skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an old thread, but I'm a little puzzled by developers wondering why the tools we use should not be well-specified. I work on backend systems that rely heavily on high-specialized RFCs for DNS and domain name registrars. If they weren't painstakingly detailed, we'd be toast. But a new executive (no longer with us) once told us to simplify our representation of top-level domains because she thought it was too complicated, as though we could ignore the RFCs.

Are we playing with an idea that has similar dangers here? Ask the opposite question: what would happen if typeface designers didn't go to all this detail? Would we just want to know that "Arial is the round-ish one and Times New Roman has little footsy things?"

Font selection is a big deal to brand identity and marketing. They like to have lots of choices. We even design our own fonts sometimes. How many developers have, as I have, changed fonts in our code editors, looking for the one that's "just right?"

For whatever reasons, the demand for distinct fonts is high, and if there are lots of fonts, they need to be completely specified, so that they can be created and rendered correctly.
This font has Mario 64 vibes.
For much of their history, legacy admissions were a tool to keep out less desirable Jewish/Catholic/non-WASP applicants [0][1]

[0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23055549

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/us/legacy-admissions-coll...
You already have my issue:

https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/issues/9533
Did they also end discrimination against asian and white men?
I have yet to try Zig, but I approve of the idea of taking extra time and reducing scope to make sure that what you do ship is solid, especially in something like a programming language that may end up being a foundational piece of many other projects.
The US. There is no other country.
Well they've gotten enough money now to appear virtuous onwards.
I wish we had a monospaced version of Comic Neue[0], which is a really nice font!

[0]: https://comicneue.com/
"otel-cli" is a command-line utility designed to send OpenTelemetry traces to an external OpenTelemetry collector OTLP endpoint.

Its main use case is within shell scripts and other situations where trace sending is most efficiently achieved by running an additional program.
And then people are saying that their microservice is high performance because it's handling 10 000 req/s per 72 core node... which is ok but rather per core (depending on the amount and type of logic being processed), not node.
I'm handling requests in high microseconds range (median) in high volume, low latency network service with hard limits on latency numbers (not HFT). Good luck building that kind of service (a lot of constantly changing state) with only microservices with less complexity and higher throughput then in monolith or semi monolith with a lot of internal state guarded by different synchronization mechanisms. I/O overhead alone would eat you.
Data classes are "self-documenting" with respect to the "keys" you can expect to be present. Relatedly, they enable meaningful type hints:

def some_method(input: Dict[str, int]):
...

You can just as easily call `some_method({"foo": 1})` as `some_method({"bar": 2})`.

vs.

def some_method(input: MyDataClassWithFoo):
...

Now you can't pass a dict where the key is "bar" and presumably get a KeyError when it tries to look up a "foo" key, you can only pass a MyDataClassWithFoo.
Perhaps it’s politically incorrect to say, but students learn best when they’re around students that are of similar intelligence and motivation to succeed.

Taking a brilliant kid and putting them around underachievers doesn’t do anyone any good.
I think you're underestimating how biased literally every other possible metric of admissions can be.
it's not worldwide, it got down to freezing here last night, which is unusual even though it's the middle of the winter
>Mind if people just take the fruits of your labor for free?

Heh, you just described taxes.
I'm not sure I'd count fighting back against pirates or even skirmishing with natives as saber-rattling. The serious Indian Wars happened after the Civil War if for no other reason than the US had a large army with nothing to do.

I made another comment conceding the point about the the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars, which were fraudulent albeit separated by several decades.

Nevertheless, the thought of the US Government unilaterally dropping bombs or executing a raid on sovereign foreign countries like we have done in Iraq or Pakistan would have been seen as outrageous before the DoD days, notwithstanding that the United States is the preeminent economic and military power today. But I think that fits in with OP's point: the incompetence is a feature of giant, hegemonic power, not a bug.
They were lying. Or at the very least didn't understand the claims actually made by Pfizer/etc, which was only that these vaccines prevented the disease, not that they prevented infection/transmission. They made no claims about infection/transmission.

We knew this in 2020:

https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines...

https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...

https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-...

It comes down to the stupid conflation of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 into just "covid". Pfizer/etc use the two terms correctly, saying they prevented COVID-19, but didn't say anything about stopping SARS-CoV-2, but because everyone thinks "covid" is the virus they can't seem to understand what was actually said.
> Now which one would you admit?

Why not both? I think a lot of the debate over college admissions misses the fact that so much of this is artificial scarcity. Some of the big schools like Harvard/Yale/Princeton etc. could easily increase the size of their incoming classes many times, and still have them only be filled with highly qualified candidates.

Top schools exist not just to educate, but to ensure that the social hierarchy is maintained. If it were purely to educate or to ensure diverse learning environments, the top Ivies could solve this easily by quadrupling the size of their classes, but then this would of course dilute the exclusivity that is the primary reason for these institutions in the first place.
There was an interesting piece in a NPR podcast on the effects on the more "elite" students:

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/16/1182630192/the-indicator-from...

Basically, when the top students couldn't enter the more selective schools, they'd go to private or a bit less competitive schools and compensate the difference in education/networking in other ways, making it a wash when looking at their income years later. In contract students who benefited affirmative action where getting a way better deal at the exit and saw more significant salary difference compared to those who couldn't attend the more selective schools.
I wish I read this, 7 years ago
Does this mean they won’t take a call from well connected politicians and billionaires ?
I love this font, but I am currently giving Commit Mono (https://commitmono.com/) a spin. JetBrains did a great job.
What's the point of the donations to maintain an institution, if the institution's effect is to further entrench the advantages held by the already well-off and well-connected legacy admissions?
Isn't this expensive compared to something like surfshark where it is 2.99 per month.
Yes, but as it’s a finite resource, it’s also taking a spot of someone deserving on merit. Schools will have learn to operate without free money.
depends on their race
> dangerous to think that a meritocracy always leads to good outcomes

People who argue against meritocracy seem to forget that it's the only proposed alternative to the "birthright"-ocracy that civilization has been trying to pry itself from the jaws of for centuries.
Everyone understands that standardized tests are biased. They are still the least bad way to identify students from underprivileged backgrounds who have high potential to succeed in college.
That is exactly my motivation to become wealthy. I don't need a nice number with lots of zeros. I need to secure my children's future, including their prospects for higher education.

I see no problem with those who have amassed significant resources, being afforded use of those resources to their childrens' advantage.
Why would "anti-family" laws make sense? People who come from stable families are statistically much much more likely to be happy, successful and contribute to society.
Sure, but it's legal in many governments too. The classic example is the Office of the First Lady: an institutionalized nepotistic government position for which one qualifies solely by being married to the highest elected position in the US, the President.
The end result being Hal-9000
That's the Arctic, the chart for the Antarctic is further down and has 1970-2023.
Magic that happens in top universities in US is combining money (kids of billionaires) with smarts (kids with 1600 SAT) in one place. Both bring different skills to the table and result is disproportionate share of top scientist, business and political leaders produced by those universities (from both classes of people). Removing either group from university will just lead to university stopping being elite. Considering that number of billionaires is measured in hundreds (so only a dozen or so kids of billionaires enter universities every year), university may just admit that one kid.

On Student 2 who build something in Sudan from stick and rocks. Unless he is from elite family he most likely did not get proper school education and won't be able to keep up with rigors of studying in top university even if he is very smart. Harvard is not really in a business of providing remedial education. With that if he is really smart and resourceful, he had a very good chance of doing very well for himself in Sudan (becoming entrepreneour, building soemthing local, become warlord, etc) and then his kids will be fully equipped to go to top university.
Humans are definitely aligned, and for the same reasons as a LLM. Socialization, being allowed to work, being allowed to speak.

edit: It's a social faux pas to say "died" about a person acquainted to the listener in most situations, you have to say "passed away."
This is so naive. Poor kids do worse in school because their lives lack the material and parental support necessary for quality education.
Companies are actively working to make it harder. Some games now launch without microtranscations of any kind, or with cosmetic-only ones. Then, after they gain popularity (and thus hook you in), they start adding more and more pay-to-win transactions. Sometimes it's also unclear that an item they offer for sale will make it easier to win, by hiding the advantage behind various layers of obfuscation.

Also, if you agree that these types of games are not worth playing, perhaps you also agree that not much would be lost if they were outright banned?
So.. file a claim against the southern plantation owners who benefited in excess of the compensation paid? What's the relevance of any of this to anything?
I never actually understood the whole fuss about fonts.
I tried playing around with them few years ago and i never noticed that something is easier to read with some font or another, especially in the long term. Whenever i started using some font, i got completely used to it in few days. Therefore i just use the default fonts now.
The mobile Dungeon Keeper was pretty infamous for this.
Thank you! Party this evening at my place.

It's fine to say "the earth behaves similarly to a black-body" or "a black-body is a good approximation for the earth". But that's different from "the earth is a black-body".
The Casefile podcast had a great two-part series on Blackout crimes last summer, one in London and the other in Berlin.

- https://casefilepodcast.com/case-218-the-blackout-killers-pa...

- https://casefilepodcast.com/case-218-the-blackout-killers-pa...
This is exactly my setup. It is SHOCKING how well it works
The privacy is real. Moved to only binding ssh to ipv6 addresses on the internet. Cleanest ssh logs you will ever see. Basically invisible.
They love to tell this story. It's absolutely laughable how limited scholarships are for actual academic performance.
Reconstructing our attention in the age of infinite digital rabbit holes
I don't think the author is necessarily aiming at purpose built file parsers with that statement, but rather "parser generators" like ANTLR.
This is fantastic.

I've been doing more Rust hacking at home and I genuinely think that this next decade will be just gangbusters for Rust; its gotten a lot of early adoption, and the next wave is going to be wild.

one of these days I'll work at a Rust shop, and I am hyped for that possibility. it'll be NICE.
I recently came across a somewhat provocative defense of legacy admissions. The argument is that the iveys are great because they bring together the children of the rich and powerful (legacy admissions with connections) with really smart and hungry students (children of the middle class, mostly).

It's arguably a good deal for both. Smart kids get access to wealth and power and they get to learn how the world works. This is the one thing they can't get anywhere else. And the legacy students get the prestige and credibility of having gone to a top school, as well as access to hungry students who are eager to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way.

When Harvard becomes an institution of merit will it still be worth the price of admission? I'm not so sure.
I use it to and yeah, I find the readability really good. It's not something I notice consciously, but my theory is the little imperfections in the loops and such make the text easier to scan. The loop in say an 'o' has a slightly different shape than the loop in a 'p'.
Yeah I see this take all the time. Admissions offices are allowed to take a student's means into account! So in deciding between two students with equal SAT scores, one from a Greenwich private school and one from South Tucson, the one from Tucson is the more impressive student.

Affirmative action was misguided because it assumed that because one student was Korean and the other Mexican, the Mexican kid must be disadvantaged. Besides the fact that there's an inherently racist worldview baked into that, Newsflash! There are tons of poor Korean kids and rich Mexicans!
If you were to extend it to three then this would be me, but with the addition of agave and mononoki.
What about smaller, recurring donations? Does that increase the cost?
Then your $1B is provably not a donation, and hence subject to taxes.
> There's a tiny patchset that's required to enable some guarantees (literally a handful of patches), none of them of interest to the upstream project.

Do you perhaps have a link where we could see those patches? Purely for curiosity's sake.
Can't explain it, but to my eyes Jetbrains Mono is too robotic or mechanical, maybe clinical? whereas I love that Fira has some character and feels at least a bit Humanist for a monospaced font. The iA Writer fonts are another great option.
They could, but they make more money by keeping the clearing price unknown.
Scientific Computing in Rust 2023 [video]
Elevating the Conversation with LLM Assistants
Do you happen to have that chat in your history? It might be worth playing it back as it was to compare. I have this feeling too, and I will check it this weekend and maybe post results.
"Ironically, the AI is a lot better at high-level thinking than correct calculation."

That would be actually a human like feature .. except I do not consider what LLMs are doing as thinking.
To add to the first point, creating documentation from bullet points.
Prompting something like “Phrase the following points as technical documentation. Use the Microsoft Technical Writing Style Guide. Don’t add or remove any information” is really good.
This is not a devils advocate because in your hypothetical you already defined the gambler was a fully consenting, which is in alignment with the persons comment you replied to.

A more accurate devils advocate could be one who suggest that forms of manipulation and coercion should be allowed because its physically possible in reality to do so.
Another bug: if `maxlen <= 0`, then it will overwrite the character before the start of `ptr`. And then there's the infinite loop if `maxlen > INT_MAX` on 64-bit machines. And maybe `out + skipped` can wrap as well?
Eh, I think the concept of benefiting from being exposed is on the face not a bad one.

But this issue is, the first exposure these kids are having is gambling on steroids. Which in itself is bad, but their brains aren't fully developed.

Where if you were born in the 80's or 90's you had at least somewhat of a chance to learn while these companies tried things out. Think of it like this, we were given the opportunity to start in the baby pool - get our faces wet/etc, then the shallow end, then in the last decade we started to get to play in the diving well/deep end of the pool. Where kids now are thrust into the deep end without floaties, sink or swim, get a crushing addiction ruining your life and your family dynamic or learn how to cope with the constant pressure to spend money
Patent offices can check whatever resources they want in terms of finding prior art. But in practice, they mostly just check patent applications, because they have a big database of those.
I too would have disagreed 10 years ago. 15 years ago I may also have downvoted.

Now I recognise that we should, unless there's a very good reason (not for style), keep our code stupid-simple.

And doing that is harder than making it clever.
> China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies).

I wish Western countries had import bans on goods manufactured by Chinese companies that did that.
File sharing program with dwindling userbase embargoes itself in EU political protest; fails
“Merit-based” is such a loaded term.

What do you mean by that exactly? What are you envisioning?

EDIT: Wow, a downvote. For this comment? Yikes!

EDIT 2: Oh, I see. I was using the phrase “loaded term” incorrectly. I only meant that “merit-based” is a phrase that can mean a lot of different things.

However, thinking about this more, I do still think it’s a loaded term. Politicians and the adjacents have visibly been using it to push an agenda. (I’m not saying this agenda is right or not. But it’s still clearly an agenda. I mean, that’s what their jobs are: to literally have agendas lol.)
This is why we need Unenclosable Carriers, and decentralized/distributed "apps" that cannot be de-platformed, and ...

There is a reason that Holochain was invented, and this entire conversation re-validates it.

The primary marker of Mercantilism (what we erroneously call capitalism, here in the west) is the erection of barriers to competition by entrenched players, via their purchased politicians.

When their control of the money supply, artificial barriers to competition, etc. is made much more expensive and difficult, their hand will be revealed. They will have to expend increasingly expensive (and obvious) force against ever more independent and smaller adversaries (their fellow citizens), to maintain their ill-gotten market positions.

It's gonna get fun!
This comment is wrong on so many levels it's hilarious.
Except for, you know, Letters of Recommendation, which at top schools are often the deciding factor. All else being near-equal (or not), a letter from a Kennedy is going to get you into Brown versus say, a regular high school teacher that many of comfortable-but-not-connected suburban students applying to college will be using. Maybe a local lawyer, if you’re special.

Those are who families who scream “meritocracy” should be directing their ire at, not the applicants (usually with more impressive results and stories considering the background they grew up in, compared to—sorry!—a hum-drum suburban also-ran) _think_ they’re better than, which ultimately is what a meritocracy boils down to.

Ultimately the only answer that will give you, or your kids, peace is accepting the fact that schools will curate the student body they want. They’ve admittedly done a good job at it! Complain all you want about Harvard tilting the scales, they’ve done an amazing job maintaining their reputation and exclusivity. If they don’t accept you, they don’t want you. If they do, they do. It’s that simple.
If you are logged in you can press “x” to eliminate shorts from your home page.
> Is Notepad++.exe terrifying?

I mean, yes, but for different reasons.
We'll never have a perfect way to measure merit, but that doesn't justify the status quo. It would likely reject both students for a third student that checks the right intersectional boxes, even if coming from a more privileged upbringing than the other two students.

We should be constantly improving our ways of measuring merit, not throwing up our hands and pretending it's meaningless to try.
Noto Sans Mono
What is the evidence that the tests now are biased other than that different groups score differently?
I don't think that was the point of the person you are resounding to. I think the point was that no single group should make all the rules.
Probably not, because they don’t come with the string attached that “you must build a new building and name it after me to receive this donation”.
Open source projects with permissive licenses are subject to this kind of abuse by companies who benefit from the community and then wall off their derivative projects without paying the community back by way of contributions.

I do think there's a place for permissive licenses, particularly for academic and government projects. However, it seems like private entities can't be trusted to play nice, so copyleft licenses should probably be used by more open source projects to protect the public knowledge base.
That's a false dichotomy.

Yes, we have agency. But it's not absolute. For instance, you don't have the agency not to use the toilet for days on end (or end up going somewhere less sanitary) if you're eating and drinking.

If you're on your third day without food, you don't have complete agency not to eat whatever food is put in front of you, even if there's some negative consequence to it. Yes, technically you can choose not to. But even if you know, without a doubt, that you will have another opportunity to get food before you would literally starve to death, there are biological and neurological processes at work that make it very, very, very hard to choose not to eat the food in front of you.

I have ADHD. In a very real sense, I am "addicted to doing engaging tasks". I don't always have full agency to choose to do a task that I know will be stressful and unrewarding. My brain treats it as if it is painful and dangerous.

Many games create a dopamine loop that is very hard to break out of. Many game companies have done neurological research to understand how to make that even stronger.

Agency is not a binary thing: you aren't either completely free of outside influence, or completely under the control of another. There are influences all around us all the time, some of which are heavy and obvious like near-starvation, others of which are much more subtle like advertising.

However much you may think you are immune to outside influences, you're not. None of us are. That's just an undeniable fact of how human brains work.
The original thread from Matei Zaharia (Stanford prof who contributed to the paper) is a bit better: https://twitter.com/matei_zaharia/status/1681467961905926144
Also spectacular because we might have had the hottest day globally in 100,000+ years.
It's very unclear what people mean by "clever". For some people, a map or a fold is already "clever", while for others, this is just very straightforward code.
and less accessible !