skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> WhatsApp has scaled less than 10x since acquisition. They used to handle ~3M open TCP connections per server, and as a result could run their entire operation with under 300 servers.

They switched to a new protocol and grew from 200 million to I guess about a billion users since 2013. If you believe a team of 50 developers could deal with this and not cause extensive downtime and service disruption along the way I pray you never ever manage software engineers.

> Sharding and fan-out solves the burstiness.

Great, at least it's no longer "just add CDN to solve 99%" here;)

> And people overall receive a similar number of messages (and thus push notifications) from WhatsApp as Twitter.

Yeah again WhatsApp has many users but as an engineer you just don't ever have to worry about delivering a message instantly to more than 32 people (512 as of this year), and you never have to account for moderating any of that because it's e2ee and there are no adverts next to the messages. It's basically dumb pipes terminated by one native client. Twitter has to maintain a mix of automated and human review of all UGC and is accessible via extensive APIs and search engine indexed web app in addition to native client.

> Then there are DMs

Let's ignore Twitter's DMs, even without them it's far more complex and demanding than an IM app.

> StackOverflow still runs off of 9 on-prem servers [0].

Yeah, and SO maintenance page or read-only mode is up about once a month and lasts dozens of minutes. What are you even talking about now bringing up a niche programmer-oriented help forum for comparison here?

You may be stuck in the times where Twitter was a RoR-based microblogging platform. It's not been that for years.
It is the same problem as with all the AI models that are “racist” (note some are actually racist or insensitive): the AI model just does what it’s told, doesn’t know right from wrong, and amplifies fake and actual differences in ways that make us uncomfortable.

So you can get an AI model that hasn’t been hardened against these attacks to write a paper on why <racist thing> or create an image depicting <racist or porny thing> and it just does it. Because the model is just an input:output device and doesn’t have the “wait maybe I shouldn’t do that because it’s bad” feature.

And while teen and young 20 something males will get a huge laugh out of posting screenshots of it, the journalist crowd will freak out and start calling the model, researchers, and company racist.

Personally I have played with large language models and the chutzpah with which they will lie and make things up is indeed astounding (they do a good job at making them sound believable, and lie with utter seriousness and confidence). So I can see where the controversy comes from, although I agree with the other commenters that the researchers should be able to put up a bit fat disclaimer about it
I think the next question is, forget battery life, how long do I get security updates for and will the newest releases slow down my car’s functionality like a new iOS update…
> impress a visiting friend or hell at a light next to an annoying BMW M owner that you suddenly need to smack down

You are the annoying car owner.
minimum wage is just an example. you pay $40 for what? 5 hours of minimum wage work time while in india that is 7 days? cost of "admission", that sort of thing.

this is just a reference point. Sure, any student who wants to do research "probably" already has access to "some" journals through their universities who pay through the nose for "institutional subscription", again, money that these third world institutions would rather use for actual work, as opposed to paying for elsevier. If instead of paying for a subscription, the university funds the research of a poor student? would that make more sense?
Windows Subsystem for Linux Is Officially Released
Hark: https://examine.com/conditions/attention-deficit-hyperactivi...
Without being an expert in this matter, this seems wrong.

Sure you want quality here but there’s always going to be a human in the loop for this kind of work.

Any workflow with a human in the loop has this speed vs accuracy tradeoff.

While I’m not saying that speed trumps accuracy here, I don’t think you can dismiss without evidence that the tradeoff exists and speed might have benefits.
I think as of today the most efficient approach is pumped storage hydropower. However that is severely limited by geography
Yes, apparently it took Microsoft's persuasion to make it happen, hiring Guido exactly for that purpose.
An actual solver in Python:

import numpy as np
from mip import Model, xsum, minimize, BINARY

def solve(tiles):
rotations = [[[] for _ in row] for row in tiles]
rot_vars = [[[] for _ in row] for row in tiles]
model = Model("rotaboxes")
for i, row in enumerate(tiles):
for j, tile in enumerate(row):
for _ in range(3):
tile = tile.transpose((1, 0, 2))[::-1]
rotations[i][j].append(tile)
rot_vars[i][j].append(model.add_var(var_type=BINARY))
model += (xsum(rot_vars[i][j]) == 1)
costs = []
for i, row in enumerate(tiles):
for j, tile in enumerate(row):
for (di, dj) in [(0, 1), (1, 0)]:
if (i + di >= len(tiles)) or (j + dj >= len(tiles[0])):
continue
for r0, t0 in enumerate(rotations[i][j]):
for r1, t1 in enumerate(rotations[i + di][j + dj]):
if di:
a, b = t0[-1], t1[0]
else:
a, b = t0[:,-1], t1[:,0]
n = np.square(a - b).mean()
d = np.square(a[1:] - a[:1]).mean() + np.square(b[1:] - b[:1]).mean()
e = 2. * n / (d + 0.01)
v = model.add_var(var_type=BINARY)
model += (v >= rot_vars[i][j][r0] + rot_vars[i + di][j + dj][r1] - 1)
costs.append(e * v)
model.objective = minimize(xsum(costs))
model.optimize()
solution = [[[r for v, r in zip(vs, rs) if v.x >= 0.99][0] for vs, rs in zip(row0, row1)] for row0, row1 in zip(rot_vars, rotations)]
return solution
> I wouldn't buy (and probably wouldn't afford) a 30-day stay at the most luxurious spa in my country, should I insist that they let me enter anyway?

That's tangible. You consume space, resources, people time, water, energy, etc. People have to clean after you.

For comparison, take the scenario of a 10 year old from a poor family pirating Solidworks, which costs $5000-ish a license. The family doesn't have $5000 in their bank account.

So there exist two possible outcomes of this situation:

A. Kid pirates Solidworks. Company makes $0.

B. Kid doesn't pirate Solidworks. Company makes $0, because it's impossible for them to buy it.

That's precisely why many such companies have huge educational discounts, and offer software for free to students sometimes, and sometimes ignore piracy in some areas. If you could eliminate piracy by non-engineering companies you wouldn't make much of a difference, because pretty much no hobbyist out there spends $5000 on software they might use just a bit. Rather than buying it, they'll make do with alternatives instead.
I am surprised by the design of jai. The author has very interesting view on typical programming problems (RAII, exceptions).
The only reason this doesn’t bother me is because I don’t care about faster acceleration. Now if they start charging for Apple CarPlay it’s a different story…
We are nowhere close to that kind of pace for temperature change. But it was that much warmer during several eras in the past, including the age of dinosaurs. Life arguably thrived even more under such conditions.
Speed is a poor metric for safety and speed limits have a history of being set at levels optimal to generate revenue, not optimal for taxpayer convenience or safety.

The speed-unlimited sections of the German autobahn have far fewer accidents per million miles travelled than any US highway, in spite of the fact that many people are routinely doing 150+ mph / 250+ kmh on a daily basis through those stretches.

If you're arguing from an environmental perspective, just remember that even if the entirety of the USA and western europe hit net zero carbon emissions tomorrow, it would still be impossible to avoid 2° C of global warming thanks to India and China alone, to say nothing of the rest of the world.

I forgot which study it comes from, but I read that several dozen Chinese coal-powered industrial cargo ships produce more CO2 than all North American personal automobile emissions combined.
People like this are one of the reasons biology visualization is so difficult: Nothing less than a perfect simulation is good enough, and any editorial/design choices to make certain processes perceptible to humans are problematic in some way. It's all true really, but there are many valid reasons to create visualizations that are less-than-perfect. But yeah it's a fine balance between accuracy and the appearance of accuracy (e.g presenting a process as linear when it's really stochastic)
Diagnosis is classification. They almost always do work for service rather than dealing with patients on a regular basis.
Exploring OFRAK's Minimap View
I don't see why a language can't be one guy's passion project. Even if he releases it and it turns out he's the only person that likes it, so what? It's not like he's had millions in VC or government investment dumped into it or something. He's got some ideas and he's implementing them. I'm interested to see how it turns out.

Golang has had success and was primarily made in private by 3 guys and hasn't strayed too far from the original founding principles they came up with.
Judging by the title, I was expecting to read about the advantages of dynamically-typed functional programming languages like Scheme and Clojure over statically-typed functional languages like Standard ML and Haskell. It seems to me that large segments of the functional programming community love static typing, and the research community has done (and continues to do) a lot of work applying type theory to the design of programming languages. However, there are still many advocates of dynamically-typed functional programming languages, generally from the Lisp family.

I don’t think of functional programming when I use Python, even though it’s possible to program in a functional style. I’m also unaware of any Python development environments that offer Smalltalk or Common Lisp levels of interactivity, though this is less of a criticism of the language and more of a matter of tooling.
I don't understand why you mention the wife so explicitly. If anything, it will only makes things easier. Unless you have a partner that is unable/unwilling to take care of themselves ofcourse.
Debug info is one of the backend things that does get priority with dmd. It has gotten some performance increases in recent years but these are mostly just a nicety.

Personally I have fixed some debug info generation problems so it is being worked on.
Sounds like a great case to forcefully open-source it in court, so that all parties may inspect it.

And naturally, case law as well.
For me, subscriptions need to really earn their keep. I suppose I'd miss my devices if Amazon started charging a subscription, but I certainly wouldn't pay and maybe I'd replace them with something else simpler.
Apple and Elon Musk’s Twitter are on a collision course
Look, if you don't like the work because the model is too big and expensive to run or because it is stochastic and can spit out garbage sometimes - that's valid criticism and something that a scientist can respond to. If you're going to level ideological accusations about biases and harms and the gender and race of the authors, then only people who share your ideology are going to be able to respond, and very few do.
The point of the article isn't to say that python is better, all it's saying is that a more functional style leads to cleaner code. This is irrespective of python's technical merits.

With a dynamic, functional language you could enjoy all of this simplicity.
But you don't even need that to benefit from this perspective today! You can adopt the techniques of functional programming right now in your favorite language (such as Python, used above). What's important is your mindset and how you approach problems, minimizing state and maximizing clarity in the code you write.
^ and this isn't just a public service problem, either.

I'm making this number up, but I swear that 90% of the time when I come across a company that's absolutely floundering under the weight of its own poor decisions, it's because those decisions are enforced by software such that people CAN'T work around it.

What ends up happening is doing anything crosses 15 silo's and each of those silo's absolutely enforces it's authority such that no single person is able to bridge the gap between even two of them.

What makes it hard is that there are legitimate reasons why you don't want a single person being able to write code, push it to production, open firewalls, open access to databases, add ACL's, etc. Depending on the industry, the need for controls should exist, and because there's SOME legitimacy there it gets pushed across the threshold past reasonableness to absolute pain for everyone involved.

---

And if I may, that's where the most dangerous solutions lie. When there's a legitimate use of them but they can be abused.
I've had like 40 not useful and 1 useful one. I'd rather it remind me about my macbook and not my ipad.
“Field is squishy” != all parts of the field are equally squishy. The presence of some clear problem-and-solution pairs does not preclude the existence of more ambiguous problems. This is especially true as we’re deploying AI against increasingly vague goals with increasingly vague constraints, such as in the case of the non-lying Diplomacy bot that absolutely did deceive human players.
> It's better in general not to go around judging people's morality, and if you can't manage that, try to keep your moral judgments to yourself.

You do realize that this is, itself, a moralizing statement, don't you?

I also suspect nobody really adheres to it, either. People simply say "don't judge other people's morality" because they don't want themselves or others to be judged by the default/most common cultural standards. But as soon as you tell other people to judge or not to judge, well, you're judging.
Yes? It’s written in RoR.
Definitely checking this out. I’d love to dive into some new blogs that offer in-depth, rich, original content.
You are always welcome to use the opportunity and start a competing service in a fraction of the cost. Mastodon is indeed inefficient but you also pay a lot for peace of mind.
No idea. I found the question interesting and looked into Enron a bit. No idea how comparable it is.

December 2, 2001 – Enron files for bankruptcy

February 19, 2004 – Jeffrey Skilling surrenders to the FBI, released on $5 million bond

January 30, 2006 – Trial starts

May 25, 2006 – Jury returns verdict

October 23, 2006 – Skilling sentenced

December 13, 2006 – Request to remain free during appeal denied, prison sentence begins
>Mastodon just the most inefficiently written software ever or something?

Yes, it's notoriously bad.
http content can also be modified in flight by your ISP/VPN/Starbucks wifi hotspot spoofer, you could easily change the links on the page to ones where you would end up downloading malware/spyware versions of the products
This reminds me of Neocities Districts! https://districts.neocities.org/
It looks like it's names for individual dogs, broken down by letter then by the type of dog. Houndis and braches, male and female hounds respectively. Tereris I'm guessing is terrier.

Greyhoundis and greybicches. I don't know why that's so hilarious to me. I think it's just the archaic spelling forced me sound it out and it took a second to process.
Low to moderate stress is good for you: study
My game+engine wich is composed of 37k lines of D + 22k of C code (with D's ImportC), fully recompiles in 1.2 seconds with DMD

https://bpa.st/raw/WCVQ
> We could ignore both asteroids and climate change and according to the best known science there'd be very little impact for vast timespans and possibly no impact ever (before humanity is ended by something else like war).

That's just incorrect. The Tunguska event was a nuclear-weapon scale asteroid. These are predicted to happen once every hundred years or so. If it happens over a populated city millions would die. If a person wrongly concludes this was a surprise nuclear attack, maybe everyone would die, to say nothing of the real risk that the asteroid itself could be big enough to wipe us all out.

There's a lot of uncertainty around climate change, but changing climate patterns will certainly change resource allocations (fresh water, arable land, etc.). This will lead to shortages in places that were once abundant, which could easily lead to wars in which millions die.

> Really stuff like asteroids and climate is a good counter-argument to caring about AI risk.

This. This boggles my mind. Long-tail risks exist, and burying your head in the sand and pretending they don't just places millions of lives at risk, and potentially the entire human race. You don't have to think these are top priorities, but to dismiss them as complete unimportant is frankly bonkers.
It doesn't. They're almost always open collector/open drain signals, with the pull-up on the host (PC) side. No power needed, if you've got mechanical switches doing the commutating!

(Of course those aren't so reliable over the long term, so transistors are usually used. But swinging a base or gate around is all that's needed, and that is easy to do with almost any available power source. Like the main power for the fan!)
The migrant workers struggling in wake of India’s Covid response
Lets see if it has better luck than C++ on domains that don't care about anything beyond C89, and compiler extensions.
> states like California now won't allow cars with these sorts of mods to pass smog tests

Thankfully, a lot of us live in better-governed states than California. And even if it is illegal where you live, stuff you own shouldn't try to enforce laws against you.
Design by committee vs. design by singular vision is an age old debate. We have plenty of the former, why not give the latter a try? There are plenty of good languages out there already to use, why does this language have to aim for wide adoption?
My experience is that mind mapping on an iPad is the best way to retain information, because there is a spatial component that doesn’t exist in any other documentation format (and it is searchable; you can also use handwriting in the mind map).

My brain takes advantage of the spatial component for sure.
My skepticism about e.g. AI and blockchain is not definitive or final, and the goal is not to end the conversation. To the contrary, for me this is a (possibly very deficient) style of reasoning about the world. You are excited about technology X, can I express my skepticism in a sufficiently annoying way to prod you into helping me understand some insight about technology X which disproves my hypothesis that technology X is a technology in search of a problem? For example, I don't see an important problem which is solved by blockchain in a way that's superior to other solutions, when taking into account their respective advantages and drawbacks. Just don't see it.

For example, I want to have a centralized authority which can override fraud or a mistake in a financial transaction. I want laws to apply, I want them to be written by elected humans.

I'm not even sold on the value of any kind of electronic voting in general elections, since trust in the process is so vital here that in my mind the horrible inefficiencies of pen and paper and a bunch of humans manually tallying up votes in a thousand school gyms until 11 pm is actually quite okay. I'll pay for that with my taxes, no problem. Now you add blockchain into the mix, and I don't know what problem it solves that does not have superior alternative solutions.

And so on. But I'm gonna stay open minded. Technology X might one day find the perfect problem to solve, or I might realize I was stupidly wrong about technology X for some time.
Is UCIe Really Universal?
The article they quote from,

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/18/1063487/meta-lar...

Twitter-quotes both of them and others
Any site that requires a password will need an email for password resets.
you just described how modern high content screening, which has been one of the most useful techniques for finding drug leads, works. Since lead-finding is a bottleneck in the drug discovery process, it has been highly effective because it can measure things that are not currently computationally accessible.
I use IntelliJ products but still prefer Emacs as an editor. I moved off it for code for IDE features, even if I managed to get some convenience in Emacs it ran synchronously which meant experience could be pretty laggy at times vs "at worst popup with extra info will be delayed" in IDEA
Never use a warning when you mean undo (2007)
No, I think the original accusation was "selective information feeding", meaning that Assange was trying to hurt Hillary and help Trump, and therefore held something back.

That accusation falls apart if the accuser can't even think of a plausible scenario in which Assange might have had information that would have hurt Trump. Assange couldn't hold back information he didn't have.
> Every week there's a random here post about "some AI detection system closed my Gmail account / took down my Android app / froze my Square funds", and Hacker News is seen as the semi-official tech support line for companies who have turned to biased AI to cut costs.

I would agree with this if I ever saw these self-appointed AI-ethicists focus on these kinds of harms. But, at least in my experience, is usually focused on the exact same set of concerns that 90% of the time has "intersectionality" somewhere in the criticism.

Yes, I'm being a bit unfair and snarky, but I'd be more willing to pay more attention to some of these criticisms if I felt it included more of the harms you bring up than just what I feel has become a constant bone to pick. I agree with the GP when he wrote "You could code a bot with a lookup table to write their tweets about literally anything AI-related."
I've seen a few Mastodon instances using https://opencollective.com/ which seems like a pretty reasonable way to cover ongoing costs and the like. Here's an example: https://opencollective.com/libreops
I want to see good interactive tools for working with and introspecting threads / async / other concurrency models first. In general, because I don't know of any, and in Emacs in particular.

My current experience with Emacs concurrency is mostly negative - occasionally, an async-heavy package (like e.g. Magit-style UI for Docker) will break, and I find it hard to figure out why. Futures-heavy code I've seen tends to keep critical data local (lexically let-bound), which is the opposite of what you want in a malleable system like Emacs. For example, I'd like to have a way to list all unresolved futures everywhere in Emacs, the way I can with e.g. external processes. But it seems that at least the async library used (aio, IIRC) is not designed for that.
I'd have a problem if they were autonomously picking and choosing who lives or dies - like autonomous driving algorithms.

If there's a police officer trained in controlling and using the robot then there shouldn't be any qualms about it.

It's no different from a soldier controlling a UAV from across the world - just in this case I'd expect a lot more auditing and scrutiny if the tech's used domestically.
That's not a wrong abstraction, it's just not the abstraction level that you want to work at for this problem. So... create multiple endpoints that all call the same function to perform the behavior you want? Maybe call it a "controller".
Is it a joke that there is genuine interest in giving them billions of dollars to revive FTX, let alone see any returns on that investment? It's a genuine question seeing as crypto space has all this MAD going around that needs to prop others up, I just can't see how after all the public lies he would expect anyone to trust anything with FTX.