skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's why many modern programming languages like Go and Zig define strings as a simple array of bytes.

I'd argue this is not in fact a modern approach but rather a pretty dated one.

Modern language string API design instead leans into 'views' of the underlying depending on what you are trying to do with it.

- Transmission and storage: UTF-8 bytes.

- Parsing: code points.

- Editing: grapheme clusters.

- Rendering: pixels.

It doesn't make sense to consider a random assortment of bytes to be a 'string', that's just an array of random bytes - and the language almost certainly already has a better type for that like a vector of 8-bit unsigned values or a slice type. Strings should be opaque - but always valid - encoded data to be sensible and differentiated from a slice type.

Zig seems to be even worse than Go, requiring null-termination instead of storing them as Pascal strings. This means that a valid substring requires a copy so that the substring can itself be null-terminated to be valid. Inner pointers are not valid unless to the end of the parent and therefore substrings are very expensive relatively speaking.
I was sympathetic to the movement when I first heard about it in the early 2010s, but once it reoriented itself around "longtermism" and especially donating to politicians and NGOs, I knew that it had shed any objective sense of altruism and become just another way to increase the power and prestige of neoliberalism/the cathedral.
The crypto game is all about potential value.

Both opponents and propontents can be so sure about themselves, either that it's obvious it's all a scam or obvious it has value and huge amounts in the future.

The fact of the matter is that nobody can tell at this moment (I'm sure plenty of you will claim they do).

If you cannot see the potential value yourself, I would advise to stay away from it.

And if there will be something in the future where you can see the potential value, and is high risk/high potential return, you could invest 1% of your portfolio into that one. Worst case you lose 1%, best case you gain 100%. The latter is how it went with crypto, but it could have just as easily turned the other way.

I guess investing in startups is the same, although you need a shitload of money to get into that game.
Consider teaching on your own blog - it's not immediate money, but if you're patient, you'll start to get folks asking if you're available for consulting, or if you've considered writing a book on what you write about.

Source: I wrote a book about a single function in React, it did okay.
We use Retool, but haven’t tried workflows. How is this different from Zapier? I see it’s more code-focused, but can’t you write code in Zapier too?
git reset --hard origin/master just deletes all your local work on the current branch.
with cloud gaming and GPU mining in sharp decline, that seems to be unlikely to happen soon. the GPU market recovering.

and even if "cloud" "gaming" becomes the new normal shoved down our throats anyway, there are enough great games for a few lifetimes already
Thanks, that might be true I have not seen in it.

I took this passage from effectivealtruism.org but I was mostly referring to the EA community online which seemed to mostly be the rationalists like the OP said. It's worth pointing out that Eliezer Yudkowsky was mentioned ITT.

Impartial altruism: We believe that all people count equally. Of course it's reasonable to have special concern for one's own family, friends and life. But, when trying to do as much good as possible, we aim to give everyone's interests equal weight, no matter where or when they live. Thi s means focusing on the groups who are most neglected, which usually means focusing on those who don’t have as much power to protect their own interests.

So this is not saying all EA people think the same thing or have the same values or are on that site but I do think this is a common viewpoint among them. I just question why that should be and whether or not a lot of EA people are even altruistic or just virtue signalling on the internet.

I toned down some of the language in this post. I am not being meticulous I am just freestyling my thoughts because it's fun and there is a dose of humor I am putting in here but usually it's not appreciated on HN. Anyways, I don't know if there is a counter criticism to EA officially by some philosopher, and I actually agree with some of what they say because I remember a lot of discussion about choosing charities wisely and not wasting charitable resources. So I don't want to write a formal argument but nevertheless I think what I wrote is a summary of why I am skeptical.
iCloud was down a couple weeks ago for most of a day.
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/01/icloud-mail-down/

It definitely happens to other providers.
> Most people would call helping a relative pay their medical bills altruism.

Altruism is the disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others. Helping your family is not altruism.
This reads as though it were written by a teen, and the core argument isn’t remotely true.
> From my perspective `git add -p` is an important essential functionality that hg does not provide.

Mercurial has an interactive commit mode (hg ci -i) with a slick TUI for navigating and selecting chunks to commit.
> you can't criticize a decision made with limited information with perfect information, and pretend like you would've seen the perfect information at the time.

I can absolutely criticize handwavy low knowledge / high impact decisions afterwards, because that's what they were and that was clear to many at that time already. Consensus wasn't reached based on knowledge, but based on power.

Luckily I came to that conclusion early during the pandemic, so I don't feel compelled to defend unethical decisions now.
As not a fan of professional sports, every time I see a sports game on TV, I feel like the game itself is secondary. It absolutely feels like an advertising show with the unimportant addition of people playing something.
Check out Arweave. It's not quite as tested as something like BitTorrent but 'perpetual endowments' in theory make data on Arweave persist "forever"
Instead of giving examples of abortion, can you give examples where the court has punished businesses that hired white males, contradicting the race and gender protections offered by the civil rights law.
Worked for a corporate and it was amazing to witness folks doing "BS" jobs and getting away with it and people contributing nothing measurable to project outcomes except attending meetings and the release party.

I work for much smaller company now - sure there is more pressure, a level of disorganization but everybody contributes.
This has such a long way to go, not just in the language part wihch is borderline gibberish on the prompts I checked but it just generates incomplete results and has wikipedia text reproduced verbatim eg https://galactica.org/?prompt=anomaly+detection

"Anomaly" redirects here. For other uses, see Anomaly (disambiguation).

That prompt also generates a broken empty "other methods" bullet list at the bottom
> Of course there’s going to be some wackos on that lot. Not so many with access to nuclear weapons, fortunately.

How would we know, one way or the other? I mean, it only takes a few wackos to trigger such a scenario. And there are clearly a lot of wackos among 8 billion people. Doesn’t seem far fetched to me at all.
Temporal Trends in Sperm Count
> you're only going to win if you time it right

People who try timing it will always fail. I tried trading and timing, and if I compare that to just holding bitcoin and no timing or no altcoin trading, I would have ended up with more.

I'm not the only one it seems due to the famous HODL.

Same as with the stock market, just buy and hold for a long time. Hard to beat that strategy.
> and there are still those of us who actually use Mercurial

I'm certainly in that camp; and it pains me every time I have to use the hggit extension to convert a mercurial repo to git in order to work with everyone else...
..."If you look for perfection, you'll never be content."
Instead you have to worry about new things, like not regularly backing up your files to new media since hard drive failures and bit rot are real. You may also have DRM, logins, and paywalls to overcome which are total non-issues with paperbacks.

Ultimately, it's a trade off. Assuming that you have a DRM free digital copy of something and that you're remarkably careful about keeping back ups and multi-site/format copies a digital file could easily last 100 years, just like a well cared for paperback could last a hundred years. At that point, the difference between them is how easy it will be to read the contents. For the digital copy you will need a certain type hardware and software which may or may not exist or be easy to obtain in 100 years, but you need nothing at all for the paperback.

I like books, so I think the best bet is both the physical copy and multiple digital copies in various formats. It's not as if we have to chose one or the other, so it's okay that both options come with different strengths and weaknesses.
I'm sorry ... 'shelling'...? There is no russian artillery in range of the ukranian polish border please go and look at a map!
Reminded me of "Report From An Unidentified Space Station" by JG Ballard:

http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/roauss.htm
Also remember the man responsible for his death: Stephen Heymann. Lest we forget.
Yes I concur. I wasn't lamenting our good laws. I very much hope this style of business folds. Especially when it erodes the already fragile social contract of workers. Ie fair work fair pay
I recommend the Engineer SS-02 solder sucker. Way cheaper than a proper desoldering iron, way more effective than a cheap Chinese one.
> From here, my worry is the regret when it almost inevitably affects my home and family time in a negative light. When I miss that baseball game later down the road or am on a "business trip" for a family event that I most certainly wouldn't ever have to do in the position that I am in now, it'll likely make me 'kick myself' for not keeping this position.

I worry about this constantly myself, I'm fully remote and I hope that I'll lapse into a sort of malaise at home and I'll start missing out on things I otherwise wouldn't.
> Now its all bullshit shell games and scams.

Do you also consider projects like Monero to be scams?
Consider a program that prints "A", waits a second, then prints a combining mark. Before the combining mark shows up, the terminal has no way of knowing to expect one, so it'll render an unaccented "A"; it then has to go back and modify that glyph (breaking the second rule) when the combining mark appears.

A terminal can't defer rendering that "A" until another character shows up -- that'd break common use cases like echoing user input -- and it can't refuse to apply the combining mark just because it arrived later, because the input to a terminal is a stream of bytes, not characters, and that stream can be delayed or interrupted in any number of ways.

And that's without getting into other interactions with terminal features, like: what happens if you move the cursor, or change its attributes, between the base character and its combining mark? How do you apply a combining mark to the last character on a line, since printing that character moves the cursor to the next line? How do combining marks interact with backspace? And so on.
well played! lol
Nah, twitter is getting what it needs
Greater fool theory doesn't align with HODLers.
I just typed:

Space-time continuum documents

It responded with:

Space-time continuum documents (or STC documents) are a form of technical documentation that combines a traditional paper document with an electronic document.

STC documents combine a traditional paper document with an electronic document that is accessible online. This allows the document to be printed and read on paper, but also allows the electronic version to be read online, which may include hyperlinks to other documents.

STC documents are typically created using Microsoft Word. A .docx file is used for the paper version and a .pdf file is used for the electronic version.
Live broadcast: https://youtu.be/CMLD0Lp0JBg
Self hosted Paperless NG works great - built in categorization rules, imap integration and ocr. Really like it.
Wait till you find out what they can do with the little steering wheel like thing and the other levers in front of them!
> Imagine what SpaceX could have produced for $21b

A little under half the cost of destroying Twitter?
There's something special about NASA launches, I feel a palpable energy, it spikes my Adrenalin! - What a Buzz!
I know. I don't want the fake memory.
The hadith is not clear on this but unlike cats who keep themselves fastidiously clean, dogs will happily roll in their own poo and mud and then try and lick your face afterwards.

Thus, dogs have thus been declared as unclean and impure by Muslim scholars but I do have Muslim friends who has dogs, you just need to wash where they touch you and keep them outside the house.
Which is probably why it say "past 20 years" - it's citing from publications done adjacent to the award date of the Nobel prize.
Add command palette to your Django admin panel
Here in HK, uber eats folded partly because of those reasons. Customer support from Deliveroo was so much better in case of issues.
When I was a teen, I used TA precisely because of oop support :) it was a bit cumberstone compared to higher level languages, but worked quite well for the kind of stuff I needed (mostly display-related and IO libraries)
+1 I don't gave a generally poor memory but my memory for dates is horrible. I've missed my loved one's birthdays and important life events before, though generally not by much, enough to disappoint. Using tools to help with this has been life changing.
Dimensions of Scalability
Ok great, that's all very cool, but do you know what the consumer experience is? It's sluggish as heck in the browser, it consumed way too much space in cookies (max I've seen is 85mb, the majority of which are loaded upfront) in the browser, and the app feels kind of jittery and constantly snatches posts I'm looking at away from me in my timeline mid-scroll.

The corporate side is also problematic as the company wasn't profitable. Not to say Elon is going to help, here, but fundamentally the economics of Twitter didn't seem to be working out, and they had had enough time by now to try and make it work.
this is a nice accompaniment... thank you
Is there a feature allowing to see at a glance all my contacts (group by category) and if they are getting stale? Didn’t see it at a glance.
It's not a big deal either way, but the staging area interacts worse with some operations. For example, if you have staged changes and then get a conflict with `git checkout --merge`, AFAIK there's no way to undo to before the conflict in Git. When using commits, all of the standard merge and undo tactics apply.
Wow. Thank you, this was immensely helpful and informative.
Reddit like notification bell inside HN
A physical book goes from pristine to yellowed and loose-leafed. An ebook just completely stops working. The failure modes are completely different
Do you create custom models for each customer in this case and they run it on their own machines afterwards?
So strange seeing modern HD video of a rocket that size lifting off. Can’t wait to see HD footage from the surface of the moon.
Chuck a ebook on any storage medium and wait 20 years, and odds are the file is unusable, due to the file being incompatible with new software, the storage medium being unusable, bitrot or a number of other factors. Maintenance is required for both physical and digital. Physical requires a relatively dry space and not bending the spine, which anyone's grandma's dog can do. Digital requires backups + regular recovery testing to be guaranteed.

There's plenty to worry about with maintenance of both formats, but for paper most of the investment is upfront. For digital it is an ongoing investment, with the benefit of a pristine copy being maintained.
"Unsinkable", yeah right.
That's a spicy take, but I fully agree with you, and it's a shame you're getting reflexively downvoted instead argued against. SLS is a hugely expensive pork-barrel project that's basically the same as Atlas in the 1960s, and Artemis is an equally pointless rehash of the Apollo program. Neither will meaningfully advance the state of anything.
I have the same concern and it's a major one for me. I don't like to switch to distros that destroy such basic QoL functionality as HW decode and turn your laptop into loud battery draining stovetop when watching a Youtube tutorial, without also providing a quick and easy workaround. And I have not found any quick and easy fix on how to revert this (all search results for me yield just threads of people being annoyed with this decision rather than solutions) which is why I'll be staying away from vanilla Fedora for now despite being a favorite distro of mine. Worse, my other favorite distro, OpenSUSE, will follow suit on this, despite being a EU company not affected by the US SW patents issue.

The super ironic thing is that, after the Linux community preaching for so many years that "AMD works best with Linux, always buy AMD, f*ck Nvidia", only AMD users are affected by the axing of VA-API, as Nvidia and Intel have alternative/proprietary APIs for hardware decoding to fall back to which can be easily enabled out of the box, versus the "just works™" AMD users which are currently screwed by this.

I hope G.E. from the Nobara Project[0] will fix this and give us a great Fedora 37 spin with batteries included.

[0]: https://nobaraproject.org/
Put your face in any video, GIF or image
Yet, money was not taken from individuals' pockets.
Thanks a lot, Jemaclus! That is excellent feedback. I felt that I might not find the perfect audience for my post here, but I thought I try :-). Any advice or input in this state is very valuable.
As you indicated, we definitely have to do more market validation, incl. pricing research, and nail down our value prop. We wanted to release an MVP to start getting feedback from a technical standpoint and from artists on the feature front. Our goal is to create a community-led product story. :-)
I asked it to give me a proof, and it just outputed some Python code.

>Prove the last digit of pi is 3.

import math

def main(): for n in range(1000): x = math.sin(math.pi * n) if x > 0.99: break else: print("error")

main()

Hard to argue with that.
The best listing of these I've found is here: https://github.com/smirnov-am/awesome-saas-boilerplates

I believe they are listed in ~order of popularity/maturity by framework. Or at least the top 1-2 in each framework are the ones I've heard the most about.
Why would you not? Just curious as to what the red flag is, as it’s not clear to me.
> Already commonplace in Europe when say, Ukrainian Uber drivers consistently work to ruin Russian user accounts.

That's not really "racist". I won't say that it's right either, but I guess I can understand it. I accept that I'll get a certain amount of hate just for being American in places where my government has gone around acting like a dick. It's not fair, but it's common for people who are powerless against their abuser to lash out at someone else they aren't powerless against, even when it's undeserved.
Nice theory but wrong. They just lost out to Uber Eats and DoorDash.
Someone's commented saying "EA was basically Judas Iscariot's method" and it got flagged. I think that statement was inaccurate. A motive like EA ("that oil could have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor") was the front for his real method, which in the Gospel is to sell out Jesus for money, so he can buy some land. His intentions were ultimately proven to not be altruistic. Knowing I'm guilty of some of this inappropriate judging myself, I think it's bad to judge people today who say they want to do EA by reaching for such a quick, easy "call them Judas" gambit.
Ive thought about the blog thing, i just have no idea how to find readers? With the book the publisher takes care of the marketing part? I think that's a common theme Im noticing with where I seem to stop. How do i find, reader, clients, users for whatever i want to do.
Ask HN: Becoming too much of an analyst ruins creative abilities?
We are in a specific time where evidence is all that matters. We analyse and over analyse things to juice things as much as possible. We are analysts.

I don't know what the opposite of that is - maybe, a creationist, constructivist? Whatever that is called, are we going far away from that? Because to me creation of new things calls for breaking rules. Of course we need to be aware of what the rules are in order to break them sometimes. That's where analysis comes handy. But too much analysing stuff may have hampered our abilites to create beautiful stuff.

One example that comes to mind:
In college a Design and Analysis of Algorithms class rarely teaches design, rather it spells out popular algorithms and teaches us to analyse them.

In other engineering disciplines, for example take electrical engineering, we do more analysis than design something from scratch (maybe except some top schools like MIT).

One answer to that maybe that hobbyists and enthusiastic people will always find out how to design on their own after learning the analysis part. And that is okay. But why not give others the opportunity of tasting what design feels like. Maybe most people don't try because they don't know what it is actually like to design or create?

What are your thoughts on this? You can belong to any field and still feel like this?
Content-Driven Growth Strategies
didn't know about duckdb.

sort of off-topic, I read the "why duckdb" page and found this really nice in this day and age:

"DuckDB has NO external dependencies, neither for compilation nor during run-time.
Just a little reminder:

Should have launched in 2015 for the cost of 12 billion.
Launched in 2022 for the cost of 23 billion.
It costs 3 billion per launch. (As per Wikipedia)
And it is recycled Space Shuttle design and material.

Compare that with Space X Falcon Heavy launch costs of 100-150 million per launch.
That is good for the US and the world - having all of our major semiconductor manufacturing concentrated in Taiwan and South Korea is not a good thing in the long run.

Afaik Intel has fabs in the US and Israel, but nobody except them uses their process nodes - are they trying to change that.
Different benchmarks are performed for different tasks. As there are a lot of things you can use language models for, there are a lot of benchmarks.

With respect to subjectivity it really depends on the task - some tasks are quite amenable to objective classification. One common task for science language models is citation prediction: do these two papers share a citation link? Obviously that's a really simple accuracy metric to report.

Often things are not so simple. An example might be keyphrase extraction - standard practice there is to have grad students sit down with a highlighter and use the terms multiple students agree on (simplification, but not by much). From there it just gets messier. Are you reporting accuracy of all keywords identified or all sentences correctly processed? What about sentences with multiple keywords? What about sentences with no keywords? Very messy, appropriate metrics can be a real topic of debate.
Well, nftstorage seems to be free somehow in perpetuity. Something about extra filecoin for those who store the massive 40GB files that can be uploaded there… can someone elaborate on the tokenomics of that?
Just like the people who were entering the Capitol about 20 months ago.
Seems to be this: https://knowingneurons.com/dopamine-makes-people-impulsive/

Original HN threads here: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=dopamine+impulsive