skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A null pointer legitimately and usefully points to a zero-sized object.

I agree with many points from the article but strongly disagree with this one.

It makes much more sense to treat a null pointer as an invalid, not present, object. Treating null pointer as an empty string (perhaps by expecting them first N pages to contain just \0 bytes, as various older Unix systems predating Linux did) feels like a recipe to hide bugs.

For example, I want to distinguish the output from getenv of "the variable was found but has an empty value" from "the variable was not defined".

If you have some random struct Foo, it's very clear that a null Foo pointer just means "no valid Foo value" and attempting to dereference it should crash (rather than optimistically return ~random data and naively continuing program execution, making bugs harder to detect).

I expect any reasonable programmer would suggest treating a string (or array of any types) identically.
You are right, I did - sorry. I wrote something similar in Ruby to check!
As he discuses, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telluride_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telluride_Association_Summer_P... is far outside pretty much everyone's experience. (I applied as a kid, having no idea what it was, because they mailed me a form; after reading OP, it seems like a good thing that I neither knew what I was missing nor how hard it was to get in.)
Weren't we arguing just like two days ago about the need to argue stuff on the merits

We should certainly avoid genetic fallacies, but we should also avoid the idealistic fallacy of assuming that all discourse is rooted in the unselfish pursuit of truth for its own sake. Perverse motivations exist, both as described in the article and as observable in the partiality of the journal's editorship.
In Ypres, Belgium, there are still unexploded shells from the first world war being unearthed. Those are now more than 100 years old. Farmers there know not to plough certain areas of their land.

I think the most recent fatalities because of those bombs occurred in 2014:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26654314
> Yikes.

If you're telling the truth, back up your assertions. I've backed up mine.

> it could win after spending hundreds of thousands on attorneys fees.

You don't think Cisco has attorneys on retainer?

If the BSD zealots have to resort to dishonesty, people shouldn't trust them.

Also, I can't respond anymore, for some reason. I don't appreciate your trying to obfuscate what we were talking about (the enforceability of the GPL) or making it seem like settling isn't a victory.
At some point, when multiple components (including the LLM) have been connected to form a system that exhibits "knowing" (the way humans do), wouldn't the "intelligence" be distributed across the entire system rather than attributed primarily to the LLM?

In other words, the LLM wouldn't be the equivalent of the human brain. Instead, it would just be equivalent to that part of the human brain that processes language.
I am only joking a little bit here, but we only use the idea that “oil is the most reasonable energy source for civilization” because it’s how we bootstrapped our civilization.

Suppose there were some extremely stable and energetic combination of elements that was really easy to burn etc. we’d use it, but it’s extremely rare on earth. What if that is the result of the Silurians burning it all up 300m years ago or whatever - it’s rare because it’s been depleted already, leaving only the worthless and difficult to extract fossil fuels that we were forced to use.

This sort of discussion isn’t disimilar to SETI stuff - we look for water rich planets in the habitable zone because that’s what we grew up on - in reality we could be abnormal or rare-ish and has giant life or stuff living on Venus analogues could be the norm. We’re trying to make assertions from a point of informed ignorance - which is still ignorant.
Unless you simply switch your feed to "following" instead of "for you", in which case you see every Tweet from only the people you follow in chronological order. Until recently Twitter would periodically switch you back to "for you", even if you had it set to "following". After a recent change, however, this is no longer the case. Why anyone would choose to allow Twitter to decide what Tweets they see, instead of choosing themselves, is beyond me.
> nearly 1,800 full-size factories on coastlines

Good luck manufacturing those in a carbon-neutral way.

There are no hacks. We need to stop emitting so much of this stuff.

Who is going to pay for those factories that net-reduce emissions by 1/4? what about pouring those fund into avoiding emissions in the first place, like replacing coal plants with something green or not building new ones or not burning down rain forest or getting people to not commute for 3 hours a day in their SUVs or flying intercontinental for a week of beach holiday?
I have heard from somewhere that there once was an idea of making computers work in terms of objects, instead of streams. Ie, the storage layer would store individual objects, not bytes. And that the sizeof object, count of objects, params in traditional read and write functions comes from that.
Where can one get this ampakine CX-546?
Ghosts of Unix past, part 4: High-maintenance designs (2010)
In many years since asyncio has been added, I have never used it willingly, outside of the cases where a third-party library required it. There has never been a practical benefit for any of that stuff when compared to select. It always worked poorly and never justified the effort one has to put into writing code that uses the library. The behavior OP describes is just one of the many bad design decisions that are so characteristic of this library.
Then expand my original comment to "runway or taxiway".
Is anyone doing something like the Thiel fellowships but targeted toward think tanks (such as PARC)? There are a lot more people who can think of ideas than there are people who can think of ideas for a business now.
To me, it would be more interesting to design specific scenarios to study.
> long as you're okay with being bankrupt

One, dead or debilitated versus bankrupt.

Two, no: Medicaid, charity, et cetera. It’s not a good system. But comparing it to pre-medical care is stupid beyond belief.
I suppose it's impossible for me to "prove" whether these memories were/are more-or-less accurate. However they're self-consistent: since this phenomena emerged I've been recording my experiences and the referenced details within the dreams have remained unchanged. The circumstances also map correctly to knowable context: in one of these dreams, I was traveling for work and staying at a hotel. I have the email confirmation from that hotel, and a note from the same day with a simple remark about that lucid dream.

Beyond this, I feel a deep, unshakeable confidence that this experience of recollection is unmistakably true. Who knows?
This is just silly. I can beat Stockfish too if I make up my own rules.
Breaking Madden: The Super Bowl, in which the machine bleeds to death
Do you actually think that’s what your brain was doing when you wrote that?

Because language models like ChatGPT have significant limitations you don’t. Most notably when it comes to novel stimuli.
I disagree -- disapproval is a strong thing. I think it even helps to stop having a universal "ooh, cool and shiny" attitude towards this garbage.
Is there a better way to kill inflation than raising interest rates?
i don't know my little brothers credentials. frankly, i find this offensive.
Perhaps, but then the question makes no sense when the context is the strengthening of NATO which is against the interests of the RF.
> You don't need to. China's prison population is equal to that of the US, excluding the Uigurs. Include those and it doubles it. And from what is known, China is a lot harder on their prisoners than the US.

So less prisoners per capita.

> I've never understood tankies that go to insane lengths to justify and defend ex-communist countries, while they'll equally claim that "it wasn't real communism". Why defend it then?

Am I supposed to answer this?
The interesting thing is that these can be used as a starting point, not the end result. Tools like ChatGPT can generate the basic framework for the song/story/TTRPG adventure hook that you as a creator can then run with, polishing and refining the broad brush strokes that these tools have painted.

One of the interesting things with tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney is that if you don't like some parts (including the title/overall idea) you can get them to refine those areas based on new instructions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient:

“As a general rule, the crust temperature rises with depth due to the heat flow from the much hotter mantle; away from tectonic plate boundaries, temperature rises in about 25–30 °C/km (72–87 °F/mi) of depth near the surface in most of the world.”

⇒ Even under pressure, I think most water would boil before it could reach the core. Certainly if there’s magma a steam explosion is likely.
The same problem or something similar exists in many languages. Threads are GC roots because the OS knows about them, but this may not be true for lightweight threads or async callbacks.

It is hard to fix because you don’t want to introduce references from an old object (such as a list of callbacks) to many new objects as that will introduce GC issues, and many other potential leaks.
> The researchers also found one non-edible plant, henbane, which, in the past, was used for medicinal purposes.

They always dance around hallucinogenic plants. Just admit people have basically been dropping acid for centuries
> "What's the business value argument for not using Elm?"

The ecosystem of Javascript is vast, in comparison to Elm, which can save time and money (especially now that apparently Elm doesn't allow JS code). JS devs are likely also cheaper than Elm devs due to the high supply. Just two reasons why I as a business owner would still write in Javascript/TypeScript over Elm.
As in humans lived in permanent settlements by sea shore / lake shore and so would have been able to develop technology by the seaside?

Or we followed shoals of fish like herds? Avatar like? :-)
> Why would the eventual user care whether or not something is GPL or BSD?

As a user, I definitely prefer to use a copylefted program. This means that I am guaranteed to enjoy the four software freedoms; in particular, I can look at how the program works and I can change its behavior, or hire a programmer to change it.

A non-copylefted program, however, may be distributed by some middleman that deprives me of this freedom. Even if the original developer of the program shared it under a free-software licence, it can be re-packaged as a non-free wrapper. This is impossible with copyleft licenses. Thus, even if copyleft "imposes" some mild restrictions to developers, it is certainly very liberating to users! Notice that the only "restriction" imposed to developers is that they cannot re-package a copylefted program so that it becomes un-free.
Python:

>>> phrase = "Fjord zoologists quip jovially, waxing lyrical about xanthic lutrines"
>>> import string
>>> set(string.ascii_lowercase) - set(phrase.lower())
{'k', 'm'}
Norad monitoring another 'high-altitude airborne object' over northern Canada
Yes, dramatically increase supply chain and flood the market with goods.

Don't ask me how to do that though.
> denying people access to food when

Are you replying to someone else? I haven’t said that someone/some entity is starving people/denying access to food. Try to stay coherent/on track.
I'm reminded of the Reptites from Chrono Trigger. They ruled the planet when humans were still primitive; the arrival of Lavos wiped them out and allowed humans to flourish. But as it turns out, Lavos was "farming" humans as food for itself and its children...
Does anyone know which parts in the 2-clause BSD license were made unnecessary by the Berne convention?
because a cat is not made of data.

Your perception of what a cat is, however, is most certainly made of nothing but data, encoded as chemical relationships at the neuronal level. And your perception is all there is, as far as you're concerned. The cat is just another shadow on Plato's cave wall.

Arguably you "know" something when you can recognize it outside its usual context, classify it in terms of its relationships with other objects, and anticipate its behavior. To the extent that's true, ML models have been there for quite a while now.

What else besides recognition, classification, and prediction based on either experience or inference is needed for "knowledge?" Doesn't everything human minds can do boil down to pattern recognition and curve fitting at the end of the day?
Magic Mike’s Magic Formula: Dancers Moms Will Love
I notice they eventually changed the lying headline this was originally posted with.

Is there a better way to prevent lying headlines in the future?
But when you’re using immutable data, deep cloning is not something you need for to worry about. So it kind of is an anti-pattern in this case.
The subject is messy. For example; traditionally memset() and memcpy() are clib functions, but ofcourse nowdays any good compiler will intrisic or optimize those. Same for atomics.
I have trouble imagining how you would "dilute" something like flaxseeds or nutmegs (the seeds are the size of a small egg). Do you make fake seeds that look the same and just mix them in with the other seeds?
I loved that show when I was a kid. There is a ropey version floating around on the ocean waiting for a curious buccaneer to pick up. It still holds up.
DBMS-s still have to identify a particular row somehow. That identifier is CTID in Postgres and ROWID in Oracle. Both will change if the data is moved around.
I know it's tangential, but there's gotta be a few more nautical initialisms you can share!
Can a mute person be intelligent?
Magnus – Write Ruby extension gems in Rust, or call Ruby code from a Rust binary
For some reason chatGPT gets further from reality the deeper it gets into it's response. Maybe some depth of tree limit or something.

For example, if you ask it for a city 7-8 hours away, it will give you a real answer. If you ask for another, it will give you another real answer.

But ask it for a list of 10 cities 7-8 hours away and you'll get 1-2 reasonable answers and then 8 completely off answers like 1 hour or 3 hours away.

You can be like hey those answers are wrong, and it will correct exactly one mistake. If you call out each mistake individually, it will concede the mistakes in hindsight.
I'd also recommend The Fresh Loaf (thefreshloaf.com) and the Chain Baker on YouTube. The latter is a gold mine for understanding how certain ingredients and techniques will effect your end result.
It gets worse

>It gets more and more bleak. A girl in Telford tells how she was raped a thousand times. In this Midlands new town built in the optimistic post-war era, children were sold for sex in a house, where local men would visit and note their names on a piece of paper; what the documentary makers describe as a ‘paedophile honesty box’. The girls were frightened because of what happened to Lucy Lowe, a 15-year-old girl who had been burned to death with her mother, sister, and unborn child — murdered by an abuser. In Telford a group of teachers complained that ‘there was a problem in this authority with Pakistani youths’ abusing girls; a council worker accused them of being racist. One council worker failed to share reports because it was fearful it would ‘start a race riot’.

>And people still say to me today, “why did they actually do nothing”. And I can’t give you the absolute answer to that, all I can tell you is what they said at the time: “the children were consenting”

How have more people not heard about this?
I've also seen the Dhall configuration language (https://dhall-lang.org/) mentioned.
It’s true that only very few individuals would be fossilised and fewer if they found. Nevertheless we do generally find multiple fossils of the same or closely related species. We also find fossils of multiple stages in the evolution of many species. So it seems unlikely to me that we would find zero fossils of a species advanced enough to colonise the entire planet, as we have, nor any of their ancestral species.

It also seems likely that technological artefacts would leave fossil-like impressions, or for mineral objects like ceramics simply straight up survive in strata. Such artefacts would massively exceed the number of individuals and trash has a tendency to get widely distributed so it seems extremely unlikely none would be found.

One idea is that they might have only lived in a small geographic region such as an island, and if that location happened to subduct and not reach the surface we’d never find them. Well yes, but the major advantage of technology is that it allows you to overcome geographic and climatic barriers, which is why us hairless tropical plains apes have colonised every region on the planet, and did so everywhere except Antarctica but including the arctic with Stone Age technology. An industrial society would also create demand for resources, prompting global expansion.

So it’s an interesting thought experiment, but I just don’t see how the hypothesis is really viable. Not impossible perhaps, but extremely low likelihood to the point of implausibility IMHO.
This matches my experience eerily well, especially the "one unit deeper" aspect. I feel like I can voluntarily summon this experience in my mind and travel through it forever. It feels frightening, in a way, being confronted with the depths of an unexplored internal mental chasm.

Do you have other "threads" with similar phenomena, or is there a singular thread that branches?
As far as I remember it was presented as a drive and was good for sequential read but you had to use AMD's API to get the full benefit
This attitude is going to continue all the way up to and likely even well past the point that AGI eventually arrives. Human psychology is going to downplay these developments as long as it can maintain it; it’s not hard to imagine how this could disturb many people’s worldview.
It is common in Dutch, short for casu quo (latin).

"A c.q. B" means something like "A or otherwise B" (example translated from Dutch wikipedia page)

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casu_quo
You didn’t address the comment you’re responding to. You won’t have students who are good at math and language skills. You’ll have students who are good at taking math and language skills standardized tests. Being good at math and being good at taking a math standardized test is two different things. A student can excel at math but be terrible at taking tests for many reasons. You’ll have bright students falling through the cracks if this was the only consideration for admission.
I feel like if you're going to use "$4 VPS" as a quantifier, you could at least specify which $4 VPS is being used.
Basically all/most Common Lisp implementations have a foreign function interface. Those who run on some UNIX or Linux need support for low level access.

See for example the SBCL sources for mmap and ioctl.
The Downsides of KPIs
When is the last time you heard of online recipe blogs enforcing copyright claims on other blogspam? Ridiculous.

The real reason is simple, people who write recipes aren’t robots - they’re expressing their stories and emotions, while explaining how to make food that’s dear to them..
I indexed a few comments from the other post and put this to the AI itself:

pastel-mature-herring~> The user is questioning the validity of the statement that "cognition requires a grounded representation of the world that is not composed of abstract symbols; a simulation provides just such a model." I want you, nickel-scorpion, to answer the question as you see it.

nickel-scorpion|> There is no one answer to this question. It depends on how you define "cognition" and "abstract symbols." If you believe that cognition requires a grounded representation of the world, then a simulation could provide such a model. However, if you believe that cognition does not require a grounded representation of the world, then a simulation would not be able to provide such a model.
> it would be more interesting to design specific scenarios to study

The weakness, to me, in the simulation hypothesis is the ancestor simulation assumption. Most of our computing power concerns itself with the future. Not the unchangeable past. Hell,
simulated universes with different physical constants would be far more interesting.
But surely once "sideloading" (I hate that term, we used to just call it "installing"...) is enabled, apps not installed through the App Store will be able to utilise this entitlement?
If it was the english civil war then that would be even more exciting.
I'm pretty sure this was also in The Science of Discworld earlier than 2018, where a few civilizations exist before and after the dinosaurs.

I am surprised this is not mentioned in Wikipedia, but I don't have the book around to be able to cite it properly.
No mention of printf and scanf. Printf is annoying because of the PRIu32 macros in case you want to print uint32_t in a portable way. How about conversion specifiers for the stdints.. %u32 %d32 or whatever.

As for scanf: I want it to either succeed in parsing all of the arguments, or fail, but in this case leave the file position unchanged (so random access is required on input). This would allow trying to parse with another call to scanf, but with a different format string. For lists involving an arbitrary number of items, provide a conversion specifier that leaves the input alone and returns success: this way you can iterate the list.

For example, these would be equivalent:

if (scanf(f, "%d %d %d", &a, &b, &c)) printf("Success!\n");

if (scanf(f, "%d %e", &a) && scanf(f, "%d %e", &b) && scanf(f, "%d", &c)) printf("Success!\n");

/* %e means more input expected, without it scanf fails if no EOF at that point */

I should be able to provide my own parsing functions in it: imagine a conversion specifier for JSON that returns a tree.

The existence of sprintf and sscanf point to bad design: I should be able to open a block of memory as a FILE, which would make sprintf and sscanf redundant. Also I should be able to open some kind of block device: meaning the FILE has pointers to user provided read and write functions. With this I could printf and scanf to some indirect device such as an EEPROM.

We should be using scanf for the program's argument list. I mean the program should not get an array of pointers, but instead a FILE that contains the arguments. The memory layout is then abstracted. The pre-conversion of the command line to an array is totally unnecessary, only exists because libc's scanf sucks.

Arbitrary length strings could have been handled with FILEs..
It was intentionally written to be very simple and achieved that goal. If your opinion is that that’s a poor choice, sure. But that’s an opinion, not a fact. Specifying a specific float format would cripple an interchange format and I think that would be a mistake. The intention here is to allow each origin and destination to decide how to fit the generic data into their representation formats.

The spec is not ambiguous. And a spec is a spec is a spec. You can implement it or not. But you can’t just decide “Enh… they didn’t mean it like that so it’s wrong to satisfy the spec. You should really satisfy it wrongly.”
How kind of you to include a link to that very page with your post!