skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Isn't the earth's eccentricity incredibly low? (To the point that human-noticeability or non-precision-machinability are out of the question?)

It's one-percentish, and causes the length of time between equinoxes to be shorter on the northern-hemisphere-winter-side by a day or so. The date scale on the model includes single-day divisions, which made me think that such accuracy was intended; perhaps I was wrong in that.
I'm not sure where your 8e9 number is coming from. Population doubling every year but the parents leaving the planet after mating?

In your calculation, after 1000 years, there would be 2^40 humans, each weighing 100kg - many orders of magnitude less than Mercury's mass.

Still, if we give it a few thousand more years of exponential growth, you will eventually reach such masses.

However, these numbers are meaningless - you are assuming that doubling the size of a population that's 2^39 individuals will take roughly the same time as a population that's 64 individuals individuals, which is not even close to plausible - especially when we reach ideas like a population weighing as much as half a planet.

You're also assuming that it's even possible for a mahcine to convert a significant proportion of a planet's crust to copies of itself - which is obviously false, as the crust is mostly rock, and machines require plenty of liquids and water to be produced (whether biological or mechanical or electronic). And that doing so will not affect the growth rate at all, even as the planet starts being formed of molten magma once all of the crust has been used up. And not to mention the gigantic earthquakes and supervolcaones they would have to deal with as a significant portion of continental mass gets shifted around.

Overall, you are only extrapolating some numbers to a completely absurd conclusion, and calling it plausible. There is nothing even close to realistic in your scenario, and indeed we have no idea if it's even close to possible to strip a planet down to create a Dyson swarm. I very much doubt your energy calculation as well, but that's already beside the point.
But scale does add difference as does all the complexity required to make that scale self-sustaining.
> no amount of new best practices will save you from old C++ codebases

That's true.

But at some point maintaining this code will give you your weight in gold on a daily basis. Like it's currently for COBOL.

No, I'm not looking for such a job. I fear C++ and especially the legacy code. But there will be likely people willing to look after this code.

> I can't see new people reaching to learn C++. It will die with its current users.

Successful languages don't "die". They fade out. Very, very slowly…

I think this process in some way resembles nuclear decay and the concept of half-time.

> If all Rust had going for it was Cargo, an improved syntax, and the better docs and compiler messages, it would still win.

Well, yes, but the syntax is no real improvement. Rust is as ugly as hell. (Which does not say anything about the actual language as such. Syntax is "just syntax". But Rust has chosen deliberately an ugly syntax to attract C/C++ people, I guess).
Agree. We have a Tacoma that has 4WD and it is the absolute dumbest implementation. Contrast that to the Subaru with AWD and it is a completely different driving experience. We go with studs on the Tacoma for that reason, and get by with regular snows on the Subie.
> AWD != 4x4. AWD + traction control absolutely helps driving on snow and ice with appropriate tyres.

Too late buddy. The way manufacturers abused AWD, 4WD and 4x4 terms they can mean anything now
>If anything it enables the enforcement of strong invariants and leads to better and safer code.

How?? If a container have `get(K)->V` and `remove(K)->V` then how does it preserve this invariant? This is an impossible contract to satisfy once you try to push once and pop twice. The container is promising you something that it can't satisfy, I would rather have a container that's honest with `get(key)->Maybe(value)`.
"Mountains of documents" is not a new problem, you just need to organise them properly.

But if you have a meeting and nothing about it was written down, who knows what was decided if it's not written down?

1) Every meeting must have an agenda and any material linked must be read before attending. You're wasting everyone's time by reading the material during the meeting.

2) Every meeting must create an artefact, otherwise you're just chatting with coworkers.
> ... bunch of parasites jump on these tokens to speculate on their price without giving a.. about the underlying utility. This completely screws the price optimum and creates a inflated price bubble, in turn preventing ...

We have exactly the same problem with real life systems like food, raw materials and real estate.
Not really - we now have the technological and resource window and we should use it. Wasting this opportunity could otherwise doom us forever if we can't get back to this level of capability again.
Mine was too. The seizure had more to do with the war (as the devices come from Russia and are explicitly labeled for hacking) - my package got to me fine, looks like it wasn’t tampered with or anything. I think business is as usual for the Flipper folks.
I didn't follow the article closely, but I assume the author's alluding to resetting the accounting/tax/depreciable basis of the assets with an arm's length sale.

There is a tax concept using "leased employees" where you pre-pay for a vendor to work on-site, and it counts as an asset on the balance sheet. I don't think that applies to independent contractors.

Sub-contractors are popular because

1. They don't count in key performance metrics like revenues/employee or liabilities (paid vacation)

2. Their costs are buried further down the income statement and appear as non-recurring/variable.

3. They can ramp up/down with less approvals.
It would be relevant to note that the Java 19 number is the JDK size.
The JRE size is almost half that, 180Mb IIRC.
Confirmed by the authorities of the respective countries, as opposed to confirmed by independent researchers, which I guess is impossible to do.
>When you schedule a meeting, you create a wiki page named like "2023-01-02 Fooproj UX Meeting with Marketing"

These are the kinds of wiki pages I come across when I'm searching for docs that are actually useful. I dont think anybody reads them.
Another Buddhist teaching is to learn how to free oneself from attachment and to be egoless.

The poster is clearly believes that there is something intrinsic and essential to their one personality that involves how they interrupt people, rather than realizing it is simply a choice they have made that has effects and consequences like any other choice.

They want and expect those consequences to be different than they are and they are anchored in that delusion.
Maybe London should stop allowing "architects" to design these modern mostroserties, and instead design classical buildings that will both stand the test of time and... not burn things.
Interesting, how does that work with the multiple GPUs? I'm not familiar with the internal workings of these models, is there anywhere where I can get a brief rundown of how the processing is split. I imagine there can't me much swapping between GPUs as that seems prohibitively slow? How is the model split such that it can be worked on in parallel by multiple GPUs w/o being bottlenecked by IO?
If your costs for community college and an AP test were adjacent your local community college must be a bargain. AP test currently costs $97 while the local community college is $185.50 per credit hour. Our local school system actually pays for the 1st 4 AP tests a student takes so the difference is even greater.
Responsible disclosure exists for serious exploits, and it sort of works.

Auto makers had ample time to learn that their current radio-operated locks are insecure by design. They had years while everybody even slightly interested knew e.g. how a replay attack can be done. Did they need any more responsible disclosure time in order to act?

BTW there's no need to radically invent anything in that space; say, SSH offers a working example of a tamper-proof, eavesdropping-proof establishment of a secure connection (after a secure initial pairing, expected between a key and the car anyway).
I don't think anyone would expect that - but the goal in space is not to replicate as much of the Earth biospheres variety in a closed system, but to feed a couple people for as long as possible (but not necessarily indefinitely) with the materials at hand.

I think a vat-grown culture of highly nutritious fungi (or algae or whatever, I'm no expert and I don't pretend to have even an SF writer's level of understanding of the subject) would be a much more viable solution.
Lacking control, how do you bring about diversion of resources to local production?
> Legacy systems die due to business failure.

You mean like in the case of COBOL? ;-)

OK, admitted, banks can't fail. They're protected by law of nature. (Or something like that).
I've had a thought, why isn't there a "Blue Marble Livestream"? Like actual image of the entire Earth, from like 20000 km orbit. Is there one actually? Will there be one in near future?
Not so hard as geology for sure, but Biology is wide. What means "hard" in this context?
I don't think kids know anything about food quality. There is also a matter of preference but to say that the small children sense unhealthy/bad quality food is ridiculous. They would probably eat "only" junk food and sweets if given the choice.
How do you make sure that children don't get inappropriate content? I know ChatGPT is pretty good at filtering already but to me it seems like a high risk undertaking - a single lapse can sink your ship.
I’m speaking from 6 months ago. My hacker (vuln researcher) friend just convinced to buy one, I went to the store and bought one. Probably just an uptick in sales right now because of similar blog posts and the current HN hit.
Italy, France, Switzerland - beef tartar is also popular and omni-present.

It is also very good. Coming from a country where tartar doesn't exist it took an effort to decide and try it the first time, but if you are OK with medium rare steaks, the taste is similar and the texture is that of a rare burger (the meat is chopped up into tiny pieces). Seasoning and condiments take it to the next level, so it's absolutely not like biting off a raw steak or chewing on a spoonful of ground meat :)
But does it not have a BT radio to connect a hands-free set?

It might need a phonebook app though :)
Our daughter is legendary in our family for the quantity of smoked salmon she consumed at the same age.
yeah I had the same feeling. the way it’s written feels like it’s semi-apocryphal to prove some kind of point about marketing
Maybe my wording is bad; the EU should offer protection to US citizens who expose crimes committed by the US government in the EU. And preferably committed elsewhere in the world, since it's in the world's best interest to know.
Functional programming is like having container-technology right in your programming language.

I.e., you can fully contain anything that a called function does.

It is immensely powerful.
That's the common definition of debate, no?
I see. If continuing to operate it is out of the question and selling it is too much of a hassle, have you considered open sourcing the code to give it a chance for a second life, instead of letting it die on a hard drive somewhere?
Time for stuff to go into public domain should be like 3 years.
People seem to be concerned about this, but isn’t this what we want?

If states get too expensive to live in, or decide to increase taxes and people don’t agree with that, they leave.

That was pretty much the intent of the 50 states - 50 different experiments.
I don't think the first people who visit Mars need to be there more than few hours. Just repeat what was already done on Moon.

We need to do some basic expreriments, take the soil samples and drill few meters down in order to check for water ice deposits.

But before all that, we need to send more rovers.
Well it seems you don't understand exceptions. They eliminate erroneous states entirely, since the objects just don't get created if an error occurs.

The alternative that the parent said was making all of your state be a union with some kind of error, and making sure all accesses handle the fact the variable might be in a erroneous state. That is a huge explosion of possible states in your program, and essentially making every invariant weak everywhere.

Then FFI, I suppose you mean interfacing with C. Problems that arise when interfacing with other programming languages are orthogonal to a language's ability to be used for system programming. Obviously you wouldn't let an exception propagate through some C code, that's forbidden.
For deciding how to invest towards the future of humanity and science/technology, have we already given up on keeping the Earth habitable?

If Elon Musk wants to be jettisoned to Mars, I'll be the first to cheer him on.

But back on our current human planet, how do we avert apocalyptic scale of misery and deaths in a few decades?
Good point re root of meat. Although it appears there is a joint root to both. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Mett
There are a bunch of semi-easy tools for lockpicking too and a good percentage of American locks are reeeally bad at thwarting even a novice picker. In worst cases you just need a flat piece of metal.

Too many fancy electronic locks can be bypassed with a single magnet placed correctly.

https://www.youtube.com/@lockpickinglawyer

These devices are the electronic equivalent of a lock-pick. They still need skill and intent to use, by itself they shouldn't be illegal. They should motivate companies to make proper security measures.

You can grab a $10 ESP32 and a battery pack, load some ready-made software on it and flood everything in a 50 meter radius with so many fake Wifi-APs most devices will go offline. Or you can deauth every wireless device within range.

The tech is available and doesn't require much skill to use.
This is what strikes me as notable: there are no Frontiers anymore (arguably there never were without massacring the existing inhabitants).

Space actually is one. And there are no (sentient) existing inhabitants.

IMO our current civilization has no way to account for, nor price, that reality - yet.
Not quite as much I would say, because crypto tokens are priced based on an over speculation of their potential long term explosion, rather than their more down to earth utility function.This is because their current utility is still to be discovered.

Take the DNS example for instance, this was implemented on Ethereum by "ENS", but the price of ETH/gas at the time made a single ".eth" domain name cost something like $500.
> People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many.

The Internet is simply following our current Globalist trend, where yes, there may be different physical towns, but there is only one acceptable way to think about the world, one acceptable form of government, and one acceptable set of morals.

Cities are becoming harder to distinguish since every new building looks the same. The same shops and chains are available. The clothing is the same. These aren't different town squares. These are the global monoculture made manifest. The Internet is simply another small part of this larger trend.
They hope it will work. If not, you won't hear much about it.
You’re assuming the codebase would need to be rewritten. It’s always possible that there might be a gradual transition within the same codebase. New features could be implemented in the new language while keeping everything else the same.
Nobody was developing vaccines for it in 2019. I forget when it was sequenced, I suppose that probably happened a little earlier. But it doesn't take much guesstimation to say that vaccine development wouldn't have started in earnest until a little way through 2020.
> If my single-family home is the only one in the neighborhood with an apartment building next to it, its value might indeed drop.

People love single-family homes in dense urban environments. A neighborhood that I think is a good example of comfortable density with a good variety of building sizes is Brooklyn Heights in New York City. You can buy a studio apartment for $250,000 or a townhouse for $17,000,000, and everything in between. You would make an incomprehensible amount of money selling your house if your neighborhood turned into Brooklyn Heights.
Kale Phone, Crack Phone
Which is the same as "there are still old school HN technologists who refuse to use Facebook. And the privacy/security is absolutely a major problem."
Even as an experiment with the sole purpose of learning stuff and having fun I find Arduino libs tend to hide all the fun stuff effectively diminishing the learning experience. Sometimes it's good to reinvent the wheel (like writing the driver yourself with the sdk) if your goal is to understand how why it works.
Go to the average British town square and tell me how many logos you can spot of American owned companies.
Defaults to log-log, which isn't terribly helpful.

Also, "GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity (PPP). PPP GDP is gross domestic product converted to international dollars using purchasing power parity rates": that's also likely to trip people up.

It would seem that the most likely explanation is that richer countries are better at confirming deaths? Or that small, dense urban microstates did badly? (Hong Kong the massive outlier)
People don’t buy code.
I have seen pair programming in actual use exactly once. And it was a pair of dudes who had known each other since kindergarten and were roommates. They basically shared a brain.

I've tried it a few times and it's like trying to read the same physical book at the same time with someone who's a lot slower or faster reader.
Treat yourself with a salmon! It's 2023!
> (There’s nothing wrong with imperative code confined to the scope of a function or a well defined object)

This is often the case with hash tables. Sometimes one simply wants to store an info and the fact, that this info has been discovered or processed or occurred. If one makes the hash table inside the function where it is used, then the important aspects of no side effects and no mutation of arguments of the function are still preserved.

However, sometimes a problem can arise later, when wanting to parallelize something inside that function involving the hash table. So one needs to be a bit careful here as well.
> It was like pulling teeth to get a fucking word out of this person. It was pretty annoying too because we were at a very social event but this person acted like a nitwit.

Sounds to me like someone who doesn't want to be there, but has to be there, and chances are they may have social anxiety and is probably, at this point, highly triggered and probably all they want is some peace and quiet away from people and their vapid small-talk.

And heres you ignoring the "please leave me alone" social cue of their closed answers, and believing this person is a "nitwit" because they're not engaging with you.

Hmmm.
great insight, but one point I miss is that to play games with cash-flow you got to have it in the first place.

Some ideas really benefit from investment before a product is marketable (i.e. for research, production). Kickstarter etc. provide a great tool to generate that for consumer oriented products before the product is launched. There are many markets where this is not so simple or not possible.
> The only thing insane about this election was

So you have nothing to say about the blatant disproportional censorship that goes on to this day? Electoral justice court judges that openly favored Lula? Who even admitted to it and were proud of their partiality?

> The "armed forces report" says only

Did you read it? The Makefile that builds the voting machine software downloads and links unaudited closed source third party libraries from the internet.

You actually trust this? I can deal with the fact laymen on social media didn't understand the problem but I sure as hell didn't expect to see Hacker News users defending this crap. Literally days ago there was news here about some compromised Python library.

Besides, they don't have to prove fraud. The mere possibility of fraud is more than enough to cast doubt on any results produced by that process. It's up to the authorities to demonstrate that it's immune to fraud. Why should a people cede power to any politician if they aren't absolutely sure the election was legit?

> the armed forces were fully willing to support Bolsonaro in a coup, and only gave up because he screwed up every possible internal and external support for this

Can you elaborate on this? Because what I saw was huge masses of people begging them to do something and being ignored. All that's left is for Lula to order the armed forces to remove the protesters like he said he would.

What support did he screw up? Because it looks like he had none to begin with. Not surprising really, Bolsonaro put his foot in his mouth on a daily basis for all 4 years of his mandate. He isolated himself from everyone.

> But your descriptions of what is happening in Brazil are just plain wrong.

And I suppose yours is better?
The French system has issues too, just different ones.

The system is extremely disingenuous. It looks fair if you take a casual glance at it but it’s actually completely rotten. Administrators from the education ministry mercilessly impose on most high schools in the country a strict adherence to the official curriculum and disallow any form of selection but as always in France a few select high schools are above the rule and start preparing selected students years in advance. If you look at the official statistics, you will see that a clear funnel to the top schools exist at least from middle school. When you consider where you get your engineering degree still significantly impact your career in your fifties (I’m not kidding), it’s all kind of a joke actually.

My main advice to prospective French students is generally to just go study abroad and then never come back and before I’m taxed of just being bitter I do have a degree from one of the prestigious Parisian schools.
And in UK. Back in the sixties, in my fairly well-off bourgeois family, chicken was a rare treat. And even now, not all chicken is cheap; I don't know how much poulet de Bresse costs in France, but it's pretty pricey here.
I kind of agree that it's possible to slightly overstate the declarativeness argument. Functional-style JavaScript is not that declarative. Not in the way SQL is.

But also, writing imperative code doesn't guarantee explicit performance characteristics. Whether you mutate references or not, you still need to know which operations are fast and which are slow.

In JavaScript, concatenation, [...array1, ...array2], is non-mutating and slow. Adding an element to the end, array.push(x), is mutating and fast. But adding an element to the beginning, array.unshift(x), is mutating and slow. So even if you're sticking to mutation, you still need to know that push is fast and unshift is slow.

And yeah, sorry, "in JavaScript" is not quite right. I meant in my browser. This is not part of the spec, and it's not mentioned in the documentation. Is it the same in other browsers? Who knows. To me, this is just as much "you need intimate knowledge about compiler and/or runtime to know what's going to happen".