skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

"The earliest versions of the parable of blind men and elephant is found in Buddhist, Hindu and Jain texts, as they discuss the limits of perception and the importance of complete context. The parable has several Indian variations [...]"
I'd like to focus on the "secret weapon" part of your question :)

I teach students, and I've seen all manner of people, and one thing that distinguishes those who get better vs those who don't is: consistency.

Show up every day to practice, to improve. Put in the effort. Try to do, try to be active. Listen to more experienced/accomplished people.

In the early days, it matters less exactly what you do. Most things will help, tutorials, courses, building your own thing. The difficult part is sticking with the process.

If you do these things *consistently*, you'll grow quickly.

PS: The second most important thing in my opinion is, managing discomfort/negative feedback.
> It would block adoption of better designed languages, tools and frameworks.

Tooling concerns are already are a major source of friction for adoption, nothing really special about LLMs in that regard.
I've used printf (or equivalent) more often than I've used a debugger but sometimes a debugger is the right way to find a problem. For example, you mention an "error message", but I've occasionally had situations in which a process running a binary built from a large code base that I have never even looked at (though I do have the source) dies for no obvious reason and with no useful output, but I've been able to restart everything, attach a debugger, and then, when it dies again, with great luck get enough information from the debugger to fix the bug faster than it would take to rebuild everything let alone insert printfs everywhere where they might help. Usually that's been in cases where I know roughly the sort of thing I'm looking for because I know the main differences between the system it's failing on and the systems it used to work on, though I have absolutely no idea where that sort of thing might be in the code that I've never looked at. If I'm running code I've just written myself I usually find I have no use for a debugger.
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> My proposal is simple: Actually do the damn evaluation, instead of just blindly siding with "moar security = moar better!"

Agree 100% on this.
People in low-income and "bad" neighbourhoods actually stand to gain a lot more by knowing their neighbours because they get a lot more out of community solidarity when there's trouble, they'll have networks to identify trouble earlier, etc.
To be fair, if they crack automated driving it'll revolutionize public transport too. Imagine buses routed dynamically, and sized perfectly to match demand. Or other automated, private cars on the road yielding to public transit vehicles.
Most cities where intercontinental tourists go to have Uber. And while I use Apple Maps rather than google I’ve used it in dozens of cities in dozens of countries on 6 continents with limited problems. Or of course I’ve just hailed taxied and shown them the hotel business card or location I’m going to.

China is probably the main tricky part, last time I went about 5 years ago I had issues paying with cash, although at least visa was accepted pretty much everywhere.
> we could have public transportation

> we can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own

I love public transportation and my favorite cities are ones that have the best public transportation.

But most of what I like about it is great when “visiting,” not living. When I’ve lived in cities that had great public transportation it was occasionally nice; I could go downtown and get drunk without worrying about/coordinating transportation.

But commute times on public transport are absolutely dreadful. Unless you win the lottery and your frequent destinations are along a single route with few stops, you’re transferring and waiting for a bunch of other folks.

And cities where public transport works well are densely packed, making getting downtown from the edges any other way difficult too.

Unless you’re talking about converting privatized point-to-point travel to public transportation, which sounds absolutely awesome and autonomous driving might bring closer to being a reality, I’d say I’m rather fond of going directly to my destination and back in less than 10min of drive time.

Edit: realizing from the comments here that many people’s experience with using a vehicle and public transport is a daily commute. I work from home and I don’t drive during “rush hour” when, for some reason, society pays to migrate an entire city full of knowledge workers from their home to a computer.

Living in the suburbs and not participating in daily commute culture looks a lot like “winning the lottery.”

An example of how I use my car: I choose to go to the grocery store with the best supply chains in my area and it adds ~5 minutes to my drive compared to the one that’s “walkable” as long as it’s not rush hour. I place my order on my phone, pull up, open my trunk, a store employee puts the groceries in, and I drive home.

That’s a hard baseline to compete with, especially for anyone who has a family they have to coordinate this around. I’d much rather stick my kids in a car seat and do the above than whatever the equivalent would be with public transportation.
I don't think that appealing to courtesy is really the play here.

We are discussing ideas about security in a place and manner that allows us to have honest and frank conversations.

I think security teams optimizing only for security is actually very apt analogy to cancer: Part of the organization is acting in a manner that is negatively impacting the organization at large - while positively impacting that subset of the organization.

Cancer is the act of some cells in your body prioritizing themselves at the expense of the whole.

Personally - I think you're digging to find an insult in that comment, and I take it as a way for you to disengage with the topic at large.

This is an attitude that is routinely used to shut out voices that don't match the current "dress code".

Trust me, I'm hardly going to be calling you cancer over the dinner table for not passing the salt. I'm using that word intentionally and carefully - in a frank and honest conversation. If you're feeling hurt (especially on behalf of someone else...) maybe go do something else?
The best thing about a debugger is that it works without any modification to the code. Prints and other debugging hacks sometimes get checked into version control and even if you are careful to avoid that the cognitive load slows you down.

That said there are certain things that confound debuggers or require technical tricks (like the method for debugging Java/C apps with both jdb and gdb which requires turning off the segfault trap). If the key to solving the problem involves understanding the sequence of events, or where the problem turns up when the breakpoint has been hit for the 74532th time prints win too.

Do you use a language with a logging facility? Learn how to use it and improve your skills.

In Java I use the debugger and unit tests a bit like I use the REPL in Python, that is I can code up an experiment in a unit test and rapidly cycle and experiment, and the great thing is I have a unit test that I can check in when I am done.
Regulators are playing way too fast and loose in this case, but given the number of human drivers that collide with firetrucks - just drop the "for a computer" from your definition.
See also

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.
Here are some possible reasons.

They use unmaintained C extensions that won't be updated.

They maintain C extensions that would be complex or painful to update.

They're concerned about fragmenting the ecosystem into GIL and No GIL.

They think that it will make single-threaded Python programs slower.

They have no interest in multithreaded Python and don't think the additional complexity is justified.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230818145647/https://www.thegu...
Being cautious does not mean you don’t have right of way.

I highly doubt emergency vehicles in the UK lack right of way.
I feel I have lost much of my ability to be a part of a community, due to the covid lockdown, full time work from home, and in general spending so much time on the internet.
The infrastructure is aimed at IT or any "bum on the seat" type of business were only tools that are required to do the work are a laptop and a phone.

But, if you, for instance want to do some light manufacturing - like making electronic devices, you are out of luck. In theory, you could do that kind of work in an office, but when estate agent hears about "soldering iron" or "ultrasonic cleaner" they nope out.
Even Silicon Valley did not really get residential fiber until about 10 or so years ago.

Speaking of tech hubs.
The mechanism, as I understand it, is that higher temperatures drives increased evaporation which leads to increased droughts. But the evaporated water in the atmosphere has to come back down again, which it will tend to do in a great big splash. These torrential rains, I’m led to believe, don’t really penetrate deep enough into the soil to alleviate the increased evaporation (too much too fast), and they also drove erosion which aggravates the droughts I think.
Thank you for the explanation. The last solution is indeed the logical one.

We have a minimum wage of 10 USD/hour in France (net, after the zillion of taxes) but the actual minimum is based on a collective bargain that exists in some families of employment (including waiters). The average net salary for a waiter is 1700 USD/month (this includes retirement, social security, unemployment etc.) - not sure how this compares with the US (if there is a way to compare at all, taken how vastly different the systems are)
> Why has the Biden administration not managed to install a new FCC commissioner

Because the Senate is a thing, and a very dysfunctional one at that.
> This one line is emblematic of the flaws in the article.

I don't think you can reasonably dismiss this article based on that line.

(1) It's just an aside, not part of the main argument; (2) It happens to be true.

Anyway... "Who knows, it might help" is OK (well, better than nothing), when there's not a significant cost to pay. But when there is, you need to go deeper.

There's a tradeoff being made and if you don't think of it that way, you're going to make a poor decision.
I'm not sure why do we need one. Nano works fine everywhere.
> It seems this is one of the situations where just focusing on the immediate area around you is faulty.

I got to see two Cruises interact with emergency vehicles last week! It was fascinating.

The ambulance was on a serious mission. Lights, loud sirens, very fast speeds[1].

The first Cruise was about to turn left onto the street where the ambulance was coming. As the ambulance zoomed by, the Cruise stopped and put on its blinkers. Looked like an “Oh shit I give up” reaction.

The second Cruise was about to go straight through a green light coming the opposite way of the ambulance. But it didn’t! When the ambulance was a block and a half away, the Cruise just stopped (at the green light) turned on its blinkers and froze still until the ambulance was gone.

Pretty cool to see. This was around 7pm in Nob Hill. Both cars were empty.

[1] emergency vehicles in SF often just flash lights for intersections, or only use their horn instead of the full siren. Helps with noise pollution in lesser emergencies.
The 2023 link still says "manufactured between January 2011 and February 2014" though, so even the new recall is for models from 9+ years ago?
I'm not going to comment on Cruise specifically, but keep in mind that AV companies have an insane burn rate in the order of 9 figures yearly or more, without any meaningful revenue at this point in time. They're under a lot of pressure to show some kind of growth, especially considering the current environment in which money isn't as easy to get anymore.
It's amazing to me that driverless cars seem to have so much trouble with emergency vehicles. They already know how to avoid other cars; seems like another car that's very big, very red, and very blinky would be even easier to avoid.
I'm assuming you mean a software-only debugger, and I mostly feel the same way as you. The process of starting the debugger, setting breakpoints, etc. feels a lot like going to the doctor when you're sick rather than self-diagnosing, which works great 90% of the time and doesn't involve getting into the car and lots of waiting.

I could see a strong use for things like multithreading, profiling, seeing a list of variables/values that are in-scope at a breakpoint. The more complex the software, the more useful...

The last time I needed a software debugger, a tool I was using would communicate with another by sending its PID as an ID. Problem? The tool thought the PID fit in a 16-bit, so it was sending a totally bogus number. I probably would have found this eventually, but with the debugger, it was as easy as "Why is the sent PID 39283 instead of 170355?" This only occurs after Windows has been on for several weeks and enough conhost/svchost/wslhost processes push new PIDs above 65535.

Humorously, such a bug goes away when you "turn the PC off and on again"

-----

Hardware debuggers (for microcontrollers) often have a whole host of benefits that are immediately obvious once you involve any physical I/O. Also, they're vital for things like event logging (for Arm, PMU events flag for cache misses, branch events, operation stalls, and much more) or seeing what's happening with an off-chip device, peripheral, other cores, anything to do with watchdogs, etc.

Writing something like impact failure handlers for a drive head controller for a hard drive, you'll want to be able to set an external trigger as soon as the failure is initiated, connect that to your debugger via one of its trigger-detecting inputs, and then you can capture the real-time data and execution traces and move back to the exact moment the failure occurred, how your variables changed, and what exactly the failure handler did to ensure the drive head attempted to park as soon as possible. In short, this is not printf-able, but it is also an extreme example.
In Croatia, emergency vehicles don't have the right to run the red light (although they universally do, sometimes carefully - other times less so).

They do have right of way when the right of way is determined by traffic signs and not by traffic lights.
Not a single complete source but possibly a good pointer:

https://archive.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/docs/SBSTA-44/Sbsta_...
I'm sure you're right but I've never lived in a suburb. Even in the dense urban neighborhoods of my experience there is a big difference. Car ownership & use may play a role though. The wealthier neighborhoods are more walkable & bikeable and closer to transit but still have more people with cars, more space taken up by garages.
It has seemed to me throughout this year with the contentious CPUC ruling that Waymo has made a huge strategic error by not denouncing Cruise. They should have totally thrown Cruise under a bus, but it's too late now. The press and the government simply conflate them as "Cruise and Waymo" or "the AV industry".
Google, the surveillance company with the attention span of a gnat? Why are you holding them up as an exemplar? They can't even stick with software projects that create returns over years, of course they failed at infrastructure that creates returns over decades.
They get the monopoly without the universal service requirements that the utility and wire-line phone companies have.
ok, I can see how the tweet on the top of the article can have that effect. In my defence, this was a humorous tweet that happened in a week where everybody on twitter, frontend and backend, were dunking on each other. So I wrote that in a humorous way. Lots of people liked it and it was funny, so I decided to open the article with it.

However taking a step back, if you don't have the context around the tweet, it can certainly be seen this way.

Since it was not my intention to have that tone, I will remove the tweet from the article.
If the sirens are at your back, you don't want that robocar to stop and hamper the traffic but to choose a side on the road/street to either park or continue its course until there is room to be passed by the emergency vehicule.

Blaring sirens can be easy to detect, doesn't mean the reaction should always be the same.

[1] preferably same as other vehicules which are possibly blocking traffic for emergency vehicles.
They are not, no.
Do these cars have microphones listening for cues like sirens?
That reminds me of Tig Notaro's incredible stand-up set when she found out she had cancer:

"I have cancer, how are you?" "Is everyone having a good time? I have cancer."

It's a masterpiece, in my opinion. Tig finds an intensely awkward situation with an audience that showed up for comedy, and just presses on it relentlessly. I really hope that when it's my turn, I can handle it like her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXk1DSbXsZk
jesus christ, i dont think ive ever seen an article that beats around the bush for as long as this one does before finally getting to the point.

anyways, for those who don't have the patience, the title is misleading.
it's just some old software from the 90s. It's only ancient if you're one of those people who completely rewrites their entire code base from the ground up every two years because to pad out your resume with whatever bullshit new "framework" is in vogue. Contrary to popular belief you actually can just keep using the same software indefinitely, it doesn't degrade with age, and for the most part the hardware lasts pretty long too as long as you take care of it (with a few exceptions like optical drives and SSDs).
> Isn't that framing what the sentiment used to be towards computers playing Go,

No. I was a student in the mid-90s, and the position of everyone regarding Go was "We'll have enough compute power one day".

It was only after AlphaGo hit the news with its wins that I started seeing this revisionist history of "They said the computer will never win at Go".

To which I have to reply "No. They did not".
Is there a link someone could share (other than the one to the post)?
> I find the five vs. six distinction rather interesting though. What's up with that?

There's no reasonable mechanism in which greeting people causes well-being. So asking why it caps out at 6 makes no sense, unless you implicitly want to call out their bullshit. It's just another vague correlation in a overinterpreted study of noisy data.
Ah, there must be a face-saving campaign on too, because when I see YouTube ads, I've been seeing a lot of content insisting "ASPARTAME IS SAFE."
I've ridden both and Cruise just sucks. Riding in their car is terrifying.
> I’ve never need to rely on anyone, other than of course normal economic transactions.

That's funny. You are relying on thousands of other people every day, all day long. you just don't realize it. And not all of those are economic transactions there is plenty of goodwill involved. For instance, you rely on other people not to kill you when you are driving. Every time a stranger saves your bacon when you make a mistake, for instance. They don't have to! But if that's your worldview I don't think I'll be able to change it.

> Why would I park my car in a ditch?

I don't think anybody who ever parked their car in a ditch asked that question prior to it happening and afterwards they probably still didn't know. But in areas where there is snow it isn't rare at all to have vehicles do stuff that wasn't quite in the plan. My neighbor in Canada managed to do this with a tractor. Fortunately for him I had a bigger tractor and was able to pull his out of the ditch. And when it was my turn someone kindly brought over an excavator...

Society is a fabric, and no man is an island, not even you. You may have the illusion that you are but from the cradle to the grave you are 100% dependent on other people. Unless you live in the boonies and grow your own food and hunt, but if that were the case you wouldn't be writing here. Speaking of which: right now you rely on me to converse with you.
No that's silly, sorry.

How do you see that actually panning out? Convince every fire and police department to retrofit every vehicle in their fleet before you have SDC's in the area? What if you want to launch to consumers in general, do you need to convince every police and fire department in the whole country?

Humans can detect emergency vehicles coming by the sound of the sirens. It's definitely possible for machines to do the same.
Agree it's not intractable (nearly any problem is tractable if you give yourself a long enough time horizon), but "premature" seems almost like an understatement?

And this isn't just shade directly at Cruise, this seems to apply to all of the SDV companies out there. It's far from being ready for primetime. And speaking who was an early cheerleader of SDVs, and who continues to be highly supportive of their development, I'm increasingly skeptical that they are ready-enough to be tested en masse on public streets.

The recent Cruise meltdown re: Outside Lands was pretty concerning. In a natural disaster (like the types that the Bay Area is highly prone to!) the idea is just that you'd have all of these unoccupied vehicles sitting in the middle of the street preventing evacuation and emergency access?!
There’s a lot of deployed Python code that uses multithreading. The genie is out of the bottle, so to speak.

The JavaScript model is, basically, the sub-interpreter model. You have multiple independent heaps. Given independent heaps, you write single-threaded code and don't worry about locking, because no other thread can modify objects in your heap anyway, outside of special objects like SharedArrayBuffer.

Maybe you could enable GIL-free, single-threaded, sub-interpreter Python as a compile-time option. But it would break such a large amount of code out there. It would be a very difficult transition, practically speaking.
Working on https://github.com/evmar/retrowin32, I disassembled one old demo that wouldn't run on my native Windows machine -- turns out it was requesting 320x200 fullscreen resolution and aborting if it couldn't get it. (Not sure why the Windows machine wouldn't do it...)
https://www.fama.org/forum_articles/emergency-responder-coll...

"In 2017 alone, more than 15,000 fire department vehicles were involved in collisions nationwide."