skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your mind must be pure to understand Nix. Work on your purity. Just kidding. You might explain why you want to try nix? That would help customize an explanation for you, because there are levels. Umm... here is my attempt. Sorry.

Nix is a programming language plus utilities that are useful to define and work with software packages in a reproducible way (https://github.com/nixos/nix/).

Each package is called a "derivation", which is a function that takes inputs and makes output. The inputs are everything that is needed to make the output. It is "pure functional" package management - for the same input arguments, the same output will be produced. Nix is really fast because each derivation is hashed and cached and the language is lazy-evaluated.

Builds are "hermetic", meaning only the inputs specified in the derivation are available at build time. Contrast this to some packaging systems, where the build is done against some staging area where packages get installed as they are built and the output can depend on the non-deterministic order that packages are built.

Nixpkgs (https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs/) is a large collection of recipes for existing software. It contains both rules to build software as well as "modules" to configure it or extend it. NixOS the linux distribution is also part of nixpkgs. There are lots of design patterns here and it can go pretty deep. There are also tons of hacks and patches and workarounds to make software conform to the way nix works. Nixpkgs also has a lot of useful library modules built in.

Nix is the latin word for snow. Nix "flakes" are a way to combine multiple inputs as well as pin the version of inputs. Kind of like pipenv/requirements.txt or "cargo lock" or "yarn lock" but for anything.

The output of derivations go in the "nix store" which is a path like /nix/store/<hash>/, so all sorts of software can co-exist (think multiple incompatible versions of the same library) and can be referenced in a fixed way. Usually you will end up with an output that is mostly symlinks to other /nix/store/ paths.

Nix can make practically any combination of software you can cobble together trivially rebuildable/reproducible. You can write some nix code that will produce a a VM image with test scripts as well as a script to launch the VM with a patched version of qemu and run those tests. You can have all your dotfiles/configuration in code with nix installed just for your user on top of Ubuntu. You can generate a raspberry pi sd card image from a short nix source file and a single command, and then 6 months later change a single line and regenerate it without worrying it might be broken.

You can achieve a lot of that stuff with Yocto or Ansible or a Dockerfile and scripts, but it would be slower than nix and more fragile.
Please do!

And, speaking as a Qt programmer, address the biggest pain points that Qt user have.

Number one: get a virtual keyboard that supports the biggest world languages without a commercial license. That would make me an instant convert.
China’s Rebound Hits a Wall, and There Is ‘No Quick Fix’ to Revive It
I'm not aware of a way to control the GC behavior of an object in JS. The memory will be freed, and that's all. If something else needed to be done, I don't think there's a way to do it. Happy to be proven wrong though.
Great that these people had success. But how many breweries are there a town of 10k people, 1 or 2 maybe. These are the 1% success stories. The economics doesn't allow each of us to open businesses that succeed, there just isn't that much demand. Such as amazon wiping out many small stores, before that walmart killing small cities downtowns when they built one of the edge of town. That doesn't mean there were not some other new businesses to be formed, but there's a limit.
I think you're taking about two different things: a game rising from a small number of players to a massive phenomenon, and a game getting that small number of players to begin with.

The HN analogy is a SaaS company struggling to become profitable vs struggling to find the first ten or hundred users. Profitability is very hard, finding a big enough niche is very hard, but...ten users?
>Comprehensive? No. Nothing even comes close to the scale that reddit has for the niche that Reddit has.

Saidit is a publicly funded, opensource alternative to Reddit, that uses the same old.reddit code. For anyone who doesn't like the Fediverse, Saidit seems like the best option.
And then it goes into a black hole and no one else will ever benefit from that knowledge. It's a major reduction in the utility of the internet.
Snyk Capture the Flag (CTF) has some solutions that describe vulnerable architectures. Automating some of that capability could be a useful feature set for such software:

https://snyk.io/events/ctf/#solutions
Grep nixpkgs for `buildNpmPackage`, it's ridiculously easy to package a node app nowadays.
What’s your thought on OPA Rego?
I’m just not convinced that anything not tied directly to a government issued ID is going to be strong enough.
I would rather die in an implosion that running out of air at 3,000 metres over the course of several days.
I'll also add that some of the state proposals are in general quite nice in where their priorities are. Such as prioritizing working in the open, both in sharing research, working with standards groups, and open source tooling.

It would be nice if we could come to a thorough solution that actually does cover all bases, rather than all these companies trying to create their own digital ID services that just encourage us to instead do silly things like photograph your ID front and back.

I mean hell it's taken like 20 years for privacy by design to become an ISO standard? That sort of timeline is not something we can really tolerate as more and more people continue relying on online services and in turn wind up trusting horribly outdated techniques/general malaise about data.
Minorities have congregated together, for all of history, for a reason.
Haven't they (and the Economist and others) been writing the same doom-scenarios for 15+ years? Reminds me of the "Apple is doomed" articles appearing every month since the introduction of the iPod. Talk about prediction skills...
> > Please cite the language in your employment contract that entitles you to this.

> Please consider the possibility that I'm not in the US. You're just going to have to take my word for it.

I want to be clear—this wasn't intended to be a gotcha or anything! I am honestly curious about how different labor laws exist around the world. But I don't think this distinction is rare. Germany, for example, has one of the most regulated and regarded-as-worker-friendly payroll systems in the world. But even Germany still makes a distinction between the fixed pay scale and außer tarif employees, which almost universally has an expectation of vertrauensarbeitszeit ("trust-based working hours" i.e. non-hourly work)

I would be surprised if there is a modern country that does not make this distinction between hourly and non-hourly pay in some way.
Is this a slightly less esoteric version of the Lambda calculus?
>> No sign of them giving up in the fossil record.

Actually there are signs in the fossil record that dinosaurs weren't doing very well even before the K–Pg extinction.
Yes, but it’s relatively unlikely to go back a billion years given how geologically active our planet is and how fast microbes can mutate.

The oldest I can think of are the Movile Cave [1] which was isolated for 5.5 million years before it was discovered and Lake Vostok [2] which has been isolated for tens of millions of years.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movile_Cave

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok
He got lucky
We do have initial support for screen readers. That’s using accesskit, or Qt when using the Qt backend.

It’s still basic, some controls like text input need work, or customizing the focus chain.

Building blocks are there and will need further polish.
Get a text copy of the book and then pass it through the tool yourself, right? Who cares how much the publisher wants.
Other than the backs of wardrobes and bookshelves that are attached by nails, IIRC you can occasionally find elements that need to be hit with a hammer to ensure full, tight fit - in those cases you want a rubber-tipped hammer though.
All postgres processes run under the same system user and all the access checking happens completely in userspace.
Does anyone else see this and think, "async programming is much worse than non-async programming"?

Compare this to Go code, and I'll take the equivalent Go code any day of the week.
You think corporations known for professional behavior do everything they can to save people from harm’s way?
>And if you’re considering becoming a prompt engineer, don’t count on a long-lasting career.

There's like this whole class of technical jobs that only follow trends. If you were an en vogue blockchain developer, this is your next target if you want to remain trendy. It's hard to care about this happening as the technical debt incurred will be written off -- the company/project isn't ingrained enough in society to care about the long-term quality.

So best of luck, ye prompt engineers. I hope you collect multi-hundred-thousand dollar salaries and retire early.
> loops are typed gotos, so are if statements, so, really are functions.

All of the above don't break the continuity of a program's control flow. Maybe you should be arguing with Dijkstra, not me: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/E...

Pretty sure we've already litigated that goto/jmp is bad, which is why it's almost never used in modern C/C++ code unless doing very specific things.
> Are you asking, what Stallman thinks about this

No. However...

> I believe Stallman said in some interview, that there would probably be fewer developers

It's crucial to emphasize this in debates about "free" software. I think there would probably be a lot fewer developers. Stallman appears to be advocating for a decimation of the industry.

And I don't think this would help users, because a lot less software would exist.
Seems like a pretty stupid design if you ask me
and hopefully you have choices for that third party IP too

This just reduces lock-in for CPU IP
Most people will worship AIs as gods within our lifetime, probably pretty soon. Decades of propaganda saying religions are mostly different flavours of the same thing has already paved the way, together with decades of materialism and anti-spirituality. What better than a completely material god in a chip?

There is a reason why the Bible warns that man shouldn't make other gods to worship. A man-made god is by definition a false idol.
UT Austin is the only Texas public university that considers race for admissions. So what do the diversity offices actually do at the other Texas public universities?
elixir is so beautiful and expressive...it really sucks that it's almost impossible to find it in use in a company.
I don't understand how there's so much old school oop frameworks in the wild and not enough elixir/phoenix :/
Don't forget about kbin and lotide.
There's enough misalignment and ambiguity between the wording in here and how LLMs actually work to keep courts and lawyers busy for years to come I suppose.
No - the store is more like the npm registry!
Kbin.social?

Jerboa for Android looks just like redreader did for reddit
There's no need to analyse things so deeply. It's just human expression.
They're not. Someone HAS to work to provide basic necessities like food, electricity, heat, emergency services etc.

What you want is for those plebs to provide that to you, while you essentially become the new ruling class that sits around benefiting off the working peasants.

I love how you hardcore Marxists only take the good parts of what you say while conveniently leaving out the guy that's gonna be wallowing in the ditch for you.
Who’s hiring? :-D
> Hallucinations will be tamed.

I hope so. But so far, most of the proposals seem to involve bolting something on the outside of the black box of the LLM itself.

If medium-sized language models can be made hallucination-free, we'll see more applications. A base language model that has most of the language but doesn't try to contain all human knowledge, plus a special purpose model for the task at hand, would be very useful if reliable. That's what you need for car controls, customer service, and similar interaction.
Certainly begs the question... are corporations and governments inextricable?
> The conservancy, which operates 22 other preserves in California, and one in Oregon, plans to open the scenic property to the public for hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding in the coming years for free, said Frazier Haney, executive director of the Wildlands Conservancy.

> “The property is the size of — and has the grandeur of — many of California’s state parks,” Haney said. “It’s a wonder land of oak-filled valleys and magnificent flower-studded ridgelines.”

So it’s effectively a new state park for outdoor enthusiasts to enjoy in Northern California. Very nice!
"Everything I don't like is fascism."
Yeah I honestly want to know if this time is any different or are they just going to keep predicting this every few years and china rebounds with no long lasting issues
No coincidence the company is in Everett. LinkedIn shows lots of people overlap with Boeing. Also the CEO built his own composite airplane while an undergrad at Princeton.
NodeJS, however, is not running in a disposable runtime environment. It is also the location where things that need cleanup are likely to occur (database connections, for example).

For the browser context, I don’t have a good use case for ‘using’ (except for browser devs themselves where some code could be in JS now but impossible before).

Then again, people always surprise you with new use cases!
What's why I said "regulated profit" -- if they get to keep all money received above expenses, then they'll do what PG&E did and ask the PUC to set rates to include money for pipeline improvements or tree trimming, but then not actually spend the money and instead return it to investors.
Our economists tell us we produce things, implying that given a high enough growth rate and productivity we can do anything, endlessly. We take two things and we end up with more than we started.

This is in opposition to the idea that we take our renewable and non renewable resources (aka gifts of nature) and merely transform them into a different shape.

In the latter case, there is no such thing as production or growth. There are resources that you should conserve and there are resources which you should use before you lose them.
Yes. "Hazard recognition" is a separate 8-hour block of education that includes slippery conditions and darkness, and is done "on the track", not in a classroom. As far as I know e.g. the moose evasion maneuver is still part of that, and you'll be in a tailspin at least a couple of times during that day.

Before you get to that, you'll have completed minimum 4 h classroom safety training, 10 h driving with instructor, and whatever amount of theory training gets you to pass the theory test (generally two calendar months studying on the side of being in high school).

Slippery conditions aren't really hard to find in Finland. I think the black ice phenomena is really more about distracted driving.
600 comments in I don't think anybody came to a conclusion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346454
> I wouldn't dance on most of it

Which reminds me - and it's not IKEA-specific: I wonder how many people got severely injured or lost their lives due to a desk or wardrobe collapsing under them when they stood on it, unaware that these days, desks and other waist-level flat furniture often aren't designed to hold the weight of an adult human? When I grew up, standing on furniture was a normal thing - these days, I'm very careful about even leaning on it.
> Hallucinations will be tamed, I think.

I don't think that's likely unless there was a latent space of "Truth" which could be discovered through the right model.

That would be a far more revolutionary discovery than anyone can possibly imagine. For starters the last 300+ years of Western Philosophy would be essentially proven unequivocally wrong.

edit: If you're going to downvote this please elaborate. LLMs currently operate by sampling from a latent semantic space and then decoding that back into language. In order for models to know the "truth", there would have to be a latent space of "true statements" that was effectively directly observable. All points along that surface would represent "truth" statements and that would be the most radical human discovery the history of the species.
Using laws to tell how a private university should be run based on particular ideology would definately be fascism.

You are not arguing in good faith.

What if they passed laws trying to do the opposite? Wouldn't that be fascism too?
I thought Eben Upton's comments were interesting regarding using RISC-V for a Raspberry Pi board. Basically x86 still has much better software support than ARM, which has much better support than RISC-V; and on the hardware side, there were no readily available RISC-V cores that were competitive (presumably in price/performance/power) with their current ARM cores. So RISC-V wasn't a yet a viable option for mainline Raspberry Pi systems. He also complained about current RISC-V hardware implementations having too many feature variations (and this vs. ARM, which is worse than x86 already.)

However, he thought that RISC-V would work fine today for microcontrollers where 1) you're running a small/thin software stack and 2) raw performance isn't that important (which as pointed out below seems to be saying that current RISC-V implementations should be able to match the lower computations-per-second of microcontrollers like RP2040/Rpi Pico without exceeding the power/heat/space/cost requirements for that chip/board.)

(My own take is that cheap x86/celeron mini-PCs are becoming more competitive with boards like Rpi for use cases where you don't need the credit card form factor or GPIO, and x86 software support is compelling. And I agree that it will take a while for RISC-V to get good hardware and software support, though it seems to be improving every year.)
It is just malicious compliance. Since they cannot make reddits private due to threats of having mod rights taken away instead they change the rules of their subreddit to something silly. They are doing it using voting so that reddit cannot say it was just the mods as a majority of the users agreed.
That's what Gus Grissom said.
yeah the site is bad, but not because it is boring, but because it should be even more simplified than how it is now. almost of the CSS "finishing touches" have something wrong with them. the content shifts on page load: https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/nielsen.gif bizarre dropdown button behavior: https://hiccupfx.telnet.asia/what.gif and i can go on and on. i don't feel this nitpick whining is unwarranted considering the site purports to be a leader in user experience.
At the moment, I think they are just looking to hang on as much of the community as they can, as a bridge to the next thing/until Reddit comes to their senses.
When Apple Computer was founded, it's cap table contained three people - Jobs, Woz, and Markkula. That seems like a reasonable definition of cofounder, even if he wasn't an active participant in the company.
If you're willing to have government intervention and regulation to enforce a free market then why not just remove the "landlords" here and go with public ownership to take them out of the cut entirely?

Remember the established assumption here is regulation and intervention is required to enforce the thing. Any argument based on the allergy to public sovereignty over public goods is not applicable. Public governance is intimately involved in either solution
3-4 years ago I had such a bad experience interviewing with this company. The recruiter actively told me he was waiting to hear a response from someone else before extending me an offer, that eventually came in 40-60% below my expectation. Would love to work in this satellite communications field though if anyone has any other recommendations...
Meh, I don't think the more confusing interface defined in that issue warrants the added complexity. using should only be used for local variables, and the example you give is fundamentally complicated by who should be responsible for disposing of the object:

function inner(defaultResource) {
const resource = defaultResource ?? getResource();
using resource;
}

That is, if a defaultResource is passed in, the caller should be responsible for disposing it, while if it wasn't passed in, the inner function should be responsible for disposing it.

IMO cases like this are better handled with linting rules that forbid use of using on anything but an object directly returned by a function on that line.
Can you transmute qualitative data into quantitative data and reliably measure it?
Your use case feels like a stretch. Code reviews are handled via your source control system, one-off request to help with a bug are likely to be DMs or discussions... no idea why a manager would get involved in that, and questions about product go to... the product team, not the engineers or their manager.

Even if you do pick out some better use cases, anyone who is swamped by micromanaging Slack conversations has a problem with how they use their tools. They do need a solution, but doubling down on letting everything land in Slack by turning it into an input queue for a bot, and thinking about replacing other tools with that bot/queue... that is not the answer.
See also "Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues":

> Instead of interventions focused on objective knowledge alone, these findings suggest that focusing on changing individuals’ perceptions of their own knowledge may be a helpful first step. The challenge then becomes finding appropriate ways to convince anti-consensus individuals that they are not as knowledgeable as they think they are. One option may be to encourage people to try to explain the mechanisms underlying the complex scientific phenomena at issue. This has been shown to reduce subjective knowledge (33, 44) and increase deference to experts (45). Another way to potentially make feelings of ignorance more salient to people is to give them reference points. People feel uncertain about choices they understand less well when considering options together, but not when evaluating them separately (38).This finding suggests that people may be led to realize that they know less about vaccination, for example, than about mechanisms they are more familiar with (from their careers or hobbies say), if presented in parallel.

* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abo0038

Or, as Boing Boing stated, "Scientists study why people do not believe in scientific studies":

* https://boingboing.net/2023/06/14/scientists-study-why-peopl...
> As opposed to the professionals who went with a microsoft xbox controller?

I think what's more telling is that they didn't even splurge on the actual Microsoft Xbox controller. They cheaped out with an unproven logitech gamepad. When you're already doing something in an unorthodox way at least don't half-ass it.

> The company in question might be full of jokers, but your points don’t quite illistrate this well. They are about appearances and not substance.

Your distinction is a bit arbitrary. Every point about this company will always be about appearances unless you have first-hand accounts or experiences. Otherwise, info on the company's technology, choices, strategies or anything else will always be based on appearance. In the absence of more concrete evidence, these small indicators can at least provide something to infer from.