skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Even if [parsing command arguments via whitespace boundaries] was a simple or reasonable choice to make in the beginning, at some point around 1979 Steve Bourne had a clear opportunity to realize he had made a mistake. He introduced $* and must shortly therefter have discovered that it wasn't useful. This should have gotten him thinking.

First off, no, that's not a bug. The alternative is some variant of "here's a data structure to hold the list of arguments you need to manipulate manually". And that's how program execution works in "real programming language" environments (even things like PowerShell).

And it sucks, which is why we all continue to use the Bourne shell after four decades to solve these problems. What we really want is "here's a string to execute just like I typed it; go!". Sure, that's not what we think we want. And we might convince ourselves that mishandling based on that metaphor is a bad thing and write too-smart-for-our-own-good blog posts about it to show how smart we are.

But no, we don't want that. We want shell. If we didn't want shell, we wouldn't write shell scripts. And yet, here we are.

Again, four decades outweighs any amount of pontification in a blog post. If you aren't willing to start from a perspective of why this system remains so successful, you're probably not bringing as much insight to the problem as you think you are.
Agreed. I’ve also gone into a codebase and seen the most boring code ever. It looked like examples from an intro to web programming class. The backend did simple parameteried SQL queries. It was a pleasure to work with.

My conclusion is that the real “star” developers will, most of the time, write code that’s so simple, it looks like anyone could have written it. They ship a project on time, with good performance and availability, and then they move on. Anyone can come in and maintain it because the code is so obvious.
Yea.. I'm sure the "planned economy" will work this time.
I don't think some stability or a formal decision making structure is too much to ask. TVM, MLIR based projects, GGML seem to have stable leadership.
I agree with certain sentiments, especially whether there is an actual product market fit for this, but the tech analysis here is sloppy. Molly is a crypto sceptic so suffers from confirmation bias.
This isn’t related to pipes. This is related to how command lines and variables are tokenised and expanded. Zsh doesn’t have this issue, nor does most, if not all, other shells written in the last 10+ years.
Tarsnap doesn’t help you with using the service well, if you need to implement your own retries, and if the docs tell you to just write a single-line shell script and call it from crontab [0].

[0] https://www.tarsnap.com/simple-usage.html
The word you're looking for is "peak". Marginal capacity describes both the last piece added and the first piece removed. It can apply to both our usages, and since there's a better term for your usage...

> When the car is being used for daily commute, yes, but not when travelling (IIRC the majority of gas consumption is caused by long-distance travelling in my country).

Citation definitely needed, I strongly disbelieve this.

Even our 500 miles trip mostly use night energy -- charge overnight for the first 320 on cheap night electricity, add 200 halfway in between at expensive rates, and recharge to full at destination at cheap night rates.

> Do you have a source for that?Because me personal experience suggest the opposite actually.

First one that showed up in my Google: https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...

Even where it's not true, the production delta between night and day is lower than the demand delta between night day, so wind provides a disproportionate share of power at night.
Perhaps the left is more inclined to take some sort of marginal actions, but I don't think they are willing to do what it takes to make a difference. Everybody would like to "save the planet", but when the the tradeoff is to renounce to our individual comfort, there are less volunteers. How many people would agree to significantly reduce their consumption habits (e.g. flying, driving big cars, eating meat...)?
> We don’t need a Chipotle on every corner. We don’t need another $20 box salad store.

These are the only types of business that can afford the rents though. Even if you get another lower cost place in there, they have to cut corners on quality and end up going out of business or just being really bad food. How do you overcome that?
I believe that was Sequoia? Who just massively downsized that very fund this week. (Tho he did seem to play LoL on a lot of calls…)
I know that I did. FWIW, if you're from any of the post 2004 members then the UK is the reason that the enlargement happened.

Additionally given that we'll all need security cooperation for the foreseeable it would be easier if that took place under the EU aegis.
Lots of good analysis here, with the main flaw (imho) coming in last*. The WC team may be book smart, but not experienced or wise, especially in building complex systems with high integrity and assurance. They cut too many corners, take too many intellectual shortcuts, assume away too many hard problems, minimize important constraints inherent in their chosen architecture, and clearly haven't really thought it all through. Wishful thinking is no substitute for sound engineering. All red flags of a project doomed to fail.

*> A black market for Worldcoin accounts has already emerged [1] in Cambodia, Nigeria, and elsewhere, where people are being paid to sign up for a World ID and then transfer ownership to buyers elsewhere — many of whom are in China, where Worldcoin is restricted. There is no ongoing verification process to ensure that a World ID continues to belong to the person who signed up for it, and no way for the eyeball-haver to recover an account that is under another person’s control. Worldcoin acknowledges that they have no clue how to resolve the issue: “Innovative ideas in mechanism design and the attribution of social relationships will be necessary.“ The lack of ongoing verification also means that there is no mechanism by which people can be removed from the program once they pass away, but perhaps Worldcoin will add survivors’ benefits to its list of use cases and call that a feature.

Relatively speaking, scanning your iris and selling the account is fairly benign. But depending on the popularity of Worldcoin, the eventual price of WLD, and the types of things a World ID can be used to accomplish, the incentives to gain access to others’ accounts could become severe. Coercion at the individual or state level is absolutely within the realm of possibility, and could become dangerous.

[1]:https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=sam-altmans-worldcoin-proje...
Honestly life would be way better if we just helped each other a little bit without expecting anything in return.

I think in most capitalist circles (I’m in one, and I like capitalism) people have lost their view of other people as people. We look at people as customers and group them into profiles.

If we looked at people as people, and not just automatons who will purchase something from us, I think society would progress quite a lot. I don’t think there’s a way to do this since the majority just wants something that meets their effort:time spent ratio. However…

It sucks that we put in AI chat bots that will never work as a substitute for human care.

It sucks that we make all these horrendous UX decisions that are hard to navigate for most people who aren’t 20.

It sucks that we don’t offer service for expensive products after selling them. Why can’t I fix my own devices easily anymore?
Sorry for the pedantry, but 1 coffee at Starbucks per day is closer to 120pm alone.
There is a huge difference between X and ×. The former has angles != 90 degrees, unlike the latter.
Every CEO has, for the last 20 years at least, outsourced and offshored every role that they possibly could.

All the bullshit about co-location and productivity is dropped instantaneously when there is a chance of saving a dime.

The flat out truth is that the off shored teams are either good enough to do the job (they they have the job already, or would have in short order remote or no) or they aren't.

I agree that low cost onshore locations are likely to benefit, and wages will be lower there - this is a good thing for the developed economies though. I am in the UK and there are many cities that have complex and extensive infrastructures that could be a great place to live. These would benefit hugely from even 250 remote working IT people going to the restaurants, sending their kids to the schools, showing up to local events and so on. The IT folks would (and are) benefiting from not sitting on the Tube for 1 1/2 hrs a day and not having to work in the chaos and bullshit of a London office.

The trade off is worth it. London will be ok as it was literally bursting before Covid, I think that about 2x the people will have a job "there" in the long term.... showing up for 1 or 2 days a week and then retreating to the NORTH...
What are you on about? Youtube's auto generated subtitles are pretty good. granted, 5-10% of them are miss, but they usually convey at least enough to grasp the context. I would be lost without them (I'd have to be listening to really loud sound and/or focus more intensively to what is said)
There are enormous amounts of study on the concept that the above-average lifestyle enjoyed at that specific point in history by white men was built on the exploitation of other groups. Frequently, people who name that specific point in time as the model for how they would like the world to be are simply unaware of this tradeoff and have no idea that simply reverting society to that point would make it worse for some groups - this is why it gets mentioned when someone says "let's go back to those good times", to educate these people. Less frequently, they already know this and simply don't care, and it's always useful to give this group an opportunity to be explicit about their priorities.
I think your parent comment was making a good point. The "just write the code" and "don't try to be smart" mentality is good only up to a certain point.

Too much "just write the code" ends up creating huge unmaintainable monstrosities.

When you have a lot of time in front of you and a large team, it's okay to just put two junior developers at work for two weeks, and get a big CRUD REST api in the end.

But when you are trying to iterate quickly with a small team, exposing your database is not as stupid an idea as it sounds. And that's why things like Firebase, Hasura, Apollo, Postgraphile, etc. are so popular.

The post is not trying to convince people to build custom DSLs just for querying their database (sorry you had to work with that). It is saying that there are things that exist today, that dramatically reduce the complexity of full stack applications. And that whether or not we like it, this is probably the direction the industry is taking.
The Best Antivirus for Mac in 2023
> Outside the US it is quite common to view the bombings as war crimes,

I'm from the UK and born in the 1960s and have not heard that as a mainstream view. I've seen a bit of chatter on the Web about it, but nothing substantial.

There is very little dispute that the nuclear bombings were horrible, but it was all out war. We'd had the destruction of much of Europe including the carpet bombings and resulting firestorms causing widespread deaths. Also many of our relatives are buried in what is modern day Thailand and Myanmar after fighting on the Pacific front. WW2 was brutal on many fronts and the bombing of military, industrial, and civilian areas was a part of that, but I don't recall it being called a war crime as a child nor in most modern discussion. It was a raw fight for survival which is hard to comprehend today.

Hitler was developing atomic weaponry, despite the other many technological advances they made luckily for the world he was further behind than the allies thought as I understand.

If the war hadn't finished there, the world would be a different place. The Russians would have advanced further and it's unlike there would be a South Korea for instance. There is also the issue of did those bombings show the world what a nuclear war would be like and thus drive the stalemate of the cold war. Had they not been used in anger, would America or Russia be more casual about attacking each other in the subsequent years once they were both full armed.
Salary != Wealth.

There are billionaires that don’t make a single penny a year, and broke folks pulling in 6-7 figures.

Looking at some type of combination of income + net worth is probably better in most cases.

That being said, most folks in the US make less than $100,000/year and have less than a $100,000 net worth.
Rent-a-Hitman
I am autodidactic. Therefore I see libraries as a basic education need.

It's not practical to have 100's of reference books and texts, but if I've got access to a good library I can juxtapose several references and texts in a way that digital technologies can't emulate.

Some libraries use wonderful classification systems such as Bliss, which really appeals to me for the way it seemingly shelves books on different subjects according to the kind of thinking thats gone into them.
> as soon as the flight lands, people are miraculously "healed" and don't need a wheelchair any longer

The comment you're replying to talks about someone needing a wheelchair from time to time. Many people who use wheelchairs do not need them all the time.

A trivial example would be someone who can walk from the airport to a car when unburdened, but cannot stand in line for an hour while carrying luggage. The available assistance isn't necessarily individually tailored, so "I need to check a bag without extra charge and skip the security and boarding lines" is not an option, but a wheelchair is.
We already do that. The home office tax deduction used to be available for W2 employees, but it was suspended in 2018 under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Theoretically it's meant to resume in 2025, but I'll be surprised if that actually happens.
Five Orders of Periwigs
Lower the rent.
> Yes, when things change complexity has a cost.

Things always change. Software does not perform in a vacuum. It's subject to the inexorable progression of hardware decay and business knowledge loss, at the very least.
> In the UK, I transfer money to my friends instantaneously and for free using just my bank account.

You can do the same thing in the US. The problem is that businesses can't easily do this without collecting bank routing information from customers, which is effectively "secret" because it allows anyone to debit money directly from their bank account, so they're reluctant to provide it.

What's needed is a low- or no-fee system for requesting payments from someone without collecting any secrets from them. The technology to do this is not hard -- use public key cryptography, or just require the customer to approve merchants before they can make debits. But the customer's bank has little incentive to implement this because the customer won't choose a different bank over it and meanwhile the banks own the credit processing networks charging the high fees.

Which is why people are looking for an external solution.
They're not case-sensitive.
Exactly. Part of the appeal to consolidate all of our container images to use Debian-slim is the ability to optimise the caching of layers, both in our container registry but also on our kubernetes cluster’s nodes (which can be done in a consistent manner with kube-fledged[1]).

[1] https://github.com/senthilrch/kube-fledged
It's called the Euro ;)

I'm sortof not really joking but the German export driven economy would have been much harder to maintain with the DM.
I don’t think it’s actually case sensitive. And there is autocomplete anyways.
SF should have turned some of that office space into more affordable housing long ago. This would have created a community. The Castro is cool, because people live there. There is a little central downtown area and then it is surrounded by housing. Downtown SF is completely devoid of that.
I know what I'm about to say is not true. but it's a kernel in the right direction.
I live in a city where no matter how hard I work I will never own property... and I have this irrational belief that just harder work will allow us to be happy.
Chlorogenic acid is the real MVP in coffee.
No one cares to "do the right thing", but that's not even the problem. The developing world is producing their own externalities now. People won't accept that the developing world is allowed to pollute, while the developed world is not.
Fair enough. One of the best minds on the project.
I've done my research here. Now it's your turn. These people's names are all on the Charity Navigator pages I referenced. Try them on LinkedIn & other online sites.

Tell us what their qualifications are, what other jobs they've held, and where they live.

For bonus points: what political causes do they contribute to? Civil Service laws prohibit forcing employees to make political contributions, but those laws don't apply to employees of these orgs, AFAIK.

> If you don’t trust them, you don’t have to give them your money

I don't, but the City still does.
If you're trying to build a world where a person's iris is their unique proof of personhood, then you are building a world where people without eyes are not people. I cannot see a way around this.
> Many other large scale experiments are nearly impossible to replicate.

Thankfully, the LHC is not what all of science looks like. There is a great deal of science that can be reproduced without needing billions of dollars.

> If I send you the code that alters the results somewhere deep inside, you'll be able to reproduce them.

But the current status quo for most papers is that you don't even have that. If you public put out code that manipulates data in this way then it can be scrutinized.

The alternative is to attempt to replicate the results, and waste months of time trying to guess what the authors did (since they won't tell you), and in the end never being able to reproduce it, not knowing if it was because key information was missing or because it was falsified.

That is, if you can spend the time attempt to reproduce the results, rather than publishing your own novel and revolution results. And if you'll find a journal who'll be interested in publishing your failure to replicate.
The number of satellites is less than the number of oceangoing ships, but satellites are on track to be ahead in the next decade or so.

Then if you start counting every single piece of debris a satellite can run into, you're looking at millions of objects. Unlike ships, the debris (and even many satellites) doesn't have anyone "on watch" and there's no way to steer out of the way at the last minute. Because of how orbits work you can't really organize traffic into "shipping lanes".

If you want to do the math yourself, NORAD publishes satellite orbital parameters, which can be used to look for potential conjunctions. You can also sign up for an account at https://www.space-track.org to see the Space Force's data, or CelesTrak for something similar that isn't login-walled (https://celestrak.org/SOCRATES/). The tl;dr is that it's not rare for 2 satellites (or a satellite+debris) to have a 1 in 10,000 chance of crashing into each other. As more and more satellites go up and more and more "1 in 10,000" events happen on a daily basis, more conjunctions will occur. Each conjunction can create thousands of pieces of debris, which exacerbates the problem- nowadays I think ~30% of all debris in LEO comes from China's 2007 ASAT test.
> if even one innocent child can be spared these nightmares

If you feel the government shouldn't be installing cameras in every bedroom and bathroom to protect even one child, then with e2ee we're just arguing degrees.

Society wants to protect children, but it's only willing to go so far to do so.
> But all they insist upon is lowering the living standards

https://i.imgur.com/LaEFQmV.png

> if there is one thing solved there’ll be the next thing at hand to continue the program

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)

Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot.

> who would have thought that upper class kids could have something against the plebs surpassing them on the social ladder

:)
Every ORM I've ever used has some raw SQL escape hatch you can use when you hit that edgecase. For the 90% of DB access that really is simple, ORMs are a pleasure. For that other 10%, if your alternative is raw SQL, just use the escape hatch and you're not worse off than if you had skipped the ORM.
Dogma leads to shitty code no matter which way a person leans. One of the worst pieces of code I ever worked on was a query generator. Somebody noticed that there were recurring patterns in some BI-ish queries that were used to generate a dashboard for customers that wanted to see their usage, and they decided to factor out the redundant parts and eliminate the boilerplate.

What did they end up with? The few hundred lines of code expressing the BI queries shrank in half, but behind the simplicity was close to a thousand lines of dense, inscrutable magic. It was a net increase in LOC, but the value of the magic was supposed to compound as they added more queries. What happened was, the original programmer moved on, and every attempt to add more queries failed, until I joined and it was my turn to be sacrificed to the monster. (I did manage to figure it out. The key was realizing that the whole thing was stupid, from conception to execution — the other engineers had put the original programmer on a pedestal, and they were trying to make the code make sense, which it didn't.)

After making the query generator work for a few queries, I had established the credibility to say that we shouldn't use it anymore, and we should just write out all the boilerplate instead. Suddenly adding and modifying queries became something that anybody could do.

It isn't just custom code that ends up this way. I'm currently working on a project that uses SQLAlchemy, and as the glutton for punishment I am, I'm the person who cleans up all our SQLAlchemy difficulties. I virtually always have the documentation open in a tab, and I have the source code checked out to the version we use. If we just wrote raw SQL and wrote our own row mappers, we'd have twice as much database code, but we'd understand it, and anybody could write and debug it. Instead, half the team treats it as witchcraft, and I feel like I've invested more time learning SQLAlchemy in the last year than I ever spent learning SQL.

This is not to say I'm against abstraction, just that it can be done so poorly that it's counterproductive. You always have to compare -- are we better off with this, or without it? Saying that something reduces boilerplate or reduces repetition isn't the end of the conversation, even if it's true. You have to ask what the cost is.
Yes, reduce sales tax enough to offset new revenues from a carbon tax.

This may start a philosophical shift from the type of tax to the total revenue needed, which I think would be helpful. That would give increased room for flexibility in the form of taxation, which might give easier paths to address legitimate concerns with tax types.