:)
Enabling desktop mode usually fixes this for me. I think changing the domain to old.reddit.com also works.

But yeah, reddit is really shooting itself in the foot with this nonsense.
The coolest part is it's regex search. So you can do really neat things like answer "Does this codebase prefer ' or ` for surrounding code in comments?"

https://source.chromium.org/search?q=comment:%27%5B%5E%5C%5C...

https://source.chromium.org/search?q=comment:%60%5B%5E%5C%5C...

In this case... about even unfortunately lol.

Disclosure: I work at Google.
I am saying such a scenario may possibly exist, not necessarily that it does exist.

Mercedes could be increasing the number of overall deaths by limiting the availability of the feature and still be reducing their liability for when the system is in use.

Let’s say with FSD on all the time that instead of 30,000 people a year dying that only 20,000 people a year die. Would a company accept the liability?

What if the death rate was 10,000? 1,000? 100?

If FSD could prevent 29,900 deaths a year but still see deadly failures 100 times a year, would a company say “I accept the liability”?

So you see, perhaps it’s crucial that companies not be able to be sued out of existence even if a few hundred people a year are dying in exceptional cases under their software, in order to prevent over a quarter million deaths and untold number of maimings every decade.

Also consider in this ethical and legal liability dilemma that these populations are not necessarily subsets, but could be disjoint populations.
> Most subvolumes can be mounted with noatime, except for /home where I frequently need to sort files by modification time.

That doesn't sound right. Noatime turns off recording of the last access time, not modification.
Show HN: Hdrs: A HDFS Client in Rust
The application is open sourced [1], and it gets a lot of attention from all manner of people, ranging from nation states (both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys, depending on what you’re using it for and from where) and activist researchers.

It’s almost certain that some state has an application exploit sitting on a shelf somewhere, which might only be useful in some extremely niche use case, but it’s unlikely that it’s routinely ‘compromised’ in the way that sensationalised media might put it.

What’s more likely is that an exit node has been owned, or is actually operated by some nation state. Even then, you might not even see the actually traffic if it has been re-routed.

The most likely scenario is an OPSEC failure - turns out you need to be very, very good at operations and online hygiene if you want to hide your illicit activities online shocked pikachu.

[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor
Yes but the point of contention was whether this can be done without code generation and static data. And probably both you and I agree it's quite difficult for a large organization to get 20k-30k net LOC additions per engineer without "conifg or autogen".
I haven't done it myself, but from what I've heard it isn't hard to work around the licensing restrictions and run it anyway even without a hobbyist license.

I know a lot of people in the OpenVMS hobbyist community were dead set against people doing that, and I do understand why – one of the big reasons was they were worried that it might give the hobbyist community a bad name inside DEC/Compaq/HP(E), which in turn might lead to the hobbyist program being discontinued.

But, when it comes to OpenVMS on VAX – there is no alternative, I really doubt anyone who currently works for HPE cares one iota, and I'm not sure why VSI should be upset about it either? So maybe that former logic is no longer applicable.

Different story for Alpha and Itanium (and soon to be x86), for which there is a hobbyist program run by VSI, and the same concern (that hobbyists hacking license restrictions might upset the vendor to the point that they cancel the hobbyist program) applies to VSI as well.

(I suppose one possible reason VSI might get upset with breaking licensing restrictions on VAX, is that any technical workaround for VAX licensing might also work on newer platforms – but I don't know if that is actually true, and even if it were, VSI could easily make it false by moving to an incompatible licensing system for their OpenVMS releases.)
It is somewhat rude to speak in imperative ("don't say stuff like this"), and it is completely non-informative. If you disagree with someone, stating your reasons is much more likely to change others' mind than speaking in imperative, which only makes you look like a bully ("don't say stuff like this or I'll take your lunch money").