skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your last paragraph: I agree with C++ w/ GUIs if you need crazy performance -- oil and gas exploration, medical imaging, etc. If your user is internal / big-corpo, then Java Swing or C#/XAML is totally underrated and boosts developer productivity by many-X. Ugly UI is fine in these cases. I know this from experience. Have you used any of these and what is your experience?
BEAM Robots [1] were some of the first robots I ever created in the late-90s. They were extremely accessible to someone still scraping together allowance and riding their bike to radioshack for parts. The photovore was one of the earliest designs I copied. It always astounded me how much the simple analog circuit "brain" made the robot's behavior appear complex and bug-like.

Stripped down to the bare essentials, the simplest photovore circuits [2][3] work by setting up a voltage divider between two photoresistors positioned like eyes on either side of the robot's body. The output is fed into an inverter based oscillation circuit biased by the side of the robot light is coming from. This runs through some more inverters in parallel to step up the current high enough for two tiny motors with wheels. It creates a robot that waddles towards the brightest light in the room.

The simplicity of the circuit makes the various emergent robot behaviors that much more surprising and interesting. The frequency of the oscillations get faster in brighter light and slower in dim conditions, almost like the robot is searching harder to find the light in a dark room. If one wheel gets stuck, the torque stalling motor backfeeds into the control circuit and it can sometimes jolt or vibrate itself unstuck. If you power the whole thing with a solarpanel that charges up a capacitor for bursts of runtime, the robot really seems to come alive as it wiggles it's way towards the light imperative that keep it's circuits fed. There is something magical when you see a robot struggling to stay alive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEAM_robotics

[2] http://solarbotics.net/library/circuits/pix/4_comp_pvore.gif

[3] http://solarbotics.net/library/circuits/bot_popper_240.html
Agreed. Reddit is complete trash now. I think reddit peaked in 2013. Aaron Swartz is rolling in his grave.
It may be an enormous challenge but I’m glad people are trying.
Agreed. Point is, even then, you'll find unrepentant pikers and jacklegs everywhere. Every organization that can't fire them or route around them will be overcome and mired in dysfunction. For whatever reason, other professions just accept this as reality and move on.
> (there is an infamous macro in the linux kernel that is so cleverly hacky that it is on another level)

Probably that says more about the particular programmer than it says about macros. Also on a Linux kernel scale some tradeoffs are different.

> And all that for nothing, as the language is incapable of expressing even such a basic thing as a generic array/vector-like data structure

Something you often do not do when programming in C. You do not want "vector", reallocating by a constant factor without second thoughts, for "serious" systems programming. Same goes for much of the other stuff that is in STL for example.

And you can in fact design macros in a few lines that allow you to do something like

DECLARE_CHUNKLIST(My_Foo_Type) foo_chunklist;
CHUNKLIST_PUSH(&foo_chunklist) = make_foo();

I.e. In fact no terrible noise involved. The hack employed here is

#define DECLARE_CHUNKLIST(type) union { type *_type; struct { /* chunklist implementation ... */ } _impl; }

which allows the list to carry its own type to support operations like CHUNKLIST_PUSH. For good ergonomics this relies on typeof().

But again, there is a lot of "serious" programming that gets by just fine without any of such hacks. Sometimes you're programming an event handling system where you mostle use fixed-size but dynamically-allocated buffers and push those around. There is very little generic code used here, the functions you write are dealing with concrete flat buffers mostly.
The TornadoCash arrest is still high up on HN. If you think completely unaccountable money is going to be left alone you are mistaken. I only fear that the backlash is going to be excessive and leave the rest of us with intrusive restrictions.
WinCleaner
You can begin to say no.
Did you mean hundreds or thounsands of millions of years?
I’m waiting to see the tool, but I also got intrigued by this. Looking forward to the follow up.
Honestly, and dont take my word for it, the international Visa Debit card you get when opening an account works flawlessly!
Wow, this is really great! Just installed it. It is just what I had in mind as an ideal PDF reader. Thank you.
Amazon Black Hat Seller Short Scenario
The people you perceive as getting “picked” for good projects are in reality probably generating those opportunities for themselves.

You can do it. Ask around and figure out what the important problems are for your organization, who is thinking about those problems. Talk to them. Design concrete solutions. Go ahead and start moving it forward.

No one is going to walk up and say, “Hey quit doing things we didn’t ask for!” Or if they do, ignore them. They’re not going to fire you when you’re working hard. Eventually someone will say, “Look how much initiative and leadership this person is displaying! Thank God somebody is doing their job around here!”

Not sure what precise industry you’re in, but general advice is to not bother with certifications. Just start solving problems and learn as you go.
> Code maintenance is hard and requires experience and familiarity

Exactly and also knowing when to be conservative about changes and when to be a bit bolder. That takes experience and trust.
Transferring and holding. This only requires a private key. NFTs are not needed for this.
There is a huge amount of "legacy" software out there and a huge amount of software dev work involves maintaining it.

This is as it should be. It means that the software which people have already created is working and generating value. It's not necessary or desirable that as an industry, we should keep making new things non-stop.

Maybe you really want to be one of the people doing "greenfield" work. If that is really important to you, start looking around and see what other work opportunities are available. Your current employer might give you that opportunity if you ask, but they might not. If they don't, does it matter enough to you that you would switch jobs for it?

Don't worry about whether you are a "bad engineer" or not. That's just a distraction from the actual issue.
The flaw is definitely most acute when it is combined with operators, but it would make storage resizes vastly more accessible for less capable devs if it were able to be done declaratively via the spec instead of via a painful workaround.
You can DIY-it for a lot less. I patented an invention for about $2k. I wrote the claims, specification, and produced the technical drawings myself. Then I had everything reviewed by a patent attorney. If you have a lot of spare money or you're hoping that your patent is going to be the next big thing you may want to shell out for patent lawyers though.

On the other hand, there are cases where even the pros make serious mistakes in drafting patents despite all of the money they charge, because no one really understands an invention like the inventor. So there's a lot to be said for understanding how the patent process works, especially if you might become a prolific inventor at some point, which it sounds like this teenager is well on his way toward. Then it's likely worth the time investment to understand the basics of IP law and patents.
Is there any mitigation against these kinds of power/timing attacks? I think the Switch was originally hacked this way.
Hi Chris,

Can you remind me: Was your end target platform embedded or desktop? If embedded, I cannot see any other way except C/C++.
I wouldn't call it a joke but more like written by a junior in a malware class :)
Maybe 10-15 years ago, C was the best option for some microprocessors. These days, good C++ support is pretty universal.

There is always a compiler available from the manufacturer, and often a gcc target.

The AVR family of processors, for example, are supported by the manufacturer's IAR compiler, the ImageCraft ICCAVR compiler, AVR-GCC and several others. IAR produces the fastest / most compact code in many scenarios, but costs $thousands. The ICCAVR compiler and IDE is much cheaper and preferred by many developers. Personally, I tend to avoid pushing the limits of a processor, so the GCC toolchain is most often good enough.
I'm thinking it may be due to functional programming ideas slowly being introduced to (or were already part of) some of the more trendy/mainstream languages like C++20 (ranges, lambdas, concurrency, etc) & Rust (pattern matching, immutability, etc). Haskell always seems to pop up when discussing these topics lately, which made me more interested than I was previously. I intend to (attempt to) start learning Haskell in the near future, so I'm glad that there's new books being written on the subject.
VM means:

* virtual machine

* virtual memory

* version manager

Amusingly:

* virtual machine is itself overloaded (do you mean OS vm or language runtime vm)

* virtual memory is itself overloaded (do you mean mapping one address space to another via MMU for process isolation or using a swapfile to have more "memory" than ram)

I propose we start calling vcs/scm programs "version managers" so we can make this overloading fully recursive! (that is it would make this the 3rd bullet: do you mean switching between version of programming enviornment or keeping track of source code history?)
No one needs to know about distributed systems until your company wants to send automated emails to customers and someone thinks all requests need retry logic.
Like obliquely insulting people on Hacker News?
he's describing short selling

Some brokers will lend out your stock holdings (usually it's in T&C or you have the option to opt-in to lending for a cut of the interest) to short sellers

These short sellers sell the borrowed stock and hope its price drops and they can buy it back for cheaper.

As shares are fungible, the borrowed share the short-seller has sold gets bought by someone, so two people "own" the same share. In reality, two people are owed a share by the broker, the broker owns a share, and the broker is owed a share by the short-seller, so everything adds up

The short-seller will have posted collateral and if the price of the stock rises too much the broker will force them to sell the collateral to repay their borrowed stock.
Reenigne and Scali, I am very honored to have an answer from both of you :-)
Proof-of-waste systems have to go as well, or a lot more than bitcoin is going to "die in a fire".
It doesn't cost that much to file a patent. It costs a ton of money to hire lawyers though.
What's it like using C++ for something like an afib detector? I imagine you can't use much of the STL, _or_ you toss in your own custom allocators to everything.
The Facebook way! Almost all DBs at FB are MySQL (slightly custom) with MyRocks.
> It is arrogant to think that 1. people are too stupid to debate amongst themselves to let the good information rise to the top and 2. that the person in charge has all available information

I can get behind number 2 but I can’t really get behind number 1. There are too many human motivations other than rhetorical efficiency for this to be true. It’s a nice libertarian idea, but I think the reality is if you look at the spread of ideas, “best” attempting some kind of objective determination rarely rises to the top. This is like basing economic theory on the rational actor. You can come up with some good theories, but they’ll break down when you apply them to reality. I think the reality is unfortunately much more murky. People don’t have to be taught that Facebook is a good place for information for them to be influenced by it. I think most conservative thought I’d based more on personal stories and an appeal to your community then science or rational thought which makes Facebook a more fertile ground.
"After the war, the British decided to demolish these structures. They needed over four months for preparations and over sixty tons of dynamite to destroy one"

Built to last is an understatement.
> most code is legacy code

Exactly this. I remember when I was in school it was definitely stressed to us that if we ever find ourselves working on a greenfield project to consider ourselves extremely lucky. 90% of software development is happening on established codebases.
This creates psychological and political problems.

It's not at all unusual to hire a fresher to start a project and then have an experienced person do the final work to put it into production.

Maybe 1/3 of the time this works really well and you can deploy the system faster than management can approve the deployment. The rest of the time (which consumes more of your time because these projects drag on and on) the fresher got the project to the point where it seemed 80% done to management but the work that is really left to be done is intricate and immense.

Often management thinks the programmer who started the project was really productive and that the finisher is "slow"; they think it would be great if they could get more people like the starter but the reality is that with people like that they wouldn't deliver consistently and the quality of what they'd deliver would be terrible.

It's one thing to feel unappreciated but it's particularly destructive when the finisher internalizes this attitude that they really are unproductive.
With Supabase being a very similar product to Firebase, with the addition of a self hosted version (something that is hard to profit off of), what is the plan for the future in getting market share from Firebase users? I can see that GraphQL was added recently and that is a great feature that Firebase doesn't have, but features like that don't move significant people from Firebase to Supabase.
Yes and no. Is the $25 increasingly irrelevant. Sure. Is it clickbait-y, yes. Does it matter because it might make it more widespread, it probably still does.
What do you recommend? This seems like the singular usecase of cryptocurrency.
An uninspired DHTML exercise, not a chemistry or visualization project.

I'd add to the problems others point out bad layout: without spacing the lantanides and actinides look like rows 8 and 9.
The grass is not always greener. In my experience, this is especially true of 'migration' projects. Migrating an existing system to a new stack can be the worst of both worlds if the existing system is complex and poorly designed. I am living through this right now migrating a 20 year old tangled mess of a system to 'the cloud' and it is a nightmare.

There is a lot of good advice from others here on how to pursue things though.
Bronze age? No. Once gold leaves the sovereigns borders, it is a neutral money.

Since 1971? Yes. That is a very brief experiment in monetary history, and quite Lindy. It can be validly estimated to have 51 years of life left in it (albeit with vast error bars, difficult to calculate).
Not to crash the party or anything. Supabase is great and all (congratulations BTW on such a huge series B!) but in terms of feature completeness and getting actual products built, it doesn't come close to Parse[0].

Same with Appwrite. Both of these are very popular but they either lack essential features or have them behind a subscription wall. For example, the OSS version of Supabase (last I checked) doesn't include the edge functions which are really important for easily computing stuff on the server side. Parse on the other hand is 100% open source and has a huge feature set. It's older than all of these lo-code tools and actually helps solve the issues one comes across when using such tools.

Another thing is extending these tools which is a pain. For example, Parse supports multiple databases by default (postgres & MongoDB) and the ability to write a custom adapter if you need something else. Similarly, if you at any point need to go 100% custom it also makes that possible so you are never locked in. These tools however don't have that level of low-level control and are general all or nothing kind of tools best for small-to-medium sized problems which don't have a lot of room to grow.

But both of these (Appwrite & Supabase) are super markety. Appwrite is all over the place with their ads, Supabase got a huge trend when it launched etc. Parse on the other hand is not too good at marketing their product being fully community run which is one reason not many know of it. Another is their not-so-fancy docs.

I have no stake in any of these products: just my conclusion after having tried all of these.

[0] https://parseplatform.org/
Whatever tool I use to get Python onto a system I never call it directly except when running python -m venv <name> to set up the environment my code will run from.
Price is a factor for how accessible the hack is. If it requires an expensive FGPA or a lot of AWS time to crack then that makes it less appealing.
what exactly is the value proposition upon which you can raise millions?
Unlikely. Blackrock has $10 trillion in assets under management [1], while the entire crypto market is worth $1.78 trillion.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/1/14/blackrock-hits-a...

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-cryptocurrency-market-...
Various states already prohibit using public money to fund abortions, a prohibition on private funds for an act they consider extremely illegal and equivalent to murder is not a stretch.

"12 states prohibit state family planning funds from going to any entity that provides abortions."

https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/state-family...
Startups are great for learning. Make sure you get paid too
This is similar to another pair of conflicting narratives:

1. We will soon all be using $CRYPTO_CURRENCY for day-to-day payments. (Implying that the value of said currency will be stable enough, so that we can measure the value of objects – i.e. determine their price – and store our savings in that currency without high risk of losses.)

2. $CRYPTO_CURRENCY is definitely going to go to the moon in the mid- to long-term future because of 1). I'm putting all my money on it.
I think the point is that anyone with $25 can hack Starlink once the script or instructions are published online. Information costs almost nothing to publish/ share so it's the cost of the hardware that matters.
\begin{rant}

I hate gift giving entirely. Not for economic or ideological reasons, but because buying gifts stresses me the hell out. I don't even like receiving gifts because they come with an unspoken implicit reciprocation. This means I have to buy them something at some point. The better and more thoughtful the gift to me, the greater the anxiety and stress that I feel about trying to be a good a friend by getting something as good and thoughtful for them -- I am terrible at this. I end up getting something they don't want or need which instead of being a good, is a net negative for them because now they have to pretend to like it and then store this unnecessary thing for an indefinite period. Some people do like giving gifts and are good at, I am not and hate it. Now some people may read this and may suggest getting an experiential gift like buying dinner or so on, and yes I have thought of these but its not the same. If I go out with someone and pick up the check, it doesn't have the same gravitas as giving them a wrapped box with a thing in it.

\end{rant}
(Pulls spectacles down to tip of nose) Ha, I remember this site. Back in my day we had to make our animated gif's by hand. I remember having a lot of fun photoshopping each frame and using some shareware to stitch it all together into an animation. However, after all that work I was not going to ditch my hand crafted animated gifs. Thankfully Unisys probably realized there was not much money in going after millions of freely created Geocities sites. About the equivalent of the fed trying to chase down every autist posting on 4chan today.
Good luck with your launch! As a latin in south america, can I open an account in your bank? Do I risk getting blocked if I deposit through crypto exchanges? My country is in ruins and using local banks just means we lose all our money really fast, we have crypto as an alternative but I want a bank I can trust.
a) Interesting choice of words b) Donating to PP is aiding murder (née abortions), it's a small step to abetment.
In my opinion, this (very popular!) line of reasoning is missing the forest for the trees.

A knife is widely regarded as a tool that's legal to own and that, save a few precautions, you can carry with you. Switchblades, despite being also knives, are widely considered dangerous and their sale and possession is overall restricted (presumably) due to a strong correlation between the presence of a switchblade and stabbings.

Just because SMTP and Tornado are protocols it doesn't mean they are the same - one is a protocol enabling a wide range of activities (some of them criminal, some not) while the other is literally designed to hide the origin of money, an activity that most governments frown upon.
I don't know that any of that is true.

Farms can have different makes and models. I also think that there is a lot of on board control.
Using one single search engine really holds you back, in terms of results, and privacy. Use a metasearch engine. I recommend Searx/SearxNG. It's open source, so you can run your own instance if don't trust public ones.

https://searx.be/ for example.
It's a tradeoff. You can have your built-in anti-malware, or you can choose not to leak information on the files you open. Which is more important is not a "one size fits all" situation. If you shut any of that off, you should be aware of the implications, as it is a potential footgun.

It's good that things with security ramifications are separated, but they must be used with care.
Pfizer vaccine becomes DNA in liver cells
In-vitro Swedish study

Would love to understand from anyone what this could mean for liver cells that undergo this RNA to DNA transformation (and absorption?) into their nucleus. Please excuse my naïveté. I am completely unfamiliar with the mechanisms in the microscopic biological realm.

Disclaimer: I am vaxxed (including Pfizer).

Study source: https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73/htm
Where's the contradiction?

If you assume that people answered honestly, it's very possible that remaining proportion of people who viewed Asian Americans negatively were more likely to express anti-Asian American racism and hate over the past year, instead of keeping quiet about their views.

Furthermore, a lot of people are biased to skew their responses or lie due to social-desirability bias [1]. The responses are self-reported. It's highly plausible that many people said their opinion "stayed the same" while actually worsening.

Most importantly, anti-Asian hate crimes have "increased by 339 percent" from 2020 to 2021 [2]. Even if you doubt the data, comparatively, crime reports are more reliable and objective than self-reports when you ask a population about their views of people of a particular ethnicity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-c...
The rail company probably lost a lot more money that they anticipated so maybe they're be more careful about pricing.
Ah thank you, I misinterpreted. I assumed it was talking about changes to the routes themselves over time. I don’t know why, but train-to-train transfers makes more sense. Okay, in that case, I agree fewer is the better word. ;)

There could still be reasons to use ‘least’ subjectively - for example the locations, time of day, traffic, and wait time between transfers may matter.
Wrench-attacking one person is easy. Wrench attacking 10% of your population is impossible.

In CS terms - Digital Central Bank money is O(1) to control. Bitcoin is O(n2).