skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this misses the whole point.

If you want novel computer systems you can't build them on top of the old ones. That's the whole point of Pike.

An OS is the thing in about Linux (kernel) scope. The whole point is that this is something that is by no mean "done". If you want innovation in this space you need to build exactly such a thing from scratch!

But the OS is only one part of systems design. Doing something novel in this area would be to continue where we stopped around 1970. There was no progress since than. Only one computer architecture with only one OS left. Since than nothing truly innovative was even tried. (OK, to be fair, almost nothing. There been things like Intel's iAPX 432, or Microsoft's Midori, or things like the Connection Machine. But mainstream is still on the std. tech form the 70'. Even mainframes are actually technological more advanced, as they had for example multiprocessing, VMs and containers already decades ago).

I for my part think that if we would rethink computers form the ground up in light of today's possibilities they would be very very different. Alone the security hell today is only there because we still want to run "normal C programs". Everybody knows that this is not fixable without throwing away some of the old concepts. Still nobody wants to move. (Almost perfectly secure computers would be possible. You "just" need to build capability security into CPUs, the OS, and all apps…). Or another example: Scaling to many many cores would be much easier if computers would be fully data-flow aware. But currently we like to pretend that our CPUs are still PDP-7s. They need to offer the exact same interface (conceptually) or else this would not match the C abstract machine any more 1:1… But the CPU than needs to use a built in "hardware JIT" to translate the sequential command streams it receives to its internal data-flow operations. Somethings that's extremely inefficient and overly complicated—besides that it conceptually can't even help much. There is only so much parallelism extractable form an inherently sequential description of computation… (The most crazy part about this is that we have plenty information available on the high level which we happy erase during compilation, so we can present a "nice flat command stream" to the CPU. That's imho pure insanity). But nobody dares to rethink such systems as a whole: which means form the languages and their abstract machines, through the concrete hardware, the OS level, up to application design. Things like the von Neumann bottleneck were discussed already almost 50 years ago. The issue remains open to this day. Just put another layer of caches on top. Nobody cares about efficiency anyway… Because rewriting software would be to expensive. So the hardware can't be improved. So software needs to optimize for the old hardware concepts. Which leads to the dead-lock in which we're currently, where no substantial improvement can be made any more.

We're in this trap since 50 years. And that's why systems research is absolutely dead by now.

My 2ct. Sorry for the long post. But I have strong feelings about that topic.
Nice! Thanks for working on it, the "command prompt" is absolutely miserable. I read all the blog posts explaining Windows and its different terminal/shell layers before the new one was added.

I hope it ships with Windows by default one day.
Google used to have Caja

https://github.com/googlearchive/caja
I haven’t found the time to examine it closely for several years now, but after finally skimming a couple of chapters of the Foundations book (thanks!) it looks like a classic multiserver to me.
"Parent -> Guardian" or "adoptive parent -> parent" hardly matter because there's very little chance of being surprised by the change, the terms are nearly equivalent and the differences are unimportant in almost all contexts.

In contrast the differences between "man" and "woman" are stark and matter in all kinds of contexts.
What's the difference between safe and unsafe JavaScript?
> Some people (you, apparently) agree with that and just want to shift the definitions so "man" means "someone who identifies as a man" and will be replaced by "biological man".

I don’t particularly care what the common use meanings are or if they shift over time, I’ll use what I think is most appropriate for the circumstances and audience, while trying to be as inclusive as I can.

Though I won’t be using “menstruators” any time soon for the same reason I won’t use “Latinx”, too many people I interact with find it derogatory and offensive.
Statement remains true if you exclude all women who don't consider themselves cis.
Accomodation to receive good medical treatment is more important than accomodating feelings about words.
Meh, that's an argument often heard "I'll download this game to try it and if I like it I'll buy it legit", but how often does it really happen? :). Maybe some did, but it's impossible to quantify.
> ECMAScript does not have maps where keys can be integers and neither can keys be floats.

map = new Map();
map[1] = 3;
map[1]; // 3
map[1.2] = 3.4;
map[1.2]; // 3.4
typeof(map.keys().next().value); // "number"

I'm not an expert in JavaScript. What am I missing?
What a lot of the comments in here are bumping up against with regards to “fairness” is the fact that willingness to pay is a function of both preference intensity and ability to pay.

The way to make sure TS tickets go to the biggest TS fans is to remove the influence of ability to pay and sort only by preference intensity.

Solving wealth inequality fixes this problem entirely - among others!

Edit: like all good economists, I leave solving that particular bit of the problem as an exercise to the reader.
It’s a widely-used aphorism for governments’ monopoly on violence, which, as others have pointed out, is ultimately how governments get people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do.
Heh nice story. I wonder if you can sidetrack sandboxes like that.
> Meta's backend operating system for the last 7 years

Sounds interesting, I had no idea Facebook had their own OS - presumably a Debian derivative?
Doesn't seem like assignment to me, more like documenting.

Has a penis -> Boy

Has a vagina -> Girl

Of course that is not a designation of what gender identity the person will adopt, and perhaps change more than once, over the course of his or her lifetime.
All kinds: pax Pamir, brass, food chain magnate, race for the Galaxy, a feast for Odin, Trickerion, root, etc.

They are my only friends. Since I don’t have any closer friends, I consider them to be my close friends.
Counterpoint to your counterpoint

For much of human civilization there has been an inherent social contract of sorts around communication.

I can take what you tell me, mix it with other things, and retransmit it. While I love books, bits and bytes are not books. There is no physical media. Now, we are in an era of inherently zero cost redistribution, and the vast and giant fraud perpetrated on us by the cabal of distributors, publishers, authors, publishers and agents finally is seeing pushback.

The vast amount of exploitation of public research, and non-value adding commercialization inherent in some of the scientific publishing and the gatekeeping boards is some of the worst of the lot.

Most of all, because it actively interferes with the transfer of knowledge and serves to penalize those without means, and those in poorer countries.

Considering the vastly exploitative system and the outrageous prices and robber baron profits these industries have made...

I consider it my duty to accelerate its creative destruction and return the ability to recommunicate ideas back to its inherent social contract.

Using your bits and bytes to store data is a revolutionary act that this vampire industry of ghouls seeks to prevent.

Down with the literary Robber Barons!
I'm too forgetful to log and fill in time sheets reliably, so I started building a tool do it for me automatically and retroactively (so I don't have to press start/stop on some timer, or even remember to run the software ahead of time) based on data gathered from the system, like file timestamps, browsing history, syslogs, etc.

I got deep into gathering all the data and ML analysis, to the point I started brushing with digital forensics. I got spooked and abandoned it when I've realized I can never release such tool without it being abused for surveillance ;(
I'm not worried about being forced into doing something I don't want to do. I'm worried about wasting my time. I'm worried about getting someone's hopes up, only to upset them when I have to have a very awkward conversation where I tell them I'm not interested. I'm worried about an angry reaction or being accused of being transphobic if I have to do that.

You claim that nobody is hiding information about their genitals. But while we can debate the semantics of "hiding", there are certainly lots of people who are not being open about that information. And I am arguing that the world would be a better place if everyone was just open about their genitals (and indeed their hormones).

It shouldn't need to be a big deal. There's nothing shameful about having genitals that don't match your gender identity (and that would not put me off dating someone).
I'm surprised I need to pay to read this book :)
Related:

A Guide to Color from 1692 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33628768 - Nov 2022 (3 comments)

A Guide to Color from 1692 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755839 - April 2021 (18 comments)

A colourful book (1692) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7702850 - May 2014 (8 comments)
Not all books are available in all countries, especially poor ones. My whole point is that we’re talking about freedom of knowledge. Someone who writes a book or publishes research is doing it for the spread of information/knowledge and for the greater good. I agree that these people have to make a living as well and that’s where it’s getting difficult. In my mind, piracy of knowledge is ok, but piracy for profit or for not wanting to pay is bad.
If you're in the bay area, I am always up to have coffee with new, interesting people. I don't have a lot of time, but I actually automate this, and allocate a few hours a week just to casual meetings people. I rotate around who I get together with to make it manageable, so an hour or so doesn't disrupt my schedule at all.
Can confirm to some extent - I started out in data analytics for call centres, and important episodes of Eastenders et al would completely bork the demand predictions by causing exactly the pattern of depressed traffic followed by a massive surge described in the blog post. Some of this was less about tea and more about just having four television channels.
> ... What is the point of it without exchanges?

The point is that exchange of bitcoin for goods and services is possible without trusted third parties. Whether you approve of what is being traded is a separate question.
You can certainly map floats to int ‘bin number’ which is the index into an array. No need for a map.

But the ‘naive’ histogram is an example of a map using float keys.
Unfortunately, I was not contacted by any intelligence agency with a promise of money and lack of prosecution, so that was my choice at that time.
This technically named modulation. Without it any piece of music sounds boring, sterile.
It was a joke reference to a scene in the film...
Geothermal is not an easy solution. Just drilling deep enough doesn't begin to address the environmental and engineering issues involve. Perhaps these issues will be resolved. I hope so.
The same censorship exists when you can’t read a message because it is too gray or white.

There is also censorship when a comment is flagged even without actual reason.

Another particularly annoying form of censorship is being unable to defend a position when providing something controversial which limits your submission rate.

HN often comes out with very tone deaf responses and takes, so I don’t think that it is the best argument. HN is also a rather niche community that caters to a very specific audience.
If you're not slightly technically inclined you wouldn't be interested in contributing to Z-Libs decentralised hosting so this isn't an issue.
Can read DMs, not "could". It's just been made clearer:

> Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any dangerous information over Mastodon.

(Mastodon seems to allow you to set visibility of posts to specific users, rather than have an actual DM feature)
Facilitating the exchange of stored value for goods and services without a trusted third party.
If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.
Just wow... from their FAQ

>How do workers benefit from WakeCap?

>Workers’ location and activity is identified within the boundaries of a project for the greater good of all involved within the project and to ensure every worker is safe especially when it comes to fall from height detection, ambient temperature extremes, and confined space crowd control, and more. We found that workers responded positively to the technology.

>Do you have proof that it works?

>WakeCap connected 15+ job sites with 2000+ workers per project...Predominately mega construction projects in Dubai and Saudi Arabia.
IPFS is a caching or distributing layer, not a persistent storage. There are some attempts to make a storage that backs IPFS by Filecoin team (Filecoin and IPFS teams have a lot of overlap.)
> They are moving to Mastodon because of disagreements with the owner of Twitter for the most part.

Actually, I have no doubt some are doing that, but from my twitter perspective, most are actually doing it because they expect twitter to end or, otherwise, become unusable or be abandoned by too many others. Many aren't moving to Mastodon so much as creating accounts there just in case — then continuing to use twitter for the moment.

Musk's acquisition is absolutely fuelling this, but the cause for movement is less ideological and more pragmatic, IME.
He has a book about it. The reason the questions tend to be less exciting is that they need to be pretty well defined so that there is no question as to whether the event in question happened or not.

So, "what could surprise us next year" would need to be reformulated to something more specific. "What are the chances GDP will grow 5% over the next 12 months?". "What are the chances the US launches a missile intended to hit mainland china?".
> If you were in online techie chat communities since at least "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog", you might think at least 10% of people were trans.

Actual number: 0.39%.[1]

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/transgender...
>Authors are often robbed by the middlemen and copyright helps the middlemen.

Can you explain a bit more what you mean? How does this justify copyright violation? Unless you ask the author, how do you know they would let you read the book for free? Surely they get paid more when people buy the book, right? IIRC most authors recieve royalties.
As both the guilty party behind "I no longer build software" and the keeper of some chickens, I'd just like to suggest that anyone who wants to get out of software strongly consider woodworking over becoming a chicken.

I still have all ten fingers.

For comparison, we have acquired fifteen chickens over the last two and a half years and now have five. We lost two to a bear that broke into the coop[0], turned an aggressive rooster into soup, and the rest to foxes. They mostly stay cooped up lately unless we're around :-/

EDITED TO ADD:

Oh yeah, I really do still write code from time to time!

https://github.com/longwalkwoodworking

[0] The coop now has an electric fence around it like some kind of cock-a-doodle-gulag.
Nah. It'd probably be surprising how many crates have dependencies here and there on C code – mostly it's seamless even when cross compiling. I've gotten (ages ago) a cross toolchain setup to build binaries for one of those MIPS routers and the biggest pain point was being stuck on an antiquated Debian where cross compiling was painful. There are popularity issues with Rust (e.g. crate namespacing), but non-Rust code hasn't been one of them for me.

So far Conda is pretty much the only problem I've had with native code mingling with Python (although pip was able to get numpy installed on my BSD box). Otherwise it's an issue of the tooling just being really archaic. Which is amusing to me given how much hand wringing there is over providing one right, idiomatic way to do things (e.g. ternary operator). For me digging into Stable Diffusion (and related bits and bobs) was a bit of an eye opener with just how much cargo culting is going on. Installation instructions are often copy and pasted from other related projects. Or maybe just check out our repo and follow the instructions from some other project.

Honestly, my hope is that some of the effort spent obsessing about language details gets spent on coming up with a better packaging and dependency management story.
You should focus on developing this further, I see lots of potential.
I think reason and empiricism are useful tools. But so are intuition, deontological ethics (thou shalt/thou shalt not), and adherence to tradition. I don't think we can do without any of these things and EA seriously overrates reason and empiricism.
I think the original reasoning went like this. When you refer to a black person standing by a tree, it is preferable to say "That guy in a blue shirt/in glasses" and omit the skin color.

Similarly here, you omit the names of body parts that could be used to identify the biological sex and therefore infer the gender of the person you refer to. But I'm not convinced it's actually beneficial to the people in question.
Cave of Kelpius – Philadelphia, Pa
You have to think about what correctness means. Rust is designed for memory safety, i.e within a program memory space, it ensures that when something writes to a memory its allowed to. Most of the code in your program won't benefit from this, especially if using standard libraries for things.

For other things, like data manipulation, its no more correct than any other language. It also won't help you with algorithmic errors that are language independent.
That’s a good point! However, there’s still things Python could do to help make the experience better.

The package I was using had multiple artifacts per version, including the raw zipped source code and wheels for each ABI they built for. It’s certainly convenient that the most applicable one for your current system is pulled automatically by pip. But in this case that’s not the behavior I wanted, and I could not successfully get pex or pip to download a “less optimal” artifact.

You can blame C++, but if Python is already papering over deficiencies it’s not unreasonable to expect improvements that aren’t fundamentally impossible. It should definitely be possible for there to be one easily understood argument to specify which artifact pip should download. In my (potentially flawed) experience, figuring out which ABI value to pass was already not straightforward. Even then, the arguments for selecting an ABI or even asking for the raw source instead of a wheel weren’t seeming to have an effect.
Related:

Starting Forth: An Introduction to the Forth Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26677630 - April 2021 (19 comments)

Recommended Reading: ``Starting Forth'' and ``Thinking Forth'' by Leo Brodie - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20193620 - June 2019 (1 comment)

Starting Forth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164448 - Sept 2017 (5 comments)

Starting Forth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9855977 - July 2015 (68 comments)

Starting Forth – the classic Forth language tutorial - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5909968 - June 2013 (32 comments)

Starting Forth - After yesterday's Prolog post, another awesome language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1980123 - Dec 2010 (27 comments)

Starting Forth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=448303 - Jan 2009 (7 comments)

and of course:

Thinking Forth – A Language and Philosophy for Solving Problems (1984) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18885493 - Jan 2019 (41 comments)

Thinking Forth (1984) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9842557 - July 2015 (31 comments)

Thinking Forth - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3389286 - Dec 2011 (21 comments)

Others?
Why can't you have an alias that's basically:

mkdir /tmp/my-hourlong-project
cp ~/my-env-definitions/python.nix /tmp/my-hourlong-project

Is that something like what you mean?
> But it does strongly suggest that he is starting with a conclusion and then working backward, which is the antithesis of proper scientific research.

His is not scientific research, but the book IMHO is a surprisingly effective and professional weaving of philosophy, history of philosophy, popular science, and history of science toward consideration of Natural Theology.

Point 1: Shannon applies. Point 2: s/supporting a hypothesis/required to support an interpretation/

He acknowledges IIRC that we do not know ranges for potential tunings of physical constants, if that description applies. Has his reference to unexplained low entropy in the Universe been eviscerated? I can't assess his arguments about sparse solutions in protein/fold design space; if you cite a rebuttal of course I'm interested.
That was not my main point, but primitives are not axioms. They are objects talked about in axioms. I give you they are close.

My point was that

1. numbers are simpler primitives than wisdom

2. You can treat mathematics purely syntactically, as meaningless games played by rules

3. You can then give them neaning in the elaborate practice of scientific research, technical implementation and prediction, on the background of human language and practice. Mind you, we went to the moon and have mobile phones and penicillin.

4. Since this can other than science grasping something about reality only explained by a big miracle, it does not matter where you started the proof of your worldview. It’s not grounded in rationalistic first philosophy, against which the trilemma argues. It is simple, practical, ongoing and repeatable success - power over nature if you will. That is a basis outside of logic. Ignore at your own peril, but true - I cannot logically prove it so you must believe. That’s all talk and never found a useful truth, like Kant already noticed in his preface to KdrV [1]. It has not changed a bit since then.

Lastly, from what you say I understand that the trilemma „undermines all truths“. Is it itself true? And then what? Is it thus faith based? Or does it undermine itself? You see that this logico-rationalistic approach leads nowhere?

[1] http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Kant,+Immanuel/Kritik+der+...
How to Keep a Commonplace Book