skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
File system semantics need a rethink. Here's what I've proposed. This is not original with me; these are all things implemented in some non-UNIX-based systems.

Files should come in several kinds:

- Unit files. They're immutable, but replaceable. This is the normal case.
You create them with "creat",
write them, and when closed, they replace any previous version with the same name. Any program which opens one for reading sees a complete file. On a crash before close, the new file is dropped and the old version remains. If a program aborts, that also happens. An explicit close commits the file update.

- Log files. These are append only. On a crash, you are guaranteed that the file will be intact to some point ending at a write boundary. The last transactions may be lost, but the file must not tail off into junk. For journals, log files, etc.

- Temp files. These disappear on a crash.

- Managed files. These are for databases. They can do everything files can do.

Along with this, you need async I/O. This is primarily for log files and managed files. When you do a write, you get two callbacks, one when the buffer has been copied, and one when the data has been committed to permanent storage and will survive a crash. It is the job of the OS, drivers, and devices to not send the data-committed completion until the data is safe.
Only a few programs need that, but they're the important ones - database managers.

This turns the fsync problem around. Instead of doing an fsync to force write-out, databases wait for a completion before considering the data committed. It's not a flush-everything; it's a commit-complete for a single write. So if you have multiple I/O operations pending on a single file, a normal event in database land, there's no big stall for a cache flush.

There's also no incentive for drive manufacturers to send commit-completes early. The only people who use them are the ones who will notice if someone cheats. Most bulk I/O is on unit files, where something is being copied.

(There are mainframe systems that had this sort of thing half a century ago.)
I do that on non-time-critical cases, if it doesn't matter whether I deliver it within an hour or day better to just do it now when I have it fresh in my mind.

But anything longer gets thrown to backlog
Which part is Apple copycat? Seems like they're wrecking it plenty by themselves without needing to take cues from macOS.
Or you know, you could stop fighting with your computer/OS/vendor and pick a different OS.

No OS brings enough of a difference these days that it’s worth suffering an adversarial relationship with.
The original code doesn’t use a single transaction.
> Both of those are super anti-consumer.

That’s like saying air bags are anti-consumer. Two differences between air bags and SIP: Consumers don’t know SIP exists, and anyone savvy enough to understand the esoteric reasons for needing to disable SIP can do that.
As a life-long Windows user, the most frustrating part is how broken search is, and always has been, but… in new and unique ways in every version I’ve ever used!

It’s astonishing: they’re clearly working on it, making material changes, but only ever sideways. I’ve never observed an improvement.

To those people that say “version x has worked”: I doubt it. Maybe after a month it successfully indexed the 100KB of text in your start menu. Maybe you just got used to what search terms work, and forgot about it. But I assure you that it has never “just worked”.

I still have a habit of searching for “management” in the start menu because if I type “SQL”, it won’t ever find “SQL Management Studio”.
> Steam doesn't run natively

What do you mean by this?
Yup. Different problem space! Thanks for laying it out clearly.
There's no possible way to underestimate the effects of US gun violence on even the upper-middle class of Mumbai.
Eh, Dad would see that as rude.

But the moment you un-friend someone, they instantly show back up in your friend suggestions. So while Dad doesn't really talk to these people, the desire to not offend them, and their desire to connect with names the recognize, just puts everyone in a spot where they are prompted to re-friend one another.

Thanks though! I don't use Facebook myself, so there may be some other options I'm not aware of. I just want to not see those people and not have them show up in a friend suggestion, but also not block them from talking to Dad if they ever need to.

It's the overly-political ones, or the ones that spew fake news, that I worry about. Dad would say, "Oh I trust their father, they aren't going to lie to me, if they said they saw Joe Biden at a satanic ritual eating freshly killed Christian babies, they wouldn't lie about it!" =P (Only slightly exaggerated from some of the stuff these wackos post.) Or he thinks the internet is moderated by Walter Cronkite, "They wouldn't let them post it if it wasn't true!" (And honestly the "citation needed" marks have made things worse since a lot of times they don't show up and that makes Dad think it's been verified.)

Blocking them may be the best call... but it's hard if they find out they are blocked since that makes more drama. Then they call, "Why did you block me on Facebook, was your account hacked?" kind of stuff. I just want like a "mute" button that makes the person not ever show up in the feed or comments, but doesn't cause them to ever show up as "blocked." If you know how to do that in Facebook let me know. "Shadowban" is that the right term? =P Opt out!
> If you go to a conference, you can be quite sure no-one understands you apart from your friend who you are talking to

I'd be careful about that. I've overheard others making nasty remarks thinking I wouldn't know what they were saying. Seinfeld had a pretty funny episode about that.

I've watched Polish movies. It doesn't take long before one gets the hang of what others are saying.
True.

A commit on every insert would definitely crush your performance. That's one of the worst ways to do bulk inserts.

Really the whole thing is kind of pointless because there are so many factors. It's not about the language, it's more about sqlite and its configuration.
Read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Accounting-Game-Basic-Fresh-Lemonade-...

I have introduced countless people who never though they would need to understand bookkeeping and accounting with this awesome tool.
Truly, what has happened here? Windows search was so good circa 7. It is astoundingly awful in 10.
Disagree. Some examples.

If I have an LLM in a video game that generates NPC dialog, I might want to feed more information to the prompt based on things my character has done in the game so the NPC dialogue is more relevant to me.

Maybe I want to inject the user’s location or the current weather in Sunnyvale, CA for the specific query. Or maybe I want to inject that the user is currently at Disneyland.

Maybe the user really likes a specific tv show and I want to let the model know that. Or maybe the specific TV show was DMCA’d by an IP owner and I need to put that in the prompt.

Do I need to detect that the user is below 13 yrs old and use a different prompt (or a different model altogether)?

Maybe I want the model to only ever respond with JSON without the user needing to specify. It needs to be clarified in the prompt with no way for the user to override it.

Models can be simplified to: input to output. Prompt engineering will be engineering the inputs.
Wouldn’t early commits be a way to game synthetic benchmarks? (And thus sell more hardware if your product benchmarks well.)
I think a much better is done by Boston Metal:

https://www.bostonmetal.com/

Based on this paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12134
Keyword here is "continuously"...

You mean Trump never went to New York for the past seven years? That's hard to believe...
How do you decide on your breaks? I have prescription too, but I usually use everything up within 70% of the time period and then 30% I have a break, which was not intended, but this is what I've been doing anyway. In a way it's good to have these breaks at least to understand dependence and tolerance.

So each month I have a period of a little over a week of break.
Huh, I was proficient in Rust before "properly" learning C++, so maybe that accounts for it, but I didn't realize C++11 was controversial. Is it just move semantics, or are there some library things that are hard to implement?
how is SIP "super anti-consumer"? You can easily turn it off if you want to. AFAIK there are no repercussions if you do even other then your computer being more susceptible to malware.
You're correct. Posts like these are made by people who haven't actually tried to scale the approaches they're advocating.
>This is of course completely forgetting the era when every prebuilt would ship with crapware

This was a clean Windows install, not one that came from an OEM. Clean Window installs at least used to be exactly that: they came with nothing but Windows.
Nobody in the west cares about Myanmar. Most people dont even know which continent it's in. Yes, we are hypocrites, but thats what would make the difference for Ukraine.

> People who protest the war in Russia get arrested not shot because that's all it takes to suppress them

But if as you believe Ukrainians care so much then they would definitely not give up after a few being jailed.

> Nor does it mean that Russia wouldn't apply harder measures elsewhere, if they thought it necessary.

Harder than bombing cities and destroying the infrastructure? Strongly doubt so. Doesnt seem like your way worked well for the Ukrainians so far. Unless all you care about is making Russia weaker, no matter how many Ukrainians it take.
Over the last 10 years or so, I'd try out Linux for a week, get frustrated for one reason or another, and then switch back to Windows.

Back in February I decided to try Linux Mint again, and this time it worked, and I haven't switched back to Windows yet. I think Linux is starting to get good, even for someone like me, who doesn't want to become a part-time Linux admin.

(Your joke still made me laugh, for the record)
I made the mistake it getting a Rift, it is gathering dust now that Facebook has gotten their creepy hands on it.

I wonder if Linux is a fundamentally much better platform for VR than windows? The problems are mostly latency related, right? And the openness of the platform means that Valve can really tinker to their hearts’ content.
Thank you for the honest peek behind the curtains.

Are the companies enamored with the productivity gains of prompt-based systems sufficiently that they can ease up on the requirement for consistency?
See my other comment I just posted to someone else for examples.
GP probably meant a “JS” instruction rather than a “JVM” one: FJCVTZS, “Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point rounding towards Zero”[1,2], introduced in ARMv8.3 at Apple’s behest (or so it is said). Apparently the point is that ARM float-to-integer conversions normally saturate on overflow while x86 reduces the integer mod 2^width, and JavaScript baked the x86 behaviour into the language.

[1] https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0602/2022-12/SIMD...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24808207
Sure but which other tool is there in practice? I have seen only Zoom (and equivalents like Google Meet) and an in-person 30 min coffee is 10x better than a quarter-full of weekly Zoom socials. So if you know anything better, please do share.
Here are a couple of good resources around prompt engineering

https://www.promptingguide.ai/

https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-03-15-prompt-enginee...

These clearly demonstrate that there's engineering skills beyond "I want you to act as a Linux terminal."

Also note that there's a difference between the prompt that you use on ChatGPT and the one that you use in the GPT API or other LLMs.
In the first, you're already dealing with the prompt that openai supplied to the LLM in the first place.
The thing is, those claims about MacOS have been true for some time, while Windows becoming this bad is a relatively recent thing. 10 was the start, and 11 was a huge escalation.
people have been saying such things for nearly as long as SIP has existed. going on 7 years now and still just as easy to disable.
People in management have a wide spectrum of technical proficiency and to imply that someone in a management position could not legitimately help reeks of inexperience.
> Gaming experience on Linux is still terrible and a non starter for most people.

That's a very confident assertion for something that is extremely debatable either way. Do you have a source on Linux being a non-starter? At least a million Steam Deck users seem to be doing just fine.
It works both ways. Some folks were overly concerned about both memory footprint and total run-time as their importance actually declined. I made a career out of ignoring both and making leading edge apps that pushed these limits. Few other programmers had yet realized that these things were becoming practical. Within my organization I had an un-earned reputation as a leading edge programmer. Not so. I was a mostly self-taught hacker trying to keep up with the others. Now I was doing scientific programming, and there are plenty of other places where this approach won't work, but it worked for me. Look forward, do new things, and build the future.
This would be a great resource for GPT to find humans who can prompt GPT better.
Wow, must be difficult being you. I just add some to my fluid reservoir when I get up there.

And I benefit from the clear skies down in the valley when I am here. In the 60s you couldn’t see the mountains from Mountain View. Now you can again, and people have fewer breathing problems.

If that’s “California Environmentalism” well, it seems pretty good to me.
English speakers are apparently the only culture that doesn't care about cultural appropriation.
Having that knee-jerk reaction in the first place is something you want to lose ASAP.
Ask HN: What happens after ChatGPT gets access to real world APIs?
I was just playing with the idea of ChatGPT replacing the backend of Alexa, Siri etc and I found some very dystopian scenarios.

Do APIs need a more restrictive permissions model? How do we protect the real world from hallucinating technologies that can interact with our physical infrastructure?
This kinda of overly simplistic analysis and invalid comparisons is what republicans like you use to manipulate people and gain power
Yeah, there’s no way we’re tossing our $3 milk delivery bottles…
4chan came here to chime in a bit. You were downvoted by 10 year old children, good luck explaining to them how memory locking works :)
Archive: https://archive.is/2QW4R
For Vancouver's geography to be a legitimate concern, we would have needed to maximize what we could do with the existing land, and it's very, very far from that.

I would argue the latter 2 arguments have some bearing, but imo it's more about cheap capital coming in from many directions including locally for so long in combination with artificially choked and inflated development processes for decades. For example, there's a parking lot with an old grocery store sitting there at the busiest transit hub in the U.S and Canada. The proposal to redevelop the site has been repeatedly stalled every year for what is now 6-7 years, meanwhile only the most meager development projects have gone forward in the same neighborhood. That said, because of the other reasons, as soon as it hypothetically went up, all of the units would be purchased by speculators because they'd be wildly out of reach for any regular person anyway, due to decades of the other crap.

I went to an open house yesterday for a modest one bedroom with no interesting view or extravagant features, listed at $750k. When I remarked that the cost of the mortgage alone would be a multiple of 2.5 - 3x our current all-in expenses, he simply suggested that in 5 years I can just move out and hang on to it, renting it out to someone and keeping another unit off the market.
> Am I wrong or was programming just way cooler back then?

You're wrong, to be blunt.

Sure there's some interesting challenges to solve around keeping memory usage low, but mostly it was just tedious and limiting.

Programming has enough challenges and interesting optimizations without worrying as much as one used to have to about memory.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35236192
The reason I posted is that I'm about to throw out an HP OfficeJet Pro with that issue. It's a few years old but it hasn't worked properly for a while now, and given the costs of ink it's not worth repairing. I used to have a laser and I'm planning to switch back.
It’s hard to take seriously an article with nonsense like this in it:

“First Russia tried to suppress the U.S.-backed Euromaidan movement in Ukraine”

A Russian canard that Ukrainians don’t have agency.

The rest of the article is more breathless sensationalism masquerading as investigative journalism. Like this nonsense:

“Trump also threatened the business interests of the most powerful sectors of society. It was the latter offense, rather than his putative racism or flagrant un-presidentialness, that sent the ruling class into a state of apoplexy.”

The ruling class? Is this ye olde Pravda?
Read “Racing the Beam” for a good time learning about how to do a lot with crazy constraints we don’t have today!
>There is little 'european culture' left ...
That's your opinion, and it strikes me. I don't understand the difference between what you call "fossilized cultural artifacts" and "alive culture and thought". In france, there are a lot of linguistic communities that still talks local tongues, and there are some events in which people reunite themselves in order to perform some folkloric dances (not related to age). Is this a fossilized cultural artifact ?

A lot of the good films I saw the past years were from europe. I really enjoyed the contemporary scandinavian scene recently, you could try to enlarge your vision and watch different things (recommendation [0])
There's a crazy amount of artistic domains, and I can't believe that someone (as you just did) can think of having scanned successfully the whole Europe cultural practices to be allowed to say " european culture is gone".
Music, dance and visual arts are being created everyday : does it constitutes a part of what you call "culture" ?
Concerning the public intellectuals you talk about, well, they were only a diffusion channel for one part of the european culture , and I don't think their death implies the death of culture, but rather the lowering of the signal amplitude perception from USA.

[0] https://www.on-tenk.com/
Post-Mortem Stewardship
What do you think happens to open source libraries whose maintainers shuffle from the mortal coil?

They never set a plan to hand over the keys, so are the libraries set in stone and simply need to be forked, or is there a way to carry on the mantle?
That's from Microsoft's and Apple's marketing material, not a reflection of reality.
the chemicals in the microplastics are making the kids gay
> Life gets much better when you stop thinking of your body functions as bugs. They're features.

Counterpoint: this is like considering various peculiarities of software from 1980s to be features in 2020s. Yes, our bodies are well tuned. To an environment we've lived in until our ancestors, thousands of years ago, boarded a metaphorical rocket ship, and left it flying under constant acceleration.

In certain aspects, we're quite far from the environment we evolved in, and evolution has lost the ability to keep pace some time around when it granted us with ability to develop a language more complex than a few grunts.
Sadly I've ranted enough on this account that it needs to remain anonymous.
OPEC
Add two HiDPI monitors and you’ll see.
I think certain developers don't care because they don't even understand programming on a lower level nor they understand hardware. As a sysadmin that really grinds me gears.

These days, developers have no shame - even Microsoft shows Teams was a utter piece of garbage with both memory and cpu usage https://youtu.be/CT7nnXej2K4 . Are they even serious with 22 second loading on a modern hardware and multiple gigabytes of memory usage for a stupid chat app?

We still use laptops that have 8GB of RAM in our company for positions like HR, marketing and others and the fact that Teams and couple of browser tabs can totally kill their PCs is insane. Laptop manufacturers haven't caught up to the news and they still charge premium for 32GB machines, while 8GB is no longer sufficient for anything and 16GB should be the baseline these days.

And of course this is not just Teams but many other applications. Too bad most users don't understand the issue and think that something is wrong with their computers.

Regular users are not great testers. Testing used to be a dedicated job...

Anyway I think there should be a lot more pressure on developers to use our current hardware more efficiently
I think it is much cooler now. So many more things are possible now. Instead of having 8 low res sprites to push around, we have high quality 3d rendering. Instead of making a robot with 2 wheels that bumps against a wall and turns, we have humanoid robots to work on. I find it all really exciting.
First Wired AirPods
It used to be said that piracy actually helped the copyright holder, by exposing more people to the work who sometimes might buy a copy.

It's also curious for an open source advocate to complain about knock-off brands such as Ender and Behringer, when open source is lousy with projects that are knock offs -- sorry "open source versions" -- of commercial products.
I remember visiting a shopping mall in Stuttgart. From the parking garage, to the building architecture, to the layout, to the businesses, to the advertising signs, you could not tell you were in a country other than the US. It was kinda sad.
McDonald's temporarily shuts its U.S. offices and prepares layoff notices
I find it mildly amusing that AI "breakthrough" follows with lots of references towards hallucinations. Apparently it's not only the AI hallucinating, also the the doom seeker.
The biggest beneficiary of the AI space race
I hope that will help you, in the common journey we are all on, and from which we are not likely to escape.

The problem is most religions, under the presentation of being about the after, are very much all about imposing, some kind of sometimes very light, sometimes very strong, anxious tyranny on the shared societal present.
How the U.S. Came to Use Spyware It Was Trying to Kill
Arguably they'll be learning more valuable skills than some of the schoolwork teaches.
People want low prices, and care about little else. Possibly because it’s simply one of the easiest to understand metrics. How does a Ryzen 4678v compare to an i12363k? I follow computers and have no idea.

Price matters a lot even if you do know all the ultra-technical things.

How do you make computers cheaper than the next guy? Subsidizing. Who will pay? Ads and internet companies.

People complain Apple stuff is overpriced. It’s not subsidized by Intel or AMD or Candy Crush or TMZ.

Yeah they like their profit margins (especially upgrades). But they only shill for themselves (which IS getting annoying). They’re not angels. Still sounds better than that experience to me.

Without a privacy law to make data collection illegal or something to make junk legally easy to remove… this is where the race to the bottom goes.

It’s just like what happened to TVs. You can’t buy a consumer model at any price that doesn’t suck. $4500? Still tracks you and wants to push apps.
It is not necessary for an allocator to have any hidden overhead inside an allocated block. That would be quite unacceptable for small blocks like a 32 byte block holding four pointer-sized values.

In any case, applications can do their own aggregation for small allocations: allocate the nodes in an array and dole it out from that. It can recycle unused nodes itself.