skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a lovely ode to the period in which I developed my love for computers. Although like many growing up east of the Atlantic Ocean, my computer of choice was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Without the budget to afford to buy much in the way of cassette-based professional software, like most I resorted to manually entering programs from magazines like Sinclair User[1] and Personal Computer World[2], which got me into the habit of reading others' code. When they were inevitably incorrectly entered, I was introduced to debugging techniques for the first time. After a while, I figured that I could write a computer program of my own; and not long after that, I realized I could submit my own program to a magazine and even earn money from it[3]! I don't think I would be working at Google now if it were not for this first-hand, somewhat unforgiving education I got in the 1980s.

That said, those who missed out on this era also missed out on quite how limited the available sources of information were. Without online services to consult, the primary source of information being trial and error, and one incorrect machine code instruction leading to loss of all data entered, progress was very slow going. A committed learner could certainly make far faster progress with a more modern environment.

For today's generation, I'm grateful for books like Charles Petzold's Code [4], which constructs a computer architecture from first principles. The joy is still there waiting to be found!

[1]: https://archive.org/details/sinclair-user-magazine-033/page/...

[2]: https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1984-01/pag...

[3]: https://archive.org/details/sinclair-user-magazine-044/page/...

[4]: https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/code-the-hidden-la...
Is it me, or is the UK government launching an unusually large number of boondoggles lately? Nuclear reactors on the moon. Attempts to become a major player in battery technology. It feels to my jaundiced eye like the UK is trying just a little too hard to remind the world that they still matter.

Some Brexit insecurity might explain this, perhaps, but that was over five years ago.
I'm guessing for one of the same reasons they were used originally. From that town and gown wiki article [1]:

> The gown also served as a social symbol, as it was impractical for physical manual work.

The gowns symbolize that graduates are now above physical manual labor and are destined for greater things (Starbucks barista)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_gown
Scarr's
People on HN love to talk about authentication. I was excited for an authorization discussion! Alas. Good luck in your research! I am not the right person to help you here (beyond wondering at the former discrepancy).
let's not overly romanticise it though

the vast majority of people with access to computers in the 80s didn't harness the opportunity to be able to understand a lot of what was happening

that was always going to be the case, and similarly people nowadays more often than not don't harness the vast opportunities that they have at their fingertips
It was highly dependent on when you were doing this. There was a time very early on where even moving the mouse would cause it to skip. (also had the same issue playing MP2 (yes, 2) audio files). That was when we were really pushing the limits of the hardware (33MHz 486).

These issues were resolved pretty quickly in the next generation of CPUs and recorders, so if you missed out on the very early versions you never would’ve seen this problem.
Court cases have been widely covered in all kinds of media for centuries. They are matters of public concern.
accredited is not much of marker of quality.
Plenty of people get a bachelors in psychology that cost them $80k and 4 years of time and no job prospects.
I can write SQL safely so I’ve never used an ORM myself. I have maintained code that used an ORM.

When I’ve asked other programmers why they use an ORM the answer usually comes down to “Because I don’t know SQL well enough to write it myself.”

Understanding SQL and the relational model has for me proved the most valuable and durable skill I ever acquired. I’ve avoided rounds of layoffs and got hired just because of that skill.
The challenge is blue rays are increasingly not available for many titles...
Interestingly this sort of thing falls into a special category where reasoning from first principles is less rigorous than pattern matching to experience. That's because we don't have a good theoretical model.

We're at the point in history where doctor who noticed less patients dying after they wash their hands argues with the doctor with a very erudite explanation of how that's impossible. Maybe someday we'll discover germ theory, but until then we're left to argue anecdotes down in the mud.
Xerox PARC stole everything they could from PLATO after their 1972 tour of PLATO and being PhDs never gave credit where credit was due! Picture language, app generator, multilingual fonts, a system so simple even a kid could learn to program it (I did at age 14, self taught), bitmap graphics, etc. When I went to work at Xerox Office Systems Division - the development arm of PARC - I would say that after 13 years of trying - with computers 10x faster - they were PARTIALLY caught up! Highly inferior communications tools, and no support for inter-terminal games . .
We're only human.

I think it would be incredibly difficult not to feel slighted and go through a whole range of emotions when laid off.

Furthermore, most people will naturally compare themselves against others. It's how we navigate society.

It's one thing to live and let go, but it's another to understand why things are happening and why certain treatments or gradients exist. It's logical to recognize and perfectly natural to have feelings about.
In Beijing, in '96, it was Weiwuerzu (Uighur) rouchuanr. Cheap-ass fatty lamb on sticks, fast grilled over charcoal. Seasoned w/ chilli, cumin, and salt I think. Buy 'em by the fistfull.
Can it be cached yet? I didn't think any http caches work with graphql?
I don't understand who gets the rights. Da Vincis descendants? Will this encourage the artist to create more content, or cultural institutions to become more litigous?
But of course, Alec from Technology Connections has us covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCTWyNstpD0
Polymorphic allocators:

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/polymorphic_allocat...

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/memory_resource
There are two facets to dd usage
Yes, the important thing is to have a data schema that defines the limits and that is enforced at all system boundaries. That way you also identify the cases where the limits may not match those of the protocols you are talking to (mappings between schemata, basically).
What's new for RISC-V in LLVM 16
And they could drop out in 2 years and owe $30k and have no job prospects at a regular university.

For some students if they do a year at a bootcamp and then manage to get a $100k job, paying back $40k isn't hard and better than 4 year university.
It seems to me that the EPA has been totally captured by corporate interests. It's hard to listen to stories about decisions they've made, for example approving Atrazine[0] despite the protests of the scientific advisors, and have any confidence that they'll actually make a meaningful impact.

[0] https://youtu.be/i5uSbp0YDhc
forever chemicals is another step in horrible messaging by the scientific community about the environment.

first we had global warming, then we have yearly “point of no return 2C” targets, now we have “forever” chemicals

why does it have to be so polarizing? plastic was just about a “forever” chemical until we did any work breaking it down and now have many solutions to degrading it. i’m sure these new chemicals will be similar in 10-20 years.

the fear mongering does nothing to help the real problem
I understand the point the author is trying to make: computers were simpler in 1983 than today, so you could actually understand how they worked, if you studied the technical specs. There was not some big operating system in the way. Operating systems were literally referred to as "disk operating systems," because that's pretty much what they did: mediate loading and saving data to disks.

And that's all a good story, except that it mostly didn't happen.

Not everybody was typing in BASIC listings, then spending hours debugging where the typo was. There was more than enough premade software, including games, out there for the major computers on the market (C64, Apple II, TI-99) that you could have a lot of fun without ever seeing a BASIC prompt.

And, while the manuals were much lower level then than they would be just a few short years later, and you could certainly learn a lot about how to control the machine by PEEKing and POKEing memory locations, the fact that if you POKE some address and the screen changes color doesn't tell you anything about how it all happened. It's just as mysterious as how moving the mouse on a modern computer moves a pointer on the screen.

BASIC is too high level to teach you anything meaningful about what's going on under the hood. But, fortunately, the machine languages of the home computers of this era were generally pretty well documented. However, even then, while you'd know there's this thing called a CPU and that it has things called registers and that you can give it instructions to read and write memory locations, those things are still pretty big abstractions if you want to claim to understand "how it all works."
Here’s my anecdata: Tried it with a few different wordings and GPT-3.5 got it wrong every time. 0/3. GPT-4 got it right 2/3 of the times. But if you really want meaningful data I’d suggest reading the paper and specifically paying attention to the human-level performance (95%) of GPT-4 on the HellaSwag data set which includes a lot of these sort of “common sense reasoning” problems. No other LLMs or specialized models have been able to achieve this kind of performance; the state of the art at the time of publication was around 85%.
Infinity here means "so big you don't have to think about reaching out". For example, the Rust standard library assumes no system could possibly support more usize::MAX/2 threads, but it worries about you cloning an atomically reference counted pointer usize::MAX times.
Just a heads up that ending a prolonged fast (3+ days) too quickly can cause refeeding syndrome, which can send someone to the ER

Also, certain conditions (including but not limited to T2 diabetes) can make fasting like this dangerous. I believe kidney problems are another one
Most definitely did not, but for those that put some interest, it seems like it was much easier than these days.
Analyzing a failed drill bit with an electron microscope [video]
I have made a few runs at adopting spaced repetition learning via Anki into my life. The failure point each time so far has been making cards that are worth anything.
Exactly what I was interested in, and the other benefits and properties of this setup are great.

I want to put some portion of my portfolio in something exactly like this. It would make sense to me if more companies and individuals held some portion of their net worth in these safe depository vehicles. This feels bullet proof.

Thank you!
Back when you needed a carrier to hold the CD-R on the drive.
Agreed. I'd guess that for every hobbyist programmer, there were probably at least 10 people who just wanted to play Ultima or something.
I don’t get your point. They can also not get a job. You know, bootcamp is not typically considered something good.
I had never heard the story about google trying to make Ken Thompson take a C proficiency test before, that is hilarious.
Into what? I never claimed expertise around Chicago pizza.

The thread I responded on [1] concerned New York pizza. You asked for recommendations [2], ignored and mischaracterised them, and then went on a tirade on a tangential thread. Your throw-out on $1 pizza was shot down by Kenji himself—I’m honestly confused if there is a point underneath this all that I’m missing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35213996

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35214079
> Also note that this approach generalizes to other text-based formats. If you have 10 gigabyte of CSV, you can use Miller for processing. For binary formats, you could use fq if you can find a workable record separator.

You can also generalize it without learning a new minilanguage by using https://github.com/tyleradams/json-toolkit which converts csv/binary/whatever to/from json
One downside is that depending on how your backend is structured, nested GraphQL queries can hit an arbitrary number of different endpoints, tables, services, or databases behind the scenes. And some of those queries could take a long time to resolve and not cache as cleanly as individual endpoints.
Looks like the author doesn't know about FZF's different search syntaxes https://github.com/junegunn/fzf#search-syntax

If they had left quoted the word makefile, GNUmakefile would have been the first result.
As someone who has purchased a lot of supplements over the past few years to (try to) deal with a health issue, the biggest problem I face is fake/untrustworthy reviews. Either outright fake reviews, or reviews that were "bought" by offering free products or something like that.

I just want to know from real people whether a given supplement worked well for them or not.

Bonus points if you can link scientific studies related to a supplement, so I don't have to search for them myself.

These are the main two issues I faced. I don't mind researching things myself, but the fake reviews really get on my nerves.
Double major in business, bleach. I was math & cs and I wanted to do physics too.
+1. While yes, you can have a giant json object, and you can hack your way around the obvious memory issues, it’s still a bad idea, imo. Even if you solve it for one use case in one language, you’ll have a bad time as soon as you use different tooling. JSON really is a universal message format, which is useful precisely because it’s so interoperable. And it’s only interoperable as long as messages are reasonably sized.

The only thing I miss from json lines is allowing a type specifier, so you can mix different types of messages. It’s not at all impossible to work around with wrapping or just roll a custom format, but still, it would be great to have a little bit of metadata for those use cases.
A college is much better than a bootcamp
Except they made the right choice with WebSQL. Exposing and securing the entire api surface of sqlite -- from sql syntax to binary compatibility to behavior-altering pragmas -- would have been a compatibility and security nightmare that would make xkcd 1172 look tame by comparison. Exposing a block device instead [1] and layering user-provided sqlite on top of it via WASM [2] is infinitely better than rushing to lock ourselves into a roller coaster that runs straight through the worst compatibility minefield the web has ever seen.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35165640 "Firefox 111.0 enabled Origin private file system access"

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33374402 "SQLite in the browser with WASM/JS"
Police record, not some hidden college record
That's a pretty good takedown of my comment, I appreciate the effort that went into that, and, well, you make some fair points, but I went back and reread the post, and stand by my response. To me, Cory Doctorow isn't making any substantive arguments in the linked article that I feel are worth digging into.

He denigrates ChatGPT as glorified auto complete but in the end, auto complete is... actually pretty useful?

I do appreciate him bringing in Ted Chiang, I love that quote - "it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism".

I haven't been exposed to Pluralistic before so maybe that's just his style there, but I think the difference between the hype around crypto and the hype around ChatGPT is that people in the world of finance are able to intuit where crypto fits, but people outside that world can't really appreciate that. ChatGPT; anyone who uses English can create their own account and play with it and see what the computer is doing. Sometimes hype is actually justified.
I think it's so important to keep universities connected to the tradition they arose out of in small ways like a gown.

It's amazing, when you read the history, how much of today's discourse about the value of a university education, the conduct of students, and the antagonism between university faculty and intellectuals who exist outside the walls of the university is a replay of stuff that happened in the 14th century and every century in between.
I have CD-Rs that I burned 20 years ago that are still readable. I would say this is the majority of disks.

I have a box of thumb drives that are between 10 and 20 years old... less than half of them even register, let alone read anything. And often those that do quickly die.
Also the lazy approach that nobody should ever do but we know everybody does at some point of connecting it directly to databases will leak data
who caches their API though
Asked ChatGPT

Yes, you are correct! Ancient Greek has a dual number, which is used specifically for referring to two people or two objects. The dual is a distinct grammatical number, separate from singular and plural.

In the ancient Greek language, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs all have different forms for singular, dual, and plural numbers. The dual number is used when referring to two things or two people, while the singular number is used for one thing or one person, and the plural number is used for three or more things or people.

The dual number is no longer used in modern Greek, but it was an important feature of the ancient Greek language, which had a rich and complex system of inflectional morphology. Other languages that have a dual number include Old English, Old Norse, Lithuanian, and Slovenian, among others.
Ehh yes and no. Many languages indeed use conservative GCs, but that is because it is significantly easier to implement than precise GCs which require stack maps etc. I don't think it's exactly a question about languages and static types/generating code, it's more of an implementation detail. Conservative GCs can be fast, but they are inherently less space-efficient as you retain more objects than a precise GC would. Of course in some cases a conservative GC _is_ required, for example if your language has heavy interop with C/C++ land.

Also supporting interior pointers is not too cumbersome even with a "Java-style GC" (whatever that exactly means). It requires an additional bit per smallest aligned object size to denote if an object is allocated or not. If you need to check if a pointer is an interior pointer to an object, you walk back in the bitmap and find the last object with a bit set to 1 (i.e. find the allocated object which was right before the pointer you have), get the size of that object and check that the pointer you have is within the range of the start and end of the object.

EDIT: The big issue you would face with directly porting a Java GC into other languages is the weak reference processing semantics. Each language has their own subtle differences which would make it a pain.
I had an ex who was deeply into roughly this idea, but for beauty products. There’re many micro-domains where people spend a lot of time trying to figure out where things come from, what their environmental impact is, the production process, etc.

Maybe not a billion dollar business, but hey it is an honest thing to try to sell.
That isn’t any better!
I was thinking about j40.

It's cool that there's a Rust implementation in progress. If it works out, it will make it much easier for me to support JXL. I've been waiting to RIIR the j40 instead.

AVIF (HEIF) container format is MP4, which browsers already parse for video. There is a bit of extra work to extract image-specific data, but it's minor compared to AV1 implementation. AVIF even contains a completely redundant copy of key AV1 metadata (av1C) to spare implementations from parsing the AV1 payload.
How has it ended? Companies are going through a strategic inflection point with AI. When that stabilizes over the next decade(couple years probably), hiring will boom again. Demand is only temporarily dried up due to navigating rough seas and aligning internally. Read Only the Paranoid Survive and you’ll see the same thing happening today.

Bootcamps will still be needed as new tech needs to be learned quickly to fill vacant positions.
The mention of farmers with access to groundwater reminds me that water rights issues in New Mexico vs. Texas have, in part, been caused by a disagreement over how much pumping out groundwater affects the downstream flows of nearby rivers in the aquifer. https://sourcenm.com/2023/02/10/state-requests-125m-over-fiv...

Oh yeah, and the Colorado River Compact was based on estimates of river flows that were optimistic even for wetter years in 100 years ago. The compact allocated over 16 million acre-feet for a river that most years manages less than 14 million.
You almost can, other than the annoying animated image exception (I would really like media controls on those, you can currently only set them to play once, never, or infinitely). Privacy and Security -> under "Permissions" click settings next to autoplay -> select "Block Audio and Video" under "default for all websites".

For animated images I'm not sure if it is exposed in the UI but in about:config change image.animation_mode to "once". If you want to replay it after that, you will need to open the image in a new tab. It is somewhat easy to miss them with this setting since even images at the bottom of the page will start their single animation when you hit pagedown (even if you move the page view up again almost immediately).

Mostly this autoplay blocking has been wonderful, a massive improvement. The one slight annoyance I've noticed is that the exceptions managament isn't as flexible as uBlock origin's configuration and you can't tell Firefox to unblock all of Bandcamp. I'm not sure if this is something that could potentially be done in an addon. The other thing I'd really like is a way to default "loop" to off on media controls so that I can just play the media once by default when I do play it. Oh yeah, for some reason I can't imagine Twitter tries hard to make videos repeat and current autoplay restrictions aren't able to stop that (I don't have an account so I suspect this is a "fuck you for not making an account" thing. I can't imagine anyone putting up with that more than briefly).
Extra client dependencies, for one. REST support is baked into pretty much every web browser and OS. But for GraphQL I’ve seen some hideous deployments with dependencies on giant libraries as well as bundles containing dozens of GraphQL queries as long strings, jacking up the memory usage of the webapp.
A Rant on Terra (2019)
I can predict even without looking into comments that we will see all five stages here but probably mostly still denial. I'm excited primarily because this is really the best educational tool I've ever seen, I want to see what I can create with this.