skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's what you're used to. Cups and gallons are confusing to me!

In some of my Dutch cook book, there are mentions of cups. But mostly as a relative unit; add one cup of X, two cups of Y.

For absolute amounts, the metrics system just makes more sense, as it nearly combines the different quantities without weird conversion constants.

Note that in medical or scientific environments, centiliters are actually used.

But then again, we still use milimiter-mercury as a unit in medicine too ;) [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millimetre_of_mercury
SEXPR := YOUR-CUSTOM-LITERALS
| "(" SEXPR* ")"
Doesn't Amtrak pay for that? I have a feeling if there was an effort to shut them down and replace it with buses, the freight companies would block it. They benefit from the relationship.
That sounds like a regular monolith but with extra steps.
Don't forget all the nurses and doctors fired for not getting the COVID vaccine as well. Probably wasn't the wisest decision.
I don't know anyone who isn't in computers for work who even knows what mastadon is
Sam Bankman-Fried responds to fraud charges: 'I didn’t steal funds'
If you only need something for internal use, nothing prevents you from using s-expressions, and interpret atoms (number -> uint16_t, dates in "yyyy-mm-dd") whatever your application feels like... With this lil' trick all parsing problems are gone. Inferior Format Users will be jealous, and Inferior-Format-Parser-Writers will hate you
It matters not to the driver or to the general public but to audiences like this one where knowing if a 10+ year old mature system not based on ML did this or a beta, in progress neural network based system did this makes a difference in thinking through the implications of such an error.
Except that in 2023 the police won't even try to look for them. Maybe if you can provide their real address they will consider perhaps doing something about it.
> but it's not like it was spying on them without their consent

Actually that's exactly what they did because the "their" here encompasses all humans in the building. Unless there was a requirement to post prominent notices "you will be subject to filming if you enter this facility" around the place, then no there wasn't consent.
This is known-hard problem, involves building mutual trust and getting everybody aligned towards the same balance of business and engineering excellence.

The lazy solution is to bring in a consultant or tech advisor with some impressive resume and thoughtful demeanor.
In my experience, these types of people never really learned software engineering beyond "don't repeat yourself." They learned to code and they're smart enough to come up with clever solutions to complex problems. They don't understand the value of maintainability because they enjoy figuring out complex code.

The software industry often values this–myopically, since their opaque code and misunderstanding of DRY are sure to cause bugs. Some junior engineer five years later will misunderstand how coupled some 300-line function is with unrelated components and introduce a bug while implementing a feature. It happens all the time.

I've seen managers who encourage this and I've seen managers who see the big picture and value simplicity and maintainability. Beyond being in the right environment, it's hard to mitigate the problem. These programmers don't think they need to learn anything from you and are unlikely to ask, and unsolicited advice is not likely to be well received. I've sometimes found that leading by example can help, if they notice that the code you contribute is more pleasant to work with. Perhaps pushing for more pair programming on your team so that members can learn from each other.

Ultimately these people are more interested in solving puzzles than producing software that will stand several years from now. If you can present that challenge as a puzzle they may start to find satisfaction in it, but if not then this will weigh on more than just you and is bad for your product and company.
That's just not true.

Moving faster does not mean moving more effectively. Frantic activity should not be mistaken for progress.

I'm OK with the FAA taking "days to resolve the problem" if it means that nobody dies.

For what it's worth, my team and I are partial to "move carefully, and tend things".
Use ARM processors.
The computational and engineering effort for these hacks to get to those results in production would have made those price sensitive consumer gadgets far more expensive. It just wasn't economically feasible.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, those hacks look good on static images but could produce nasty artifacts on moving images.
The implementation wasn't great but SimpliSafe used to have these cameras with an automatic reflective (so you could see it) shutter on them; it was a good concept and I went with it because of that.
I don't wonder. The -only- way to really try to protect that data is to not share or make it available - even to companies that allegedly have good intentions.
> I don't care that 0°C is freezing for water, and 100°C is boiling for water.

The best part is that isn't even true at different elevations. It makes no sense as a reference point for many people that live at higher elevations. What a weird thing to base a system of measurement on since it isn't constant.
> 1. The FAA basically handed their risk-management keys over to Boeing when authorizing the 737-MAX, contributing to those deaths

Couldn’t this also be interpreted as: when the FAA holds the keys, disasters like the 737-MAX tend not to happen? Obviously this raises questions about how that decision came about in the first place, but as an example, it seems counterproductive to your point, i.e. evidence that shifting away from some long standing policies directly led to harm, implying the original policies might have been better ones.

In a thread that seems eager to move fast and break things, this seems like a big problem, and would seem to indicate the need for a return to founding principles, not the opposite.

> 2. The FAA's pilot medical vetting process

This is an interesting one for sure, but also seems like an incredibly complex issue. Have there been studies about the safety of operating machinery while on those drugs that would obviate the need for a policy change?

The potential risk averted by such a policy would need to be weighed against the negative impacts of the 2nd order undesirable behaviors - obviously it’s bad that the policy discourages much needed mental health support, but how bad this is depends entirely on how effective the initial screening process is.

I’m not saying these mental health policies shouldn’t be changed, but neither do they seem to have obvious or measurably better alternatives at the moment.

And taken in the context of the original claim - that people are grossly misunderstanding the FAA and all of this is theater - they seem like weak examples to use as evidence of broad organizational failure.
Most fediverse servers automatically provide RSS feeds for users, and sometimes for hashtags.

I don't think Fediverse should necessarily replace RSS, but there's something nice about being able to retweet / like posts in a somewhat agnostic context, just as there is having the option to "follow" feed sources in RSS readers if you want that.

There are a number of Twitter feeds I subscribe to in my RSS reader using nitter.
This reads like incoherent rambling around one thought without ever finding any justification for this thought.

There are exactly same dynamics between hardware and software in free as in proprietary. The only difference is that free software is not sold directly. But it still is created and still acquires new features that need better hardware.
What flaws allow sites to hijack passwords if pages aren't programmable? Are you talking about phishing, and how would js help?

My mental model here is that the browser's password manager autofills a password that the user doesn't even know, and without scripting or dynamic resources, it's not possible to exfiltrate that data automatically. Without styling, form buttons would have a standard look so it's harder to trick the user into submitting something without knowing (c.f. the recently posted fake captcha that tricks users into revealing the visited state of links).
Immediately thought of the assembly-level hacking people did ~20 years ago on TI's graphing calculators to get reliable grayscale, for instance this on the TI 83 series: https://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/7/77/77966.htm...
All relative of course. Eli Lilly.
Having grown up in a country into adulthood that used metric and then moving to the US there are certain things that are nice about the US system.

In particular a foot is an extremely intuitive unit of measure. It covers a number of use cases better than meters or centimeters.

I also prefer Fahrenheit now that I'm used to it. Fahrenheit has a nicer range for the temperatures we live our lives at, whereas Celsius compresses that range so much.

Unintuitive US units:
Miles - I still have a very hard time with how far this is, km was much nicer.
Fantastic, would love to know the name if you end up remembering. I see this pattern so often.
… that looks like a document
ChatGPT tl;dr

Mexico City subway riders are expressing concerns that distracted train operators might be putting commuters’ lives at risk, following a collision of two trains that left one dead and dozens injured. However, due to the system being poorly maintained, drivers depend on their phones to communicate with each other and keep the trains running. The use of cellphones during working hours is not condoned by Mexico City’s mass transit workers’ union as per the organization’s general guidelines but it is essential for the trains to run smoothly. The Mexico City subway is one of the cheapest in the world: 5 pesos (about 25 cents) per ride, but the budget only covers operative costs. It would require double its current budget to cover maintenance costs.
It seems strong but it would prevent social pressure: “hey, I know it’s your day off but…” sounds different when it costs money and that makes it a lot easier for people to resist a pushy boss or coworker.
This ignores the fact that SQL already has standards with multiple implementations and is very well established. You can have a basic portable subset - the problem was already very well specified at the offline level.

A simple SQL standard would therefore not have incurred an unnecessary dependency on SQLite (had WASM/filesystem existed at the time, I suspect we could have also supported Web SQL with it).

--

Bugs of course, exist with IndexedDb as well and will exist with these new WASM implementation.
> I see a lot of posts but it's very rare that there's a reply or conversation in even 1% of them

Less than 1% of tweets have replies or conversations. Most of what people have to say just isn't interesting.
"Structuring" makes a huge difference. VCs will invest $10mm for 10% of a company, making it apparently "worth" $100mm. However, they will get guarantees such as a right to the first 30% of profit before any other investors get paid back. It's not straightforward to know precisely how deals like that that translate into the final value of the company, but it's a guarantee that it's less than $100 mm, and with harsh enough structuring the actual value of the company could be closer to $10 mm.
I agree, now reintroduce the archaic old currency system to replace the metric pound division you have now. That would really add a certain quirky touch to your financial institutions, foreign trade and tourists will surely love it!

There is more than one way to lead your country back into the late neolithic, just go on.
CEO Jack Altman’s email to Lattice employees
take a look on how tires are measured, https://www.bridgestoneamericas.com/en/company/safety/choosi... , it's like a xkcd joke
I see that as an organizational issue within that company and its project management rather than a political issue. US engineers certainly all know how to use and speak metric. I actually promise you that you won't be able find one who doesn't.
gdb has had reversible debugging since release 7, in 2009. What does udb offer that it lacks?
Yea this also. Colorado, one of the major state producers requires all chickens who produce eggs for sale to be cage free as of January 1st.
Why the hell do I need my VACUUM to have a camera and an internet connection?!

cameras for object detection, fine ... but there are VERY few things in my home that I need or want to be connected to a network, and my vacuum cleaner is not one of them. And why do I even need this thing to persist images in any capacity (even locally, let alone remotely)?

Despite being a software engineer for 25 years I'm starting to become a luddite because of things like this. One of these days I might just pack up everything and go live off grid.
One common problem is building new things with tech that is already obsolete. Given the choice between new and old, the old is perceived as more tried and tested. Granted it's sometimes difficult to distinguish "new and going to last" from "new and shiny", but when it comes to software choosing to go with "old and tested" can be counter to cyber security since the old software is no longer updated.

Of course you also have "old but still developed, and likely to be supported in near-perpetuity". Things like SQLite fall in this category. Unfortunately there's this other problem of management being inexplicably down on anything open-source. I don't know whether they've been exposed to too much FUD from vendors selling proprietary solutions, or just that the idea that security through obscurity is no security at all has failed to reach them.
Linting, git commit hooks that enforce the linting. I'm guessing some static analysis tooling on the build server as well
You're working too hard. Just make a linter or auto formater do the work. Agree on the rules. If the rule doesn't exist don't comment on style. You can make/debate new rules but don't mix it into code reviews - separate problems.
Gotta love a Danish author’s nod to a well-known Danish folktale as a mirror of the hubris, naiveté, and sheer foolishness present in our industry.
> What happens is that one browser (usually Chrome) implements a useful new feature.

What happens is Chrome releases a Chrome-only non-standard (at a rate of 400 APIs per year). It cobbles together a barely legible spec [1], and then uses its multiple propaganda channels like web.dev to present them as actual completed standards that other browsers are just slow to implement.

Even if other browsers only learn about this a few days before Chrome ships, or have multiple objections.

[1] Example, File System API https://wicg.github.io/file-system-access/ "not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track."
The PWM greyscale is commonly used in other other display technologies like LED where controlling current is not feasible as well as Texas Instrument's DMD which is a micro mirror that can only be on or off.
Mozilla opposes the picker methods of the File System Access API. They are fully behind the Origin Private File System part, and actually have the SQLite demo from the article running in Firefox Nightly.
> Their examples of forecasting waffle fries reminds me of a failed startup that forecasted how many checkout lines to open via computer vision (which I can't find on Google).

CFA leads the industry in revenue per site. I think more accurate forecasting is a significant factor contributing to this. Their sites aren't larger or better located than their competitors. In fact, they're often right next to their competitors in a similar footprint. Since I have a CFA nearby which I drive by multiple times a day, I've seen first hand that they always have substantially more cars in the drive-thru line and parking lot than their competitors in the same strip mall parking lot.

Customers will see the overflowing CFA line at the drive-thru yet still choose to pull into line because they've learned that CFA's throughput is dramatically faster than their competitors. In my experience I'd guess about 2x-3x faster which is incredible when you think about it. They achieve that by getting a lot of things right but it seems obvious ensuring their order delivery backlog is as fast as possible through more accurate load prediction would be a key factor.
No, because the other regions of the world also use metric. America is an outlier.
I’d call Postgres “heavyweight” compared to SQLite. Maintaining a SQLite db is as simple as a file, and then you can use litefs or litestream to back it up.

Maintaining a Postgres server or cluster is hard. But it offers way more functionality.

I agree that the term heavyweight can mean many things to people. I’ve take it as a generic mix of maintenance, complexity of project, ease of use for your purposes.
that must explain why the countries with the best socialized childcare benefits have the lowest birth rates...
So, just to be clear, in what languages do I not need to "support myself" under your definition and what does the "support" consist of?

Do I get an Android test phone to try my software out? Is there like free phone support so I can chat to some expert in my language about Android problems? You make it sounds like a pretty big deal, but my small experience† of writing Android software a decade ago was that it just wasn't that hard.

† I wrote an implementation of the now obscure mOTP (similar to TOTP) for in-house usage. For obvious reasons I named This One Time app "Band Camp" which was already a pretty old reference at the time but once I thought of it I couldn't help myself.
Almost 15 years ago I saw this kind of thing in Seattle.

The tower had electromechanical / pneumatic fingers and pluckers running over the strings.

Here's a blogger's experience
http://maiden-voyage-travel.com/one-of-my-fave-museums-exper...
The optimizers take parameters and their gradients as inputs and apply update rules to them, but the gradients you supply can come from anywhere. Backdrop is the most common way to assign gradients to parameters, but other methods can work too—as long as the optimizer is getting both parameters and gradients, it doesn't care where they come from.
Example Mastodon user -- in this case, the project lead:
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron

It's easy for me to view and scroll his feed despite not having an account on his platform. Also easy for me to find his posts via Google. And (in case it's not obvious in your browser) it's also easy for me to find the automatically generated RSS feed of his posts.

YMMV.
Put the 20 line version in a properly named function, even if it's only used once. There are two reasons for this:

1. You're probably doing something else where you don't want to stop and decipher a magic one-liner. That comment is a great name for that function.

2. Now that you have a function, write a test. Now that you have a test, your coworkers won't be tempted to tuck extra stuff in that function, because everyone hates editing tests.
For me it's about how much heat they put out. I have to crack a window I'm winter when gaming.

I think others are concerned with a trend that extrapolates to something insane power consumption where power use grows exponentially to megawatts where clock speed is growing asompotically to say 10ghz
I will forever hold it against Boeing for using imperial in their engineering drawings, when almost every other aerospace company in the world uses metric. I cannot tell you how many hundreds of man hours I've seen spent by engineers and technicians, remaking designs and rebuilding prototypes to the correct dimensions. We once had something shipped to us on a pallet instead of the expected box, because the factory built a wiring harness to inches not centimeters.
Great, the price of ramen noodles and curved screen TVs is stable. Thanks, Fed, time to set interest rates at -1% for the next ten years of whacky growth.
I haven't had a car crash, should I also thank the FAA?
Your last sentence is interesting. You use a future tense when a past tense seems more appropriate, especially regarding the specific example of semiconductors in the last 3 or 4 years.
HTML and CSS alone allow you to concoct a webpage where a user's input appears to be going to one place but is in fact going somewhere else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller
No it was broken by the US first by providing farm subsidies the size of the GDP of nations
On the German keyboard layout the “@“ Symbol is entered by holding the “AltGr” modifier to the right of the space bar and pressing “Q”.

So on the German Mac layout you are holding the Command key and pressing Q, closing the Application.
The right input would be Option-L.
Yet another blatant misuse of RFC 1149

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149
Well now you're speaking from privilege. Maybe you can escape from your dysfunctional circumstances but a lot of people can't.
My org-roam workflows for taking notes and writing articles – Dominik Honnef
> but Mozilla could be supportive of parts, provided this were segmented better.

They seem quite positive to parts of the spec. Don't know if that's the parts relevant here or not.
Ask HN: What would you do if you didn't have to work?
So as a result of an extreme example of inefficient bureaucracy, one which is probably unique to the military, I have found myself in the fortunate position of being paid to effectively work 2-6 hours a week for the next 6-7 months. It was preceded by 6-7 months of 60-80+ hour work weeks, so I like to think it all balances out.

I graduated a few years ago with a degree in computer engineering, and I am now located in a small coastal city. If you were in my position, beside the obvious of relaxing, hobbies, etc, what would you do? I have considered trying to find a part time development role (it would be difficult though as I am effectively on-call for when those 2-6 hours are). Alternatively, I could pursue a side project to keep my technical skills sharp, but I can't think of any that call me. Any ideas?
Reminds me of a game theory experiment they ran as a competition. Build a bot that gets the most resources in a deal-making market.

The optimal solution is tit-for-tat. And it leads to a stable equilibrium for the market as a whole and everyone is better off.

But if you know everyone else is playing tit-for-tat, then you can exploit that by always taking advantage. Then you win.

But if too many other bots also make that same realization, everything collapses again. The whole market is worse off.

China, in this case, is playing a lot like that one player who noticed everyone else believes in free markets. If you’re the only player with the opposite strategy, it works great … until others start changing. Then everyone is worse off.

Although whether markets were ever free free is a questionable claim at best. Are there economies without subsidies and without tax breaks?
> it's very rare that there's a reply or conversation in even 1% of them

The interaction we used to see on Twitter is largely dead as well. Few people with followings in the thousands will engage with someone outside their small circle. Many block for trivial reasons. It's not what it was a decade ago.
Yep, Chrome is the new IE. Only instead of ActiveX and small proprietary HTML additions and EEE, it's a full coup de tat on web standards and Embrace, Extend, Control.
That extra amount likely would have been more than cancelled out after your kid went to school, due to higher future wages (raises over time, plus your ex not having a huge gap in her work history).
XML is like violence. If it’s not solving your problem, you need to use more
Pull up a list of the Fortune 500. Look how many US healthcare companies are in the top 100. Many in the top 20.

That, plus the loosening of donation rules aka "corporations are people", is all you need to know about the state of American healthcare.
Crime App 'Citizen' Lays Off Dozens of Employees
Not my experience at all. The people I follow have very active followers. It’s a much better experience compared with Twitter.