skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Any C alternative will be expected to be on par with C in performance. The problem is that C have practically no checks, so any safety checks put into the competing language will have a runtime cost, which often is unacceptable. This leads to a strategy of only having checks in "safe" mode. Where the "fast" mode is just as "unsafe" as C.

I don't think this is true, in the general case: Rust has shown that languages can be safe in ways that improve runtime performance.

In particular, languages like Rust allow programmers to express stronger compile-time constraints on runtime behavior, meaning that the compiler can safely omit bounds and other checks that an ordinary C program would require for safety. Similarly, Rust's (lack of) mutable aliasing opens up entire classes of optimizations that are extremely difficult on C programs (to the extent that Rust regularly exposes bugs in LLVM's alias analysis, due to a lack of exercise on C/C++ inputs).

Edit: Other examples include ergonomic static dispatch (Rust makes things like `foo: impl Trait` look dynamic, but they're really static under the hood) and the entire notion of a "zero-cost abstraction" (Rust's abstractions are no worse than their "as if" equivalent, meaning that the programmer is restricted in their ability to create suboptimal implementations).
This article is just apologism for the status quo. Nothing new here.

> Memory allocation, array and string handling are often tricky, but with the right libraries and a sound memory strategy, it can be minimized.

Such a handwavy deflection. Parsing strings in C is a joke and also a minefield bursting with vulnerabilities. And if you use null terminated strings (which you are, let’s face it) it’s slow.
There are plenty of counterpoints to freakonomics conclusions as well. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-...

It's not about soundbytes but making a good story for entertainment instead of seeking truth.

This happens very broadly with "popular" science kinds of media. A disturbingly high amount of what you read in them is distorted for presentation and entertainment.
> Yeah, writing software in the old language is more convenient because it's older than dirt. More chicken and egg nonsense. It's not impossible to have LLVM add additional targets, right?

It seems like you're being needlessly hostile. There is nothing personal about this discussion, and it's not nonsense. I write embedded software that needs to run on PIC18 microcontrollers. Support for that in LLVM was dropped about 8 years ago. Do you think it's reasonable to say to someone "just add a new LLVM target, it's not literally impossible"?
My only short exposure to Prolog was trying to implement custom submission rules in Gerrit. It made an utter fool out of me at every turn - it really seemed like an insane interface, compared to e.g. a Python or Javascript function that could be user-implemented.

I get the feeling there's more to Prolog than I was able to unlock - can you recommend any reference materials for beginners?
I had a similar setup for a few years in Munich. My office was 5 minutes bike ride from home, I had a nice window and met a lot of interesting people. I would be happy to be in that setup again. The thought of sitting in a cube without window or an open office fills me with dread.
Winter Is Here–Which Space SPACs Will Survive?
Glad you got a good think.

One thing worth pointing out, is that I did try to head off an experience like what you had by stating my position up front. In the first section after the ToC, the third bullet point reads:

> If a Rust program panics, then it signals a bug in the program. That is, correct Rust programs don’t panic.

I suspect you might have just accidentally skipped over that. Because I think it re-affirms that you should indeed not panic arbitrarily.

As for runtime invariants, I have them a lot in Rust. I tend to work on lower level text primitives (regex engines) where perf is quite important. Perf tends to add complexity in the form of an increased number of runtime invariants. I do my best to push them to compile time where I can, but it just isn't always possible.
I actually saw him working at a café this week!
I would say his audience is not just the influential business types, but the types of business influencers who don't have time to read those nerdy book things, so they buy the audio cliffnotes version of such books from Skymall and just listen to the book summaries on the plane.
There used to be lots of interest by fintech companies in using private blockchains to secure trading of derivatives and such. I got the impression it was seen as a way to keep exchanges private (which means less transparency and less ability to regulate them). Not sure if anything came of it, it may be in use but how would anyone know? Though the idea was to use it for verifiable transfers of things of value it wasn't really a cryptocurrency, it focused more on the unforgeable ledger aspect.
> It's a position paper meant to sketch out the negative space that a viable C replacement can't meaningfully compete in

Yeah, I get it and I'm not sure it does that job well enough to be taken seriously.
Searching for images of what that might look like are extremely disappointing. I was hoping for something sci-fi like a pyramid-shaped crystal.
I'm curious, what were the sparcs doing?
Dad’s hate “Chinese crap tools?” Say it ain’t so!

The average person that says “I need a chainsaw” will likely be well served by renting one from a home store, or buying a cheap one from Harbor Freight. They’ll probably use it a dozen times at most.

Is your cheap chainsaw going to hold up as well as the Husqvarna my dad has been using since the late 80s? Absolutely not. Do you live on a 70 acre orchard? No, so a consumer grade tool will do.
This would be a huge deal for more rare/advanced types of printing such as Piezography

Oddly it seems like a simpler problem than 3d printers? You could literally even expose a sheet of photo paper pretty well with a formlabs printer if the paper was UV sensitive.
I use one of his books to even out a broken chair I have.
"I think we're moving fast to a world where many knowledge workers are becoming zero-career fend-for-yourself, kpi-only, you-wont-have-an-office, we-dont-know-you, "widget cranking" gig workers, and trust me that only benefits the shareholders and "the company".."

Employers will do that anyway no matter you are at the office or not.
What happens if I publish the code under a restrictive (non-open source) license?

Even though the code is available, that does not mean you can use it however you want, no?
An almost guaranteed way to get a highly upvoted submission on Hacker News is to submit something about Hacker News...
Yes, a better language would protect innocent programs. Take stack canaries. They are to protect stack corruption due to an application bug, e.g. unsafe input handling. Input handling is perfectly safe in many other languages, but C has a lot of footguns.
I can cite many examples of how cryptocurrency reveals the pervasive harm done by the centralization of finance (financial regulations).

In any case, unless you ban public access to strong encryption, people will use cryptocurrency with increasing frequency. A set of permissionless tools offers the potential for lower friction in finance and payments than tools permissioned by a centralized entity.

The question cryptocurrency forces you to answer is: how far are you willing to take centralization? You can no longer leave free speech and encryption communication alone, while centralizing finance under regulatory authorities.
What compels him to spout this hypocrisy? Is this some corporate psy-op that has captured him? How does Gladwell stand to benefit by saying this, rather than saying "WFH is great" which appears to be his true opinion?
What's your use case? In my case, obsidian + anki seems to do very well (I can keep a decent amount of context in my cards) for math/CS topics.

Can you also give an example how you benefit from your workflow, and say a bit more why Anki wouldn't be sufficient? Wouldn't keeping a track of articles and making cards in Anki achieve the same purpose, or is there something else? Of course the implementation matters, and having a system for paper-reading and revising by itself is a nice feature.
We can look into it. Adding it to the backlog.
> I'm sorry, but the C language toolchain is not great. The only part of the C language toolchain that is good is it's platform support. Every platform has a C compiler.

Please take a few days to review John Regehr’s excellent blog. I’m certain that you’ll find dispelling your ignorance rewarding.

> How do you grab dependencies for and build javascript? npm install, npm build.

Npm is the poster child for supply chain attacks.
Answering my own question, but it looks like llvm-cbe is it, as far as I can tell.
What stops people in power from purging entire populations? Like happened in Georgia, only this time in their own country, and instead of ethnicity, based on the metric of wealth?
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I was surprised at how content-free Malcolm Gladwell's position on this really is. The bit about "feeling necessary" really grates and the bit about "sitting in your pajamas" strikes me reductive and borderline insulting.

> “As we face the battle that all organizations are facing now in getting people back into the office, it’s really hard to explain this core psychological truth, which is we want you to have a feeling of belonging and to feel necessary,” he said.

> Gladwell added that it was “not in your best interest to work at home.”

> “I know it’s a hassle to come into the office, but if you’re just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live?” he questioned. “Don’t you want to feel part of something?”

This idea that if I don't sit through a boring and pointless commute, then sit in an office all day (no matter how much work may need to be done) in order to feel like I "belong" or that I'm "necessary" is entirely unhinged. The tone here that people just "don't know what's good for them" sounds pretty sanctimonious.
Depends on the functions used. memcpy is better than strcpy
There is likely no way to detect how full the ink pad is though. A counter does make perfect sense but it should be legally required to allow the user to replace the pad and reset the counter. Most service alerts are based on usage counters.

But all of this is very specific and complex so there isn’t enough demand for laws to mandate such things.
He isn't wrong, insofar as when you start WFH, the pretense that work is anything other than an involuntary trade of time (in too large a quantity) for money (in to small an amount) people do because they have no other choice drops away.

> “I know it’s a hassle to come into the office, but if you’re just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live?” he questioned. “Don’t you want to feel part of something?”

Doing a braindead typical corporate job from home, in one's pajamas, is an alienating experience. The issue is that, above a certain level of intelligence and awareness, having to go in and do that job on-site is even more alienating.

I don't "feel part of something" in corporate work. I haven't since my 20s, when a series of life circumstances forced me to figure reality out very quick.

At the same time, the few jobs that are intrinsically rewarding and useful do not become less rewarding and useful .

To keep hoi polloi motivated, and to keep them overestimating their tiny actual chance (less than 1%, in many circumstances, because it's typically something one is born into) of being invited into the executive circle so they actually do the work (which they are just smart enough to do, but hopefully not smart enough to see the pointlessness of), the office is pretty much necessary. Otherwise, it becomes just too clear, even to people of sub-mediocre apperception, that "work" isn't really about Starbucks at 11:00 and town halls at 4:00, but that it is merely the trade of an intensely valuable and personal commodity--one's time--for the artificially scarce one called "money" (existing largely, in bulk, to measure the asymmetric state services called "property rights") that (a) is owned in the greatest amounts by the literal worst people in the world, but (b) is absolutely necessary if one wishes access to the means of survival.
I don't understand this response. Nothing really stops that, regardless of implementation language. It's why we have an entire bodged and mostly ineffective AV industry, as well as a slightly less bodged and partially effective endpoint monitoring/detection industry.

Runtime mitigations exist to mitigate some of the latent risk associated with programming in unsafe programming languages. We use them because they're our best known approach to continuing to use those languages without letting script kiddies own us like it's 1993.
They've expanded to laser cutting and stencils too, which are awesome. Purple PCBs forever!
Bitbucket anyone? Or Atlassian is no longer an option?
Are you saying the air has to be ultra pure to avoid fire, or are you misunderstanding what I meant by good in italics?

I originally wrote "very good" or something but I thought that was too strong.
High level: https://personalmba.com/management/

Management is the act of coordinating a group of people to achieve a specific goal while accounting for any Change or Uncertainty.

These are the six principles of Management:

1. Recruit the smallest group of people that can do the job quickly and effectively.
2. Communicate clearly the End Result, who is responsible for what, and the current status.
3. Treat people with respect. Use The Golden Trifecta consistently.
4. Create a productive Environment, and then let people do their work.
5. Have an aggressive plan to complete the project, but don’t have unrealistic expectations regarding certainty and prediction.
6. Measure what you’re doing to see if it’s working, and make the necessary adjustments and Experimentations.

Concepts applied: Comparative Advantage, Communication Overhead, Commander's Intent, Reason Why, Bystander Apathy, Golden Trifecta, Importance, Clanning, Environment, Guiding Structure, Cognitive Switching Penalty, Change, Uncertainty, Planning Fallacy, Parkinson's Law, Tradeoffs, Measures, Key Performance Indicators, Economically Valuable Skills, Five Parts of Every Business, Friction (among others)

Medium level: I like the handbook from Gitlab for looking at interesting Management Artifacts you might produce (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/)

Low level: Might want to search for curriculum from "Masters of Engineering Management" courses and find role-model mentors. Good luck!
Do CEOs on the level of Tim Cook pay any attention to Malcom Gladwell? I don’t know anyone remotely at that level who takes his work seriously.
While I can certainly see improving recall being helpful, for me, knowing when to apply something is the powertool I need. eg. I know what commuting is, I know how to do it . . . what I really need to know is when to commute.
Like you I'm still on the fence, but lately I'm leaning that the Titanic was unseaworthy.
That assumes that homes have AC. Here in the UK it’s common for offices to have AC, but almost no homes do.
Anecdotally it also looks like productivity / output depends not just on the person but also the organization / team. Probably not feasible to say as a blanket statement either way if WFH is more or less productive.
Malcolm Gladwell: that guy who writes about his own thoughts and re-words them as if they are factual and apply to everyone.
That's not the point. The point the parent is making is that yes, languages that include safety features are slower, but you will actually need those safety features in C as well, in the code. So your program will also be slower in C.
Welp, welcome to the surveillance state, everyone!
But why were the industries so much larger?
> It seems like you're being needlessly hostile.

I'm profoundly disappointed. This article's reasoning is not good.

> Do you think it's reasonable to say to someone "just add a new LLVM target, it's not literally impossible"?

No, but that C is already pervasive because it's been around 50 years isn't a case "against an alternative to C" as much as it is a headwind. That's fair. C has a massive head start and no one should discount that. But I'm not exactly certain that was the argument he was making.
The language the innocent programs are written in can remove attack vectors that the malicious programs use; I don’t think it matters what the malicious programs are written in?
i dont disagree, but just to note the CSR gives you $300 back on a very broad, very easy to hit "travel credit", making it 250 a year effectively.
I thoroughly enjoyed the article, but I do tire of the “hundreds of olfactory receptors Vs JUST THREE colour receptors” trope. Perception of EMR is fundamentally simpler (just two receptors could do it, one at either end of the spectrum).

Smell is fundamentally more complex, which is, I suppose, the point, but I feel that the naked repetition of the trope harms articles such as these, where acknowledging the physical complexity directly, without the trope, might better serve.
It would prevent or at least mitigate some classes of exploitation. Buffer overflows are very common attack vectors: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=buffer+over... (386 results, 11 from prior years, so 375 from this year). 23 of those are in kernels, many leading to privilege escalation.
This case I was on the bank text support requesting to make a transaction of $100,000 in one go which the app would not let me do. So it was a real person on the other side. Bank was in Australia called Up.
Australian court finds insurer not liable for ransomware clean-up costs
He makes a lot of money on the corporate lecture circuit. It is probably a lot easier to get invited to talk for $$$$$ if you say shit that the decision-makers want to hear.
Did anybody try to generate desktop icon sets for Linux?
Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated (2019)
There are a lot of different reasons a project would want something like this. In general though, I think the most common is CI and build automation. Currently, build automation for Mac requires doing some shady stuff with VMs, or renting or buying and maintaining a physical Mac. Being able to do everything on Linux vastly simplifies the infrastructure needed to support that.

Even if you're just writing standard native apps with Xcode, being able to build, test, and deploy your app every time you push to the production branch in your Gitlab/Github repo is valuable. With codesign on Linux, you can build that on top of a simple, ~5mb alpine linux container.
Illinois Extended Reality Testbed
Honestly, working from home is kinda shitty, because you lose all the 'watercooler talk', all the informal meets with coworkers, lunches etc., and other opportunities to share ideas and get feedback, that you usually don't have over zoom/teams/...

On the other hand, you can do this even if you work from the office once per week or even once per two weeks, so this might be the solution.
I work in an electronics OEM, and I can tell you that all our products have a variety of age-related failure modes. We design them to last a long time, but not forever. LEDs age, as do capacitors, transistors, and batteries. Electro-mechanical systems are even worse!
Languages where blocks are indicated by indentation are not context-free (you have to keep the current and previous line indentation level as state). Everything about them is more tedious because you can't do structured editing.
January 6 wasn't enough?

Just for fun, what would convince you? "Profound wrong" is a great phrase, but what specifically?
This works if you're just trying to solve the problem for yourself. The suggestion from the parent is if you're trying to help other people
The number of people on iOS and iPadOS with no other computing devices is high. Walled gardens. Lack of ability to easily install any apps you want. Pushes for remote attestation. Hypervisors beneath OSes. The darker parts of “trusted computing”. I could go on with many more examples.
And there's a ton of hard data showing that the executive-favored open office plans massively distract tech workers and hinder productivity, yet a decade later they keep on building them.
Why do you expect services for free? Is it really too much that you have to ask to be upgraded for free?
I recently recall free donuts being offered for medical injections so I think a donut and coffee for my data privacy is a no-brainer. I'm pretty sure it's all been breached time and again anyway.
> Avoid unintentionally erecting Chesterton's fences

This is a great rule of thumb. I often find I unintentionally do that all the time and then I have to figure out why I did something I did. Trying to avoid that with good comments, documentation, etc. earlier in my career would have been a great practice.

I find I often think something is so common-sensical that I would never forget and then come back a while later and have completely forgotten.
Collectively, we just asserted that "ejecting from an airplane is similar to falling on the ground from 6 feet". This doesn't sound right. Surely pilots who eject go through harder stuff than falling on the ground.
I’m having trouble thinking how to explain to my SO “yeah, I’m going to pay for my own office so I can have more freedom and reduced family responsibilities.”
I might be legitimately sleeping in said office for the foreseen future.

Edit: for context my only child is a teenager, and we have 2 dogs.
> That is not the job of the data format, that is the job of the meta data format.

In theory maybe. In practice it's really nice that all JSON documents have the same standard handful of basic datatypes (number, string, etc.).

> Again, json is gods way of teaching bad devs why xml is such a mess.

Maybe that's the lesson bad devs take from it. Good devs take something rather different from it.
Yeah, I use Firefox and I worry about the web increasingly becoming Chrome-only. :(
That applied to intermediaries. This applies to personal use of privacy tools, which is a significant escalation of the criminalization of privacy.
Plenty of tech companies have done just fine skipping VC money, or delaying it until they had maximum leverage, like GitHub or Transmit.

Autodesk isn't really interesting here, though. They IPO'd almost 40 years ago at a tiny fraction of their current value, and that tiny fraction is the only number that matters. Anyone could've jumped on at the IPO and still realized 99% of that $47 billion. The investors missed out, but it wasn't some big whiff. The IPO was mediocre by today's standards.