skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basically engineering as marketing—advise other companies’ engineers to use your company’s products/teach people how to use your company’s tech products/talk at conferences and make demos of your company’s product in action.
His book is out. Scott Alexander did a review: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn...
> I think it's time we bring back some engineering mindset in the design of societal governance, because we might just have been too busy making the internet to notice that the people in charge are no wiser than most of us; in fact they're pretty much the very type of human beings we usually don't listen to for serious matters —at least when we're on the 'good' timeline of humanity.

This is a classic mistake, thinking you or your tribe (in this case your profession) are a special case that will save others. You're right that 'the people in charge are no wiser than most of us', but also you are no wiser than they are. It's humanity all the way down!

It's the people who think they are superior and will help everyone else that are the danger - in fact, the magic of democracy is that it give the power to the everyone else. Often, those superior people are blind to and disregard the needs of others - they are superior and know better, after all - and they have another big problem:

The only way you (or I) can really help is to realize that, and realize we are prone to the same mistakes, biases, corruption, systemic influence, etc. If you don't, then you won't anticipate and manage those risks, and they will sweep you up like so many of your predecessors.

To put it in engineering terms, you would be like a developer who expects that they, unlike everyone else, will write bug-free software and therefore schedules deadlines that way and worse, doesn't provide for any tests, documentation, debugging, failure modes, etc.

Many of your predecessors thought the same as you, and were eaten alive and swept away by the systems in place. Those systems haven't survived by being easy to overcome; plenty of smart people have tried. And there are plenty of hardened veterans of it who will be licking their lips when they see you coming.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't get involved - do, by all means! But please go in with plenty of humility.
Less than a 1000 conformance tests for a standard? Sounds Pretty simple to me, no way you could make an HTML compliance suite that small.
Addendums to fix the initial assessment? It's overrated that engineers and entrepreneurs can self manage. Look at any team of engineers without a good EM or PM
I'm not arguing against the power of the error classes. I argue that you're turning python into golang, whose error handling is arguably worse than python or Java.

> How Python people deal with the fact that simple things like dictionary key lookup or URL parsing raise exceptions without thinking of that as a language-design error, I'll never understand.

"if "x" in dict", or "dict.get("x")" works really well. But again, if you want the exception, it's there. "dict["x"]" will raise.

You also have sets in python so you can do stuff like this:

potential_keys_in_d = set(d.keys()).intersection(potential_keys)
potential_keys_not_in_d = set(potential_keys) - set(keys.d())

A lot of production code uses urlparse() and it raises ValueError. https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.parse.html#urllib.p...

> Or, at least, it shouldn't be throwing any exception your caller would ever expect to need to catch as part of the semantics of using your library.

So your code does 1/0. What should the language do? raise an exception? return NaN? Panic? Core dump?

I ask because 1/0 is perfectly recoverable in most cases. In C it's undefined (core dump anyone?). Golang panics. Python and java raise an exception. And javascript returns ... well ... something worse.

> What Python calls "errors" and Java calls "unchecked exceptions" — e.g. MemoryError and the like — are fine to let "leak out" of pure functions, because those exceptions aren't really intended for the direct caller to handle.

From the standpoint of a being a pragmatic programmer, the language just needs to choose one error channel and let that be the primary form of error passing.

Golang has two error channels, panics and return values, and I'd argue in this respect it's worse than Java.
The first issue is Apple's vision of privacy requires absolute trust in them and providing them with access to all your data so they can leverage whatever parts they decide is useful for their software.

The second issue is Apple facilitated the modern form of having no privacy - apps with discrete access to all our private data, tracking us in real time, using APIs Apple designed, using an approval process Apple cheaped out on, and they have profited immensely from this state of affairs.

The third issue is Apple is often at odds with consumers, there is an entire Wikipedia article about their litigation from when they fucked people who buy ebooks, tech workers they employed, parents who let their kids play iOS games, people who bought laptops with butterfly keyboards, developers they chose to compete with, they often do things contrary to our interests and rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation
The author has been pushing this conjecture for a year over the past year or so, and has been repeatedly called out on the Hardware reddit.

I would recommend not taking their business conjecture without a giant pinch of salt. Just today they were claiming Apple has lost hundreds of engineers in the chip division. The idea that a single division somehow lost hundreds without the industry noticing is ridiculous.
"pronoun czar" is the most apt description of activist devrels I've ever come across. the person's twitter feed speaks to that, in addition of the pinned tweet.
Tow-Boot is great, and slowly being adopted by distributions (typically mobile distributions) as the way to do firmware/booting on aarch64.
> I'd love to see that, but for engineers (who generally value things like accuracy), being involved in politics is particularly distasteful. Instead, we live in world run by lawyers and moderated by marketing consultants, where the truth is unimportant, and discarded completely if it's a hurdle to winning.

Look at Facebook, adtech, cryptocurrency, etc. and tell me how honest and accurate engineers are.

If you really care about the truth, discard these simplistic notions about lawyers, marketing, engineers, etc. They are fodder for Internet discussions, a distraction for the public, but serious reality is a very different thing.
I'm almost certain that this is the work of China. If that is true, China is sending intelligence operatives aboard innocent looking cargo ships and fishing boats, across the Pacific Ocean all the way to the West Coast. They deploy drone swarms to observe Navy ships, evaluate crew responses, and collect electronic intelligence about the ships' sensors.
There’s a mixture of universal features of how societies work well and political fashion. The parochialism is annoying.
If you don't have enough ram no processor can save you. And if you aren't running out of ram adding more won't help. The m1 isn't magic and I'm sure it does some things slower than Intel and some things faster. Maybe for your workload or is slower. For the workloads I run (rails apps, postgres) the m1 has almost identical performance to the Intel i9, but is more efficient in terms of battery life.
Oof. I did not know this one.

> npm (originally short for Node Package Manager)

Acronyms can make sense to switch case, but initialisms... en-pee-em... I guess it happens. I originally was introduced it as Node Package Manager, but I'm gonna make an effort to correct this now.
I used Hired.com to find a few of the jobs I’ve had over the years, including my current job. Happy to recommend them :)
> Do not move to Dallas if you're 23

My company just transferred me to Dallas to trade equities. It's gonna be awesome!
This will be an ever increasing scenario. I'm surprised that we are not putting priority into developing technologies to disrupt drone systems.

And if there is some kind of non-aggression agreement, then some amount of subtlety and plausible deniability must be developed in addition to the direct disruption tools.

It cannot be too hard to blind a device with RF or light or sound.
That one errors out with "Too much traffic" and this one doesn't.
Pretty sure the former
APC Masterswitch AP9211 for my lab (2008)
I take it you don't live in LA
You have to keep in mind gas to get the food. Now if you stop on your way, you can call is 0 total. If you go home first, do things, then go get food, you need to include the cost of fuel.
I implemented multiversion concurrency control and a poor but safe lock free algorithm.

I am still coming up with rules. As the Serializable Snapshot Isolation paper attests, you can avoid dangerous 2 reads and writes to the same data structure with an algorithm (in the paper) with timestamp ordering and trying to detect cycles with a heuristic in the graph with two booleans inConflict and outConflict.

The answer to concurrency bugs is that languages implement MVCC.

See my ideas4 page for concurrency control ideas.

Most software doesn't scale with threads and doesn't offer true parallelism. In other words programs don't use threads to their full potential.

I have an idea for LMAX disruptors with a multiproducer multiconsumer ringbuffer in ideas4. Don't block the event loop!

I like process calculus and pi calculus and CSP. But I think we can combine them altogether.

Universal constructors and work stealing and compare and set is a powerful primitive for concurrency.

HTTPS://GitHub.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-control
HTTPS://GitHub.com/samsquire/compare-and-swap-sort
HTTPS://GitHub.com/samsquire/ideas4
Looks like there are steel ones with textured tips. The engraving doesn't look very pronounced, so not sure if there'll be much difference. I wonder why no ones makes them outright knurled--shouldn't be any harder to clean in a dishwasher.
Yes, “if”…
Yeah the volunteers you’re talking about here are the all-day (7am to 9-10pm!) volunteers, not the counting people who come for just the evening the day of the vote. They outnumber volunteers by a factor of 3-5 where I am.
You mean with the formal complaint to NIST?

https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/group/pqc-forum/at...
Congressional staffers aren’t allowed to accept meals from lobbyists. The rules are very strict, to the point where government employees will do stuff like kick in for the price of their meal at things like industry conferences.
Android should abandon the current permission mode

Everything should be permitted by default, however, the user can choose to return blank, fake or real data.
Context for cancellation and replacing thread-local variables (or indeed any way to observe your "current" thread) is one of the things I like tbh. Though Context has abysmal performance implications.

But yeah, I want a goroutine handle with a "Wait()" method. Ideally also returning the results. Like most languages. It'd eliminate a ton of manual mutex and channel use that doesn't need to exist.

---

Re thread vs tasks: that's an implementation detail. You write threaded code and it runs in multiple threads with thread-like memory behavior. In all in-Go observable ways it's identical to threads, and it could be changed to use real hardware threads tomorrow and none of the semantics would change at all. Even cgo would stay the same.

Go has (green) threads. Being more specific is relevant for runtime implementation spelunking and performance details, but not otherwise.
Geopolitical Shocks to Science
Hamlet is what rerevealed Shakespeare to me. Now, speaking of forest and trees, what's even more mindblowing is to consider all those plays together, all the characters, (and the sonnets). What range! What scope!

Who else? Melville's Moby Dick blew me away a bit like that too. And Joyce. And Goethe.
Great resource, nice work putting it all together. I was on the software side of 360 (mostly C++ and Lua), so I didn't get too deep in the hardware. Most of my time was spent modifying and building on the XAM, glad to see it mentioned briefly in there!

The old screenshots of the dash bring back lots of memories. The releases were all named after European cities at the time; Berlin, Geneva, Stockholm, Madrid, etc.
That’s legal in Europe too. Where’s Gerhard Schroeder these days?
Ask HN: Have You Regretted Immigrating?
I'm curious to hear the stories of who went through economic immigration and regretted it.

I know of some people who went back home. I used to not understand it. Having immigrated myself to North America, I see the point now.
Are unbanked/underbanked driving electric cars? I can’t imagine they can afford to pay cash for those vehicles, and they obviously won’t be getting a car loan. I doubt it’s possible to rent one without a credit card. Not to say the chargers shouldn’t take cash, just that the unbanked seem an implausible excuse.
The argument I've heard for such domain specific software having poor UIs is refined UIs only matter for a the first third "10,000 hours". After becoming an expert you simply become used to the software. Anybody professionally using the software would only see a _loss_ in productivity - even if the UI changes for the better.

See also Emacs, maybe?
America obviously has myriad subcultures. I meant “American” in a generic sense, which I tend to think of as Massachusetts or Iowa rather than Los Angeles. (Same way when folks say “German” they are probably thinking of Bavarians and not Berliners.)
I think it's important to realize that djb's code is an artifact of the era when it was written -- the 1990s, before C99 existed. A lot of his code would be far more readable if "translated" to use types and standard library functions which exist in modern C but didn't exist at the time.
Not "must" but bayesian statistics would argue it likely. Just as it would be highly unusual for somebody who generally supports progressive social ideas to loudly oppose language changes which are generally agreed to be anti-racist. If you do fall into this tiny minority, it would be fascinating to understand how you justify this apparent dissonance.
What do you mean? "die shot bleeding"?
As I mentioned, it's a matter of priorities, not whataboutism. We should fix the financial system: how about we start with Citizens United, with lobbying in Washington, with more stringent insider trading rules, etc.? This (definitionally) should be of a higher priority than the blockchain—if we really care about fixing the financial system. Lamenting that the blockchain might get "regulatory favors" when the government spent $700 billion bailing out the banks in 2008 is so tone-deaf it's almost in poor taste.
No shade taken. Your assessment makes sense if you look at it from a “how does it do today” standpoint.

I don’t really see too much worth in it though. Of course requirements change and people make useful commits to the code. That’s to be found in any lasting open source project.

In a strange way, I find that your comment almost amplifies what I’m trying to say. Perhaps I wasn’t too clear, mea culpa.
Paging doctor Church, paging doctor Church, your patient Turing is here to see you
You can't just shoot someone else's drone down because it's a bit iffy.
Another window manager list site:

http://www.xwinman.org/
I don’t have a strong opinion about it. I have held varying opinions over the years, but my take now is that outside of the kernel, I’m over C, much as I still enjoy writing it.
How is the DRAKE system mentioned several times in the article not a technology to disrupt drone systems?

It's literally an RF jammer!
> - Login to the Mac in question

Really? Usually malicious stuff is installed by the user themselves being unaware of it.
I mean, sure, if you'd like to ignore the entire point of inherent or intrinsic value, then... go for it? Weird flex, but sure.

And no, it's not circular - "negative sum game" is literally baked into the concept of a purely speculative unbacked "asset". More money has to go in than can possibly come out, and there's precisely zilch to show for it.

Any place that accepts crypto is simply immediately selling it for fiat, and making the customer pay more than they otherwise would in fees and headache.

Anyway, it's fun to be obtuse, I know, but you're pushing the limits here.
I remember seeing these when medium was growing years ago.

The end must be near for substack.
My time to shine.

I have built a programmable tooltip for Mac. It works on any app. I use this hundreds of times a day at work for 2y now.

You can select any text and activate the tooltip with the short key. Then, the tooltip offers a list of options like jumping to URL, showing some extra info.

You are the one who write the script to process the text and return the options.

You can check it out here: github.com/tanin47/tip

PS. I configure a mouse button to trigger the Tip short key, so it is even more convenient.
> Funny you use the word "disrupt" in your ending paragraph, given the HN community is so full of aspirational start up founders and engineers who prided themselves on being "disrupters" at least that was the rallying call for a decade.

I don't think it's coincidence. What was a tool has become a religious practice for which the original purpose has been forgotten, and which powerful people have twisted to their own desires - more power and wealth for them by shifting it away from democratic government, the public, by making themselves arbiters of truth who judge, in their monumental, blinding genius, all of the world's scholars - all they need to do is say something disparaging. Now they disrupt everything, including democracy, truth, and freedom.

> a lot of people are scoring points online calling academic research bunk because a lot of it is bunk, published for professional gain instead of pushing human knowledge further

Isn't that just repeating Thiel's and Andressen's claims (as you describe them)? You say it like it's assumed, but other than everyone repeating it, I don't see much evidence of it. Of course it's flawed, like every human endeavor is flawed, including Thiel's and Andressen's.
Thank you for this! I feel dumb. I've been using my RockPro64 as an OpenBSD router and I have wrestled with U-Boot to recognize my hardware. I didn't know OpenBSD came with U-Boot binaries, I've been compiling from source. I'll try the official binaries.
I'm still amazed at how jumping to a rival firm like this is possible in California, those of us in pretty much the rest of the country are locked behind non-competes.
The normal way to describe that movement is “the field of cryptography”. Lots of people are working on it, and almost everyone pays attention to it.
Google: Land cover data at 10m resolution
Weird, mine worked. But probably should spend less, so thanks for the nudge I guess.
Your electric vehicle is going to identify itself to the charger. Paying cash will not gain you any privacy.
Any way to get this on the Internet as a web page? It's ironic how this book covers some of the most advanced technologies in our age, yet gatekeeps it all behind plain old printed pages or a "watermarked ebook."
Things are transparent that don't absorb, scatter or reflect the light. For stuff like quartz the band gap (energy above which photons get absorbed) is higher than the energy of visible light so the light just goes through and its transparent... Are you asking why certain materials don't absorb visible light?
Standard headline-and-introductory-paragraph bait and switch: “remember that breakthrough in human trials? Well, we've extended it to other forms of cancer… [3 paragraphs later] in mice.”
Likely its a bit of hyperbole to get views.

I think there's always a desire to work at a startup in SV and in a low/zero interest rate environment - VCs could probably fund something in the chip design space.

But now that interest rates are going up, I think that will be a lot tougher and Apple will be a better position due to their direct access to free cashflow - to either compete or acquire them at a later date.

Its also an observation that w.r.t. chip design and consumer electronics, the pay is general lower than say Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Web 2.0 based startups (i.e. AirBnb, Uber, DoorDash), etc.

My presumption is that this is because as a chip designer or embedded software/hardware engineer, the capital costs to do anything interesting on your own as a startup (i.e. tape out a chip, mass production in Asia, etc.) are very very high and very fixed and very up-front. Even fabless semiconductors and factory-less product design companies that outsource manufacturing to Asia would need to go find outside capital for IC masks or HW prototypes. You also need a cadre of supply chain, biz dev, marketing, ad spend, channel sales distribution.

Compare that to AirBnb, Dropbox where you need a good idea, a handful of 10x SW engineers and an AWS account that can scale as you grown and a free tier for onboarding customers. Therefore, Google/FB etc. need to pay more to prevent these folks from going off and starting their disruptor (i.e. Insta, WhatsApp, SalesForce).
Then that's not the company you want to work for.
"Cut and paste the options from somewhere" is a questionable practice even when it's not part of a security-critical workflow. And yet I'd venture to say that most people who use OpenSSL do so with commands copy-pasted verbatim from the internet, specifically because of its obtuse complexity.

Set-and-forget still requires you to know what to set.
It’s general interest and there are no technical prerequisites which is part of its magic. (based on the 1st ed)
I used something called Avant browser back in the day and I recall it being the first browser with tabs that I ever saw. I was really young when I used it, but I'm pretty sure I used it for years until I discovered Firefox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avant_Browser
Often, which is why people like me still use uMatrix.
Yes, me and my wife play every night after the kids go to bed.
If it's doing flybys over your naval ship - why not?
Yes, in the sense that Latin was the common language.

But the sense was far stronger in that texts existed in Latin. And for the most part, not in other languages. (I'm not sure what the status of Greek was, given that much of Roman (and Byzantine) culture actually used Greek.)

In modern terms, producing a single copy of a book cost on the order of half-a million to a million dollars: 300 cattle for the vellum medium, and 4-12 months of a scribe's work to copy out the text.

It was vastly more tractable to bring readers to texts (by teaching the small literate portion of the population Latin) than to bring texts to readers.

This all changed with the introduction of the printing press, one of the first consequences of which was creation of a large vernacular literature, both through translation of Latin works and the creation of new works in the common tongue. That also turned out to be highly disruptive, in interesting ways.
In business, if you can't succeed in the current climate, you shouldn't have the job. The job is to succeed in the current climate.

Of course, it's not intended as a logical extreme. People make adjustments in their expectations based on circumstances. But ultimately, you are responsible, especially at that high level (VP of Apple). If you can't deliver the results, why should people pay you?

Government is different: A businessperson controls a business, someone governing can't control reality. But they also can't throw up their hands - again, if they can't do the job, they shouldn't take it.
Is this satire? The over usage of woke is funny.
The amortization still goes down, you don't refinance on another 25 year mortgage typically. So if you kept the same home and refinanced every 5 years the 4th refinancing would be your last and you'd own the home outright after the term.
Trying to navigate and interact with these on mobile is difficult and frustrating. Adding`overflow-x: hidden` will fix most of that and larger graphics for small screens would help a lot.