skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone whose age starts with a 5, I don’t think it’s at all ageist to judge people on what they bring to the table at work. In fact, it would seem “reverse ageist” to have lower expectations for someone who was older.

If you can (and will) do the job, you should be welcomed, respected, and rewarded without regard to age, race, gender, degree, veteran status, parenthood, height, weight, or any of 100 other irrelevant characteristics.
> Int to string is especially egregious because it requires a lot of division which is basically the slowest (common) thing you can do on a CPU.

Yeah. There's some great benchmarking and tips: https://www.zverovich.net/2013/09/07/integer-to-string-conve...

Godbolt example: https://godbolt.org/z/M4b353PKv of which the meat is

imul rcx, rcx, 1374389535
shr rcx, 37
imul edi, ecx, 100
mov r8d, edx
sub r8d, edi
movzx edi, WORD PTR .LC2[r8+r8]
mov WORD PTR [rsi], di

So if our example input is 12345, the first two instructions use the field-inverse property to compute "123" with multiply rather than divide (1 clock, latency 4), then multiply up again to get "12300", then subtract that to get "45". That can then be looked up at position 45+45 in the string "00010203040506070809101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899" to give you the two digits.
There are data brokers but they hardly compare, e.g. North Data. And the amount of information that these make publicly available is astonishing.

For an example, here's Bosch in Germany. Scroll down to "Netzwerk" and you see a relationship graph down to the individual level showing subsidiaries, managing directors and such: https://www.northdata.de/Robert+Bosch+GmbH,+Gerlingen/Amtsge...

If that list seems incomplete, the page also links to all known direct subsidiaries and indirect subsidiaries. This is in addition to available financial and historical data.
There are still plenty of open problems! Here are some of my favourites:

* Is there an oscillator of every possible period? (We have them all except 19 and 41.)

* If you start off the entire plane in a random starting state, does its density tend to a limit as time goes to infinity?

* Is there a 'phoenix' oscillator, in which every live cell dies every generation, of period greater than 2?

* Can every pattern be destroyed by bombarding it with gliders?

* Is there an indestructible pattern?

At the moment people are working on building a spaceship which is only 1 cell tall in its starting state: https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2040.
Linux in a Pixel Shader (2021)
> and then I'll find something else again.

Do you feel confident about that? I'm a couple years younger than yourself and before starting this gig about a year ago I was considering doing something else (anything ... Apple Store, "IT guy" for a small 10 person company) but always got turned away for "too qualified". No desire at all to get in to management / team lead stuff.

Thankfully this job is pretty cool but I'm quite worried about what to do after, when that time comes.
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
Sadly not for firefox mobile. Is there a fundamental difference between FF desktop extensions and mobile extensions?

I would be fine using it, with ugly UI, not optimized for mobile ..
_Really_ sneaks up on you, doesn't it? Especially the side profile thing. I have a couple of shirts that make me look fine from the font, but I turn to the side and just see the gut.
Are you looking at losing weight at the minute?
This is really interesting jonahss, well done for completing it! Have you looked at the physical games and convention spaces?

Things like DnD roleplaying games or Megagames could both use something like this.

I'd personally be interested in both those applications, what kind of wireless communication can they do?
Out of curiosity what connectors did you use between the card and the plinth?

Are they some sort of pogo pins?
‘It was not sustainable or real’: Tech layoffs approach Great Recession levels
You assume that your personality cannot be (semi-)successfully simulated as something that only barely diversifies from everyone else.
I would disagree on two points. One, ads aren't only a medium for tech. Two, ads have been around longer than 20 years.

Ads were in print for newspapers. Then in television, allowing for content and network providers to grow. Tech just became the next delivery medium for ads and a superior one at that once data harvesting and targeted ads were the norm. Tech has become the de facto medium for ads due to the margins and greater potential for returns.

Apple's implementation of IAP was to neutralize as much competition as possible, probably because they would not have been able to compete fairly. This anti-competitive behavior hurt the other ad companies but it also hurt tons of smaller businesses that were able to benefit from the targeted ads. This is probably the government intervention that needs to happen IMHO.

NB, I don't know what the solution is for ads in tech. On one hand, targeted ads mean data harvesting and all the repercussions associated with that (we know now there is no such thing as anonymized data no matter who is collecting the data) while non-targeted ads have little value for all parties involved (wasted ad spend dollars by companies and patrons being shown ads that are not relevant to them), and no ads mean less revenue for services and sites, which mean they eventually go out of business unless they have other means of monetization. What is the optimal solution? (Or just the least bad one if we must?)
Great work! How's it been keeping the weight off?
I noticed that hnrss misses some of the second-chance pool stories (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool), I even raised a GH issue, only to be told that it is expected behavior of the system.
I feel like Kickstarter is more like a tactic than a strategy.

That said, this might be a good "real startup." The problem domain seems modest (e-ink playing cards) but... could be a bridgehead to interesting territory.

These might be designed/used as playing cards, but it's actually a computer with lots of little portable screens. The actual thing is general, a proverbial "computing paradigm."

These are playing cards, but could be concert tickets, conference badges, security doohickeys...
They can open a door, clock you in and display your in/out status. If you want to go full "SV Pitch:" these cards are money. Transfer 69 FTX coins onto a card at a secure terminal, and pay by handing it to the hooker. A casino could give you one of these to be your wallet.

Solutions looking for problems sometimes find them. See apple/msft.
It's like as if people commenting here want CBDCs and would love the banks to impose savings limits on their accounts and pretend that they know best what you should be spending your digital cash on. [0]

[0] https://reclaimthenet.org/digital-euro-spending-saving-limit...
> Becoming lighter has encouraged me to exercise but what I eat has always been the main factor in what I weigh.

That's exactly what I've found. I can exercise two or three hours a day; means nothing if I'm not watching my calories.
Congrats on the weight loss!
This may be useful to generate random charactersistics / powers / hit's health cost (in case of a character card) or text for event based cards.
Damn, impressive OP. This looks really nice. The design of everything is awesome.
MakerNews – November Roundup
Disgusting. Should be a case for the FTC (or equivalent agency in your country). Also, competitors should sue Amazon for such anti-competitive behavior.
No one says you have to stop writing tests when you have types. You can have less tests when you have more types. There are type systems that requires an overhaul of the whole toolchain, but what we’re talking about typescript isn’t that. You can literally run plain js with jsdoc through tcs and make your comment provably accurate documentation, rather than a decorative one.

Im just too tired at this point to address the comment that having more types is somehow a burden on eng velocity while having more tests isn’t. In reality, you never have nearly as many tests as you ideally need, but you can add more types more easily and it will help people reason about your system much easier.

Speaking of which, tests are often way too verbose it hurts readability aka the ability to reason about your system
Don't say that out loud or the heavens shall burn(cloudnize) this project.

/s
Below is the guts of the advisory. Some crude workarounds - changing permission on /sbin/ping, blocking ping packets with a firewall, etc. - would be fairly trivial to implement.

[...]

Affects: All supported versions of FreeBSD.

[...]

II. Problem Description

ping reads raw IP packets from the network to process responses in the
pr_pack() function. As part of processing a response ping has to
reconstruct the IP header, the ICMP header and if present a "quoted
packet," which represents the packet that generated an ICMP error. The
quoted packet again has an IP header and an ICMP header.

The pr_pack() copies received IP and ICMP headers into stack buffers
for further processing. In so doing, it fails to take into account the
possible presence of IP option headers following the IP header in
either the response or the quoted packet. When IP options are present,
pr_pack() overflows the destination buffer by up to 40 bytes.

III. Impact

The memory safety bugs described above can be triggered by a remote
host, causing the ping program to crash. It may be possible for a
malicious host to trigger remote code execution in ping.

The ping process runs in a capability mode sandbox on all affected
versions of FreeBSD and is thus very constrainted in how it can interact
with the rest of the system at the point where the bug can occur.

IV. Workaround

No workaround is available.

[...]
if you're on iOS you're out of luck, Apple forces to use the same underlying browser, so there are no extensions there
Overview of GraalVM
Building from source. I have a bunch of patches in the lread.c to make Clojure-style #f(+ % 1) lambdas work, so I don't have much of a choice. Recently (this year), the reader was rewritten to be non-recursive, so I had to modify my patches too. Other than that, dnf builddep emacs && ./configure && make generally work well. It's worth looking at config options, some interesting things are still disabled by default (last I checked, modules, threads, and xwidgets; though it might have changed in 29).
"Windows is so bad at being Linux compared to Linux! Why is it so bad at being the same as Linux?"

Well, yeah. I sympathize with @bagder here trying to be cross-platform but Windows is just Different than POSIX, and if you try to write everything for Linux then "compatibility shim" your way to Windows support, you're gonna have a Bad Time
On Android, you do have competition though. There are app stores from Amazon, Samsung, and F-Droid. Not to mention, you could go direct to consumer and list the application's installer for download directly on a web page.
Show HN: Realtime GPU fluid, cloth & softbody sims that respond to breathing
Hey HN!

Lungy is an iOS app that responds to breathing and was designed to make breathing exercises more engaging and beneficial to do. It hopefully has many aspects of interest to the HN community – real-time fluid, cloth and soft body sims running on the phone’s GPU with generative music via a sequencer and polyphonic synth. I’ll put further details in a longer comment below.

Would love to know what you all think!
Possible? Definitely. Easier? Probably not. At least for the most part, there are a couple things which C(++) can sometimes be more ergonomic for and those can be isolated out and used independently.
Seasonal themes, delighting users and small UX touches
So much this. The postwar period was more than a little insane - a combination of bureaucracy, technocracy, and competitive academic over-intellectualisation. Academic music mirrored all of this.

But the aesthetics date back to a 19th century music theorist called Hanslick who was aggressively against emotional expression in music. (He literally said women are too emotional to be good composers.)

Postwar academic composers fell in love with this idea, and the result was a torrent of abrasively pretentious tuneless nonsense, most of which was forgotten almost immediately after being written.

That's where most aleatoric music lives. It's not as clever or interesting as it pretends to be. There's nothing outstandingly effective about using dice or radio channels or the I Ching or whatever to spray notes and sounds around.

In C is a bit different because the randomness is limited to selecting and playing entire phrases that (mostly) fit together. It's a much older, less extreme, and more accessible version that isn't too random because of the phrase content.
Further details:

My background is as a junior surgical trainee and I started building Lungy in 2020 during the first COVID lockdown in London. During COVID, there were huge numbers of patients coming off ventilators and they are often given breathing exercises on a worksheet and disposable plastic devices called incentive spirometers to encourage deep breathing. This is intended to prevent chest infections and strengthen breathing muscles that have weakened. I noticed often the incentive spirometer would sit by the bedside, whilst the patient would be on their phone – this was the spark that lead to Lungy!

I had never coded or developed an app before but had a background in 3D design and Houdini which uses an expression language called VEX. I started to learn Swift and Metal in the evenings during lockdown and eventually, I had a good enough understanding to build a working prototype. After the first year, I won a couple of small government grants to develop Lungy further and build a small team. I managed to find some talented developers, and over 5 months (Nov 21 – Mar 22) we built the basis for Lungy as it is today.

The visuals are mostly built using Metal, with one or two using SpriteKit. There are 20 to choose from, including boids, cloth sims, fluid sims, a hacky DLA implementation, rigid body + soft body sims. The visuals change each day in the free version, and are fully unlocked in the premium version. The audio uses AudioKit with a polyphonic synth and a sequencer plays generated notes from a chosen scale (you can mess around with the sequencer and synth in Settings/Create Music!).

There are obviously lots of breathing and meditation apps out there, I wanted Lungy to be different. Rather than closing your eyes and zoning out, Lungy is about tuning into your surroundings and noticing the world around you, so all the visuals are nature inspired or have some reference to the physical world. I didn’t like that apps like Calm and Headspace require large downloads and/or a wifi connection, so Lungy’s download size is very small (<50MB), with no geometry, video or audio files.

Lungy is initially a wellness app, but I’d like to develop a medical device version for patients with breathing problems such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) & long COVID. I’m collaborating with a prof at UCL to try and complete a feasibility study next year.

Lungy is iOS-only for now. I’m not sure the variability of Android hardware would support a consistent experience. Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback, thanks for reading!
End of an Era: Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin Dies at 96
Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin Dies at 96
Only 3 books (or set of books…):

Zero to One by Peter Thiel: philosophy for building companies and future.

Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson: a life of one of if not the most influential founder of our time.

Incerto 5-Book Set (Black Swan and Antifragile included) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: how to understand and win in life, literally.
Perhaps the implication is that it's poor form to publicly announce you understand How Things Work so you should use a more neutral handle like SoyLord66 or DankM3mer - same reason nerdctl is a worse Docker.
Except that the semantic shift of triage to also meaning any under pressure prioritisation of too-scarce resources, including in a project sense, is decades-old and predates its usage in tech. This is a case of tech adopting business jargon, not the other way around.

Even if the product manager wasn't familiar with the term itself, they'd surely be familiar with the idea of prioritising incoming tasks by importance and value and moving out work with lower scores. A simple question should've allowed them to link the word and the concept in their heads. This is unlike true tech jargon, where both the word itself and the underlying concept might be completely unfamiliar to anyone outside of tech and difficult to understand.

You shouldn't have to explain prioritisation to a product manager.
Kindness: Do Not Ask, Give
Limits it to the owners of the instances, who are just as (more) vulnerable to pressure from cancel campaigns.

Remember when Gab tried to join the fediverse? A bunch of instance owners got together and agreed to betray the entire premise of the fediverse by blacklisting Gab.

[bla bla bla, i don't support gab, and all other disclaimers]
Yeah ok, but what is the sound of one hand?
Same impression I had. I really enjoyed Asimov's Foundation but yearned for a bit more of exposé on the psychohistory concept. The TV series is a very different adaptation but I feel it can stand on its own, the development of characters instead of the arc feels like a good approach for the medium.

I don't think that a faithful adaptation would work so well on the screen, it spans centuries and centuries of history in the books, the revolving doors of character would just make the audience not care at all about any of them in the end, given that most would be dead by the next episode/chapter because a century or two has passed. Or just confused with many characters appearing for a brief part of the arc.
I discovered that it is dangerous to have that exact thought. If I hapoen think: "ok, this is not so bad, this could last a while" the big bang blowing it apart, is usually not far away. If you found happiness, enjoy it, but better not think too much about it.

(I might have to read Goethes Faust again)
Crypto is a cruel joke played on the poor and middle class.
Scientists Discover Two ‘Alien’ Minerals in Meteorite
main() is a well established entry point in computer science. It’s the first thing one learns when learning to program. Nowhere else in C# are there “ambient” variables.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entry_point
No questions, just "zig" saying hi :) Nice article.
Kek

(I bet I read the book more times than you. It's sitting right there on a shelf next to my desk :-))
Life in a Sofa
The principle is the same as von Neumann's "universal constructor", so it doesn't really prove anything we didn't know in theory.

However, von Neumann's design uses a cellular-automaton with many more rules, and those were specifically chosen to help define that constructor (Langton Loops are a more extreme example of choosing rules to make construction easier). In constrast, the rules for Game of Life (GoL) were chosen to be simple and interesting, not fine-tuned for any particular patterns (for an even simpler set of rules, see the Rule 110 cellular-automaton).

We know the GoL is Turing-complete, so it can emulate any computable system; including those other cellular-automata, e.g. von Neumann's universal constructor. Such emulations will typically use a large GoL pattern to represent each emulated cell (e.g. see "life in life"): if we emulate a universal constructor, we can use it to assemble any pattern of those emulated cells. We could also emulate GoL inside some other cellular-automaton, and hence use a universal constructor to assemble any pattern of emulated GoL cells. But the question still remains: can we assemble any pattern of "native" GoL cells? That's what the constructors in the article are doing (at least, for a broad class of patterns).

The rest is a matter of "code golf", trying to make the patterns smaller and faster (and indeed feasible to run on a real PC!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_loops

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Turing_machine

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Unit_cell
I stubbornly hate code like this - but largely because of the security and correctness nightmare this is when combined with user generated data.

For example, in a library one of my coworkers wrote, object paths were flattened into strings (eg “user.address.city) and then regular expressions and things worked on that. Sometimes user data ended up in the path (eg “cookies.<uuid>”). But then - what happens if the user puts a dot in their cookie? Or a newline? Does the program crash? Are there security implications we aren’t seeing? What do we do if dots are meaningful? Do we filter them out? Error? Escape them (and add a flurry of unit tests?) Are there bugs in the regex if a path segment is an empty string?

It’s a nightmare. Much better to have paths be a list of keys (eg [“cookies”, uuid]). That’s what they represent anyway, and the code will be faster, and this whole class of string parsing bugs disappears.
American cities in general. If in an average US city, most people live in a detached house, aren't they just a endless sprawl with nightmarish commute times?
I know someone who scored a couple of very large VAXen from the prison service, and discovered they contained a lot - really a lot - of records of prisoner details that should absolutely not have made it out of the door.

Cue a couple of police and prison service cars rolling up outside his house and disgorging a lot of very beardy old sysadmins, who copied everything off onto modern media and wiped the drivers. They then offered the guy a contract to maintain the VAXen they still had, and help in the project to transfer stuff onto more modern databases.

Things became interesting when the guy got jailed for a few months for a minor incident that escalated a bit, but still needed to be given access to the prison service computers...
Ask HN: Are iPhones designed to last for a couple of years?
I bought an Iphone SE in January 2021. The battery performance was already rather poor - lasting less than a day with fairly light use.

I've purposely not upgraded IOS because I do not want to pull even less use time from the battery. But now my hand is being forced due to App Store needing the latest IOS to install new apps or update my current apps.

Given that some of my most used apps (eg Signal) require being up to date to open them, I appear to be left with the choice of either bricking the phone or running it at a highly reduced battery. Yes, I can text and make calls, but I could have bought a Nokia burner for that.
Consider how many people here may be invested, financially and ideologically, in maintaining the status quo or suppressing interest in potential competition. For better or worse, the "Hacker" in Hacker News refers as much to capitalism as software.
If you want to be accommodating to people using different units of measurement, I would consider adding kilograms rather than stones.
Yes, the person will have more than five fingers
If you have all the dollars then you have a monopoly on them. If the government forces people to pay their taxes in dollars you have a government supported monopoly. It stands and falls with the government's support for it, the connected regulations, etc.
The Future of the Transistor Is Our Future
Here in Blighty, paying a ransom is legal per se.......

.....but making payments to a sanctioned country or a terrorist organisation is very illegal (as I suspect it is in most of the world).

For this reason, any organisation obeying the law will refuse to pay the ransom.