skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“Never rewrite” is a popular cargo-cult that sprang from a well known blog article that made the rounds some years ago. The urge to rewrite can be a naive impulse for sure, but there are LOTS of cases where new and better technology can result in tremendous gains, or where a code base is simply too far gone to redeem. The biggest successes of my career have almost all been ground up rewrites of existing products using new technology or techniques that resulted in orders-of-magnitude improvements in performance and ROI. If you can make incremental improvements that’s great, but sometimes it’s just not possible to rewrite “a piece at a time” because there are no pieces, just one big ball of mud. To the original author: If you don’t rewrite this mess, your competitors will. I’d say: lay out the case for an overhaul, stand your ground, don’t implement any new features until you’ve got a clear path to reducing technical debt, and if you can’t get buy-in to an overhaul just leave. What you’re describing sounds like a textbook scenario for burnout and there are lots of other opportunities where you can work on things in ways that you’ll actually enjoy.
I know little about airplane tech, but do these onboard systems such as PA ever get OTA software updates? Perhaps an update got pushed that runs the prank? Could explain it happening on multiple flights and attendants being unable to stop it.
Or perhaps all those flights took place on the same plane.
> An IPO would be fine!

And now instead of venture capitalists you have Wall Street to answer to.
Sounds like my experience when I had a Leaf with a heat pump. The Bolt does not, so it uses a lot more energy to keep the cabin warm.
Airline intercoms are usually analogue systems with no state or access restrictions other than physical.
They explicitly say they don't recommend interviewing in OCaml just for the sake of doing so, as that's not going to net you any bonus points. But if that's your preferred language for interviews, it should work as well as any other one. Direct quote:

"We also don’t award bonus points for using a functional language like OCaml. Please don’t use OCaml just because you think it will make us happy. We want to see you at your best, so you should use the language you’re most comfortable with. If OCaml isn’t your strongest language, then don’t use it."[0]

0. https://www.janestreet.com/preparing-for-a-software-engineer...
There is absolutely no need to remove land from food production to put solar on it. The crops do better with protection from full (particularly afternoon) sun, you use less water, the panels run more efficiently, and the landowner gets two revenue streams that operate on different schedules.

So, agree, dedicated solar farms might be a dead end.

Geothermal is a minor player because it is quite expensive to build and operate, kind of like a nuke, albeit without the poison-a-whole-region risk.

Fusion will never produce so much as one kWh of commercial power.
Yeah great convenience to miss part of the movie because they want to sell inflight shopping :P

I had totally forgotten about this because I haven't flown long-haul in decades. I suppose these days I would just watch video on my tablet anyway.
Wow, this is seriously impressive work, if it really works as well as the code examples make it seem. Many of these ideas I have not seen in other JS typecheckers:

- Inferred generics that work

- Effect tracking

- Prepack-style AOT evaluation, but for typechecking

- JSX built in, with proper inference

- Using a typechecker to reduce the amount of work React needs to do (!!!)

- Using a typechecker to make SSR more efficient

- …

These are super interesting and very novel. I hope to see this open sourced soon —- curious if this kind of approach will work at scale.
That's a bit like saying "I wish more musicians would write hits more often." Talent and luck is the bottleneck as much as good taste. Certainly its not developer ignorance about what good software feels like.
Okay, fine. That list clearly wasn't sufficiently exhaustive. I want to use the technologies I want to use and not be locked in to certain technologies.
> It sounds like you want to get something for nothing.

Not exactly sure how you read that from what I wrote. Maybe you were replying to someone else?

#1 is definitely not free. My company paid a bundle for that audit; far more, than if they had simply licensed commercial software.

#2 would require some kind of paid “middlemen.” The biggest problem would be that the money would not go to the authors, but to the auditors, instead.
Fair. It was something that resonated with me but can see where you're coming from with your perspective. Curious if you have an author or book you'd recommend instead?
This is a very old-man thing to say, but I think Photoshop peaked somewhere around version 6.0, which is what I’m still using. Amazing that it still runs, since it’s from the mid-90’s but it’s free of the cloud and really is very feature-dense. Thanks, windows appcompat team.
> I just don't get it. Governments around the world and spending trillions on this stuff so why is there no clear answer on this?

Why would there need to be a "clear answer" on something that quite obviously wouldn't work?

Everyone here has done a great job of explaining to you the complexity of your "simple" solution, but you don't seem to want to accept any of the explanations. You seem to think that your back-of-the-napkin calculation can just be magically turned into a major part of our transportation infrastructure.

Cars aren't television remotes. The batteries in the cars aren't your standard AA battery. The situation is far more complicated than you're making it out to be.
Is the guard freq available (to receive from) at flight altitude? At least one of the reports supposedly involved the entire flight time.
Trying to find that hash by iterating on the manifest hash (as opposed to e.g. manipulating whitespace etc) would eventually succeed approximately 1/e of the time. Better get cracking!
what a fucked up assumption that every should understand the game. what if i don't like games. never played one but also never had any issues with calculus. well i can say it's a f** up thing dum people needs gaming to learn maths.
A simple fix that would be to intern all valid header names into the keyword package on startup, and then when processing a request, use FIND-SYMBOL against the keyword package rather than INTERN. If that fails, just drop that header.
Honestly though, if you're worried about losing friends by cancelling faceblock you're doing life wrong.
Darth Vader’s Voice Emanated from War-Torn Ukraine
Ask HN: Is Humane Vaporware?
This stealth startup has spent three years and $42M in investment and not released a single product. All their pitch seems to be based around founders having worked at Apple, one of them as a project manager.

Its aim is to build “technology that improves the human experience and is born of good intentions; products that put us back in touch with ourselves, each other, and the world around us; and experiences that are built on trust, with interactions that feel magical and bring joy.”

Who knows anything about this company? If we pattern match, does it suggest they will release successful, income generating products?

Here is a PR piece:
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/01/humane-a-stealthy-hardware-and-software-startup-co-founded-by-an-ex-apple-designer-and-engineer-raises-100m/
How many percent?

"And there have also been reports of tinnitus following COVID itself." --- Again, how many percent?

Where is the study / research on this? Even something that looks like they went through a rigorous process. VAERS isn't valid, yet they're bringing it up as something authoritative. Anybody and their mother can make a unsubstantiated report on there.

Ugh
Files, URLs, RSS, interoperability.

The war on general purpose computing has been quite effective.

Everything has ended up like on a phone, where you have dozens of apps that barely interoperate, you are running app A, or you switch to app B, but you can't really compose them.

The idea of using app X to write some files... but then app Y to store or compress them, app Z to search them, etc like good old fashioned UNIX pipelines, shell scripts, or macros has died, and people no longer think that way. Instead, they store their data "inside" the app or the cloud... so they need the app to search, backup, export, restore, etc... and if the app doesn't do that, there is no hope of operating on the same data with other software.
Implication in another axis: proprietary is underrated and overbashed. I'd love Adobe to prove me wrong by making Figma file format opened.
I was also plagued with exhaustion and lack of motivation.

Now, 5 years into getting married and having 2 kids, I value my time and my self in ways that simply would not have been possible prior. I am learning to focus not only on what I want and 'me'. I have begun to contribute to my community through serving in community oriented roles. I stopped my worst self destructive habits explicity so that I may be a good role model for my children. My energy is at an all time high as a result of taking care of myself physically, mentally, and emotionally so that I may do the same for those around me. I have found motivation in doing good work to help others, even if it's not 'ideally' fit for my personal tastes at any given time. Doing good work, being consistent and stable (where I was not before), and striving to bring about positive change has resulted in substantial gains in a number of areas in my life. I would still be smoking weed and fucking off playing 1 player games by myself without my family to motivate me.

Maybe it doesn't work this way for everyone, but this is my experience.
Some questions it would be great to feature in the README:

- How are the error messages?
- Does it produce source spans for intermediate AST nodes?
- Can it handle operator precedence without encoding the precedence into the grammar?
- Can it handle source-code-defined operator precedence?
You don't avoid this by reducing federal scope and giving it to local. Say you achieve that goal, and then a populist gets in anyway. What happens then? Obviously they increase the scope, as all populists have done once they achieved power. The way you avoid this altogether is by creating good material conditions for people. One way you create good material conditions is by removing corrupt, vampiric local governments that contribute the opposite. Local governments are creating the conditions for populism by causing negative sum policies to add up to global tragedy.

Also, goodness isn't a binary switch, and goodness needs to be compared with the alternative.

I'd add that reducing local government doesn't mean that federal government has to be large and bloated. I still want a lean federal government.

I can also never pin down exactly what advocates of larger local government actually want. What powers and capabilities, specifically, should be removed from federal and done by local?
There is no way this is mechanical or feedback-related. The sounds are just too varied. There's a point where the guy clearly says "raargh".

It's obviously someone messing around. I assume AA claimed it's a glitch because PR doesn't want stories going around about how their planes are hackable, but it just makes them sound untrustworthy.
even if everything you said is true (and thats a stretch), what does that have to do with the person calling the other a zealot for using the word Linux?

It seems by your logic, calling a Linux user a zealot is fine. Also by your logic, if someone casually suggests trying Linux, then that person is abusing their privilege and lacks empathy.
The Power of SuperGoals
There are reports of it happening on both Airbus A321 and Boeing 737-800 planes.
Ask HN: Would you like to make an AI artist with me?
Hi HN,

I am a software engineer based in London. I am interested in the disturbing images that AI image generation can make. I think they are a form of art.

I would like to create an AI artist persona to share these images. I don't see the need to do this alone, so I'm looking for one or two partners to try this out with.

I am open to be joined by anyone, but please let me know why you think you would be a good AI art partner.

My email is in my profile.

Thanks!
Agreed, safety critical, used in emergencies and non-emergencies for safety procedures.
Modafinil?
There is a comment about that up-thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32957861
-fdata-sections can increase code size if you have lots of small global - the compiler doesn't know where they will be placed and has to generate pointer literals for all of them, in every function that use them (due to function sections). Without data sections it can generate one literal and then use relative addressing.

I've been hitting that in embedded code with tight size constraints.
If an object is initialized with a constant, the constant itself can be located in read-only memory and copied to the object at runtime. The constant can then be deduplicated.
Couldn't have guessed that such a small tree (in the video) can be that dangerous! And that's enormously much force in the river ...

Thanks for the explanation and link
Microsoft is full of those.

When you enter your birthday during Windows installation (yes, you have to have a Microsoft network account to log in to your own computer, and you have to supply a birthday), the button for confirming the date is a small, grey checkmark hiding below the date picker. Clicking the big, blue “Continue” button in the lower corner will discard your date choice (since it wasn’t picked) and then fail form validation because you didn’t pick a date.

There is a certain cubicle masochism associated with this kind of system. I’m convinced that computers did not get easier to use since all of them had command prompts. But you know, it’s got windows!
Firefox is by no means the "best" product, it's an average Chrome clone that's worse than competing Chromium derivatives (Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, etc) from a compatibility and performance point of view.

Back when Firefox actually was the best product, it stole ~30% (or even more?) marketshare from Internet Explorer, despite the latter being bundled with the OS.

Firefox can be the best browser with third-party add-ons (such as uBlock Origin) and a custom configuration, but Mozilla would rather puff more hot air like this (and their other commitments to "privacy", despite their telemetry implementation not even being GDPR compliant) rather than actually making Firefox the best product.
You can turn individual krunner plugins off, like "Recent files".
What is that they have mounted on the front of the scope?
const pretty much does nothing to allow optimization in C/C++ :(
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32959277 - Firefox is not failing because of anti-competitiveness, it's failing because in its default configuration it's not bringing much to the table for the average user compared to Chrome or Edge.
Voting is a choice and is free. Taxes are neither. I hardly see how the two are similar.
Ubuntu + VSCode?

Not sure where powertools come in, but I’m personally agnostic wrt. shell scripting flavours.
`"dear friend"` is in fact a prefix of `"dear friend\0f"` - note the embedded null byte. However, I'm guessing GCC doesn't implement this optimization because it's uncommon for a string constant to contain an embedded null.

GCC does implement suffix deduplication, though: `"foobar"` and `"bar"` share the same storage. For example, in https://godbolt.org/z/o81xa94v7, `foobar` is at 0x402004 and `bar` is at 0x402007.
Not exactly how I'd characterize it :)
(yawn!)
Well, a part of Mozilla (the foundation) keeps calling out Apple, Google and other big tech companies for their control, censorship and browser monopolies. However, another part (the corporation) keeps accepting regular pay checks from Google to fund themselves, can't really wrap my head around this "Mozilla Foundation vs Corporation" conundrum!
Maybe with a big enough life jacket (and helmet) one is pretty safe

(Whilst anyone unprepared, or a daredevil, wouldn't have had a life jacket, and then maybe 100%)
This reminded me of something that happened to me in college. This is a unlikely sounding story, but I swear it's the truth.

I started noticing some odd sounds in the Student Union building. One day I had some time and decided to investigate. I realized it was coming from a fire alarm. I stood under the alarm and listened for a while.

The alarm was quietly whistling "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" by Daft Punk.
Very let down by the title -- why no ancient Roman abstract algebra?
I'm one of those people who thinks easter eggs are great, and miss the days when you had a decent chance of coming across one in a program or game.

The FAA does not agree with that. The FAA probably thinks that easter eggs in avionics software are a crime. And I agree with that position! Aviation, medical, military, and any other critical software should not contain easter eggs, and it should be an offense to knowingly include one. Stuff like this (even though it's probably not an easter egg) is a great example why. Just imagine the cost to patch this if it's widespread... and it has to be patched, because this one can literally kill people if you don't fix it (think spooked flight crews making rushed or generally poor decisions if you don't think this is potentially lethal).
Firefox's built-in privacy features are meaningless as long as it has single-digit marketshare and the user-agent itself sticks out like a sore thumb.

Furthermore, the only real way to make a difference by actually blocking malicious domains and resources - uBlock Origin - still isn't bundled by default despite being permissively licensed and Firefox having a way to install extensions at first run (that's how Pocket is distributed - it's not built into the browser, instead it's an extension automatically downloaded on first run).
I've seen two episodes. I think some parts are great, and some parts are frustratingly bad. It's fun to see people take Tolkien's world in original new directions, but on the other hand about half the time it just seems like lazy Hollywood blockbuster writing by people who don't understand the source material. Many of the elves we've seen act more or less like teenagers. Galadriel seems like a decent character, but the story keeps taking her in weird directions, requiring her in one instance to swim an entire ocean.
> Windows is the only practical desktop OS for most people.

I agree except that the more naive among them are always one click away from being wide open to downloading and installing malware, you can't lock that stuff down without making the account very inconvenient to use.

Linux, at least it's at least a bit of a pain in the ass to download and install something even if you want to.
FWIW, GCC does implement this optimization; see https://godbolt.org/z/o81xa94v7 for an example. I've definitely run across real-world samples where it saved some bytes (at the expense of making reverse-engineering a bit more annoying!).
> Charge your car at work in the sun and use it to power your home at night.

Completely infeasible in cold climates if your house is heated by electrically-powered air source heat pumps, as it probably should be.
be careful with these if you get too extravagant. the only thing keeping this from being considered destructive device is that its a smoothbore muzzle loader.

if you were to put a bolt action and or a potato hopper on it or rifle the bore it would be a DD , stay on compresed air if you want to mod up. other than that, smooth bore shove a spud in the end and light up with butane and its a legal device
Is running a VirtualBox and sharing the work folder too slow?
Did they ditch CPUs after spectre?
I think the challenge is that within those pages you might have absolute pointers rather than offset to some “page” boundary. In that case, everything really must share a single uniform address space even if any given mode accessed only a small portion, no?

At that point, maybe you want 256bit or 512bit pointers so that you can build a single global addressable system for all memory in the world.
> 2. The tech savant

yes but you're saying things in a slightly negative way and not mentioning, for the tech savant it's not just good, but better.
An opinion piece that basically says “it’s complicated” is hardly the argument they’re making it out to be. Consider me unconvinced and still concerned about the climate.
If your meaning circuits aren't firing you're probably too comfortable would be my guess. Not to be demeaning in any way. The condition you are describing is real, horrible, and worth taking seriously. My experience growing up mixed race, on the USA and Mexico border, with different family members on each side, some how my "poorer" family on the Mexico side are happier. Their lives are challenging but simple, rewarding, if of little consequence. When the pandemic hit, I left Silicon Valley and had to leave California because I couldn't afford it there anymore, and while I've visited Mexico multiple times since, I moved to the forest near the Canadian border where some of my closest friends now live in log cabins and heat their homes with wood burning stoves. They hunt for and grow their own food. They get together for harvest festivals and apple picking and are far poorer than most people I ever knew in the SF Bay Area but they seem to me to have so much joy, purpose, challenge, and hope. I am the least educated of them all as a hispanic American. Some have bachelors degrees while others have full on medical degrees, yet they've removed themselves from city comforts to live an intentionally different kind of life.

Within the first month of meeting these people they had me on the roof of a barn after 8 inches of snow hard fallen repairing a roof for a single mother. That's the kind of stuff these people do on their weekends. It feels like another world, far closer to my experiences in Mexico than in the city centers of America.

So I say all this to share an experience because I do not believe our meaning circuits only fire in a vacuum. Perhaps like a car others can "jump" our transmitters. This is what I found and worked for me. I don't know if it work for all or even many but I do believe something to the effect of changing your current place for somewhere else and finding a way to serve others with others ideally can be of benefit.

I very much appreciated you sharing your note with me here and hope for reprieve and resolve for you in your journey. And I welcome any recommendations you have for a book as well on this topic. I too am on my own journey and choose to continue learning. Thank you.
Who is under whose thumb here?

Like most things, its a bit of a two way street.

From an intelligence perspective, I agree w huntergatherer that everyone's not under active surveillance. IMO the problem is:

- once you are its far cheaper and more complete to surveil than it used to be, and...

- the bar to be a "party of interest" is far lower than it used to be. We can see this especially as some tech filters downwards into local police stations.

Its also tremendously useful for FAANG/MAANG to ensure their interests are adopted by elected officials and US officials are pretty cheaply bought. Honestly two senior SWE salaries for a year would do it for most congressmen. Just like Altria, or energy companies, tech companies donate to both sides of the fence, solicit tax breaks from both sides of the fence and look to keep labor cheap and competition low so that their owners/shareholders/investors are enriched.

From a federal government perspective, we need these companies to be 'American'. It doesn't matter where they pay their taxes, how much they off-shore work, etc. these companies trade on the US stock exchange, make up one of the strongest economies in the world, driving capital and human talent from every corner of the world to the US.

Why slow all that down in the name of 'fairness', user protection, competition and a lack of predictability