skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ive always hated "If" as it captures that British Imperialist viewpoint at that point in history

Its background is that it was written as a tribute to Jameson after the failed Jameson raid - which was an attempted South African coup
Losing money while growing revenue isn't necessarily a bad thing. This can be caused by growth investing, and is often the right thing to do. Amazon is a famous example of this line of thinking.
Having children is crazy expensive.

Also in a world of climate chaos and ecological collapse, a lot of younger people don't want to bring kids into the world.
Dwindling market share of firefox is pretty much not related to how the mozilla foundation is managed. They had 55% of the market when the only competition was:

- ie6 which was a security nightmare for everybody

- browsers like Opera developed by very small companies against which competition was more based on merit

The only way for Mozilla have been able to maintain its market share against chrome would have to manage to reach both these requirements:

- build the #1 smartphone OS in the market in term of market share to have it preinstalled everywhere

- build the #1 search engine in term of market share to advertise using it everytime the user search for something.

Both feats requiring:

- financial means that were out of reach from the Mozilla foundation at any moment in time regardless of its management.

- giving up on mozilla ethics and values to be on same level as the definitely evil competitor.
You don't think they may also bring us transportation, agricultural and logistical innovations that will make increasing the population a non-issue?

If we actually reach a point of technological singularity, it may well be the case that we are living amongst the stars within 10 years. Nobody knows. I wouldn't worry too much.
> It works in code compiled from c++ too: define and associate a signal handler for sigkill, call a function whose symbol can't be runtime resolved by the linker, sigkill is sent and caught, define your function (in your asm dejure), patch the GOT to point from the original symbol to wherever the bytearray is with your asm, and voila.

I don't need to do anything like that in Lisp. I just define the function and RESUME THE COMPUTATION WHERE IT STANDS in my read eval print loop. << important parts in uppercase.
> In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023.

Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to my questions. Wikipedia is still doing well, meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management.

Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. SO is an information repository. They need to accept that stop trying to “enhance” it with more crap because they don’t realize their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense.

SO doesn’t need large language models. What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit). Turn the top answer to popular questions into a wiki so that everyone can update it. And then add backlinks for questions which were closed for being “duplicates”. It solves so many problems SO has.

Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves.
The other guy up above claims this is a feature unique to calling functions, rather than all error states, and that the lisp runtime specifically guards against this. If that's the case then my answer is very simple: it would be trivial to guard function calls (all function calls) to achieve the exact same functionality in python. I'm in bed but it would literally take me 5 minutes (I would hook eval of the CALL_FUNCTION opcode). Now it would be asinine because it's a six-sigma event that I call a function that isn't defined. On the other hand, setting a breakpoint and redefining functions as you go works perfectly well and is the common case and simultaneously the kind of "repl driven development" discussed all up and down this thread.
Economics is fundamentally about the allocation of scarce resources. So if we are talking about how human civilization allocates scarce resources (and not about some virtual economy e.g. inside a computer game), then economic growth is very much anchored in reality.
I'm not talking about credentials or trade vs science. I'm talking about the attitude and disposition of knowing just enough and tuning out the rest vs being curious and digging deeper. This has nothing to do with society, markets or staffing practices. This is about how each one of us can approach challenges.

Besides most people in the world are not struggling. Where do wealthy Americans get this idea that out there most people are poor and ignorant? Global poverty and vulnerability stands at around 15% of population.
Any kind of digital National ID is a privacy disaster in itself because then things will use it to correlate your activity across different devices and services. That should not exist.
Same on the Limmat in Zürich, such a relaxing 2-hour float down the river (only interrupted by the deadly dam in the middle).
Arve + Rhone in Geneva Jonction = pretty spectacle from Jonction bridge, where two distinct waters meet - crystal-clear Rhone which comes down from limestone (majority) part of Alps, has time settle any silt in Geneva lake, so it has easily 15m visibility, jut like most seas.

On the other side, Arve coming down from France is muddied right at the source by Mont blanc range, which is mostly granite. You can see the exact spot where specific stream comes into play, very gray, and it doesn't get much better afterwards.

Its enough to get big river like Rhone dirty all the way to Mediterranean sea. Also, after Jonction Rhone becomes pretty cold to just swim in even in warmest summer days. But yes many tkae it down during summer on inflatables, including us.
Show HN: AI-utils.js – TypeScript-first lib for AI apps, chatbots, and agents
I'm building LLM (and diffusion model) apps (and agents) and was not that happy with the existing libaries. Either they take away a lot of control (especially over the prompts) or they are just the raw APIs, e.g. OpenAI. So I wrote a lib that tries to cover the middle ground and provide additional functionality (e.g. type checking and LLM abstraction) while letting you fully control the prompts etc.
> The second step failed almost immediately, with an error telling me that a
replayed log entry was recording data belonging to a machine which didn't
exist. This provoked some head-scratching until I realized that this was
introduced by some code I wrote in 2014: Occasionally Tarsnap users need to
move a machine between accounts, and I handle this storing a new "machine
registration" log entry and deleting the previous one

Recommend writing a TLA+ model to catch stuff like this
This does keep coming up, and it's a few years old now. I think Quicklisp can easily still support https while supporting the older packages that are tar+http, which could easily be mirrored in a git repo. Quicklisp has unfortunately taken over the entire ecosystem, making it hard to use anything else, and you often need to depend on it to use a lot of tools in the ecosystem. It sort of reminds me of Systemd in that way.

I agree on the version pinning being a worse situation, and also not having something like "node_modules" for lisp. I haven't tried CLPM since a while back, it was kind of hard to setup back then.

I have a little package manager thing, cl-micropm, that just uses Quicklisp to fetch everything via docker (should probably support podman too), and an .envrc file to tell ASDF to look in the project directory (a project-local node_modules-like folder called "lisp-systems") for systems. That way I can pin my deps manually by picking the commits + git submodule in lisp-systems/, and it's isolated to my local project. I looked into using the Docker container to rewrite the requests to use https, bypassing whatever Quicklisp is doing, but I never got around to that.

I'm looking to switch it to something even simpler/explicit though, cl-pm, that'll only optionally need/use Quicklisp via podman _only_ to figure out what the dependencies are, and then just have a function that uses wget/curl/git-pull to conveniently explicitly pull them in on request. That way you can decide to add a git mirror for an old http library, or pin a specific version, etc. It's slightly more manual than Quicklisp or CLPM, not a big deal, but very easy for anyone with just a little bit of lisp knowledge to understand the whole thing in under an hour.
Restarting from the debugger keeps state without third party Python hacks that you mention. In this example Python increments x twice, Lisp just once:

>>> x = 0
>>> def f():
... global x # yuck!
... x += 1
...
>>> def g(y):
... h()
...
>>>
>>> g(f())
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 2, in g
NameError: name 'h' is not defined
>>>
>>> def h(): pass
...
>>> g(f())
>>>
>>> x
2

Versus:

* (setf x 0)
* (defun f() (incf x))
* (defun g(y) (h))
* (g(f))

debugger invoked on a UNDEFINED-FUNCTION in thread
#<THREAD "main thread" RUNNING {1001878103}>:
The function COMMON-LISP-USER::H is undefined.

Type HELP for debugger help, or (SB-EXT:EXIT) to exit from SBCL.

restarts (invokable by number or by possibly-abbreviated name):
0: [CONTINUE ] Retry calling H.
1: [USE-VALUE ] Call specified function.
2: [RETURN-VALUE ] Return specified values.
3: [RETURN-NOTHING] Return zero values.
4: [ABORT ] Exit debugger, returning to top level.

("undefined function")
0] (defun h() nil)
; No debug variables for current frame: using EVAL instead of EVAL-IN-FRAME.
H
0] 0
NIL
* x
1
this is sooo cute! I don't have a use for it right now, but I had a lot of fun editing the website
Dupe.

Discussed at length 2 days ago, 768 comments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855516>
People would never choose the bird over not paying rent for nothing, especially because the people doing this trick would not be the one’s with a lot of money.

Here in The Netherlands, bats are protected. Bats nest in the ventilated outside walls of houses. According to law, if you want to insulate your walls and it is suspected you have bats, you now need to pay an inspector €3000-6000 just to check. If you do have bats, they need to be lured out and re-nested with another expensive operation.
What people do instead is flush their walls with low grade toxins so the bats get scared off.
You have always been able to swim in the Thames albeit only in Canary Wharf.
It is from finance: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/alpha.asp
Do you think the magic fairies are doing it for you? Your interpreter/runtime is still doing it whether you're aware of it or not.

My point is very simple: I can do it too, in any language I want, and so there's nothing special about lisp.
I think most Google employees can get whatever device they want.

I was thinking of someone who does not have the money for a new device, but acquires a salvage one.
I mean there is one thing we can safely assume: their vehicles have to operate in the same universe as ours, at least when they are meant to be in ours at some point.

Now they might know some tricks around the limitations of our universes physics, but even those tricks must do something measurably.
Roughly: The number of hours of my time that would be required to get something with even theoretically equivalent features would be sufficient to make the cost - and opportunity cost - involved seem far more reasonable.

Plus "written by cperciva and heavily battle tested by Serious Sysadmins" is a feature I couldn't recreate myself - notice that while there was an outage, part of the reason for it taking a while was a conscious choice to take a much longer path to resolution than bringing up the previous server in the name of paranoia. Paranoia about data corruption is a nice thing to have in a backup system and something I'm happily willing to trade-off uptime for.

However: For backups of bulk data then, yes, it's going to be relatively expensive. I wouldn't put e.g. my media backups on tarsnap, but "use tarsnap for your git repositories and other high value data, and something else for the rest" is both perfectly doable and an approach I suspect cperciva himself would endorse.
If anyone is interested in seeing rigorously analyzed video material, I recommend the YouTube channel of Mick West[1]. He is an experienced programmer that has written a software to combine available data into a 3D space. This makes it possible to recreate situations and validate/invalidate hypotheses by stepping through time and looking from different camera angles. He also analyzed the famous gimbal and flir videos (Spoiler: There is a straight-forward explanation for what they show) and deconstructed some of David Grusch’s statements[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@MickWest

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvhMMhW-JN0
does this require gpt-4? I can't afford such a luxury sadly.
Author here - thanks for the mention! Re publicizing: I can never get any attention for my projects, no matter where I post them. Sites like this one (where I tried posting the project multiple times) feel very gamed to me at this point.
> How much of the web will go dark to anyone not using a corpo software stack?

If you can detect if anyone is using a system that supports this then you can ban only them instead of allowing only them, right?

Maybe we should nip this in the bud? If even 10% of sites banned anyone with this enabled from day zero before anyone else is requiring it, users would turn it off and then it wouldn't be there for anyone else to use.
Compared to Python, Common Lisp hardly has any performance issues.
>Can people in other societies have a say about what they want in the matter in their own society, or your also prefer the norms of you and your society imposed upon everybody?

Of course people in other societies should have a say in what they want in the matter of their own society. I just prefer they come to the same conclusion mine has, since it’s the superior one in many respects. (Not all aspects, of course — there is no “perfect culture” or “perfect system”; all of them have downsides in some aspect)

>From that I’m sure you can guess my own nationality.
Is it one where foreigners massacred and replaced the native population, took their land, relegated them to specific areas, and even took their children and closed them in camps? I guess those natives were xenophobic too.

The genocide of the peoples indigenous to North America is a black mark in the history of the United States, as is slavery. Neither has been adequately remedied, and I’m unsure it ever will be. The US has a lot of work to do on both of these fronts.
Since we're in a thread that started with:

> if other life exists, the chances of us being first would be really low given the size and age of the universe

I assumed that I didn't have to re-state the assumption that other life exists as the basis for my argument.
An increasing population is already an issue. Perhaps not for humans, but for non-human life. More transportation and agriculture means more ways to get to new locations, which in turn means the eradication of the natural environment there. Of course, we could follow the advice of E.O. Wilson and preserve half the earth for other life-forms, but I have little trust that we could do that, especially in developing countries.

No, new developments in transportation are unlikely to solve anything, except give some people more space in the short-term, and cause even more habitat destruction. New efficiencies in agriculture will help in the short term, but then make producing new humans even more efficient, causing even more destruction.

As for your predictions that we will be living in the stars, that's depressing. On spaceships and barren planets? Think terraforming will help? We can't even take care of one of the easiest planets on the solar system, earth.
i could be completely wrong here, but i do seem to remember something about there being some physical chip in the machine that needed to be present for e.g. iMessage to work. this was a while ago but iirc they also somehow incorporated local Apple ID account management into that system.
Every species is precious, not matter its name.

Don't you agree, little Iandumoema smeagol?
I don't understand, where did you find any study that proved that the capacity of feeding would grow with population ?

It's easy to judge in hindsight, but 30 years ago, long before the current slowing of population growth, you had legitimate rights to worry about food production capacity increase, it _has_ a limit.

Nowdays, given food inflation is partially due to shortage not only because of war, but instability in production. India just banned rice export. You're really that sure of your opinion ?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows

Technically Newfoundland is an island, but I would call that North America
That's basically what Smalltalk was back in the 20th Century.

The OS, the development environment and the application (both code and live objects) where one and the same thing. To ship an "app" you would export the image and the user would load it into their Smalltalk VM.
> Tarsnap makes a lot of sense when you benefit from the encryption and (especially) de-duplication features that it offers.

Can you provide more detail why you think so? I don't believe there is any use case in which tarsnap makes sense, other than maybe some Plan-C backup solution which you fall back on in the highly unlikely event that neither Plan-A nor Plan-B worked.

Concretely, what benefits does tarsnap offer over restic or borg in combination with rsync.net, to make up for the substantial downsides (such as insanely slow restore, complete lack of wetware redundancy or being written in C[1])?

[1] https://www.tarsnap.com/bounty-winners.html
I'm not here to defend it but I only use it as a secondary backup for my mail server (so basically append-only) and for a low amount of gigabytes it's fine and just works. No, I wouldn't want to write changing 100GB there.
I'll take this as an answer to my sibling comment that the answer is "No". I'm really sad CPython can't do that, but maybe some other Python can. It shouldn't necessarily be any slower for the interpreter to figure out where to jump to before saving the execution trace and jumping.

It's not "pointless", I was tearing out my hair and losing days because I couldn't do this in CPython. Yes, I'd much rather use Python than Common Lisp regardless.
Maybe I'm missing something. What about the site is giving CGA vibes?
A couple of years ago I had built a product for health systems in the computer vision space - and ran into the challenge of trying to commercialize it (with no luck). Even if the product/technology is excellent, the regulatory hurdles & red tape make it insanely difficult to get this sort of stuff commercialized in a healthcare context.
Yeah this will slow down and already slow ide even further for little benefit.
Why would you want them to shut up? They have given information to those who can actually do something with that information - e.g. get into military and commercial workspaces, subpoena government and private sector persons for questions, seek budgetary audits and clarifications, etc.

A person says "I swear under oath that there is so and so place. Visit for yourself and see". This person is not allowed to take pics at those places. But the official visitors definitely can go see for themselves. The motivation can be "get first hand knowledge of whether budget is being wasted and whether people are being killed", for starters.
And it's derivatives
I have a hard time feeling sorry for Stack Overflow. They had most developers in the world visiting frequently. They have detailed information on exactly which languages, libraries, toolchains, and platforms those developers use and their pain points. All of their content is given to them for free by volunteers. All of their moderation is done for them for free by volunteers. The only thing they have to serve is text. How can you fail to build a sustainable business on top of that‽
I’ve been doing full stack web and mobile development on a Chromebook for about 18 months now. It’s actually the best developer experience I’ve ever had.

Everything is nicely sandboxed, things work well by default.

I probably spend about 50/50 of my development time either locally in the integrated Linux developer environment or remotely using GitHub Codespaces where I’m just using a PWA essentially as my IDE.
Losing money while growing revenue isn't necessarily a bad thing.

If you strongly believe that you have a viable long term plan to switch to a profitable model when the time is right, sure. When AI comes along and wrecks your business before you manage to extract the profit then you can say (with hindsight) you made a mistake by waiting too long. I'm not saying this is the case for SO, but it might be. Time will tell.

Getting to profit quickly is a hedge against change. Nothing guarantees that your business will be around forever. If you don't take the money when its there you might lose the chance.
What to learn from AI writing, the impossible heatwaves
from the same thread ...

"@adrian that reminds me of the story where a sec researcher bought license plate NULL. And got all the traffic violation tickets which could not be assigned to a license plate."

Priceless.
A short article explaining the javascript .forEach array method aimed at those who are unfamiliar with its uses or those who want to refresh their memory.

Please consider signing up to receive weekly updates on javascript concepts...

https://thecodingapprentice.substack.com
I like your point of view. I started working with software more than 20 years ago and did my fair share of VMs, bare metal, ESXi 3.5, and so on.

However, we live in the world where the choice we have for new hires is: a) teach them all of those OS fundamentals, b) give them Docker.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive to teach said new developers all those underlying concepts, but when we talk about training juniors and have them contribute relatively quickly, it’s a much smaller surface area to bite through.
Proof or gtfo