skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote my latest (released) iOS app in obj-c.

While I see some of the benefits of swift, I find it unnecessarily unreadable. One might argue about this, but as a developer, I value how readable the code is (no matter the language).

Going over various projects written in swift on github, more than 50% don't even compile without serious refactoring.

OTOH, grab a project in obj-c, from 15+ years ago, compiles with minimal changes (or, most of the time, without any).

I'm a big fan of Chris Lattner and his work, but swift is not his most successful children. While I believe his intentions were good, the end result is a mess worse than brainfuck (the programming language).

YMMV
The article was originally published in 2021.
Or like gigapedia : https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2012/3/1/the-disappearing...

Few people remember that. But losing it was such a shame.
I use a shell script with ffmpeg. I encourage you to check out what works best for you but honestly the quality is pretty stellar with just a really simple one like

mkdir -p reencoded

ffmpeg -i input_filename.mp4 -c:v libx265 -crf 26 -preset fast -c:a aac -b:a 128k reencoded/output_filename.mp4

That's a fast single-pass constant quality encode - a two-pass encode would be better quality for the size but I find that very acceptable. It knocks down what would be a ~2gb file all the way to between 800mb - 1200mb with very reasonable quality, sometimes even more - I've seen a 5gb file become a 400mb file (!!). You can experiment with the -crf 26 parameter to get the quality/size tradeoff you like. I run that over every video in the directory as a cron job basically.
Are you trying to find a job as a journeyman developer (nothing wrong with that) or are you trying to lead a team or be a senior where you are expected to be productive from day one and maybe mentor developers and be more strategic?

Would you hire me someone who not only doesn’t know anything about Android development but doesn’t even follow the ecosystem and the current trends?
Another example: when I realized that most of the commercially successful bands that got played on the radio when I was young, including a few that I liked, were there because of payola, not because their music was better or their work ethic or whatever. They were probably better at sucking up to the gatekeepers who would pay off radio stations (illegally) to play their songs.
Julia, perhaps? Although calling it popular is a stretch maybe. Its multiple dispatch system is even more ingrained to the language than CLOS (all functions are generic by default). It's very much a Lisp in Matlab's clothing.
Doing science today means expanding on the known body of published work, and progress involves either (a) doing novel work or (b) overturning established work - which is why scientific debates are often contentious. For example, there was one a theory that tidal cycles controlled the climate but technical discoveries in the 1950s and 1960s pointed towards infrared-absorbing gases (mainly CO2) being the main factor, and plate tectonics came along and overturned the orogenic consensus.

It is true that some fields of science have large budgetary demands, like high-energy particle physics, relative to things like cold condensed matter physics, but climate science is hardly a budget-breaker, and much of the data is just archived weather data.

It's been an issue in some fields though - renewable energy development in the USA is lagging far behind China because China invested a lot of money in R & D in the sector, resulting in engineering victories like mastering monocrystalline silicon ingot production at scale.

Also, there are dozens of practical studies pointing to the ability to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix while maintaining and expanding overall energy production on a global basis.
>my peripheral devices work

I would live a little more detail on this.
>"Linus didn't have a machine with 8MB RAM:

'* For those with more memory than 8 Mb - tough luck. I've

* not got it, why should you :-) The source is here. Change

* it. (Seriously - it shouldn't be too difficult. ...'

Today, machines with 8GB RAM are very common. Furthermore, 8GB is not enough at all for software engineers ;)"

Bill Gates, 1981: "640K ought to be enough for anyone..."

Linus Torvalds, 1991: "8MB ought to be enough for anyone..."

Jen-Hsun Huang, 2023: "144TB ought to be enough for anyone..."

:-) <g> :-)

(Disclaimer: The above quotes are written for comedy purposes only! The above individuals referenced probably didn't actually say those things! <g>)
The Second Oldest Bug / Jeremy Evans [video]
Maybe my scale is wrong, maybe it's not.

In the above case, big media couldn't afford to drag everything along forever. If every music track over 20 years old cost $25M per year to renew, they'd let tons of it expire into the public domain.

This kind of increasing scale renewal fee forces them to make more impactful works that are worth paying for. If they're truly valued by society, they'll pay the tax to keep them for longer.

It forces everyone to keep creating, which is good for employment and the economy. You shouldn't stop your output.

There's probably some optimal scale that incentivizes everyone to make more, and more of the content to be excellent.
In ten years we will be complaining how giving bad input to LLMs gives us insane and horrible output.

End of the day we’re talking about people. Most people have no idea what they’re doing or want.
Are there any jobs where you are payed to setup an in-house AI system? All "AI" jobs I have seen are basically just API jobs more or less, where you're contracting out the actual AI to some other company that runs the models on your data.

Seems like there is bound to be far more jobs creating the apps, than actually building, training, configuring, the models.
As a WVU grad who grew up there: ya, pretty much. Outside of some select towns and cities, WV is poor as shit, and it's only getting worse. Lots of abandoned towns, homelessness, and very few jobs. Even when coal mining was big, it wasn't exactly a thriving area. The movie October Sky is a great rendition of what it was like in the 50s, the coal company owned everything, and was the only source for anyone's income. Now imagine that 70 years later with all the coal companies gone, and tons of painkillers.

Its a very sad state, anyone I knew with half a brain who grew up there wanted nothing but to leave. Even those in good situations were all looking to move far away after college.
The neural network just generates a set of probabilities for all tokens. The actual next token is then sampled from this set, which is always random for T>0 (and in the case of GPT4 even for T=0, because of the way the model itself works).
The problem there would be how they fall out of date, and updating them is a heavy operation.

An alternative I've heard before is using triggers with regular tables, so updating one automatically updates the relevant other ones.
> At least in Computer Science

Computer Science rarely intersects with politics.

If a scientist's novel claim (however well proven) offends a powerful group, their career is over.
Got any data to back up that claim? Because all the data available to me disagrees with you. Here’s an easy to digest presentation of said data: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists...
No. Intel CPU's, even way before Linux, were microcoded, so you're still using the full instruction fetch, decode, and microcode system for every step in your infinite for loop. You aren't wearing out the CPU any more than running any other code.
+1 for Mike Ash's Friday Q&A. Very fond memories of seeing a new post show up in my feed.
That's a weird take. They had cloud ready quality tooling before everyone else. Consul, Vault, Terraform, Packer and Vagrant were all significantly ahead of the competition. That's an objectively impressive run.

Those tools however were better early on when we were all managing our own EC2 instances. Most people are moving on from that in one way or another (fargate, kubernetes, lamba, etc.). They aren't as useful with the newer tech and Hashicorp doesn't have a cloud offering that's competitive. No moat so to speak. That's an unfortunate turn of events for them.
They're all GUIs. Most people using computers in the late 2000s were using GUIs, not X-less Slackware. You asked what "normal" was -- this is normal.
The article addresses that:

> I chose to run a Mastodon server (instead of some other ActivityPub implementation) because Mastodon is the most popular one. Good managed Mastodon hosting is readily available, there are tons of options for client apps, and I know for sure that my server will work well with other people’s servers.
Theorizing is important, but it's also good to test your theory. Again, you can take my word for it, or you can ask my neighbors yourself. If you think I'm at all imposing enough that anyone would hesitate to speak truth to me, you've never been to Philadelphia and met Philadelphians, and you've no idea what a pencilneck dork I am. It's important to look for areas of improvement, but you're foolish of you ignore the actual positives of the current situation as well, and only seek out theoretical negatives.

As far as forever changing, I have several families that have become regulars. Some, annually for a music festival, others just like the price and location. Regulars or one-timers, they all typically spend more at local businesses than locals, or renters. Tourism has pluses and minuses, but so does any industry.

My neighborhood is a blend of homeowners and renters. The landlords are less invested in the neighborhood than me, without exception. The homeowners are a mixed bag. The renters couldn't care less, I suspect that their mothers show up weekly to do their laundry and wipe their asses. (that's exaggerating, but you get the idea) The ones who are as invested, if not more, have lived here since the 70s in property they own, and are definitely NIMBYs. For better or for worse.
Everyone wants to think they are special and thus different and better. Nobody is. You are all the evils of Trump / Stalin / slave owners but for minor differences of situation.
This comment is in no way an endorsement of Scott Adams, I generally do not like him. However, he recently posted something on Twitter that has been a brain worm for me.

>"Success is mostly imitation. We study successful people and then try to imitate what worked."

>"Imagine being Black, learning the history of slavery and racism, and being asked to imitate your oppressors to succeed."

And a followup tweet:

>"The most damaging reframe in American history is that using the universal tools for success is “acting white.” Solve that problem and we’ll have better visibility on the systemic racism that is primarily caused by the teachers unions."
You probably don't even need to make a DMCA claim. Probably just ask them to take it down. That's pretty much how the IA has operated in general. Mostly just act as if most people don't care (which they don't) and, for most other cases, take any requested actions because it's easier for both sides than a lawsuit.
I’ve been a big fan of Oxide’s approach for a while - thank you for articulating and sharing the thinking behind it.
Problem engineers are not necessarily all new hires. It could also be people who were there initially but fail to transition into a role more suitable for a growing company.

A classical example, which I've seen before, is a cowboy coder who can be a useful asset in the very early stages, but who later demonstrates a total lack of teamwork ability.

Such people are even worse than bad new hires because they have a certain clout with management who is therefore more willing to turn a blind eye.
Why are people so obsessed with hyper specializing in software development? Labeling yourself a react dev or rails dev or flutter dev or whatever is only going to limit your growth and options. Your career will outlive many tech stacks. Tech changes quickly. Never stop learning.
There are many different causes and all need to be addressed. Look over there is the refrain of people who want to hide their corruption.
Enhanced CO2 extraction works by pushing the CO2 through the oilfield as a carrier of the oil, so what you get out of the extraction borehole is a mix of CO2 and oil, and the CO2 just vents back to the atmosphere during refining. Some fraction is left in the oilfield, but it's fairly minor.

The cost of the CO2 injection system is thus offset by the profits from the oil recovered; if this were to go to zero then the corporation would abandon it as an unprofitable exercise.
Any instructions on how to run this and get same output or data? I've got access to some SPR systems and would be interested in helping
What a beautiful website! Sadly cannot find a RSS feed :/ !
Out of Africa, a New World War?
There is something here that I cannot quite put my finger on. I am going to guess there is a lot of tiny little things - for example :

>>> This tool is a collection of macros that work with Microsoft Word to export Word comments into a pre-formatted Excel spreadsheet, which is used to disposition comments

Considering NASA also released was it openshift and a mission control suite this ranges from the sublime to ridiculous.

But it does suggest something valuable - putting your good ideas into a big pot of open source means more code reuse and much better focus on small problems that bother just your organisation

i think it's worth trying at work
I think this is a bit unfair, evryone in the west has profited incredibly from China, greatly, and while I don't like the CCP at all, I think it's really sad the people of China who basically built the last 30 years, will be on the receiving end of a potential major financial collapse and are less likely to profit from their hard work and sacrifice.

For the world, this is all bad news, China may not have the money to at least clean up some of the toxic waste land and again it might end up costing everyone on earth dearly.

China is also a major trade partner for a lot of countries so they might be heavily impacted by this news too.
As long as you're okay with the reads being a little out of date after writes occur.
I don't even know how to write a linked list in Rust... Dang! I'm doomed... :o)
Agreed. It's easier to learn how to do practical programming with CLOS from Keene's book. AMOP is more useful for those who want to know more about how things work under the hood, or who maybe want to build their own implementation of CLOS or something similar, and easier to understand after you've absorbed Keene.
That's direct evidence that covid was in the market, but only circumstantial evidence for where it originated.

The market was both (1) close to the lab and (2) a place where nature contacts humans.

The lab origin theory says it originated in the lab, and then an infected WIV employee came to the market for lunch or dinner and created a super-spreader.

The zoonotic theory says an animal brought it or a precursor to the market, where it possibly mutated and jumped to humans.

The existence of covid in the market provides circumstantial evidence for both theories.
Like the idea, but tangible arts like paintings or live tours are scarce, unlike digital media. So for these money should be going directly to the organizer (artist, sculpture, troupe, etc). For non-tangible mediums, an endowment would make sense (despite the bickering). I can see an incentive for artists to then produce tangible arts for the monetary rewards, but also our industry already is filled with negative incentives and bickering. Something new would be nice.
There were a bunch of other vi alternatives back in that day. vim was just the one that wound up becoming the most popular.

nvi and vile were two names that spring to mind, but I know there were others.

Looks like vile itself started in 1992:

https://invisible-island.net/vile/
Did either of these billionaire's do much actual parenting in the same way us non-billionaires do?
Curious as to why this is posted? The graphed results are over two years old, and the most recent commit to the repo is Nov 25, 2021.
You're letting perfect be the enemey of the good. It's possible to do two things at once: say good job on repairability and also, bad job on software.
I agree that's a potential loss with a 20 year or life term, but I still argue this is a net gain for the world.

Edit: I might be flexible on the life part. But not the 20.
Some things make more money than others. A uniform pricing means that Disney can afford to keep their work protected for decades while my non-monetized short stories/illustrations/blog posts will be protected for a year.

How do you even price that per item? Do I pay once for the blog? Once per post?
The article suggests that the FDA has approved ivermectin as a COVID treatment, which is absolutely false.

A judge ruled that the FDA cannot interfere with the authority of a physician to prescribe medication to a patient. They could be prescribing aspirin to treat COVID, and the ruling would still apply.
"But you are made of my stuff"
- your dad
Inspecting rustc LLVM optimization remarks using cargo-remark
Surprising they didn't go the legal route, it must have made more sense just to follow the money.

Popular servers have monthly revenue in the millions from a mix of 'donations' and deals with steamers. Cfx takes a 'donation' cut from every 'donation'... highly profitable.

What do players get for these donations? Sometimes it merely the ability to play on a specific server, but often its content R* charges for in GTA:O.
I'm not sure it affects how you might think about probability distributions in general, although it might. I think it's more helpful in thinking about inferences about distributions and models?

The page mentions one concept, for example, pertaining to uniform distributions. We usually think of an uninformative prior distribution in Bayesian inference as being uniform, which it can be, but what you probably want is a uniform prior with regard to a metric of parameter distinguishability or something like that. This will often change depend on the model, and might not be uniform with regard to the original metric of the raw parameter.

There's a lot of other uses an implications along these lines: how you compare and evaluate models and parameter estimates.
>But if you really want to know what goes on amongst scientists, there's no alternative but to spend time talking to them.

I guess I can always have a monologue...
That’s an interesting statement, because from my vantage point “longevity” seems to be way, way down the priority list for pretty much any technology in JavaScript world. (The major exception being pure JSON.) It feels like if you open any JS codebase from more than 18 months ago, half the libraries will be deprecated or abandoned (not just the version, the entire library). Major patterns and frameworks reinvent themselves incompatibly on a biannual basis.

The purpose of an RPC IDL (protobuf being a “modern” example) is that you define the interface and encoding in a way that will still be functional when your “standard language” is long forgotten or unrecognizably different.
Some problems with 'first name' and 'last name' fields in data
A retired firefighter said every Portland, OR bridge would cut off each part of the city. This report doesn't cover this explicitly, but it's pretty clear that is a major complications to overcome anecdotally.
For sure, and like he says near the beginning of that video, "Most employees have moved to other buildings." I've been in some of those other buildings and guess what, they're almost entirely private offices... no open office plan.

They learned their lesson from the Frank Lloyd Wright building. It's a wonderful piece of architectural history, but it's not wonderful for productivity.

He doesn't mention one of the most interesting things about that building -- the building has no square corners, everything is round (even the elevator).
If I understand it correctly, that partition is not loading macOS, and is necessary for loading any OS — Asahi Remix, macOS, etc.

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M1-vs.-PC-Boot
I've been musing doing this as well, as I really can't find a mastodon server with a ruleset and community that I like, but I'm worried about the required drive space. Are there any affordable VPS hosts that would provide enough storage for a comfortable single-user mastodon instance?
Multiple ancestors on earth would likely have had a common ancestor elsewhere and would probably be difficult to distinguish from a single ancestor on earth.
Well, nobody has the intention of being a problem engineer. That said, from your comment I haven't really understood why you're considered (or are considering yourself) to be a problem engineer?
The incentives of science are often orthogonal to making a career in science.
You should read up on how DM is fitted vs how MOND is fitted. But neither preceded the data in the way you imply and DM is vastly more successful at predicting all observations with a single fit.
Edit: I have heard this before but it is never specific, in what way is it easier? I never needed the big selling points of SVN, binary files (not good enough for me at the time), controll etc.
I don't understand why this language exists. It just feels like a promotion vehicle by someone at Google who had enough clout to then get it shoehorned in to Flutter. If they had gone with JavaScript they could've made the switch to TypeScript later on. I realise this is being said with the benefit of hindsight but Flutter would be in a far better place today I suspect.
The 10% is non recoverable I believe. This means his parents essentially paid $25m to keep him out of jail for 6 months.
Of course. All you have to do is find people willing to do the work.
Incredibly dismissive of somebody's work, aren't ya? I regret breaking my own self-imposed rule of never answering follow-up questions on HN because there's always somebody willing to hand-wave away six months of my life and 40 years of real-world experience with a flippant comment of "oh, but that's easy if you don't have too..."
> Only a few states

Isn't it like 38 states? That's a lot more than 'a few'.

> and the Constitutionality is dubious.

And yet so many states have it. What's troubling is that so many of our politicians ( national and state ) openly support such an unconstitutional and anti-american law. Not to mention the media. China and russia's like "I'll have what Israel is having'.
youre making a real good case for better documenting one’s code right now
If carbonic acid has not been found before in space then this is an actual discovery. It dies not suffice to reason about something to prove it’s existence, you also must actually do the leg work of proving it. This is the main difference in scientific age and the ages that preceded it - logical reasoning is not sufficient.
That’s interesting about Austria, thanks for that! I may have underestimated them. (I did check their growth rate and for whatever reason not as strong as S Korea…)
> I wished many times that they just hired people with management skills from some field completely outside of science, a manager doesn't really need to know the intricacies of the work to do their job well.

Having been there too, I feel like this is another recipe for disaster. Technical management needs to be able to make calls on escalations — that's in fact one of their main jobs — and when they don't have the depth of knowledge to make the call on merit, they make it on rash impulse, or favoritism, or (perhaps worst of all) don't make the call and let issues fester.