skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They JUST changed it. Made a point of signifying to the masses about it last month:
https://generalaviationnews.com/2021/12/07/notams-are-now-no...

What this tells me is a group of government busy-workers are playing around with complex systems that can dramatically impact millions of people.
First confirmed interstellar visitor. Who knows how much interstellar dust and other small stuff we’ve run into over the eons.
It's not genuine linguistic drift. You and few people have your own meaning for widely used term (which you're entitled to have), and you're knowingly using that meaning in a situation where you know you are not surrounded by those people.

You made a comment elsewhere in the thread saying that HN was full of boomers.

Now it is clear you just actually meant people over thirty, which makes it true. Your usage of "boomer" has not yet passed into the main stream; it is not comparable to "dumb". Google Books easily finds a 1930's reference for the usage of someone "getting dumber and dumber".

I'm not moralizing, by thew way; dumber isn't a moral flaw. (By the mainstream definition of moral; maybe you have your own version of that too).
I get that it's high competition, but once the price difference between two slices of pizza is a few coins it stops being a deciding factor for me.
It's all fun and games until you have an F-16 head butting you because you didn't pay attention to NOTAMs and the Vice President happens to be visiting your town.
You don't need to fight a 'ground war' to cause a whole lot of problems. And you risk radicalizing the people.
DIY, full featured and smart wall clock
The great part is that we don't need fancy underground roads at all because trains and subways exist!

So we can just do all the multi-modal mobility stuff and just skip the car-tunnel part
McLuhan was before my time. In the 70's, the person to read was Alvin Toffler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
Haha! The post was actually motivated by a common (interview) question: https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when. We thought it would make for a fun adaptation for the terminal world
My favorite artistic illustration is probably Jorge Stolfi's drawing inspired by the self-adjusting splay tree data structure of Sleator and Tarjan:
https://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/splay/tree5.jpg
I have been badgered by their recruiters multiple times a week through the last 2-3 years. No doubt they grossly overhired during that period.
It's a great pepperoni, but there's no way I'd queue to eat one.
I think there are some concurrent realizations that will move it outside of purely ideological territory and be more impervious to being relegated as an unusual fad belief.

In the Americas and the Pacific islands, many cultures had non-binary gendering systems, and in the European colonization and cultural genocide this was one of many things that were erased as it was incompatible. So reconciliation and representation of indigenous cultures simply includes non-binary gendering, and it is not separable from this effort and direction.

This coincides with western non-binary recognition, the thing thats having a lot of resistance and lack of consensus.

I can see it being very likely that these efforts coincide and amplify the willingness to recognize a non-binary gendering system that is distinctive from sex, and not synonymous with sex.
Grokking Algorithms is a funny and enjoyable read
I'm fascinated by the idea that the same creatures can live in the same universe and have very different experiences of it. Ants, cats, and humans are all going to perceive the same objects in very different ways. And only humans can understand what human-specific objects are for.

A cat will see a book as a flat surface which probably smells of its owner and go to sleep on it. It has no other concept of "book." And if it sees an open book it can't see the contents as writing, because it has no concept of writing.

The fascinating part is that a human will see the same object but perceive it very differently because of the added human-specific knowledge and cognition.

Unless you're going to make the very bold claim that humans are the most sophisticated and advanced life in the universe, our perceptions will be limited in an analogous way.

We see clouds of dust and gas, star systems, and random background noise. An intelligence a few million years ahead of us may see the same objects as [symbol] and [relationship] in ways we literally can't imagine.
Also G (uppercase) doesn't have units that result in G$ being a plausible quantity even if you could combine number-unit quantities and use like a unit like that (which you can't for this exact reason): dollar-cubic metres per kilo per second per second.

It's also rather small.
You Shouldn't Go to Harvard – Malcolm Gladwell
I think easy money is coming back. There's still a bunch of wealth that doesn't know anywhere to find returns, that hasn't changed.
No, if you are a manager it is your job to keep your employees productive, happy, and fruitful by approving and encouraging ample rest time and pushing a message up the chain that you don't have enough staff to meet expectations.
Its was initially something that surprised me about Go. It was famous for good concurrency and yet compared to many functional languages and contemporary OO languages it had a lot of foot guns. There is a lot of repetition of code that even in languages like Java had long been made common. Go seems to lack obvious concurrency abstractions.

When they announced generics the first thing I did with it was rewrite my common slice parallel algorithm and my limited concurrency pool. It is an obvious area needing improvement for common use cases.
This is an incredibly misleading use of graph axes.

The baseline should be 200000 ppm, but a change of 500 wouldn't be noticeable. So they just show the change from a recent year, which lets them baseline at zero.
The million dollar question, if you had to do a similar game again, would you still pick CL?
Well that is the basic posture of all science, uncertainty. We must assume we don't know until we are convinced otherwise.
Their overall shrinkage is in line after they closed stores and put in counter-theft measures. It doesn't say anything about whether they need to further close stores in such areas, or whether mom-and-pop stores can survive in the same areas.
Probably I wouldn't lay off 20% of my staff at all, unless I was really sailing in stormy waters with no way out. And Flexport isn't: there's been a slight dip in global supply chains caused by the uncertainty in China, but nothing so dramatic nor permanent that you should run and fire 1/5 of your staff - you only do that if something happens like China attacking Taiwan, and you know that for years to come trade won't be the same. It sounds to me like another Silicon Valley company laying off large chunks of their staff because everyone else is doing so: https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-la.... Or maybe because VC funds are suddenly draining for everyone?

And,if I really had to lay off so many people, I'd take a more personal approach. Invite the whole company for a virtual or physical meeting where I explain why I have to do that, why I have no alternatives, and communicate the decisions to the managers, so people can be let go after talking to a human. Not after getting an email out of the blue in their box, in the middle of a working day. This has been impersonal and faceless on so many levels.
What I'm proposing is that the electrical box (the blue plastic thing that's essentially non-removable in current practice) would have the vampire connection to one or more cables passing into/through it, and the actual device (outlet, switch, light fixture) would plug into some conductors at the back of the box. So you could replace outlets more easily than you can today.

The boxes would come in a few varieties based on the number of cables that could pass into/through them. Again I'm picturing some kind of intermediate layer between the box and the device that could accommodate less-common connection arrangements, but maybe you lose a bit of flexibility in the name of progress.

The connections wouldn't have to be 100% reliable, but at least as reliable than hand-twisted wires and wire nuts (also AFCI breakers could eliminate a lot of the fire risk).
Lots of languages, including Java and Javascript, have been described as being "in the C family", but this papers over a whole lot of important details. Swift is a low-ish-level imperative-ish language with C-ish syntax.
I think the field of automata has some lovely diagrams.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory

I'm sure many are familiar with state diagrams, directed graphs that can be used to explain regular expressions or any other FSM

Turing machines also can be represented with a diagram featuring a "tape" - so elegant

Professor Rick Thomas made a great impression on me whilst lecturing on the subject of Automata
My roommate worked at a freight forwarder, but from what he told me, the entire thing is a mess of excel spreadsheets and highly inefficient.

I think the pitch of flexport is what if we modernize the technology and make it more efficient by reducing or removing the need of all of these people managing the forwarding via excel.
Reflections on Puzzle Gamedev
> Many who grow up in the NY area grow up on pizza.

Average pizza slice that we're discussing is according to https://www.nutritionix.com/i/nutritionix/new-york-style-piz... 500+ calories, lots of saturated fat, lots of sodium.

How healthy is it to grow up on pizza?
I worked at Dropbox for a couple of years, and it was functionally unlimited. I took two weeks off just a month in to help my wife recover from surgery. My org had a guideline of taking at least one week off per quarter, targeting six weeks per year. I took six weeks off in a year, plus plenty of half-days and single days off.

I recognize Dropbox is the exception to this rule, though. My new employer gives seven weeks, and requires that you take at least four.
Working class does not mean low income. Working class is the most of the people.
Blue collar workers can make more money than middle class, because definition of class is not just money.

working class: the social group consisting primarily of people who are employed in unskilled or semi-skilled manual or industrial work.
Some high level context for those less familiar with the Lakehouse storage system space. For various reasons, several companies moved from data warehouses to data lakes starting around 7-10 years ago.

Data lakes are better for ML / AI workloads, cheaper, more flexible, and separate compute from storage. With a data warehouse, you need to share compute with other users. With data lakes you can attach an arbitrary number of computational clusters to the data.

Data lakes were limited in many regards. They were easily corrupted (no schema enforcement), required slow file listings when reading data, and didn't support ACID transactions.

I'm on the Delta Lake team and will speak to some of the benefits of Delta Lake compared to data lakes:

* Delta Lake supports ACID transactions, so Delta tables are harder to corrupt. The transaction log makes it easy to time travel, version datasets, and rollback to earlier versions of your data.

* Delta Lake allows for schema enforcement & evolution

* Delta Lake makes it easy to compact small files (big data systems don't like an excessive number of small files)

* Delta Lake lets readers get files and skip files via the transaction log (much faster than a file listing). Z ORDERING the data makes reads even faster.

The Delta Lake protocol is implemented in a Scala library and exposed via PySpark, Scala Spark, and Java Spark bindings. This is the library most people think of when conceptualizing Delta Lake.

There is also a Delta Lake Java Standalone library that's used to build other readers like the Trino & Hive readers.

The Delta Rust project is another implementation of the Delta Lake protocol that is implemented in Rust. This library is accessible via Rust or Python bindings. Polars just added a Delta Lake reader with delta-rs and this library can also be used to easily read Delta Lakes into other DataFrames like pandas or Dask.

Lots of DataFrame users are struggling with data lakes / single data files. They don't have any data skipping capabilities (unless Parquet file footers are read), their datasets are easily corruptible, and they don't have any schema enforcement / schema evolution / data versioning / etc. I expect the data community to accelerate the shift to Lakehouse storage systems as they learn about all of these advantages.
One thing you have to give apple credit for is (usually) not jumping on the bandwagon until they have a compelling solution. Pre-release, the iPad was rumored to be a netbook during that craze but netbooks died and the iPad is still here. I'm curious to see if/how they improve beyond just adding a touchscreen to the macbook.
I notice that they "borrowed" most of the table from you - kudos I guess. My problem with your post is the it presents the choice between Lakehouse formats as a feature checklist. All features are not created equally. All implementations are not equally easy to use.

Personally, I find Brooklyn Data's post to be more practically useful since they used each format to do real work and show how they perform in practice. And they provide all their code so a reader can run the same testing themselves.

https://brooklyndata.co/blog/benchmarking-open-table-formats
True with traveling generally. The best Thai food I had wasn't at the "best Thai food" place in Bangkok, it was on a streetcorner. The best kebab I've had in Berlin wasn't at Ruya's, it's my local guy.
Web components seem like a good idea to me. I would imagine there are a lot of libraries out there (eg/ calendars, styling frameworks) that would benefit from reuse across applications. The browser could cache it even if served from a different CDN.

I'm curious what the problems are with web components that you see? Is it specifically related to how they might be used (or useless) in the major frameworks?
They don't own their name, no more than random Americans own the word "American" or random Brits own the word "English".
The WaitGroup looks suspiciously like errgroup, which even has the .WithMaxGoroutines() functionality: https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/sync/errgroup

> A frequent problem with goroutines in long-running applications is handling panics. A goroutine spawned without a panic handler will crash the whole process on panic. This is usually undesirable.

In go land, this seems desirable. Recoverable errors should be propagated as return values, not as panics.
This represents what social media should really be about. I salute you, Liam.
Unless it seeded a little self-replicating factory on the way by. The invasion force could already be growing exponentially out in the Oort Cloud.

Or not. To paraphrase: sometimes a cigar-shaped interstellar mass is just a cigar-shaped interstellar mass.
I firmly believe that we're not alone in the universe, but advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at mold - at best, with indifference and at worst, something to remove.
But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up if scientists were able to show Oumuamua was an interstellar probe ("Rendezvous with Rama" anybody?)
Narrowing focus is often a good thing for companies.
Everything from Land of Lisp!

http://landoflisp.com/
As a person who also grew up in NY, the slice was part of my childhood. I'd walk home from middle school and then high school and pass the local pizzeria where I could pick up a slice, Italian ice, and play coin operated video games. Galaga, Donkey Kong, and Pacman. I miss those carefree days where the world was simpler and the pizza tasted better.
A package manager has been the #1 thing keeping me from using Zig more. The build system is already really nice, the language is mostly really nice to use (a few oddities from my persepective, but I'm not a C programmer either), and the community is really helpful.

The docs are also still not great, but I think it's just a matter of time before they are. The team appears to be putting in a huge amount of effort on them.
Thanks for that correction. In retrospect it makes sense, because each circuit breaker isn't functioning as a little transformer.
That's also the time progressivism was peaking, and nation-states started creating centralized government welfare systems and engaging in Marxist revolutions.

Get rid of welfare states, and you can get rid of borders. But you can't maintain a welfare state with generous welfare subsidies and have open borders.
That doesn't help me when J. Random user comes for help.

If people are doing things right, everything should be encrypted.

"Average users" don't do things right.

I hate saying it, but experience has played this out for me time and time again.
Agree, but I get the temptation if you want to be able to rapidly evolve your architecture early on to discover what works best.

Removing that extra bit of documentation related friction and maintenance that keeps an ill suited architecture around longer than it should or drifting from reality would be nice. I have a hard time seeing how the complexity or quirks of a diagramming tool that could also stay tailored to certain views wouldn’t become more of maintenance headache than being disciplined about manual diagrams.
Freenet build 1496: fix keepalive, translations, windows
Well... it is an AI. It's a computer controlled training bot meant for local, offline practice, that people have managed to translate to online play.

Traditionally in gaming, you'd call that offline play "player vs AI". This bot in particular uses reinforcement learning, on top of the fact that the system that controls the computer actions against a player is just generally known as "the AI".
Are Iranian Persians considered Caucasian in the US or not? My Armenian friends have darker skin tones than Persian ones, so this doesn't make any sense.
This is terrible. It's making a lot of very obvious mistakes and is nowhere close to being a credible chorale harmoniser/generator.
Would you pass this test if instead you answered what would happen if you open a terminal in a made-up operating system and you essentially designed the whole thing in your answer?
Dealing with Money in Code
I would imagine by knowing the world didn't end in 2001. Things got worse for a while, but then for better again.
In Networking, two illustrations of congestion control are just fantastic IMO.

First one is [1], by Chiu and Jain (page 7, figure 5), showing that Additive Increase / Multiplicative decrease is the only simple policy that converges among 2 senders (with rates x and y) to a rate that is fair (along the y=x diagonal) and efficient (along the x+y=Bandwidth). This is the basis of the algorithm that made TCP (and the Internet as we know it today) possible.

The other one is this diagram from BBR [2] (from the paper in [3]), that shows how BBR sets the window ("amount in flight") to the bandwidth-delay product (BDP) of the bottleneck link (the "volume" of the pipe in a water analogy). The cool thing is that you can only measure the delay of the link if you window is <= the BDP, and you can only measure the bandwidth if your window is >= the BDP, so the algorithm has to hover around this point to make sure it can determine both.

[1] Chiu and Jain, Analysis of the Increase and Decrease Algorithms for Congestion Avoidance in Computer Networks, 1989, https://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/papers/ftp/cong_av.pdf

[2] https://dl.acm.org/cms/attachment/9cf72499-b32d-4426-914b-cd...

[3] BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3022184
As I commented above,

There has been a semantic shift with the word boomer - for older people it means the baby boomer, but for much younger people (like Gen Z) it just means anyone 30 or above.
I like railroad diagrams for language grammars. So much easier than just looking at production rules.

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

They're used at https://json.org/, for example.
If you build something much smaller, a difference betwen 5 sec and 0.5 sec is pretty noticeable for interactive work, even though 5 sec is not prohibitively long at all.
Until I read your post I didn't even realize that I have been doing this subconsciously for years. My favorite book, while a bit childish, is the omnibus edition of the first three novels in the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane.

I like it for the world building, the characters are simple but evolve over time, the settings are banal but made intriguing by the characters' presence in them, the basic idea that absolute truth is literally magic, that the fundamental language of the universe is truth and that by speaking it you can cause the universe itself to change, and that some people are given that power, and that you the reader is essentially the Wizard of Oz, peeking into the grand events from behind your curtain.

But I never stopped to wonder why did Diane Duane write these novels? What was her motivation to write these stories?

Mayhaps it is wish fulfillment. Wanting something to be true enough to imagine a story about it and how it would play out is likely the essence of sci-fi and fantasy writing. Taking that wish, the ability to change the universe with words alone, and finding a milieu to fit it into, a viewpoint character, and a series of events that would justify that character being trusted to hold onto such a power and use it as they saw fit would be a tall order for anyone, but if you can do it you should, right?

This theme of being given power and having to show that you are worthy of keeping it also appears in some of her other stories. The Door Into Fire has essentially the same thematic concept but in a different universe full of strange and wonderful things.

I just realized this is a full rant so I will stop here, but I'll keep in mind to think of asking Why the events in the stories that I consume in the future.
I think I've seen the same thing. I use Verizon in SF for both an iPhone and for their 5G home internet service, so I've got some basis for comparison.

During the setup for the home internet, they were very particular about where to place the device for line of sight to the tower. It consistently gets 1Gbps down and 300Mbps when in 5G UWB mode. There are rare situations in which it falls back an LTE connection that is somehow unimaginably worse than phone tethering.

On the other hand, when I'm using my phone, it'll sometimes _think_ it has the ability to do ultra wideband, but it doesn't work, and the icon disappears and suddenly I'm back on ordinary 5G again with a bit of a hiccup that you note. If I ensure that my phone has clear line of sight to the base station, and confirm that it is using UWB, then I can get similar speeds and latency to the 5G home internet device.

The ultra wideband mode is very sensitive to where you are in relation to the base station, so on a phone moving around your house it may be inconvenient or frustrating to have your phone attempt to use it.
The writing has been on the wall for decades for anyone who was paying attention. But it takes time for a whole industry to shift.
this is extremely cool — feels like a ton of new use cases will unfold as people explore it. congrats on the launch!
We've already been sent the world destroying bomb. It is an information bomb built on tragedy of the commons to ensure we overheat our planet before we become interplanetary. Its name is Bitcoin.
I grew up in NY and lived in NYC and I still call it a plain slice.