skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I could definitely live with like, one `.so` somewhere that never moves, I mean we've already got `vDSO` and stuff which is sort of related.

Nice idea. I think a kernel libc in the form of a vDSO would unnecessarily force compilers to use the C ABI though. The Linux system call interface is really unique in how it's not only stable but language-agnostic and it would be a shame to lose that.

I think compilers are the right place for system calls. The programming language should have a system_call keyword that makes the compiler emit the syscall instruction with the parameters in the right registers. It was my intention to eventually create that language, liblinux was something of a prelude... Then I ran out of free time. :)

Then it turned out smarter people than me have gone much farther than I did:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28283632

Really cool stuff.

> The quote about "glibc maintainers being non-helpful" slayed me.

> I guess at least some of the kernel people aren't exactly thrilled about the tireless efforts of the GNU project to gatekeep, take credit for, be obstructionist around, and otherwise subsume Linux into The GNU Operating System.

I understand what you mean. I think it's really weird how often I get glibc manual pages when I look up Linux kernel documentation. I look up some system call and get glibc wrappers instead. Aren't they separate projects?

In the first AMA someone asked Greg whether glibc was blessed by the kernel:

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2ny1lz/im_greg_kroah...

He said no, but it still seems like the official libc of Linux.

I also get systemd manuals when I look up Linux init system documentation. I expected to read about what the kernel itself expects from PID 1, information useful for making my own system. Turns out it's just a process like any other, it just needs to bring up the system by doing things like mounting procfs and sysfs.

Linux should be its own thing. It's only "GNU/Linux" because of POSIX which says an operating system has to have binaries like cp, mv, etc. Things don't have to be that way. POSIX is just paper.

> I hate that it's gotten to the point where I'm the "anti-GNU" guy, I never wanted that, but they need some fresh blood in the leadership or something.

I think it was a quote from Lennart Poettering that inspired me to start dropping this "standard" GNU stuff. I think he wrote something like "read TLPI and ignore all the POSIX stuff". So I did and I discovered a really nice system that actually turned out to be easier and more fun to program with than dealing with C libraries. No global state anywhere!

GNU is just a POSIX compliant user space. It doesn't have to be that way... Wouldn't it be cool if some awesome person made a pure Lisp user space? A pure Rust user space? It doesn't have to be the same old POSIX tools... Linux enables that. We can trash the entire user space and start fresh if we want. We can't do that on Windows, Mac, the BSDs.
PE buying a brand to ‘harvest the brand value’ has become extremely common in tools, and has ruined a lot of things.
Well, you want more people to buy your product so you get growth year over year. You can't do that with a basic widget that will last 10++ years. Otherwise your growth would plateau to the natural population growth rate and there would be a thriving 2nd hand market because your stuff rarely breaks. Adding complex electronic features is an obvious choice now. You can just stop providing updates or the electronics will fail.

Cheaper things aren't necessarily bad either. You don't want things like fridges and blenders to be items only the rich can afford and less robust things are probably fine if it was clear under what conditions you can use the item to make it last and if the item was easily repairable.

Lastly, I don't think you can blame the manufacturers alone either. I know people who don't like used things even if they are still good and will always buy new.
Is that you, THX-1138?
That sounds fun! What is it called?
Exactly. These calculations make it sound like propelling the vehicle itself from A to B is the goal. Nope - the goal is to transport goods from A to B within practical size and weight limits/restrictions. If the volume and weight capacity are cut in half, that needs to be considered. Not to mention significantly increased wear and tear on the tires and the road infrastructure, and the impact of the mining required to make the battery.

Has anyone done a similar calculation for a real-world scenario?
It’s the opposite in my experience - older brands have a hard time keeping up with newer trends and are more likely to be bought out by PE to ‘harvest value’, as they’re not as profitable right now.
Cell phones are new enough that they still change noticeably in a couple of years. Refrigerators are not.
>You can’t copyright a cocktail, so what’s a creative bartender to do?

Be thankful, you wouldn't be a creative bartender making cocktails if they were.
Yeah, I don't really see the big deal about this. Taking a better contract isn't proof that he didn't love Detroit; it's not like an athlete can only love playing for one specific team/location, and even if that weren't the case, I don't think that's a good reason to refuse a better offer (especially since sometimes a team won't want to resign a player for various reasons, e.g. not having the budget to pay the player as much as they would get elsewhere, or having signed a younger promising player in the same position). I think this is a fairly non-controversial opinion on Hacker News for software engineers (i.e. the company you work for doesn't have any specific loyalty to you and would happily replace you with someone cheaper who does equivalent work if they could), and as much as I have emotional attachment to my favorite sports team and don't really think that the difference between $10 million/year and $15 million/year will make that big a difference in someone's life, I don't see why the same principal wouldn't apply to them/
Yeah fair point, Fedora is very much the "try the latest feature out, see if it works" distro in that family.
How rich?

Start making quality appliances that work, are serviceable and affordable (maybe financing?). There seems to be a market and I think lots of people would be happy to work in an American factory making quality stuff for American homes.
Excellent and important point
Do you use forward error correction? If so, which algorithm?
Within the bounds of a childless, healthy, individual, who can work remote, living in a city that is well designed for bikes. Unfortunately this is a nearly negligible percentage of the existing population/infrastructure. There are many many decades of change, including universal rent control, required for the rest of us.
I changed a fluorescent lamp ceiling fixture this evening at my parent's house. The light was probably made in 1970 or early 70s.

It fell on my head when the last screw let go unexpectedly. And it was far heavier than I was expecting about 15 pounds for a 24 inch by 12 inch light frame. I think it's made of steel I was expecting flimsy light tin.

So yeah that was one durable light 52 years of operation.
My dad always used Consumer Reports to pick products, and... I dunno, they didn't seem to be super great.
Hopefully they don't go the same path as the Wirecutter. Started out great and small and independent and slowly started watering down reviews as they branched into more and more areas. They are now owned by the NYTimes and the quality of the reviews is much more hit and miss.
My guess is a new company needs some traffic, recognition, whatever…

So, instead of spending marketing dollars, they get attached to something Apple related and hope the Apple media echo chamber generates enough traffic to build their business off of.
Yes I like this approach. One must be careful that the learning something new doesn't become the priority.

For example are you trying to learn a new programming language (that you don't need for it), or make money.

Trying to do both a once is a sacrifice for both.
I've had this issue with McDonalds fries... I swear they did something to them because from one day to another they became worse.
The fonts used here are nice. What are they?
Non-deterministic and unpredictable behaviour is a bigger problem than whatever benefits you think shared libraries provide. That's why so many people here prefer static linking, and that's what Nix gives you even for dynamic linking.
Ah, I forgot about Fuchsia - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.04183.pdf seems to do a good job of explaining the security architecture without complicating things. With Google's backing (if they don't lose interest that is) and the potential to take over Nest/Chromebook/Android devices it might go farther than most new OS experiments.
> Honestly what is the benefit?

Clearly, you're not in the business of selling high performance, modern computers with 8GB of RAM...

Apple's base amounts of RAM are stingy at best.
This is called a "martingale" betting strategy. It's been extensively studied in probability theory. If you had infinite wealth and the casino would let you bet forever, it would work, but in real life neither of these conditions is true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)
I guess the asymmetric upside is you asking someone on a date who is extremely successful.

Then it goes so "well" that you get married and then you take half their stuff in a divorce.
Buy crypto while I'm awake, sell about ten minutes before I wake up.
The value is not in the winning part, it's in dreaming of winning. Compare that to a movie ticket, not an investment. At least before it becomes a habit. I'd guess people who buy one lottery ticket every year get much more enjoyment out of it than those who buy one every week.

I don't play either. I suppose it's a nice game if you can temporarily forget some leading zeroes.
I mean, all that game theory that the RAND corporation (and whatever their Soviet counterparts were called) seems to have worked out so far.

I think you’d need some pretty well-qualified people to crunch the numbers before just, winging it with something different. Given the stakes and all.
I think I did not object anything you've said. :-)

I only wanted to point out once more that a proper static type system is of more use than some bolted on linter. (And add the point about type inference).
Show HN:How We built TinySnap: the anatomy of a browser extension
It depends on terrain. I hiked/climber in BC for a decade pre-gps. We carried maps but rarely ever used them for navigation, as opposed to planning. Mountain peaks on the horizon (real mountains, not UK hills) made navigation very intuitive. Even in zero visibility, the slope of the terrain keeps you orientated. Sound is also a huge aspect. One can "feel" a forrest through the fog because it sucks up sound, as opposed to rock mountains that echo.
China has an explicit No First Use policy. It also has a nuclear arsenal that is more than 10x smaller than the US.

You might say that China has a secret huge arsenal. The US might have comparable things! And even among the assumed amount of 350 warheads, a lot of damage can be done. The US can do a lot of this as well! There is a nuclear triad on both sides.

Perhaps the No First Use policy is a lie. It is not a law of physics. But it is something. It is a posture that makes it harder for a nation to navigate in some liminal space that makes defensive and offensive posturing look exactly the same.

But the main point of course is that the current state of affairs is already amazingly powerful. What more do people want from their nukes? In what universe is 1500 deployed warheads (out of a stockpile of 5000) not enough to accomplish any sort of strategic objective? There have been many conflicts where 0 has been enough
The undue focus on Q caused by the likes of Sabine Hossenfelder is itself a problem.
Sort of like Fuchsia/QubesOS combo, interesting.
I have replied to your original comment, as it was written then.

You have now edited it, which fair enough, but therefore I think your "really? You can't imagine why I'd say this [...]" Is unwarranted and I cannot meaningfully address it anymore.
> These studies never account for survivorship bias.

Then I'm sure you were relieved to discover that the author didn't!

From the link:

"The very early (30's and 40's) ones were less consistent in their life spans. I've seen a document on this somewhere and will share it if I run across it again. They didn't have the automated and consistent manufacturing processes like we have today. Some of them did go out early. The ones we still have today from the early days are the ones which were especially good, and are still in the long flat bottom of the failure bathtub curve.

"What I foresee killing off many of the 2000's compressors are the lower engineering margins in the design. It takes less of an incident to go beyond that margin into the region of damage and failure; as compared to earlier compressors with a larger engineering margin.
I am, I try to live appropriately, knowing what I know, and I was expensive to make, so I may as well make the most of it.
A 30% return on the amount spent on tickets would not improve quality of life drastically for most people. Winning a big jackpot would. That creates a situation in which expected value might not be the best metric. Measuring it in expected quality of life, for example, would favor playing for many people including likely most reading this.
> Do we still need makefiles :(?

Yes, because

> What’s the alternative?

There are endless alternatives - none of which are even remotely as ubiquitous, most of which are more complex, less portable, make aggressive tradeoffs, aren't as flexible, etc. Make is everywhere and provides a decent baseline.
I have tried the QubesOS and boy does it bring back memories of Windows being called Pentium to 286 converter.
It is slow as molasses on hardware where even Windows 10 and Gnome are both fast and to make it usable you have to keep relaxing the security to the point where it is probably less secure than regular OS. And don't even bother if you have to use scaling other than 100%, sure you can scale the DOM0 but the rest of the VMs are not scaled and there is no documentation on how to do it.
What we need are simple sandboxes that isolate GUI applications into chroot environment and keep them away from other applications and documents.
> there's a very high chance of getting a 15-30% return on investment

Average yearly return for index fund since 1957 has been around 10%. It's been wild recent years but that should be seen as an exception.

Though you didn't specify the time period. So if you meant longer period, then fair enough.
Surely, the fact that all US manufacturing seems to be going to China must have nothing to do with it
I worked on AppKit's persistent state feature. One of its primary uses is persisting UI state across app restarts, for example when performing a software update. Simply writing out memory to disk would "persist" data like Mach ports or file descriptors, which would no longer be valid when the app is re-launched.
He's in counselling, but to handle being the subject of her rages and paranoia. Post-partum psychosis isn't really something you can understand their viewpoint on.

She really needs professional assistance but won't seek it, and her family have been slow to move her towards doing so, as her Dad is a prominent religious official in their small town, and there's some shame in having an unwell daughter.

But, recently they've acknowledged that there is something that needs treatment and have been gradually approaching it, which gives my brother hope. He loves her, of course, but there's marriages worth fighting for, and marriages where you're being abused. Currently, his is the latter.

So... not super similar ;)
On day 1 of the sprint, aren't they all in the same stage?
Why am I being downvoted? Is it because I didn't show proof? Here's my video showing Arch Linux (systemd) booting to the login prompt in 3 seconds, including network: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hgeopuou9rzq6ru/linux_vm_on_macos....
Automation is so productive that the difference in wages is insignificant so who cares.

The problem with automation is it is very hard to make it, but once it is made you can use it cheap. So you need to make many parts before it is worth it. 30 years ago it's was cheaper to pay a skilled lathe operator to turn a drawing into a single part, but if you needed 1000 it was worth writing CNC code to automate it. Today the state of CAM is such that many drawings can be turned into parts CNC directly, but assembly of those parts into a tool is often still manual unless they sell a lot of parts. (I don't know what Milwaukee is doing, but I expect cordless drills are assembled automatically, but their cordless bandsaw which is much less in demand is manual)
> Capitalism is why china is already ahead

Yes, but not in the ironic meaning you probably meant it in. China is more capitalist than the United States or Europe at this point in time. It's why they managed to catapult themselves so quickly ahead.

> Capitalism is why there is no chip fab in the US

Umm what? My friend works at one. There's dozens of them in the US.

Also the reason why chip fabs took off in certain other countries is because of state sponsorship by feeding their development off of the tax base. i.e. corporate welfare.
Side note, I really would love it if there was à way to stop os x from reopening all windows on the next boot after it crashes. I hate that so much.
More that they don't ship that here as most who care about quality were slow to move manufacturing overseas.
It's the indifference and apathy that is annoying. Just yesterday I was told "did you check online" from a local business that was complaining that nobody buys local.

Or my new hated phrase "ready to ship" on store websites, in other words they don't have it. Why would I get it shipped to them and then have to call when I can just order it direct.

Between crap quality, apathetic store staff, and no inventory it's become a pain to buy anything locally or online even just a regular toaster.
Let's say 500.
> constant infantilization of people

So the solution to avoid infantilizing them is to organize through scrum, standups and sprints? :P
(which is where the discussion started)

That said, it's fair to say that a lot of young people are capable of far more than contemporary culture (or management) recognizes.
Your mistake is thinking that the solution that was adopted for one instance of an issue is the only possible solution that can be used forever.

None of this is static. The DAO hack showed a flaw in the then-current practices of smart contracts. Developers learned from it, changes were made to the system. The system became more robust after it.

Much like any organism living in an ambient with evolutionary pressure, different mutations come up. After the DAO hack, some prefer to write their contracts in a way that allow some level of control by trusted admins, some of them still don't like the idea of privileged access to the contracts but will favor adoption of contracts only after formal verification. Some saw that as opportunity to specialize in contract security and become auditors.

None of these approaches are perfect by themselves. Other bugs will come, other "hacks" will exist, and hopefully each of these will act as evolutionary filter on the existing system.

Without a central authority, this is the only I see for systems to evolve. And if the whole point is to create an alternative that does not depend on a central authority, I'm fine with the current approaches to risk management.
Chill.

It’s a very common colloquial way to refer to big machinery.

“A Tesla almost hit a pedestrian”

“I’ll just mill that part on the ol Bridgeport”

“For my 18th birthday my dad bought me a Chevy”

“Looks like the neighbours bought a brand new John Deere”

Etc.
Real compensation has tracked with productivity gains quite nicely, though a growing gap did start to emerge in 2008. https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economic-issues-watch/gr...

Two things that _are_ real issues are

- Compensation includes benefits, and much of the increase in compensation has been eaten up by healthcare costs. This means wages haven't increased nearly as much.

- There is a growing gap in productivity inequality within labor which has led to growing income inequality. Those productivity and income increases have disproportionately gone to the upper percentiles of workers.
This is a good example, but I've found that this benefit is actually non-obvious to people in the beginner stages of learning.

A popular view before starting to learn is that everyone should "learn to code" because programming jobs are in-demand and pay well (at the pre-beginner stage). Then, when many learners actually start to learn, it can take months to write a genuinely useful program. All the way, you might learn how to do arithmetic in Python and write loops, without a seemingly practical purpose (just seemingly-contrived exercises). I admit that this actually put me off programming for a while, because I couldn't see the upside.

Eventually, a web scraper became helpful for a project, along with a better understanding of programming for tweaking a website. Then I went back to studying, and it helped me greatly to have very specific goals. So, while "learning programming" is correct, I think it will help people stick with it, if specific outcomes are emphasizes (e.g. "learn automation through programming" or "learn website application development through programming").
On Blenders, I got mine from the free/donation pile at the dump. It’s glass, all metal and proudly declares itself “solid state”. It has 14 speeds with a high and low and smells vaguely of ozone when you turn it on. It’s bulletproof.
I’d say it’s both: GPS are great but you should be well practiced in wayfinding with a compass in case the GPS fails. I’ve never taken a GPS on long hikes anyhow seems overkill as long as you have a good topo.
FWIW I've had a Baratza grinder going strong with daily use for 5+ years
You aren't updating it for the whole system if some of the binaries are statically linked or have their own implementations. The point is that no matter what, you still have to audit all binaries.
So, lattice QCD is often mentioned as an example of computationally well-defined quantum field theory with some reliable results. Wikipedia talks about "lattice QCD is a way to solve the theory". What does this really mean? What questions did lattice QCD answer? Is it possible to state and solve initial value problem for, say, proton-proton scattering?
Of course, but it would have affected sales. I had a Microsoft VP tell me to my face circa 2010 they saw themselves as “activists” and were investing in more protections for customers.

I laughed.