skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Couple thoughts/questions in no particular order:

---

If arrays are passed by reference, how does the bounds-checking code deal with aliasing? For instance (apologies if this syntax is wrong):

munge_arrays(int n, int[] a, int[] b) {
if (n < 0) || (n >= b.size)
return
a.Pop()
return b[n]
}

// good callsite
first_array := [1,2,3]
second_array := [4,5,6]
munge_arrays(1, first_array, second_array)

// callsite
target := [1,2,3,4]
result = munge_arrays(target.size-1, target, target)

The "Array Bounds" section on the "Highlights" page suggests that the compiler will try to spot indexing errors (like accessing target[target.size]), but thanks to aliasing b can change size "at a distance" if the right parameters are passed to munge_arrays.

---

What are the scoping rules for enum and bitflag names? The page in the Quick Start is unclear - sometimes they are qualified with the type name (Fruit.Apple) but not always (Banana, Dir farther down). Is this like Haskell records where every name has to be globally-unique?

---

Similar question for "extend" - the last couple lines of the "Struct and Class" page hint at a feature, but it's unclear what the scope of extension is. Is that based on the type of the first argument of the function being extended (Test in this case)?

---

One more scoping question: what names are in scope in an _OnBreak clause? For instance, in the nested part of the "LoopsWithExits" example, can that inner _OnBreak see v2?

---

How does constructing an instance of a class with arguments work (if at all)? The examples of constructor() functions are all arity zero, is the intent that an instance be constructed "blank" and then subsequently mutated?

---

One feature notably absent from the examples is passing functions as parameters. For instance, is it possible to write a "mapIntArray" function that takes an "int[]" and a function (that takes an int and returns an int) then returns the result of applying the function to each element of the array?

---

Has features not found in any other language

IMO you should either list them, or change the marketing language. I'd recommend the latter - people don't pick languages because they have unique features, they pick them because they NEED what the unique features help them accomplish. What's some code that Bolin makes easier/clearer/safer/whatever to write?

---

(e) Licensee shall not publish or disclose to any third party the results
of any benchmark tests or other evaluation run on the Software without the
prior written consent of DeLellis.

Is this 1994? Did I accidentally click on a link to Oracle.com? If I downloaded the software and did some experiments to answer my own questions above, would I have to ask for PERMISSION to post the results?

You want "the community" to contribute feedback and ideas for free, but you want to retain absolute control over both the software and the conversation. That's not a good trade.
A washing machine should last more than two years in home use. We have some laws here in Australia that makes them repair things even outside their warranty if their expected life is longer.

The guide for fridges here is in between 6 and 13 years. Under 6 you should not have any issues arguing with them (they will), over 6 it might take some more effort.
Real Time Lightning Map: Lightningmaps.org
> If we're being VERY generous, we've consistently lived past 40 for the last 2,000 years.

That's not... that's not how statistics work work at all.

Life expectancy was 30 because half of all babies died, and on top of that childhood diseases took out a bunch more. Eliminating this has been the vast majority of life expectancy increase.

If you made it to puberty in antiquity, you were pretty likely to make it to 60 or so. Y'know... assuming you didn't live in an area the Romans or Mongols wanted.
Re: scroll bars. Try using a regular workstation with a keyboard and mouse!
Auto-defrost is nice for the first X years, until it starts to ... not defrost as much or as well. Sometimes the simpler ones are nicer, even if they require a bit more thought/work to use.
Thanks! Good edit. For the record I agree with your comment but got distracted by the error.
> I've been seeing this as a common issue throughout most of the household appliances we've tried to buy in the last ten years. They just don't last.

I've had the same experience. E.g. I bought a kettle 2 years ago and it lasted for 6 months. Previous kettles have lasted many years (as they should).
For imap there is fetchmail. It will be a bit hard, because gmail wants the users to use oauth.
> The complaint is that one could manufacture those more expensive high quality products at a larger quantity and, through scaling effects, one would achieve a lower price, which would make them accessible to larger segments of the market.

That complaint is immature and entirely self-interested. It’s almost always beneficial (except when there’s production shortages) to have a preference that is shared by large segments of the market. It’s not the systems fault if few people share your preferences.
I have no idea why this popped up now. Overall I think it holds up reasonably well, though it's in a brasher and younger voice than I would use today. I went back and fixed the link rot.

(Incidentally, the process of updating web pages on levien.com is to log in to my Linode instance and use vim to edit the static directory. I probably should upgrade to some more modern way, at least use version control, but I do get a warm sense of nostalgia doing it this way.)
https://topica.io - productized transcription service to turn video content into a searchable archive

https://joincrux.com - weight loss community w/o the snake oil BS
DRM is coming to batteries to prevent such adaptors.
Yes. But for certain vendors and voltages it can make the tool much more bulky: the Milwaukee 12v is cylindrical and inserts into the grip while Dewalt 12 is rectangular, etc.
You negotiate for one grade of steel, initial runs are that grade, but over time some manufacturers will start substituting a cheaper grade and hope you don't notice ("quality fade"). In most countries employees would see that as unethical, and companies would risk whistleblowing and fraud suits if they went ahead anyway.
The story continues:

You open the door, and immediately a banner slowly slides up asking if you'll accept a virtual cookie. Obviously you want that cookie, so you agree. The banner slowly descends back into its slot.

Now you identify the location of the milk and begin reaching for it.

Suddenly a banner unfurls from above, blocking your reach suggesting, "Subscribe to the Samsmug Smartfridge Newsletter!" Somewhere on the edge of the inside of the fridge is a button to make the newsletter banner retract. You find it and press it, and the banner retracts.

Now you reach for the milk... But! The shelves suddenly move up and down to make room for a flip-out screen which starts playing a video ad of the new weekly butter delivery service. Somewhere else on the edge of the interior of the fridge is a button to hide the screen, but fortunately you can still see the top of the milk container down near the bottom of the accessible opening.

So you squeeze the jug out the narrow space, turn around, and slam the door as you turn. D'oh!

Now you debate just drinking as much of the milk as you can and then throwing the rest out rather than go through the whole process again just to return the milk to its place.
> route downloaded on their phone to work offline

I do it all the time and never met anybody else do it. Rather everybody happily relies on online maps.

Do you think widespread offline use is the case?

I agree that to most map and compass are rather useless, but still slightly more useful compared to a phone with drained battery or no network coverage.
I like that HN doesn't emblazon the user's points/status so clearly compared to something like FB/Twitter, where "likes" is front and center.

I also like that the quality of the post is reflected in the # of votes in the UI (by graying the post out if it's not good). I wonder if it's useful to add some indicator that a post was "highly voted", or would that create more "status accrual" behavior?

I think Reddit is completely designed around status accrual with the badges and votes plastered all over each post — that's probably taking it too far.
Because, it's forgery-proof. Didn't you read the headline?
They would do that if they needed because people were spoofing the system. Or they would do what the traditional banks are doing: avoid lending to people without a proven track multi-year record, physical location to monitor, and assets to hold as collateral for a downpayment.

However, I'm curious about one thing. Everyone who suggest spoofing the system for the sake of privacy, do you believe people who do that... will actually also repay the loan they were given? Or would they just use a fake name & commit fraud?
That is nice, as for a license, I think half of the program is someone else's keylogger code I found somewhere online, so putting my own license on there seems shitty. But I put a line in the README that anyone can steal the idea of the concept of the program, if someone is gonna do that, they are gonna want to rewrite everything anyways.
I wouldn't call this commit you speak of as something that makes me think "yeah, they're still fixing stuff"

https://github.com/codedgar/Puppertino/commit/b0148279d453db...

this commit is just fluff.
> a tech startup COO or CTO making $200k

With the title of "CTO" at a tech startup, I'd expect one to be a significant shareholder making nominal salary but, ultimately, your point stands: startup executives are just middle management of a distributed R&D department.
If I’m understanding correctly, you’re asking the manufacturers (and/or other warranty writers) to take on liability for unknown damage that may have been accrued over the lifetime of the item. The only way to make this damage known would be to return the item to the factory to be inspected, which would be considerably more expensive than “ripping things down to their raw materials”.

How do you solve this problem in a way that consumers aren’t paying for all these externalities?

EDIT: didn’t even see the crypto connection, that answers that question.
>I always have my phone.

Until you don't. It's probably a generational thing but I tend to have non-electronic backups when it's relatively cheap and easy to do so. And for relatively routine places I walk/drive, I much prefer to have the route in my head.
In the suburbs ? In some neighborhood people going trough trash will get hassled by the police. In the city (a poor city) were I live, people going through the trash are generaly chased away. Plus to go through everyone's trash you would need lots of people in the neighborhood, can you image the impact if that happens ?

Plus, ever try and return a bottle as a "trash collector" ? Stores will throw you out claiming the bottle was not purchased in the store. So I would say 90% of bottles thrown out end up in a land-fill or in the sea.
I've been using looria.com lately, and it seems to be tracking a pretty good "signal" using Reddit and other sources of consumer feedback that are currently more reliable than Amazon ratings.
Get a Vitamix. 5x the price and seems to last forever. In fact, there are even very old (decades old) used Vitamix’s on eBay that are still running and usually just need a new canister.
> First of all, I wonder how many people actually have suitable backup devices.

Virtually every group of people will have multiple backup devices, for people going solo it something that should (but isn't) recommended.

> Secondly, stuff does happen.

Stuff does and in every case if you want to follow a route having a little dot that shows you exactly where you are in relation to that route is better than having a map and compass. I am not sure why you are replying to my point as if it is not a choice for people to carry a phone with them but somewhat makes the point.

A properly prepared phone is a map and compass, it does everything a map and compass can do and then adds an extra useful feature of "and this is exactly where you are"
I suppose the moral framework I've got is that you don't have to justify your existence. For me I try to basically do what I think is probably right, or at least make personal changes in that general direction (e.g. I'm not vegan or vegetarian but I do skip meat/animal products a lot). But you know, existence comes before any of that.

Beyond that it's not really justification so much as survival instinct. But it wouldn't be right to make others justify their existence, so you shouldn't have to justify your own.
Low prices or well paid workforce...Choose one!

This is a result of decades of regulations and labour laws. Paying Americans 10x more to make similar quality tools is a terrible business decision. This cannot be fixed without government incentives/handouts (eg. Chips Act)
> For any category of good you can think of there will be producers that make a high quality version of it. Consumers who care about that quality (according to however you’re measuring it) will make their decisions accordingly.

I've been a consumer my whole life, and I still struggle to "make my decisions accordingly" because it's so difficult to find trustworthy information about quality, especially the qualities that matter to me. It can take an exhaustingly long time to gather this information, there are no shortcuts, and price and quality are often only loosely correlated.

Worse, after putting in the effort, I frequently find that those high-quality products and their makers disappear from the market, being outcompeted by junk.
I found the over use of the word cringe in the article, to quote, “cringey.”
In my mind justifying anything implies an appeal to a higher power who is demanding an account for actions.

Are you concerned with a power demanding reason for your being human? If so, What power? Why do you consider such, "higher"?
It refers to "being at work", not "actively heads-down working on something".

If you come in at 9am, do work, have lunch, make coffee, work more, suffer meetings, work, chat at the water cooler, work again, and leave at 5pm, you're working 9-5.
I've read it, and I'm sure it isn't relevant to this conversation.
why dont you just try to do something good instead of grifting
Yeah, no.

Nobody makes high quality cassette tape mechanisms. It doesn't make sense to make ten of a custom cassette tape mechanism, only at least tens of thousands, so, they don't. But the market for thousands of these mechanisms is for the cheapest possible not good quality. So you simply can't buy good quality.

It was possible in the 1980s, at great expense, for the humble cassette tape to sound pretty good, the Nakamichi Dragon is the most famous high end tape deck.

But you can't do that today. There are a handful of Chinese manufacturers, spitting out variations on the same basic cheapest possible "eh, it's good enough" mechanism and that's the entire market.
> In my experience appliances are a lot more efficient and cheaper than they used to be.

turbokinetic agrees modern refrigerators are more energy efficient but at the expense of longevity and not worth it

> I am saying that this compressor, and its application, show clear engineering choices made, which sacrificed its life span in the name of some modicum of energy savings.
'barely functional' isn't fraud. And in most cases the cheapest made in china product is barely functional.

It's only deliberately selling nonfunctional products that would meet the definition of fraud.
> What’s is the supposed business case for sharing raw, unmodified 42Mpix photos?

TFA (TFPR?) answers this.

"This technology is particularly applicable for passports and ID verification but goes further in tackling image manipulation in the media, medical and law enforcement fields. For the insurance and construction sectors, this technology will offer a secure foundation for inspection and recording of damage."

> And if they are still modified later on, and perhaps re-signed, that’s where I would attack.

Even so, the existence of an original capture makes post-capture attacks useless. An effective attack will modify the image before it's signed.
planned obsolence out there

I don't think it is planned obsolescence, it is just a race to the bottom on price. At $30, an immersion blender can't have metal gears. Most people value cheapness more than quality, so we get cheap junky products. Nylon gears are a travesty, but most people prefer replacing crap to paying 7x for the Vitamix.
I also use iTerm2 on macOS, with tmux. Here are the main reasons why I do that:

- I can create window splits running multiple shell sessions in each pane, and then "zoom" in to an individual pane to focus on what I'm doing in that shell session.

- I can organize my work into named sessions, with multiple windows within each session, and panes within each window, and navigate between these using the keyboard.

- I can persist that session/window/pane structure across machine reboots (tmux-resurrect). The result is that I always have the same set of tmux shell sessions running, corresponding to the different projects that I work on.

- The same keybindings for session/window/pane management work whether I'm on MacOS or on a remote linux machine running tmux.

But I'm not a very advanced tmux user and there's a lot more I could do. If you look through the tmux feature set it will give you an idea of what you can do beyond what you can do with iTerm2. iTerm2 does have its own "tmux integration mode" but that's never quite appealed to me: I use tmux specifically because I want the tmux style of window splits etc, and because I want the familiar keybindings to be the same when I'm on a linux machine. So placing tmux behind the iTerm2 UI isn't what I'm personally looking for. I think! Or maybe I've misunderstood the iTerm2 feature.
My existence is self-justifying, or more correctly, requires no justification. As Rand put it, life is an end in itself, i.e. the ultimate end of all your actions and purpose.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/ultimate_value.html
gnome-shell enters the chat.
Not OP, but for anyone who’s curious I believe they may be referencing George Bernard Shaw’s infamous quote [0] (which FWIW I think expresses a morally abhorrent way of going about things)

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7WBRjU9P5eo
They either built some smarts into the sensor, where it's physically impossible to trick it or you can just pretend to be a sensor capturing whatever you want. I assume with enough desire, you can built a pixel-for-pixel matching LCD to illuminate each sensor photocell as desired and capture arbitrary light the physical way. But as another commenter pointed out "it's forgery-proof" ;)
The Roe BP2 screens refresh at 7,680hz
> This technology is particularly applicable for passports and ID verification

What if you take a picture of a fake passport?
To save everyone a lot of time: he finds that a sintered bronze bearing has worn and allowed metal-on-metal contact elsewhere in the unit. He theorizes it's the oil, which he demonstrates is very thin at room temperature. Which is meaningless - film strength doesn't have to be high if there isn't high pressure between sliding surfaces.

The claim that fridges from the 40s and 50s were very efficient is nonsense. Even a 10-20 year old fridge is very inefficient compared to a modern fridge. It's as easy as looking at energy star ratings.

> When it becomes a problem, it goes to the dump where all the foamed-together plastic parts will not be feasible to separate nor recycle.

It's never been economical / feasible to manually take apart an appliance for recycling. They're shredded and the plastic/metal chunks separated mechanically for the raw materials.
Correct, this has not happened and will *not* happen
It’s just a gift from the gods(don’t waste your time reach them it’s impossible).
You can just do whatever you can/wan’t but remember you always face the consequences and thats it.
While I empathise with your position I can totally see how others might not. Letter writing is a specific skill to provide a dense and clear message. You have to prepare this message in your head first as you cannot (attractively) eliminate what you wrote already unless you redo the whole letter. Im sure many people today would have benefitted from more occasions to hone thinking and preparation ahead of expressing views or opinions.

Similarly you could say remembering phone numbers is a useless skill that many had pre smartphones - you just knew your 30 or so most used numbers. Now we all depend on our phones and once the battery is dead many people don't seem to know any number by heart.
I recently replaced a basic washer and dryer that had lasted 20 years. I went to buy new ones and asked the person for basic models that would last 20 years again. He laughed and said nothing he sold would last that long anymore. I’m glad he was honest, but it made me sad.
A more effective version of this would capture a 3D depth map with the 2D image.
It has been my experience for a very long time that most warranties aren't worth the paper they're printed on. They either take too long to replace the item so that you end up buying a new one, or simply do nothing at all. The warranty service that Amazon tries to add on to every "device" purchase is famous for this.
I think you'd really like Lewis Mumford too.

Ellul, Mumford, McLuhan, Postman and Illich constitute (accessible
[1]) Technological Critique 101. I think they are essential reading
for anyone who claims to be a "technologist" and wants to deeply
understand the anthropological relations of humans and our technology.

[1] Without digging into Heidegger and more difficult stuff.
(Warning: Semi-religious response) We are, as Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner once put it, "created co-creators" doing our infinitesimal bit in advancing The Great Project of the last 13.8 billion years (that we know of), helping to build a universe.

https://www.questioningchristian.com/2006/06/metanarratives_...
This is the root of the problem. Quality machinery costs more and most people think they are getting a good deal when they buy junk at cheap prices.

However, sometimes you get lucky buying cheap stuff that lasts and that is the experience we like to remember and try to repeat.
Right, the mouse is a concern for most people as well, I never really considered that part since with my i3wm + vim setup, I basically never touch the mouse anyways.
What you're referring to as existence is better referred to GNU/existence, or GNU stop of existential dread
>I do it all the time and never met anybody else do it. Rather everybody happily relies on online maps.

That's a good example of one way to reduce a pretty common failure mode.Lack of cell phone service is probably a lot more common than a dead phone especially if you carry a backup external battery. (Outside of extreme conditions but that's a separate matter.)
https://coderadio.freecodecamp.org/
In monopolistic industries, this happens. But in other consumer markets, value manufacturing still win, because of significant information disparities and/or consumer preferences.

If your competition makes a shitty fridge for $1000 with bearing that will fail at 15 years on average, and you make the exact same thing with bearings that will last 30 years for $1010, most people will look at the exterior, say “these look the same”, and buy the competitors model.

And you can advertise that all you want, and next week your competition will put $3 of extra steel in the door handle to make it feel more solid than yours and write the word “professional” on the door. Now your product looks like a bad deal.

Now you might say that people are making bad decisions. But are they really? Most Americans don’t keep their house for 30 years, so why do they care if the fridge fails before then? It’s someone else’s problem.

This is why market positioning is a complicated discipline. It isn’t just “make a good thing for a good price”