skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure if TAoCP is "workplace on the job" material.

TAoCP is aiming at damn near "perfection" of programming. Donald Knuth is analyzing the exact assembly language of all of his decision-making with these algorithms. The assembly language is represented as a random variable, and an _exact_ count of those assembly language statements (in loops and other complex jumps) is analyzed.

Everything from the highest-level algorithm design / mathematical concepts is discussed... down to the lowest-level assembly level details / implementation of the code. And everything in between.

-----------

As such, when Knuth / TAoCP covers a subject, it feels comprehensive, in a way that no other writer has ever accomplished.

So how does this work out in practice? Well, there's plenty of tutorials on hash tables out there. But only Knuth's writing on Hash tables / linear probing has ever hit the entire subject for me.

Other books will go over linear probing vs quadratic probing vs double-hashing. Meanwhile, Knuth carefully derives the formulas of each, and how it changes at the assembly level implementation.

-----

Is that useful for workplace environment? Probably not. In work, you only need to know "Linear Probing Hash Tables work like this, do it", and maybe not the analysis of it.

But if you're doing more fundamental programming, such as "GPU Implementation of Hash Table", something that very few other people have done... the Knuth-level analysis is the only thing that hits "rock bottom" and gives me all the insight "behind" the data-structure and its design.

I'd say Knuth's stuff is for people who invent new fundamental data-structures or other implementation details like that. Its not for typical workplace programming.

--------

For anyone who wants to know Knuth's writing style, I think his writing on Alpha-beta pruning (from the 1970s) is an excellent introduction to Knuth's writing style.

"An Analysis of Alpha-Beta Pruning" by Knuth / Moore, 1975.

Alpha-beta pruning always was kinda mystical to me. But Knuth recognizes the intermediate steps needed to understand the subject fully. The brilliance of discussing F1 (branch-and-bound) before discussing F2 (alpha-beta pruning) cannot be understated.

Knuth recognized that branch-and-bound is what most people thought of by Alpha-beta pruning. But then comes up with specific examples where F2 (true alpha-beta pruning) makes a difference over F1. And then uses math to demonstrate how often these cases come up.

Does it help in implementing AB pruning? I dunno. But it helps a lot if you wanna change AB pruning / change the fundamental search and understand why things are done that way. You only need to study "F2" if you're copy/paste programming. But the study and analysis into "F1" (branch and bound) holds deeper understandings to the entire concept of search trees.

Even if you never, ever, ever will program F1.
Here's a chart from the thread I linked above: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdo...

EDIT: I generated a new sheet for the chart with up-to-date data and fixed a data issue noted below.
Serious question, why is is it a problem to put a tiny cable in a landfill? The amount they leach is essentially zero. The EU would have done more for the environment by spending $20k cleaning up an extra few car batteries. This is so obviously pandering and protectionism and it's surprising to me people believe the "e-waste" justification.

Seriously, is there an accounting of the environmental damage caused by cell phone cables (not power converters)? Everything I've seen points to the damage being substantially less globally than a single digit number of cars or batteries.
No it doesn’t, or at least not always. I wasted my time last night on the stupid “junior dev thinks he’s a senior” crap post because it was on hckrnews (with points and comment counts) even though it was killed (flagged) on the real HN.

(I browse with showdead but I still have a signal that says “this may not be worth your time” before reading.)
You should read the book Mastery by Robert Greene, which is exactly what you want.
Why APIs
> That's still Apple hardware/software.

Incorrect, Apple did not build the software for all of the listed devices. Apple licenses the protocols and provides reference implementations through their MFi program.
I created https://parttimetech.io/ and you can post for free. Seems like if you can define the project and responsibilities really clearly, post a salary, I think you'd get good interest and could hire quickly. Good luck.
Interesting take, and somewhat at odds with Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker's Guide:

> The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

> To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

> The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

> Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

> And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

> “Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

> And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.

> And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

> To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
In the market of mobile phones for consumers who actually buy apps. That’s why everyone wants Apple to lose that monopoly. The problem of course is that exactly that monopoly is a large part of the reason why it’s the market for consumers who actually buy apps.
I love cyberdeck projects. They remind me of how custom motorcycle builders influenced the manufacturers to where they are producing factory street fighters, cafe racers, bobbers, and baggers. That feedback loop hasn't closed between cyberdeck makers and OEMs yet, Framework laptops are pretty close to a modification platform waiting to happen.

HMDs are still way too clunky for everyday AR, and I think google glass and snapchat's AR glasses products haven't got traction because they're the AOL cdroms of their technology, but if there were commodity parts for a modification platform I could see it taking off and closing the cyberdeck to OEM loop.

It's like there is professional tech and consumer tech, and then a hacker tech is when it becomes surplus, cheap, and available. Examples like the clone i486 PC, the CB500 motorcycle, TB-303, of the 80s and 90s created entire subcultures that yielded generational innovations. Maybe current techs like that will be SDRs, machine learning libraries, adware data sets, etc.
> equality

Motte

> DEI, aka Equity

Bailey
Sourcegraph CTO here. We're elated to welcome Steve to the team and will be hosting a Twitter live / AMA (https://twitter.com/sourcegraph/status/1577364344056201236) with him tomorrow at 1pm PT. Join us if you're free!
Are OTC FDA tested and approved medication packages required to bear any kind of standardized and highly visible mark or symbol? If so, what does this mark look like? Is there any effort to publicize this if it exists? I genuinely don't know.

It seems like the real core of this issue isn't that homeopathic medicines' exist or are in the wrong location in the store, but that approved and scientifically tested medicines aren't labelled well enough to distinguish them from other products (homeopathic treatments, nutritional supplements, etc)

There probably should be 1 clear symbol for OTC medication that is common and well known and that children are taught to avoid touching.
I've had those thoughts in the past. I would do a trial run of something with much less importance t o prove to myself that I could commit to something for a long-ish time. For example, one time I used the Borderlands 3 story line as a benchmark. If I could sit through that entire story line (something I hadn't done with any game in many many years), then I would have some modicum of confidence that I could stick to something more important.
Does anyone have any idea _why_ there's a peak in Q1 2020?
It's important to focus on WHERE you want to cultivate your skills.

You're probably not naturally good at anything in any meaningful sense.

You're going to have to work hard to be good (in a meaningful sense) at anything worth being good at.

So what things do you enjoy cultivating your skills?

If you don't enjoy practicing guitar - you're never going to be a guitar virtuoso - because you're never going to want to pick up your guitar and practice.
I think the best example to work with is Star Wars, or maybe The Lord of the Rings. The harm of eternal copyright is probably best demonstrated with these. They've both entered popular understanding, becoming casually referenced all over the place. "We need to make a little stop in Mordor first" is probably more widely-understood than most references to Greek mythology at this point.

The people who grew up in the culture permeated with such stories are stunted expressively. Because they're denied the use of an ever-growing share of the tropes and characters of the common culture. Many Disney films themselves are retellings of classic stories in the public domain. If you want to reference the original Cindarella, or Greek mythology, or Oliver Twist, you're free to do so.

You cannot do that with Luke Skywalker, or Aragorn. Now, maybe you shouldn't be able to within the author's life. But how many centuries should we keep this privilege? Would you or I (or Disney) be able to tell a new story about Hercules if copyright had been around 2000 years ago? Imagine Shakespeare still under copyright! No Hamlet or Macbeth characters in any other works without permission. We can strike several important 20th century books right there. In the future, the equivalent of Shakespeare will still be under copyright long, long after they are dead. Derivation and reuse are normal in art. Disney can borrow from the public domain to make Cindarella, but it in turn will never become public domain.
Stadia implies a lot of work into virtualising PC games. I wonder if there's a world where that same tech could be used to deploy games as local VMs, where "anti cheat" is actually a hypervisor feature.
>Why do people think it is a good thing to have this enforced by law is beyond me

this idea that it is somehow a bad thing to force mega-corporations to do things that are good for society. it's so widespread and yet - short of actual communism - I have literally never seen any evidence of public action against mega-corporate interests resulting in damage to society as a whole, beyond the inevitable political lobbying and media corruption that ensues

is it any surprise that entities whose entire existence has been justified by clever storytelling (i.e. marketing) have been successful at convincing people that rules for them are a bad thing, while rules for you on the street are perfectly fine and actually good?

people act like these mega-corps are weak, soft little babies that need to be treated with kid gloves. "no, but what if this law could do that to them? but what if this law means they make 0.1% less profit this year?". I absolutely understand this kind of reticence with actual babies, or individual people, or small-to-medium-sized businesses, but it makes me angry that people are so reluctant to act against these unaccountable mega-entities. it is hamstringing society
What is generally happening in these cases is that data is getting stringified, with `null` becoming the string "null" (which is a common output for string formatting a null in various languages).

This output is is then later re-parsed, and to try to restore null inputs back to being null, the code matches on the string "null", ignoring the fact that that could have been a valid string itself.
That might be a fair point -- no comment.

This shouldn't be legislated. That's absurd.
Increased risk for all-cause dementia in people who abstain from alcohol
> You couldn't play a downloaded title on a non-Apple Apple TV device or via AirPlay 2 tbf.

You absolutely can.
Seems like a potentially useful tool. Another related approach is https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/terraformer ("reverse Terraform"), which might be better if your end goal is to build Terraform scripts for existing infra.

However I like the idea of using these visualizations to grok or monitor infra; say as a Platform or Security engineering team, you might want to keep an eye on specific classes of resource like storage buckets, load balancers, etc.
Sigh, I remember this other internet and I wasn't even a kid any more then. I remember half of it going down because of the Morris worm. Actually noticing that things had become unresponsive, before the news of the worm broke. And that was a big deal, a program abusing the wide-open, trusted nature of the internet then, and yet, the Morris worm was more part of the culture than an attack on it.

I remember staring in disbelief as the same Canter & Siegel spam showed up in every single Usenet newsgroup to which I was subscribed, and I remember the firestorm of repercussions, little realizing at the time that the spam was the new normal, and the outrage would over time get lost in the noise.

I remember enthusiastically making my own personal web site, my own little contribution to the "old" internet, and how happy I was to finally get some hosting that didn't put a banner ad - a single static banner ad - at the top of my site.

I remember Facebook being mostly about friends keeping in touch, and posting life events and cute pictures of the kids.

The "old" internet went away in stages. Or more correctly, got drowned out. It was maybe 1% of the size of the current internet, and if you look hard enough it's probably mostly still there... just drowned out by 99% that is noise.
In the late 1990s I implemented an algorithm from one of Knuth's books. (An algorithm to generate prime numbers.) I found a mistake!

I was so excited.

I then checked the errata. It was known.

It took another 20 years before I found an actual mistake, regarding the early history of superimposed codes. A very specialized topic where I have one of the few copies of the patent challenge distinguishing between random superimposed codes and arbitrarily selected superimposed codes.

I have a check.
The source is here, if anyone is wondering: https://github.com/channon036/how_fateful

It's an R Markdown notebook. I've been finding these to be a nice evolution on the literate programming concept. I also noticed the author has been responding in this thread but her account seems to have been immediately shadowbanned upon creation, seems to be a common issue recently.
Nah, that’s how it was defined historically, it has been changed to be defined in another way in order to influence certain demographics.
And couple of months later you are investigating why the branch gone dark in the middle of the day.

No.

Devices should survive powerloss, devices can have a graceful shutdown from an external source.

Key is in your "might".
If you hire developers based on the languages they know / think of languages and stacks as part of the long-term identity of a developer, then you should not use esoteric ones. This is well known! On the other hand significant parts of the industry don’t do the former, so they are free to do the latter.

As an example, nobody knows Go when we hire them to write it.
> And yet, who's writing calculator software?

Push calculators far enough and they'll all give you different results

We're talking potential human life here.

If you don't see the difference between a dumb game like chess and the infinitely complex world of medication and facing patients I honestly don't know what to tell you. Every customer facing people we replaced by computers degraded the experience for the customers
A bunch of people already touched on probably the easiest way to do it: converting your full-time job to part time. I wrote about it here if it's helpful to you: https://parttimetech.substack.com/p/easiest-part-time-tech-j....

If that's not an option or doesn't work, there are agencies like https://www.forward.id/ that try to connect people to fractional work, and I created a job board as well https://parttimetech.io.

Good luck!
The length of the article is how you know it's the real Steve Yegge. :)

Youngbloods: if you have not spent time with Steve Yegge's old writings, please go check them out. Much good received wisdom there.
The European Union looked into unifying Europe's plugs. They decided that the cost was not worth it.

I would have been happy to switch to a unified European plug. Iirc, the proposal was actually quite decent.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-6-2005-1731-...
> The gig economy works well if you rent your capital (e.g AirBnB) but has poor ROI if you supply labor (Ubereats, etc.).

Looks like a large unemployment/underemployment (of people) problem.
Facebook to Shutter Substack Rival Bulletin by Early 2023
Smalltalk, Lisp, Bash: Three Interesting Languages – Evil Tom Stuart
I think it's more due to Sturgeon's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law).

It's not unique to any one thing / field / area.
Why can't apple just include a lightning:usbc (m:f) dongle in the box?
I know what a column oriented DB is, but ClickHouse was not on my radar before.

The pitch on the landing page is that ClickHouse Cloud is great if you love ClickHouse. If you don't know what ClickHouse is, you have to do some work to find out.
They do mandate USB PD, actually!

The law [0] reads:

> In so far as they are capable of being recharged by means of wired charging at voltages higher than 5 Volts, currents higher than 3 Amperes or powers higher than 15 Watts, the categories or classes of radio equipment referred to in point 1 of this Part shall:

> 3.1. incorporate the USB Power Delivery, as described in the standard EN IEC 62680-1-2:2021 “Universal serial bus interfaces for data and power - Part 1-2: Common components - USB Power Delivery specification”;

> 3.2. ensure that any additional charging protocol allows for the full functionality of the USB Power Delivery referred to in point 3.1., irrespective of the charging device used.

As to devices supplying less than 15 Watts: the 5.1k resistors are already mandatory in the USB-C connector spec.

[0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2022-0338... , page 35
And of course in the real world the problems most developers waste our time have nothing to with CS.

Like xaml live preview somehow disappeared in my visual studio... And everything short of windows reinstall - it is still missing. Without errors or nothing. Please Mr HR that wants people with CS - send one of those to help me.
True. But, in this case, I'm betting it's Windows-1252. The character in Ch'ien's name is most likely `U+2099 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK`. In UTF-8, that's `E2 80 99`. ISO-8859-1 doesn't have 80 or 99 defined, but Windows-1252 would decode it to â€™ (what's on the card).
musk's lawyers are laughing all the way to the bank.

first they assure him that they can make him walk out of the deal.

he pays them.

then they assure him that their angry letters to twitter will suffice.

he pays them.

then they assure him that he has good chances of winning the lawsuit.

he pays them.

this racket probably ended this morning when Zuckerberg texted musk saying "yo bro forget it my cousin jim got sued and lost so yeah just bite the bullet bro"

After 3 seconds of reflection, musk decided to follow Zuckerberg's rigorous and sophisticated legal advice, because that's how he makes important decisions worth $40 billion

A fool and his money are soon parted, lawyers know this very well.
Case insensitive file systems might as well be a historic accident, because lower case letters didn't always exist and then it was kept for backward compatibility.
Some advantages of EDN:

* Can represent sets `#{1 2 3 4 "foo" "bar" true false}` (JSON only supports arrays)

* Maps/sets can contain arbitrary EDN as keys/values. `{[1 2] "foo", 5 :a, "5" :b, true -1, false 5}` or `#{[1 2] #{3 4} (5 6)}` (JSON only supports string keys on "objects")

* Supports clojure types like keywords (`:foo`, `:bar/baz`) and symbols (`foo`, `bar/baz`), and can be extended to support other values as well
This menu takes 20 seconds to scroll through
These days, I find myself feeling far more comfortable and trusting when a software community doesn't have a "code of conduct", and when it doesn't have a "moderation team" or "community leader enforcement".

Censorship, or even just the threat of censorship, causes far greater harm to a software community than a small number of thin-skinned people getting "offended" every now and then, usually over trivial and irrelevant matters.
Maybe this is a feature. When your phone is low on battery, you ask for a charger, and when presented with a normal, plebian charger you get to say "oh, sorry, I need an iphone charger".

If people want to get a practical, compatible phone, they don't get an iphone. iphone only exists as a signal. So while the EU is making a good decision for making iphone's more pratical, they are also misunderstanding what an iphone is imo.
> A political organization like EU has no say in this. EU citizens already make this decision for themselves by voting with money and choosing to buy/not buy an iPhone.

I think it's important to point out that most EU countries do not subscribe to the exact same free-market vision that the US does. And the biggest country that did has recently left it.

Most of Europe is totally happy with a much more restricted free market than the US would ever allow. This is not something imposed on us people. It's what the majority wants, aka democracy.
It's interesting the very different roles hair has played in philosophical movements: the bald Buddhist monks, the beard-growing Greek philosophers, and here the growing of long hair in Confucianism.

Unrelated to above, but I wonder how much beauty is lost in poetry with translation. Specifically, I wonder how much is actually changed between the original and the English translation... but I wouldn't even know how to quantify that. Blissful ignorance, perhaps.
I do remember the author of LMDB [0] porting some parts of sqlite to use lmdb instead, and then talking about the results. A quick googling doesn't seem to give me a result though.

[0] - http://www.lmdb.tech/doc/
TikTok creators condensing Hollywood movies to minutes getting millions of views