skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I mean, as far as correctness as concerned, of course it works, but performance-wise in a raytracer I was toying around with it was a dismal failure compared to the (traditionally shunned) analytic approach.

The issue, as far as I understand it, is that LuaJIT only handles traces of two shapes: linear code; or linear loop prologue followed by linear loop body. The conditions of any branches (that could not be determined statically) are evaluated and checked against their tracing-time values, but a failed check (“guard”) throws you out of the compiled trace and back into the interpreter. This includes normal termination of a loop and misspeculated types as well as explicit conditionals.

Of course, handling only these two patterns of control flow is too limiting, so if a guard fails too often the trace compiler can start a new trace from that exit and tie its other end to the original one if it comes back. Aside from handling things like polymorphic functions which get called for more than one combination of types and predictable branches in loops that still get taken occasionally (but too rarely for unrolling), this also turns out to handle nested loops (as explained somewhere in the docs): the inner loop get traced first as a loop, then the outer loop body gets traced as a linear block that ties the end of the inner one back to its beginning, going around from the middle of the outer loop to its end, then from the beginning of its next iteration to the middle.

The catch is that register allocation or optimizations can’t see across trace boundaries, so those side traces get second-class treatment (in particular, only the inner loop gets subjected to loop-invariant code hoisting and strength reduction, as the outer ones are not viewed as loops). Additionally, the part that decides what to trace and how (is it a loop, is it hot, should it be unrolled, etc.) is an opaque pile of heuristics which is generally well tuned, but gets more confused and slower to converge as the nesting level increases.

Turns out having your innermost loop be rejection sampling which usually terminates quickly (under the unrolling threshold) but with a varying number of iterations, in a raytracer that’s already bound to have two or three levels of nested loops, plays merry hell on all of this. Occasionally LuaJIT couldn’t eliminate the GC in the now-“outer” loop and ran 5x slower, occasionally it just fell back to the interpreter and ran 20–100x slower, but generally I think that counts as a failure when the motivation is to avoid libm because it’s slow.

(For similar reasons, the small-vector library used there is almost entirely sad repetitive code along the lines of

c.x = f(a.x, b.x)
if one component then return c end
c.y = f(a.y, b.y)
if two components then return c end
...

because that does not count against the thresholds when you have dozens of these operations per actual iteration.)
Awesome! The you should probably support the ability for people to choose on their own.
this same lady?

https://twitter.com/lulumeservey/status/1511376638487019524
A seasonal report on developer and SMB trends in the cloud
>That’s a big opportunity for scammers. People who are unable to discern scam from not scam get scammed.

Queue ESG in the current time.

I own a startup in that space, we are not scammers (source: trust me, bro) but the amount of charlatans I see everyday is staggering! Btw, Adam Neumann just jumped into this as well, just so you know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Do you think open source code is worse off for the fact that copyright has been removed (via the various licenses, all of which reduce copyright's restrictions)?

In my mind, open source code has been an excellent experiment showing that eschewing copyright doesn't mean people are less creative. Certainly, I've seen more creative open source code than I've seen creative proprietary code.

Similarly, there are huge swathes of fanfiction out there which are incredible pieces of creative writing which are not charged for, are not created for commercial interest, and while technically copyrighted, the author may not even realize that.

There are masses of people producing tiktok videos and spotify music for an audience, with no explicit expectation of copyright protection.

People clearly want attribution, not control to the point where they can say that their work cannot be remixed into a new tiktok video (a common thing), or used as fuel for a new creative endeavor.

On the other hand, copyright is largely used to stop such remixing, to prevent making creative derivative use of a work. If it were used just for "you must attribute me" (what open source licenses reduce it to), I would have no complaints.
Don't make an exception for almost any of those, add in functionality so the administrator can set a password and lock it. You still don't want the manufacturer to have ultimate power.

Maybe for a gambling machine you'd do it differently, but those are already very specially handled.
>The amount of revenue lost to that one single bug is staggering.

The players who are still there are used to it so the value is likely near zero. It's the sort of thing that's 100% worth fixing before launch or soon after so you don't lose players in the first place. But the fix loses value every day it goes unfixed because you're already lost those load time-sensitive players. Keep in mind that years after release it still makes Rockstar/Take-Two millions per day (https://www.thegamer.com/gta-5-rockstar-2-5-million-per-day/) so I guess a lot of players just don't care.

For the record: I'm surprised anyone is willing to tolerate that shit.
These well meaning sort of things are nice but completely miss the point.

Were you pushed, coerced, encouraged, fancied a go, bloody minded or all of the above. There is the concept of the "self starter" - someone who simply does exactly what you think they should. There's the bloody minded ones who simply don't conform.

People are people. No more and no less. Children can be guided and sometimes you get it right. My uncle made a suggestion 35 odd years ago about me looking into Civil Engineering and I ended up running an IT company for the last 22 years.

What got you into STEM/Engineering/IT/whatevs?
What prevents people from duplicating the cryptographic key and using that to access said clubs?
You are aware that even with Roe v. Wade there is still considerable variation in laws between the states? And I wouldn't say that the limits set by Roe v. Wade are at all very permissive compared to most European countries.
Neither was the law recently suggested by the Democrats. And keep in mind that the ruling and the suggested law only restricted the limits the states could impose, the states themselves could still decide to be more permissive than that - and that maybe that's where that impression comes from.

I disagree that race and gender is a far left thing here. Of course you never really defined what you meant exactly here.
NFTs are nothing but a scam and provide no intrinsic value (other than cover for money laundering).

I think that the way would be to use a permission-based, id-linked, reputation-maintaining mechanism. No PoW or PoS -- proof of self. It would have to be designed from the start to account for hostile manipulation. Easier said than done, of course.
> I'm not entirely sure what you're saying but it sounds like your theory is that Texan and Georgian voters were hornswoggled by New York and California carpetbaggers so their votes somehow don't matter for this discussion.

No, I’m making a completely different argument. The point is that Georgia Democrats are closer to Georgia Republicans than California Democrats are to Georgia Republicans. When politics is locally focused, there is less acrimony because the sides are less far apart.

But when Georgia politics came under the national spotlight, it became a proxy for the fight between New York and California Democrats and Mississippi Republicans. “Democrat” in Georgia used to mean Zell Miller, but now refers to Nancy Pelosi. That greatly increased the acrimony of politics in the state.

Your point about Biden actually supports my point. Before southern Democrats rescued his campaign, the Act Blue donors and activists were running a carnival where candidates were all raising their hand to open borders. Trump didn’t run against Biden, he ran against those people. That’s only possible because New York and California Democrats have so much power over the party apparatus and messaging that it’s easy to make them the face of the party.

If the states were split up, that wouldn’t happen. My county exec is a Democrat, but it’s hard for me to get worked up about him because he’s a farmer. If folks in New York and California had no input into the laws that applied to me, or how my schools are run, etc., I don’t think I would follow politics at all.
Pika Pods[0] (no affiliation) is an interesting take on facilitating self-hosting.

They offer a managed service that simplifies deployment of popular foss apps[1] using containerized SELinux. "Self Hosting as a Service"?

Their price estimates (shown on the apps page[1]) start at $1 - $2 per app, per month, a portion of which they share back to the app creators.

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284512

[0] https://www.pikapods.com/

[1] https://www.pikapods.com/apps
>> Arguing whether that tool is still useful is completely valid... I suppose that too, can be debated, insofar as what constitutes "ready, prepared, capable"

Okay. I argue such and debate such. Very clearly. In my original post. What is the point of this reply?

> If you can't afford the servicemember, properly trained and properly insured, then don't "buy" them at all.

Okay. Clearly yes. Now find me a servicemember who would rather have medical retirement over avoiding permanent disability. That's the main reason we should not be risking life and limb unnecessarily. You know, like I said. In my original post. What is the post of the reply?

This knee-jerk need to defend the Army on full display in this thread is, if we're honest, is the primary difference between the military and most of the civilian government: not superior administrative competence, but mostly just better PR.
> Looking at that first link, it appears to cost/kWh is the cost for just the seasonal power that is being produced from hydrogen.

I interpreted those numbers as average LCOE for the electricy supply, but I could be wrong.

Let's assume that you're right, and this only applies to maybe 25% of total energy needs. The averge price would still be increased by $1000/MWh, on top of the renewable costs themselves, grid costs, etc.
Iirc there is case precedence for Adobe successfully invoking the DMCA with a ROT13 protection system. That’s the software equivalence off a child’s decoder ring and can be done in BASH built in (`tr`)
I'm both. I need to deeply care in order to work on it at all and I also need to regularly pivot and re-evaluate. The two go hand-in-hand: the frequent pivoting is how I discover something that I both deeply care about and which I think there might actually be demand for. It's like an evolutionary exploration algorithm.

Like the parent wrote, I think "deeply care, but no viable business plan/market" is a very common failure mode. You need to kill your darlings. Caring deeply is a very necessary but very much not sufficient condition for me. Also, you'll end up caring about something even more if way more people care about it and are happy to have found your product/service. Like how you'll care about cooking even more if other people are happy to eat your food. It's a mutualistic cycle.

The main downside is this can lead to extreme indecisiveness and uncertainty and instability; but I've decided to accept this risk in the trade-off against the risk of building a ladder against the wrong wall.
This solves inter-bank transfers in EU but does not mean payments going out of, or into, the EU are solved.

Crypto takes a different approach: a single protocol that is shared across all countries.
I personally like requests api.

Requests gives you a response, but let's you raise an exception if an error case was caught (404, 500, etc)

And it's only one type (Response) and doesn't force the user into using isinstance to figure out if it succeeded or not.
It also gives arguments to both sides, "nuclear is shit" and "nuclear is the shit"
I’m sorry, but you need to open your eyes to a bigger world. There is real world billions
of dollars of value flowing through these systems daily; and if you don’t think stablecoins are going to be heavily used for international trade and settlement — you will be very wrong in the not too distant future. Terra Luna failure was a big disappointment and a punch to gut for most of this space, it sucked a lot of air out of the room when it imploded. Many a smarter man than I had large sums floating in this; however, to dismiss the entire space is just foolishness. One can settle tens of millions of dollars of value trivially in any internet connected jurisdiction right here right now on a dozen blockchains, how is that not a game changer for international trade and finance. This is not fantasy.
Addendum: I remembered that ffplay existed. Annoyingly, it still doesn't properly handle ffmpeg-generated .gif.mkv files by default, but you can do:

$ ffplay -codec:v gif -i A.gif.mkv

to force correct video codec.

Also, it seems this is not a problem with the video players, but rather that ffmpeg's matroska muxer writes a incorrect video codec id of V_QUICKTIME. It works correctly with mov/.gif.mov (and possibly other container formats), and should work with mkv if you can patch in a correct codec id.
…in a unit test.
But some have left:

> “A handful of young families recently moved away, including Palumbo, who left during the pandemic. Those who’ve left tend to say they made the decision in part because even compared with a few years ago, the island didn’t feel like home anymore.“

There is extra friction to leave a whole island. They can’t just pack up their stuff, stick it in a car and drive far, far away. Not to mention leaving family, friends and community they will have to buy a plane or boat ticket to see again.

I agree there are usually multiple sides to a story and this one definitely leans anti-Ellison with an obvious negative slant from the locals. The article does mention locals think it could have been worse. But I would probably be a little upset if a billionaire buys up all the land around me and drives away small local businesses and under delivers on his promises to the community.
Free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code.

Red Hat certainly does package up a large collection of open source work and sell support for it, but that has not caused authors of open source software to despair and quit writing code. It is not common for a commercial entity to republish open source software, and Red Hat is an exception.

Sure, there are a vast number of open source developers who do it on the side, or are not compensated... but that is also true of professions where copyright remains. Most authors, most artists, they write or draw on the side, post their work to substack or twitter or deviant art or such, and never see a dime.

I think open source software is a good example of what happens when you get rid of copyright - people still feel ownership for what they make, people are still creative, and a tiny fraction of people manage to make a profit off their passion projects.
They're slower if you spend cpu-intensive time in the interpreter. If you're calling wrappers for C functions then there's little difference. For example, sending SPI or I2C data are effectively identical. Same too if you want to render a QR code using a C library for example [1].

So if you ever find that you need more performance you can drop into C, write a user module, and get the benefit of easier Python syntax and C performance.

The only reason some hardware features aren't supported is a lack of effort to expose those features. Come help us fill in the gaps! :P

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=437CZBnK8vI (Not my best presentation, I'm sorry; I was running on very little sleep and a high degree of stress!)
I try to mention that I started by making games as a kid. That seems to resonate with a large number of interviewers. Then we can talk about something fun like Monte Carlo effect for calculating which part of a grid has civilization, or procedural story generation.
Some systems, such as mainframes, resist being crossed with a big X for a long time. Their simplicity (raw tcp bytes that no REST API or HTTP website can outperform) and the big name (IBM) make it extremely resilient. Users' AHTs can't afford an extra 500ms between screens/pages. Users simply will refuse using any other system
>which currently requires a blowup of one statement into four (try, f(), except, pass).

Or ...

with suppress(Exception):
flaky_thing()

... assuming modern Python.
> 1. Ory Kratos provides session-based authentication and user management.
>
> 2. Ory Hydra is a self-managed server that secures access to your applications and APIs with OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect.

Sounds about right.

> 1. Bugs around traits meant we had issues around password change, password recovery and email change/reverifications for our use-case

Can't comment much on these as I haven't experienced those issues, but I'm curious to hear what the issues were.

> 2. Lack of documentation prevented us making progress on 2FA/WebAuthn

Things have moved on in the last months, and the 2FA/WebAuthn implementation seems more mature and documented.

> 3. Bearer token/Oauth consent flow wasn't available without a lot of work because Kratos and Hydra are not "integrated" [1]. Someone shows how they rolled their own integration [2].

That's right, sadly there's no 'integration' available officially. There've been at least two pull requests (I made one of them) to add Hydra integration to the official demo Kratos UI, which for different reasons weren't merged. I'm not sure I'd say it's so much work (essentially, it's getting the existing Kratos session and translating those into a Hydra session, with a couple of API calls), but it's not something very well documented (or at all) and you're left to figure it out by yourself from the API documentation. I hope that integration between the two is improved, at least with an official demo showcasing the calls needed in order and with the right parameters.
You’re giving TX way too much credit here. Most of what they were selling was GPL-violating rebranded Atmosphere code with piracy tools preinstalled. They were screwing over the open-source hacker community and Nintendo at the same time. They probably don’t deserve a prison sentence this harsh, but I’m not particularly sympathetic toward them.
Elon Musk’s space satellites changed the war on the ground
>>Seen from the outside, it surely looks like the German population has been seriously misled.

And yet their sacrifice essentially kick-started the global solar industry. The world owes a round of applause to the German tax payer.
Agreed. All I want is the ability to grep my mail.
How much of that is just sensitivity to the cost of battery cells? If most of the world can buy lithium iron phosphate cells at $100 a kw/h, would battery storage be cost effective in ways it isn't at $300 a kw/h?

(I'm not sure what the actually LFP cell wholesale costs are these days; I get the impression that historically they've been a lot cheaper in China due to patents, but the last of the major patents expired about a month ago so maybe low cost cells will show up everywhere if production can keep up with demand. As a retail customer though in the U.S. it's really hard to find anything under about $300 a kw/h -- if utilities are paying a similar price, I can understand them not wanting to go all-in on battery storage. There's no reason for them to continue to be that expensive.)
"Fractal" is used to describe the property of not resolving the complexity detail until you get up close ("zoom into" the complexity). The amount of use cases does expand alarmingly, but even combinatorial and exponential use cases imply they are inventoried and are thus amenable to prioritization.

In a lot of human work (not just software, but any endeavor involving technology even as "simple" as building a tunnel or simply involving many people coordinating together), complexity emerges this "unknown unknowns" property. This has happened since time immemorial. If you don't believe me, go master how to live out a subsistence life in an agrarian area of $nation during the 1500's with their tools but modern knowledge, then try to convince yourself complexity did not exist back then.
This is great advice - I'm not a founder but I consult and one of the tricks to keep me motivated for each project is to make myself passionate about each project and what I can do. This might seem like circular logic, but becoming passionate about things is a muscle you can develop and it makes things so much easier!
After reading Bardini's excellent biography I found that Dr. Engelbart's unfortunate involvement with Werner Erhard and est was the beginning of his journey down the wrong path. It's hard to say if his ideas around Collective IQ, CoDIAK and DKR were too obtuse for practical application or the world just caught up with his ideas. In any case, it seems centralizing human knowledge isn't going to save the world after all.
I think your problems must stem from astounding levels of corruption.

I’m up in a small town in British Columbia, population circa 40K. Our compost is collected weekly; our recycling and garbage biweekly (garbage used to be weekly but they’ve supplied us with humongous wheeled bins now); our landfill separates trash by kind, sells what can be recycled, and keeps track of where it buried the rest; we have a massive composting facility that sells its end product; our sewer treatment plant sends its output to ranchland spray irrigation and golf courses. In the spring and fall, a chipping truck comes along and mulches any tree trimmings.

We maintain our infrastructure. Old underground services are regularly upgraded on schedule. Roads are resurfaced when they’re worn. Our downtown core was beautified a few years ago, with new trees, brickwork, etc. Down at the beaches, cottonwood trees are removed when they become hazardous; new trees are planted. Our parks are clean, despite the homeless living in them. Heck, we built several apartment buildings for those homeless that have their life together enough to qualify for residency (though provincial funding assisted on this.)

Over the past twenty or thirty years we’ve build a new swimming pool/rec centre; a multi-sheet ice rink; a truly excellent performing arts centre; acres of new park; a new track-and-field venue; removed a decrepit and failing arena; and are in the process of building out a new arena/outdoor sports centre. The only thing we’ve completely failed to implement is a new art gallery.

We do have a homeless problem (our weather is very nice) and there is a heck of a drugs problem (a lot of weed was grown around here back in the day, and there’s an undercurrent of gang activity involving the hard drugs). But on the whole, it’s a very laidback, safe, well-run community of caring people.

It’s sad that your town is a failure. It must be corruption, because surely you have people who can administer with competency comparable to my town.
MicroPython provides a way to stop the GC (and an exception will be raised if memory is attempted to be allocated). This provides us with most of the control we require...
What you are talking about here is called "normalizing deviance". We have had very bad experience with how that process plays out. It is particularly pernicious around safety.
We already have those tools for just about every age range. But like with music, just because you can play twinkle twinkle little star doesn't mean you're going to be able to join the orchestra. And if you do, you're going to need to able to play that grand piano.