skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why can't software run on distributed systems?
I remember when everything was single threaded, both the OS and the applications. I remember using MS-DOS and PCs with single core CPUs.

Now, both operating systems and applications are happily using how many cores and even CPUs you let them, provided they are on the same physical system.

I wonder why we can't have operating systems and software that can run on the same time on more than a single machine. Why we can't run software on a pool of machines and add or remove physical machines as we see fit?

Now when we need to do some work in parallel, we span more and more instances of the software on different machines and we load balance the work between them.

I wonder why we can't have one instance of the software span across many machines, as we see fit?

Yes, of course, network latency is a big deal but I think there are some types of high throughput interconnect and data transport that might help like Infiniband or HyperTransport. And if existing interconnect tech isn't enough, I believe they can be improved.

With the emerging of computer clusters like Beowulf, helped by software stacks like Kerrighed and MOSIX, I thought we will make a step in that direction, but those innitiatives fade away.
I just remember glide being that annoying thing you had to wrap to get the original n64 emulator working.
The administrators are a direct consequence of insurance-mandated budgeting.

You can't seriously argue that they're caused by "regulations" when front-line doctors are having to call insurance companies from their offices to get clearance for life-saving procedures.

Or when patients having an emergency have no idea how much treatment will cost because their insurance company has to work out whether treatment will be in/out of network, what the co-pays and deductions will be, and other bureaucratic friction which has nothing to do with providing care and everything to do with profitability.

The US has the highest per-capita spending on health, and also the highest level of personal bankruptcies caused by health insurance.

It's quite a strange point of view to consider that latter point any kind of win.
Open API schema objects are define using JSON Schema. The latest version even let you specify the JSON Schema dialect.
WhatsApp is supposedly end to end encrypted. Does Meta claim anything similar about its other platforms?
Although it probably sucks for the individuals at the receiving end of the scales of justice I believe this is an important public education campaign which will hopefully raise awareness of the scale and extent of data collection.

There seems to be a disconnect between data being collected from a terminal, how rich that data can be, and what it can be used for. If you use a digital keyboard your every keystroke can, and probably is being logged - we used to call this spyware, now even the keyboard app on your phone has clipboard sync (and it's built into Windows too!).

People need to be aware for example when activating javascript (and most don't know what that is), how much the various APIs are collecting and storing, which is used to build a "fingerprint" of your device.

The web (and digital devices in general) is actively hostile, anyone who uses noscript can attest to that and anyone who goes onto any news media website and opens "network" via web dev console can see how much data is flying to god knows where to do god knows what.

If you want to defy the state you need to be a master spy, this means actually thinking how you research, and probably learning a thing or two from Snowden (are you on wifi? open hotspot? is your device logging anything, if so, what? do you need to destroy the device afterwards incase it gets forensically inspected? If you could read /var/log what would be there and would it reveal anything about your situation? If you can't read /var/log then your device is actively hostile and not worth the risk).

Privacy is effort, and, in these cases, the 'seekers' are not spending enough effort on hiding their tracks and they are like fish in shallow water, easy pickings.

The ones who are clued up are not the ones who end up making the press, because they know exactly how to cover their tracks, and make it impossible to prove or disprove a fact, which, thankfully at least at this moment, is how justice works (for the most part).
(Military) History Portal
I've played with it and it's almost perfect from a game preservation perspective except for one glaring feature missing, many old cd games used to read the audio tracks of cds but the ao486_mister doesn't support this. So a lot of games from the exodos collection that would be perfect for this will crash when they attempt to read the audio track.
You are right. We are automating the creation of offer letters, employment contracts and confirmation letters by telling the developer exactly what to do and then testing what he did. And then still we are already working 18 months on this! 3 different developers already on the project. So if you try to create a solution without the directions from someone who actually does the work, good luck to ya!
The Techcrunch article[1] (linked in TFA) mentions FB Messenger was used, which does not have E2EE.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/27/digital-data-roe-wade-repr...
Text Search with Tries (2021)
A Static Type Checker for B-Minor
Probably going to get downvoted to hell but I'll take it. In my country the deaths were similar to a flu season we had 2-3 years earlier, and nobody batted an eye back then. Look at the numbers in your country yourself and you might see the same.

Of course it's sad for anyone who lost someone but no point in exaggerating. Why has similar years not prompted the same reactions earlier? Does the tone in the messages tell you they acted on a bad pandemic, or that they had to blow it up to scare people? Honest question.
I wanted to reply to GP with something along these lines, but I could not tell what the GPs comment actually meant, it was too ambiguous.

> It shouldn't be up to Facebook/Google to decide what is a crime, nor in which cases wiretapping should be allowed.

Could mean either:

1. FB/Google should be prevented from deciding what is and is not a crime. They don't set the laws.

Or

2. FB/Google aren't setting the laws, so can't be blamed when complying with those laws.

Maybe it's my sleepiness, but I just cannot decide which of the two statements were intended by GP.
^ This.

Even when I didn't know what functional programming was, or even there was a thing called "programming paradigm", writing programs with a lot of functions made intuitive sense to me.

This approach was much simpler.
You can say anything in China as long as you don't question the legitimacy of the Party's right to govern.

The people who get disappeared are people who organize protests or try to sue the government. Not people who just attend protests. People who distribute VPNs, not mere users of VPNs. And ethnic minorities.
> Firstly, can you even prosecute a woman for abortion? Aren't they legal?

In case you've been living under a rock for the last while: several American states have banned abortions[0][1] after the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. The federal government failed to implement any laws to safeguard access to abortions so overturning Roe vs Wade was all that conservatives needed.

Some states have exceptions for rape and incest, some don't. Texas even offers a sizeable bounty for reporting abortions. This has already resulted in medical care being refused to women carrying stillborn children and other pregnancy complications fatal to either the mother or the child out of fear of prosecution.

As for secondary criminal activity: I agree, if the police finds other illegal acts during a legal investigation, they should be allowed to act on that. This is the proof that the whole "if you've got nothing to hide" narrative surrounding state surveillance is dangerous.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-ro...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law_in_the_United_Sta...
I had the same experience. Running qw.exe and it just feeling substantial and beautiful compared to the software renderer. I have been chasing a transformative high like that since. I sat out the initial VR iterations hoping for the biggest wow factor when I finally strapped on the HTC vive connected to a PC. It was great but still not at that level.

One aspect of this story I've never seen covered is how Nvidia managed as a quiet dark horse to come from behind and crush 3dfx in a few years with the TNT and TNT2. The article talks about the GeForce 256, but 3dfx crown was stolen before that.
> no one is invested in the project (yet). We have hypotheses about who it benefits but haven't had enough time to test them.

You mean to say you built an entire project, large enough to need “a few full-time people” to maintain it, without ever getting feedback from actual users? Chance alone almost guarantees that you built the wrong thing and nobody will want to use it.
Another set of requests... (No idea if you're open to improving this?)

Stats (fairly obvious)
Sharing link for specific grid.

And the main, less intuitive one: hide a row / column when the user has marked every cell in the row column as either bad or good. This obviously only works if you also do the "changing number thing" I mentioned in the previous comment.
With the followup break down "Will AI decrease consumer prices on goods and services?" and "Will the balance of overall quality of life be negatively affected?" since simply focusing on jobs themselves without the externalities is too limited.
("Yes", and "Hard-No-in-long-term / Possibly-in-short-term")
> significant productivity increases that would affect the entire economy and likely result in unemployment. None of that has happened.

Of course. Some people believe that if some work is done by a cohort, then others can’t work. It’s the opposite that happens. If one person builds something, then others can work too. If more people work, then the entire society is richer and poor people can also find help more easily.
No seriously are there best practices to avoid common rust pitfalls with the borrow checker?
Consumers: keep buying whatever garbage Intel puts out each year

Consumers: "Why would Intel do this?"
Is this the thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27461338
You should do the bare minimum to familiarize yourself before wading in to this particular topic.

Abortion legality varies by state in the US. This is a recent development.

I wouldn’t expect to be prosecuted, or even investigated, for typing “how people get away with bank robbery” into Google. Or for watching The Dark Knight.
For one thing, everyone in the West who's fallen on hard times has been pretty grateful their government didn't let them starve to death.

This general, wide-impact instance of problem-solving is why the public will never allow libertarians anywhere near power.
In the USA, abortions are now illegal in many states. This was a major change that took place last year.
That's a very big AND.
Other than gaming and a few specialized workloads[0], many people would do just fine with such an Amiga today, which is something most OEMs don't want to hear about, naturally.

[0]- Naturally there is the issue of memory protection, but that could be solvable.
There were lots of buyers of coal at the time UK mines closed, but other sellers were able to supply at a lower price.

There continue to be buyers of coal now, and indeed the UK recently approved a new mine

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63892381
IBM could use the Red Hat Enterprise customer base to sell consulting services to. If the projected profits from consulting is large enough, no profits from Red Hat is needed.
Math has been done in natural language since the very beginning. Whatever math writing is not in natural language serves a specific purpose, such as being more precise than usual. In time, a jangon develops naturally as people with a lot of shared background knowledge optimize communication within their ingroup.
The issue they are talking about can (but shouldn't) also happen with the "Europlug" which is also used in Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europlug
This is key. Both parties need to trust that their messages are staying within the realms of WhatsApp itself, and with the usage of disappearing mode, not leaving any traces of a conversation.

They should probably be using encryption within the chat itself (and not, you know, speaking in plain English) to add another layer. Perhaps changing the keys frequently via an agreed method (thinking about how to do that safely without leaving another trace) to render older messages 100% undecryptable.

But yeah, chances are all of that data is going to be accessed and they agreed to it! It's right there in the privacy policy people don't bother reading
Collecting all the queries?
> This isn't quite like the classic roguelike in which it's a struggle to survive and a miracle to win.

Most classic roguelikes are reasonably easy to win provided you know and follow the obscure, nearly impossible to find by yourself and very rigid optimal way to go. That’s why I like to call checkbox ticking games.
> Observing whether it is alive or dead is a measurement along an axis that you get the equipment for by default.

The questions is why position is the preferred basis that ‘you get the equipment for by default’ - if that’s what you mean.
We need to invent a version of the glass bead game to avoid mass unemployment.
I am not medically trained, and have only read up on kidney stones having seen a friend deal with them over several months.

No mention here of Shockwave lithotripsy to working breaking up the stones, obviously prevention is better than cure but at least in the NHS in the UK they can attempt to shatter the stones.

Also there’s several different type of kidney stones, of which 80% are Calcium:

https://www.healthhub.sg/a-z/diseases-and-conditions/629/kid...
They can! I watched an interview with the makers of this framework and they're artists themselves that learned programming to make art.

Rust can run fast and thus is attractive for this kind of thing.
Let me take this opportunity to plug Nils his book [0] for people who don't know what Klong is.

[0] https://www.t3x.org/klong/book.html

Edit: Klongpy looks excellent; nice work!!
Is it really? I always assumed it was like Zoom end to end encryption where one of the “ends” is a Facebook data center. How can a user prove the claim of end to end encryption?
Can you temporarily disable keyboard scanning in the C64 to free up precious CPU time?
Abortions are now a crime in several American states, close if not equal to murder. These companies just do what they've always done when it comes to murder cases: hand over the data when the authorities demand it through warrants. As they should, in theory.

Facebook and Google are not to blame here; they're simply doing what the law demands of them. These companies are not above the law, they cannot refuse warrants. Blame Nebraskan and American federal law for this situation.

With a bit of luck, this situation will make these companies put more priority into E2EE. Had these conversations been done through Signal, there was likely nothing to be found or handed over.
Microsoft pushing D3D was a good thing, OpenGL drivers were an even bigger mess back then than today, and drivers for popular 3D accelerators only implemented the 'happy path' needed for running GLQuake but were either very slow or sloppily implemented for the rest of the API.

D3D was a terribly designed API in the beginning, but it caught up fast and starting at around DX7 was the objectively better API, and Microsoft forced GPU vendors to actually provide conforming and performant drivers.
The psi in the tire is set by the amount of air inside and the volume. It does not change significantly if the car is picked up (as you can see by the shape of the tire staying nearly the same).
The thing that confuses me is:

> A keyword is "known" if it is defined by a vocabulary listed in the schema's meta-schema (identified by the value in $schema).

{
"$schema": "https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema",

So, if a schema identifies as conforming to the 2020-12 meta-schema, why would a new "database-field-id" keyword in the 2025 upgrade be an issue? The 2025 parsers should know that it's not a keyword in the 2020-12 meta-schema, and treat it the same as they always did, shouldn't they?

But also - as an alternate to underscore prefixes, could new keywords just reuse the "$" prefix as in "$schema"?
> BI seems to be implying that abortion shouldn't be treated as a crime in places where it is a crime.

Abortion was explicitly legally protected for 50 years and only became a crime in some localities last year. There aren't many "crimes" like that.
Attempt at a summary (a very good talk!):
1. Open source produces immense value and ironically locks itself out of capturing the value. In the last 20 years, open source has become the oxygen of software development. Cloud providers do what proprietary software vendors did 20 years ago.

2. "IP is free, support for $$" like Red hat is a viable business model but captures only a very small part of the overall value. The much larger part is captured by private sector selling SaaS, Cloud infra vendors. Software has become a commodity, it is user-facing services that capture value today.

3. The value capturing works fine for the companies but little to nothing of that value flows back to the people who write or maintain the software. This needs to be overcome. Openness is important but we need to value it, and governments as biggest buyers of services play a role. If we valued openness more consequently, it would lead to more opportunities for open source developers to capture value by offering user-facing services.
Lightweight, Predictable Async Send Bounds
You can read the original LLaMA paper which is pretty accessible[1]. For example, they claim to outperform GPT-3 on HellaSwag benchmark ( finishing sentences ). You can find examples of unfinished sentences in the HellaSwag paper [2] on page 13. Unfortunately for LLaMA, most people would be probably just asking questions about Captain Picard and so on, and on this benchmark LLaMA significantly underperforms compared to OpenAI models (thats's from their paper).

[1] https://research.facebook.com/file/1574548786327032/LLaMA--O...

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.07830.pdf
I really recommend sitting down and listening to this - it's a very good cover of 3DFX from start to finish (and I feel like it was probably one of the primary sources for this article).
Exactly. These days there are several vendors preinstalling GNU/Linux on their machines where everything works, and it's really not hard to find machines where it's not preinstalled but where everything works anyway. These memes are memes because it's also not hard to stumble upon a machine where it doesn't if you just take a random one, but that's hardly surprising - just take a look at how much effort it takes to run Windows on Steam Deck and have everything work well there. Someone needs to put that effort first when the vendor does not.

I love those "I had issues so everyone else must have had them too" takes. I can give some anecdata too: the last integration issue I had on machines I've been running GNU/Linux on was a non-working SoundBlaster Audigy card somewhere around 2006 - and I've been mostly using laptops afterwards, some of them being from vendors that didn't provide any GNU/Linux support at all.

(that sound card eventually gained support in ALSA, by the way)
Tragically enough, Facebook Messenger does actually support E2EE. However, it needs to be enabled per contact/chat. Facebook's bad UX may just have become a driving force behind the conviction.

Facebook is improving E2EE according to their blog: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/01/expanding-features-for-end...
My introduction to functional programming, which I have embraced, came from the JavaScript community.

This is ironic. Supposedly, academia is where thought leadership comes from. In fact, much of a generation of university-trained software engineers have been subjected to a parochial form of education that centered on sink-or-swim Java projects while eschewing JavaScript as unworthy.

The React framework has been a driving influence behind recent industry movement toward functional programming, I suspect. It handles asynchronous UI events nicely by making the UI a pure function of the state. For me, and perhaps for many others, this structure was a breath of fresh air. Popular JavaScript linting policies —- also developed in the industry —- have further coached me into preferring functional programming styles, which have turned out to offer a lot to love.
Yeah, I don't want to dismiss this project out of principle, because it's cool! But I'd still recommend software like Touch Designer, or Notch (or some free alternative) for creative people. Fleshed out IDEs with both code and visual editors (and preferably with good support for a ton of peripherals).
I could never bring myself to take JSON and family seriously. This is just another indication. I mean they didn't consider that it's not possible to have things that escape validation being made to validate in the future version? And these are the people which are making the validator software?
I will start with a small nitpick: ref counting is a GC algorithm.

The answer: tracing GCs have that much better throughput. This is partly due to having to use atomic increments/decrements in multithread environments, which will absolutely kill performance (flush caches, force synchronizations, etc). Another reason which is true even of single-threaded RC is that the work has to be done “on the spot”. Clever compiler tricks can optimize some of it away, but tracing GCs amortize the costs very well (at the cost of more memory usage, there is no free lunch) — if they are moving GCs they can basically use thread-local allocation buffers where allocation can be as cheap as like 4 instructions, and later moving the still used ones out to a different region, and deallocation can be as simple as a flag toggle, now a different region is considered as the used space, the whole of the former one can be considered garbage. Add to it that many parts of this can be made parallel, modern state-of-the-art tracing GCs are really really hard to beat in complex programs.

Also, circular references are extremely common in complex programs, that in itself is a huge reason to have at least some hybrid solution (like python).
> For men, it was always "pro-choice"

You dramatically underestimate the number of both men and women who’re against abortion.
Did you check BQN?
Too limited scope. It's entirely possible increased profitability will not create jobs if it outperforms most people.

However, reduced costs and increased profitability do mean increased/easier quality of life. Even if robots are outperforming people in the business sphere, you're still gonna be seeing the externalities of incredible abundance at the local level. Hard to say how that wins out on net when people can't get jobs to pay for the (very cheap) goods and services though. This is typically where government/community should step in.
I'm in the same boat here. Had logged in with my google account which was sufficient for the first days but than suddenly they needed my phone number too.

Germany here.
I'd say you gotta start somewhere like customer support/service, become an expert on the products you support, build relationships internally. Know the competition very well. You can't walk off the street and start selling SaaS to SMD or Enterprise. Alot of sales people come from adjacent roles.
The Bank of San Serrife
There was an interesting post from Mozilla about this. There's a certain class of telemetry errors which seem to only be caused by cosmic rays

https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2022/04/13/this-week-in-glean-...