skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd define an arena as the pattern where the arena itself owns N objects. So you free the arena to free all objects.

My first job was at EA working on console games (PS2, GameCube, XBox, no OS or virtual memory on any of them), and while at the time I was too junior to touch the memory allocators themselves, we were definitely not malloc-ing and freeing all the time.

It was more like you load data for the level in one stage, which creates a ton of data structures in many arrays. Then you enter a loop to draw every frame quickly, and you avoid any allocation in that loop. There were many global variables.

---

Wikipedia calls it a region, zone, arena, area, or memory context, and that seems about right:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Region-based_memory_management

It describes history from 1967 (before C was invented!) and has some good examples from the 1990's: Apache web server ("pools") and Postgres database ("memory contexts").

I also just looked at these codebases:

https://github.com/mit-pdos/xv6-public (based on code from the 70's)

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM (1997)

I looked at allocproc() in xv6, and gives you an object from a fixed global array. This is similar to a lot of C code in the 80's and 90's -- it was essentially "kernel code" in that it didn't have an OS underneath it. Embedded systems didn't run on full-fledges OSes.

DOOM tends to use a lot of what I would call "pools" -- dynamically allocated arrays of objects of a fixed size, and that's basically what I remember from EA.

Though in g_game.c, there is definitely an arena of size 0x20000 called "demobuffer". It's used with a bump allocator.

---

So I'd say

- malloc / free of individual objects was NEVER what C code looked like (aside from toy code in college)

- arena allocators were used, but global, fixed-size arrays, and dynamic pools were maybe more common.

- arenas are more or less wash for memory safety. they help you in some ways, but hurt you in others.

The reason C programmers don't malloc/free all the time is for speed, not memory safety. Arenas are still unsafe.

When you free an arena, you have no guarantee there's nothing that points to it anymore.

Also, something that shouldn't be underestimated is that arena allocators break tools like ASAN, which use the malloc() free() interface. This was underscored to me by writing a garbage collector -- the custom allocator "broke" ASAN, and that was actually a problem:

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/01/garbage-collector.html

If you want memory safety in your C code, you should be using dynamically instrumented allocators (ASAN, valgrind) and good test coverage. Depending on the app, arenas don't necessarily help, they can hurt.

An arena is a simple idea -- the problem is more if that usage pattern actually matches your application, and apps evolve over time.
All of these arguments center on how different now is from “past” versions of transformative technologies and ignore that to past versions of people a radio show that you could tune into that was broadcast nationally likely felt as transformative as a network that connects the globe.

You can’t measure the difference in progress from a modern vantage point.

Once upon a time large numbers of people thought we were actively being invaded by aliens because of a radio broadcast that wasn’t even deliberate manipulation. Nevertheless, we made it through.

Everything is relative.
> Art sells

I think most artists would tend to disagree on that one ;)
Even more hindsight on Vim, Helix and Kakoune
The author, Dimitri Sabadie (@phaazon[1]), is a prominent Kakoune contributor[2]. In this article, he offers his thoughts on Helix[3], how it compares and contrasts with Kakoune, and how both Helix and Kakoune improve on the tried-and-true Vi-inspired formula which continues to drive the popularity of keyboard-centric editors like Vim and Neovim.

[1] https://github.com/phaazon

[2] https://github.com/phaazon/kak-tree-sitter

[3] https://helix-editor.com/
I gave up on Azure since they never bothered responding to my OpenAI application.
The Nullschool Earth Weather Visualiser does this. It displays meteorological (and related) data, not political or geological features, but is still pretty interesting. There are also numerous alternative projections available

<https://earth.nullschool.net/>

(There are many other reasons to love that tool, but the projections options is icing on the cake and/or planet.)
Almost nobody had cable TV in the early 80's. I grew up during this period but believe what you want. Cable TV was barely off the ground. HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, but outside of that it was nothing. No reach.

Fast forward to the 90's when hate groups were allowed on the internet. No race riots, burning of cities. That only happened when things started getting banned. And the violence was not from the right. It was the left. They were the ones who looted and burned but again, believe what you want to believe. If you believe it then it happened. Right wingers burned and looted Walmarts..meh.
It’s got disposable tips and you are only assuming he is indeed using it in ear! I have the same one. I do now wonder if it would work, but I’m not going to try it.

I am pretty skeptical how often it comes back at 98.6 vs 98.5 or 98.7, they have a deadband in there I think.
the way the US is setup, you are guaranteed the right to vote as an individual.

There is no protection from the election being setup in such a way that your votes are diluted by some other set of votes.
How could weight be a problem in the ocean and why would carbon fiber be cheaper than metal?

Not much of this comment checks out ?
Funny... I was never operating under the impression that I wasn't hopelessly locked into Azure and Microsoft.

I can see how google would like to frame it as entrapment, but some of us really like it in here. I feel a lot safer "trapped" inside of this Azure/.NET/GitHub/Windows/et.al. prison than on the outside.

The fact that Microsoft is getting called out for this makes me feel more confident in our technology choices. Google's leadership should feel intense shame for leveling these accusations while dropping registrar services. You can't throw the game and then complain your competition is beating your ass.
Uh ok. I mean AI is data limited. Molecular biology (outside of structural biology) is not exactly a discipline where a firehouse of uncoupled data emerge. It's not uncommon to find publications with 5 data points, n=3 on each.
Don’t use QNAP. It’s super buggy and you can’t trust it. I’ve had a ton of near misses with every piece of QNAP hardware and software I’ve used, and the only reason I haven’t lost data is due to sheer paranoia.

Synnology is much better put together, but also tends to be a lot more conservative software stack wise. I’ve had no ‘wtf’ moments with Synnology equipment, unlike QNAP - but I have had a few sigh, that’s lame moments due to older/less efficient software approaches or the like.

Anything custom, you’ll have to spend your time figuring everything out, which has pros and cons.

Personally I’ve had zero issues with a multi-pool NAS that has 20 (spinning rust) + 6 SSDs totaling around 150TB on Ubuntu with some pretty standard intel server hardware.

Been running that for 2 years, zero data loss, currently about 80% full. I’ve also learned a ton about ZFS and done some odd things for my own amusement. I wouldn’t recommend it if you want low maintenance though.
"Cubicle"
Yep! Also called "yak shaving"
Eh. I know one of the researchers whose name is on one of those Vitamin D studies. Their recommendation to me was 5000IU daily. I think there's a lot of caveats to what you're saying, and the benefits outweigh the risks.
Why doesn't the government, who has quite a few times, significantly more than any other party in the world, collectively and individually, pay a fine?

I'd love for my money back, but it seems the relationship is only one way. Government makes a mistake? I pay for it. Government needs money? I pay for it. Government wants to spy on me? I pay for it, AND my data gets used against me, AND I also pay that fine.

Then somehow, I am the evil one for not supported taxes. Beats me too.

Hilarious isn't it?
The world’s most liveable cities in 2023
Yup right. I find myself zoned out while zooming in and out frantically and achieving nothing. It's often difficult to effectively navigate without guidance from the creator of the board. Figma is better as a collab tool than a documentation tool.
> It translates to: "the national debt is increasing and it is because of Biden and the Democrats with their unchecked spending."

When the actual reality is that the vast majority of our "high-level" politicians these days (regardless of party) are absolutely guilty as sin of that very same "unchecked spending", where the only real difference is what personal or corporate agenda they choose to spend it on (at least that portion of it which escapes their own corrupt wallets, where a lot of it surely lands).
https://archive.md/61XRV
ChatGPT is an excellent story teller. Give it the dry facts, and ask it to weave them into a story for a 10 year old.
When I was a teenager, I took piano lessons from a teacher with perfect pitch. When I told her that our piano at home—an old American-made upright—couldn’t be tuned any higher than about A=435, she visibly shivered. She said she couldn’t stand playing pianos that were not tuned to A=440.

Ever since, I have never wished that I had perfect pitch.
Why do you think they organ is free? I imagine because the cost of transport and lack of people who want that exact organ?
For a brief moment, and only if it previously didn't.
Holding down the <esc> key as the page loads will give you access to the full, interactive page. Timing is tricky but it works.
It’d be hard to get average error so low, since you need precision to get low error values for varying temps.

You can’t just return 100 and -100 randomly, since the actual temp is unknown and you’d need to evenly sample around that.
I wonder why he finished the review. As soon as I determined it was average to poor, I would have stopped reading.
Well, how would you dredge up interesting materials when the vast majority of our interesting materials aren't magnetic?

I think it's more about ease, since dredging and sorting is technically possible, but much harder. In the ocean, most everything is calcium or sand, so maybe not impossible.
The title as written implies the bill will allow corporations to vote in municipal, state, and federal elections held within the state of Delaware.

That is obviously not the case. Are we in the business of clickbait and fake news around these parts?
Amazon's dark patterns around cancelling Prime membership left such a disgusting taste in my mouth that I swore the company off. Nasty.

This was some years ago but I decided it wasn't worth the cost for me so I went inside my settings to cancel. Their stipulations for cancelling the membership were "Come back 2 days before the account is set to auto-renew and cancel then." Excuse me? That was in like 6 months. Can't remove the credit card. Can't ask them to just stop auto charging.

I set about 40 calendar reminders and cancelled at 12:01am 2 days before auto renew and then nuked my Amazon account.

Dark patterns. Dark heart.
Supposedly the entire world's production capacity of the micro LEDs Apple is using is about 350k. They are really hard to make.
And what a beautiful sight to behold, I hope this continues for decades to centuries more.
1Password rolling out “privacy-preserving” telemetry system
I’m not sure I agree it’ll have more chemicals. First, industrial chicken production is an incredibly chemical and antibiotic heavy industry. The assumption that animals effectively tortured through a life of highly stimulated over growth in crowded conditions then slaughtered in questionable ways produces a healthy protein seems dubious at best. Likewise, consistent growing meat cultures requires an optimal growth environment with no contaminants or extraneous non life inducing substances and the entire process has to be extraordinarily sterile. All I’ve read about cell culture leads me to believe the product will be extraordinarily healthy and higher quality protein than what can be purchased from the super market meat. I’ll wager a true free range chicken is a better option, but they’re absurdly expensive and even “free range” is such a loose term that the reality almost certainly doesn’t match your expectation of the term. Finally the chain of custody from the farm to table isn’t particularly clean. Cultured meat will be sterile when you eat it.

The question of scale and costs is a really good one. I suspect the real savings will not be in growing a chicken but in the whole logistics of getting a chicken into a supermarket packaging for you to buy. The process of taking a chicken from farm to supermarket is highly labor intensive and while it scales unit costs don’t decrease meaningfully with scale. The cultured meat decants ready to pack and could be packed and shipped in a fully automated fashion that decreases in cost as scale increases.
None of this changes the fact that in hindsight the lockdowns were extremely costly in several ways and proved to be mostly ineffective.
I frequently receive cease and desist notices from "legal entities" demanding I stop selling the officially authorized clothing brands on one of my sites...I ignore them. Nothing ever happens. It's a competitor, or competitors, trying real hard to take over my search engine rankings by trying to shut my site down. These DMCA requests are the same thing - basically bullying or scare tactics. Real legal requests, etc. come in the form of physical paperwork, signed and sometimes notarized.
This is certainly not the first time I’ve seen the topic on HN…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32532282

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104787

And it was something we covered in school on the 80s.

It’s an interesting post but not really revelatory.
This must be very recent. I was looking at their marketing collateral in May, and it was simply no longer an option at all to buy a Mac-only license. You could only renew at the time.
Wow, that is wild. Thank you.
Slack also a game, funnily enough
I went through an “OOP in C” phase when I first got into C years ago. This stack overflow[1] helped a lot as well

1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/351733/how-would-one-wri...
A normal distribution will average to 0, with enough samples. The center and spread is important, since individual measurements can be considered a random sampling within that distribution. But, this is overly simplifying things, and assume random error, which AI systems often don't exhibit.

It appears this is moot, because the quote did not reflect the actual value or method used.
regardless of the status of the bugzilla. That _is_ a bug and a regression in RHEL 9.2.
I suspect there's going to be a whole new class of disadvantaged / second class citizens in the future who belong to the minority that can't tolerate wearing these type of devices.

Having said that, I haven't met that many people that get nausea from wearing sunglasses, so at the theoretical limit there is some level of quality that seems at least almost universally accepted.
It's to trace down abuse.

People using products for fraud, defamation, illegal categories of porn, etc.
> (4) The evidence of fraud detailed in our report almost certainly represents a mere subset of the evidence that the Harvard investigators were able to uncover about these four articles. For example, we have heard from some HBS faculty that Harvard’s internal report was ~1,200 pages long, which is 1,182 pages longer than the one we sent to HBS.

Great example that highlights the balance of presumption of innocence with the asymmetrical bullshit principal. This person should be referred to criminal prosecution for fraud as a deterrent to others. 1,200 page reports to provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not scalable.
Here's my solution to the problem I pointed out.

The basic idea is let the shell do expansion / word splitting on the to-be-deferred command when defer() is called, then save the words into an array, and avoid doing expansion. This should avoid running into quoting problems in the first place.

#! /bin/bash

defer_run() {
while [ ${#DEFER_OFFSETS[@]} -gt 0 ]
do
# Get / remove last element of offset and length arrays.
offset=${DEFER_OFFSETS[-1]}; unset DEFER_OFFSETS[-1]
len=${DEFER_LENGTHS[-1]}; unset DEFER_LENGTHS[-1]

# Get a slice of the main array corresponding to one deferred
# command's word list. Execute that word list as a command.
"${DEFER_LIST[@]:$offset:$len}"
done
}

defer() {
declare -g -a DEFER_LIST DEFER_OFFSETS DEFER_LENGTHS
trap defer_run EXIT

DEFER_OFFSETS+=( ${#DEFER_LIST[@]} )
DEFER_LENGTHS+=( $# )
DEFER_LIST+=( "$@" )
}

defer echo a b
defer echo "c d"

This prints:

c d
a b

The quoted string "c d" is preserved all the way through as one argument to echo. The non-quoted ones work as expected too.

Note that since bash doesn't have lists of lists, I've stuck all the word-lists of all the deferred commands together into one giant array, and I've saved offsets and length so I can separate them out again.

Since expansion doesn't happen again after you've deferred a command, you can't expand (say) a variable when the deferred command runs. But if you want to do that, define a function and defer it, or just use eval:

defer eval 'echo $myvar'
I don't bother vetting candidates based on their schools. Bachelor barely even matters for junior engineers; if you're hiring someone with 4-5 years of experience, college is utterly irrelevant.
> Taking 10s of thousands of IUs every day for years is probably a bad idea for anyone who isn’t regularly checking their Vitamin D levels.

This extreme is obviously bad but if you spend most of your time indoors and you're located somewhere that doesn't get much sun without government fortifying your food with vit D (like some Scandi countries do), I don't see the harm in taking somewhere around low 1000sIU per day.
Also no reason terminal editors have to be modal, e.g. pico/nano
I'd argue that, by coincidence, putting Africa/Europe in roughly the centre happens to be the most sensible. Extraterrestrials with no knowledge of humans would probably do this.

The reason for this is that it's the most "geographical centric" location, with the Americas to the left and Asia to the right, with the huge pacific ocean pushed to the edges. If you place China in the centre then you're "wasting" a lot of space on the pacific. I think [1] is a worse map because significant parts of the world are pushed to the edge in favour of the pacific, which takes centre stage.

You also see this if you zoom out on Google Maps as far as it will allow, putting Africa/Europe in the centre still shows you most of the world's landmasses, but if you put China in the centre it's almost as if the Americas haven't been discovered yet.

[1]: https://studycli.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/china-world-...
When have we ever been ready ahead of time for changes? How the actual hell would that even br worked towards? Readiness seems more an invocation of Xeno's Paradox engineered to halt progress.
Distorts nothing, it gives a particular view of the world. All our views of the world are highly localised by the very nature of our existence.

We can form our own maps by our experience but this is going to be naturally very limited and so maps provide us means to transmit a biased view of the world. All of these views will be biased in some fashion that's the nature of existence.
I think its main use case is safe harbour. Without the DMCA, if I posted something infringing copyright, Hacker News would be liable as the service provider. DMCA shifts the blame to me, but the publisher has to comply with takedown requests.

I think overall this is a good thing for an internet that hosts user-created content, which includes comments, but they could definitely tidy up the implementation. As it stands you are allowed to reject the claim if you think you are in the right, and the company should restore the disputed content if you do so - but some like YouTube operate above and beyond the DMCA and seemingly intentionally blur the lines a lot so people blame the DMCA and not their custom process.
Interesting how they call it cultivated meat instead of lab grown meat. It's almost like the idea of artificially constructed meat products is unpalatable to the masses and to increase the likelihood of accidental ingestion it is being deceptively labeled.
I honestly would have loved to have seen the debate. It seems like everything is one sided these days. Why can't people debate with their minds?
I found the video talk: https://youtu.be/VuCzXJarnEI?t=13989

Pretty disappointing. I thought I'd learn some new tricks in refurbishing old computer equipment. I am an old computer hoarder and I spend way too much time refurbishing old components(replacing caps, complete disassembly and cleaning of case and hardware, replacement with SSDs, maxxing out ram, etc.)

I have had a lot of trouble finding a way to do deep cleaning of plastics and refurbishing a case to like new status. I wanna learn how the pros do it. These plastics become yellowed, become brittle but the worst thing I am finding is just gouges in the plastic that I cannot smooth out or things such as stains that can't seem to get removed.

In terms of cleaning components, I first tried deoxit but it leaves a film that I don't like. Now I am resorting to soaking a board in 99% alcohol and using a brush to remove all the gunk off it and then using an air gun to blow away all the alcohol. Its the best way to leave boards looking like new but I am concerned with introducing liquids to solder joints and connectors and increasing their corrosion levels.

Anyone got any advice or resources I could use to improve my skills?
LLMs routinely give me incorrect answers when I ask it questions related to coding. I was nervous about them for a couple weeks, then I started to use them and realized that they're really not that useful for generating anything other than boilerplate
> the kid wants to be in school

Really? When I was in school I always wanted to NOT be in school, same for all my friends. It's always weird now hearing people my age or older saying things like this when my personal experience was completely the opposite.
What about if the group of people is investors who don't have the best interests of the population in mind, but instead, only profits?
And, once again, people seek to add additional, unnecessary steps and abstractions to perfectly fine processes, because of contrived bullshit ("copyright!")

Stop abstracting input away from output. Attribution here is a fools errand built on overbearing, unjust, and misinterpreted concerns over copyright, the relevance of which have yet to be proven in a legal sense. This is going to give The Man yet another way to suppress actors they don't like.

Repeat it with me, folks: YOU CANNOT CONTROL THAT WHICH HAS BEEN RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC. If you do not want things (people/their agents) to perceive your works, then keep them private.
Const are build-time constants, they are not necessarily the same value across all build configurations.
Next week on HackerNews:

Figma, considered harmful.
I would argue humanity can plenty handle truth-ambivalent sources (what is state sponsored media after all?). However, AI sucks on an aesthetic level, and its a real shame that we now have to just put up with it.
At 3M, Lawsuits Threaten to Transform the Company
From my layman's understanding of EU/German law and what I read today while selecting an attorney to handle this, it's actually unlawful to make this decision without giving a specific reason and/or providing advance warning.

But they don't want to reveal the specific reason to prevent giving out information to actual abusers and/or don't actually have one, because some blackbox algorithm made the decision.

So they just reinstate the account to make you go away, but only if contacted through an attorney who argues the above. At least thats how I interpret the past successful cases that dealt with this.