skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Egrodo commented Aug 17, 2023 •

Thanks for the report! I confirmed that this is a recent regression and spent an afternoon looking into it. The fix has landed and should be deployed on Monday :)

This was an interesting bug so I figured I'd explain the fix below for anyone interested:

the issue boiled down to an async wrapper we had over the DataTransfer constructor that we were using to check osme other things before handling the DT. We were doing something like:

const data = event.clipboardData;

let text = data.getData(MIMETYPE_1);
await SomePromise();
if (text == null) {
text = data.getData(MIMETYPE_2);
}
...

In this case MIMETYPE_1 was set when copying things from within WAWeb, and MIMETYPE_2 was text/plain, so basically any text copied from outside the app fell into this.

The issue was that by calling await we were switching into a different callstack, thus (presumably) triggering Firefox's more aggressive garbage collection to forget the contents of the data object. So when it came to calling data.getData the second time, the contents of the data object were missing, and we'd overwrite text with nullish. This is unintuitive since we didn't switch lexical scopes, but I suppose Firefox considers DataTransfer objects more expensive than other browsers?

The fix was to run both checks at the same time before calling any async code so the data would be preserved:

Aka:

const data = event.clipboardData;

let textOne = data.getData(MIMETYPE_1);
let textTwo = data.getData(MIMETYPE_2);
await SomePromise();
let text = textOne;
if (text == null) {
text = textTwo;
}
... <<
> I don't understand the comparisons to megacorps. It's not like anyone is donating to Apple or the NYT.

Consumers give them money anyway, it's known as "sales".

What happens is that when companies become large enough, it becomes prudent from a tax perpsective to "give back to the community" and practice philanthropy. Therefore, your iPhone dollars and your NYT subscriptions are going toward charitable causes. You may or may not be able to find out what they are. Many people have gone sleuthing for these links, and made much hay about them.

The other thing corporations do is support employees in various ways. For example, employees might be permitted a certain number of hours of community service for charitable volunteering. Or, employees' charitable donations may be matched by the employer, etc. These matches may be restricted to a shortlist of preferred charities. More hay can be made about all that.

Corporations are also, of course, one of the biggest and most powerful sectors of lobbyists in these United States. Corporations donate the most tax dollars to candidates and campaigns, and they actively send lobbyists to legislatures to ensure that their interests are met. Again, your iPhone dollars at work.

So while Wikipedia is free and open and requesting your donations, you're purchasing gobs of stuff every day from corporations, and that's why people these days often factor in the politics of said corporation in our decisions whether to buy or not buy, and where to buy.
It is confusing indeed, I usually use X in conversation to refer to any unknowns that isn’t the main discussion point, now, whenever I read these articles it’s confusing to follow, at least call it X-twitter, X-app or anything similar.
There are a couple of clear traits to bad mass movements:

> the faithful strive to escape suspicion by adhering zealously to prescribed behavior and opinion

And also the demonising of individuals or groups, rewriting of history and not having any clear goals or demands, or them being utopian as in unattainable.
Do you use a VPS/cloud VM as a development machine? What is your setup?
That's true. Unfortunately it's not feasible to build hydroelectric everywhere.
Natural history museum closes because of chemicals in taxidermy collection
Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 (Rope Piece)
I'm in Europe and I've had very poor experiences with local carriers in getting an eSIM :( Most of them outright refuse unless you are on a mobile contract plan with them (I'm not, I hate contracts so I only use prepay). On prepay they don't want to support it here in Spain for whatever stupid reason even though I've had my prepay number for 10 years. They also levy much more restrictions on the whole ordeal: Usually only locally sold models are allowed. So you can't use a Dutch Samsung phone with a Spanish eSIM. I'm really annoyed with this because the whole idea of eSIM was to make things easier for the customer, not harder and more restrictive.

Perhaps the carriers that specialise in temporary data contracts for travelers are ok, but local permanent carriers are crap with this.
This is kind of like "LLaMa implemented in 9 lines of Python" and 8 of those 9 lines are import statements followed by a huge one-liner composing library functions

If civilization were to collapse tomorrow and the survivors were left in the stone age with "All of Physics in 9 lines", it would arguably be useless. There's so much missing/buried context.
The MAGA movement does not seem to have any clear goals; the general theme I discern from it is "burn it all to the ground" (a literal quote from a supporter).

Some of their grievances are legitimate (government failures, the decline of relative prosperity) and others are "understandable" (the fear and dislike of "others" that they are uncomfortable with (LGBQT+, different religions and races, the decline of the default dominance of their alphas (white men)), the defining name of their movement is as vague as can be.

That is, what is the specific greatness to be returned to and what does achieving it look like?
You have a different definition of “bad” than PG&E. You are trying to minimize the release of CO2, they are trying to minimize the spending of dollars. As a huge generalization, building a power plant is more expensive than running it, so being able to run it 24/7 is generally more profitable than having to use “peaker” plants that are only running and profiting from 4-9pm.
They’re very useful. Although it’s sometimes hard to get eSIMs direct from carriers internationally since many only grant them on post-paid contracts.

SIM cards also have their place, however, which is why Apple’s take on it is weird. When traveling, especially with so much MFA (for better or worse) is linked to a phone number, it makes having your phone damaged a major issue. You can’t simply pop out the SIM and move it across to a new phone.

Even if you manage to get a new eSIM, most of the time you can’t activate it until you’re back in your origin country.

This as an issue (carrier or otherwise) needs to be addressed with some urgency.
> by instituting a GitHub based workflow to track patch status, but not everybody uses this.

The problem with using GitHub is that you are now at the whims of the US government[0]. If you have contributors in a sanctioned country they are not cut off from the project and their accounts. By pushing for GitHub you are signalling that you don't want free software, you only want "free for western countries" software

The nice thing about emails is that anyone can send an email. There is no third party account sign up needed.

> I used to configure mutt to use imap and connect to Gmail directly, but gmail has gone out of their way to make imap as shitty as possible

That's the other big problem is that gmail (hotmail too) just sucks for email. Personally I've switched to fastmail and have no issues with imap/isync/offlineimap.

---

0: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-coun...
I am from northern Connecticut on the Massachusetts border. I had a fairly typical rural New England accent. As an adult I decided I wanted to own a farm and I hated the NE winter, so I moved to southern Missouri. I now sound like I was born here, but if I go home I'm back to dropping R's and calling milkshakes "frappes" within a day.
Verifying Your Identity on X Will Require Taking a Selfie and a Gov. issued ID
The path to a digital ID/$ society is closer than ever, we are beta testing it live!

Not long ago the press kept diabolizing China for their social credit system, turns out it wasn't a bad idea, or was it, i'm lost!?
Not writing allegory (a very specific kind of comparison) doesn't mean nothing in the book is a metaphor. It's willful ignorance to pretend LotR has no ideology or non-narrative (moral, epistemic, metaphysical, etc.) content. Tolkien just doesn't want people to say "... and so the orcs are the Germans."
It's not an electron app, for one
By volume grown?

By number of legal licenses?

Where the new hot strains are bred?

Where the bags for the new hot strains are made?

different answer to every question.
The Missing Screwtape Letters from Academia
He did however renounced his wealth and lived a life of poverty. And Buddhism isn’t the story of siddhartha alone. He had many followers that figure in the pali canon quite extensively, and they were poor, rich, some even developmentally disabled. Concurrently, there were a lot of ascetics that siddhartha studied with - Buddhism didn’t spring out of his mind wholly formed, it was a distillation of thousands of years of Indian philosophy into a structured process with a structured monk hood and method of “evangelizing” and maintaining coherency of his teachings.

However, I’m not specifically picking on siddhartha, but on Buddhism. Buddhism has seen many people through immensely difficult situations in life, which would cause suffering if you didn’t have a way of framing the conscious experience and it’s impact on emotional and physical well being.

I used the example of Myanmar and Cambodia on purpose - they are Buddhist countries, and while not everyone who is Buddhist practices Buddhist teachings, many do. And it’s impossible to say the Burmese and Cambodians aren’t impoverished and oppressed. Yet many find through Buddhism an ability to not suffer, and lead content and full lives despite. They labor under extreme difficulty, and if you think laboring in the tropics is easy … it’s not. Yet - still, I don’t see the SLS I see in American cities and rural settings, or in UK coastal towns, etc. They’re not magical and mystical beings in burma or Cambodia, they just have access to a way of thinking that enables them to not suffer emotionally from an unpleasant life. They would escape if they could, because Buddhism doesn’t teach acceptance of unpleasantness, but it does teach how to not suffer when things are unpleasant.
Ok, you raised some very good points. first things first, you do get unemployment and sick benefits if you insure yourself, as self employed this is voluntary in Germany and in Austria you do get some basic coverage with statutory insurance afaik.

The specific case you described is not tax avoidance but tax fraud and anyone can replicate it or report it depending on their preferred moral inclination.

I'm talking about tax avoidance, again, I'm from eastern Europe and I know a _lot_ of people who have dependant sources of income but act as independent contractors despite working countless years for one employer and as a result paying much less on taxes despite having 5x income of average employee and this is taken out of said average employees salary who don't have the opportunity to work in high demand IT field whether due to education or not having above average IQ.

Of course there are a lot of people like you described in food, entertainment, maintenance or house building service who take cash on hand and never report it, but as said this is fraud not avoidance.
A little OT: do the information theory based proofs of limits on how effective compression can be also prove that backwards time travel is impossible?

If backwards time travel were possible then your "compression algorithm" could simply be deleting the file. To recover the file go back in time to before it was deleted and make a copy.

With this you can "compress" giant files down to just a short description of a place and time where the file was on your computer.
More discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37188502

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182579
The current SPA paradigm was adopted to solve a number issues that engineering teams were facing. Your sentiment is one I'm seeing a lot more as of recently, which leads me to believe we're approaching the end of the current web development paradigm. There's too much time wasted writing _glue_ when developing SPAs: database queries, back-end controllers, data serialization, network requests, front-end state, shadow dom, etc. Lots of frameworks coming out that essentially remove the need to write glue code. I expect this trend to continue until we reach the point where you are mostly just coding a few things: schema, non-generalizable business logic, and presentation.
What is a Birkeland current?
Ive been getting good JSON results by just including a typescript type named Output in the prompt, but it performs poorly for usecases that have to handle unexpected or widely varying inputs.

Thanks for the links, I missed OpenAi's function-calling announcement. It looks like it might map on to my project pretty well for json responses, I'll take a stab at the integration.
I don't know when we started splitting people into "frontend" and "backend" teams (FAANG influence?) and for what reasons, but 10 years ago we hired people with a general background, smart and curious enough to learn SQL, HTML/CSS/JS and whatever language you want to use on the server, able to build some end-to-end CRUD features on their own. And that's like what 99% of the companies need.

My point being: when you have the same person building the UI and the API, you avoid a lot of the problems described in this article.
This is a well thought out post, and the blindness rage causes will lead people to continue to underestimate people, and wonder why things don’t turn out the way they expected.
> I've always found that ruling so bad. Who pushes the button is the least important part of photography and can be easily automated. It's choosing the subject matter, getting the camera to that location, angles, exposure, lenses, and taking the time to do it all that is the creative part.

Wasn't the point that all those things were absent in that case? If the monkey indeed snatch the camera completely unexpectedly, and then proceeded to take a selfie of itself, then the photographer didn't choose the subject matter, location, angles, exposure, or anything else.
These attacks on CPU defects do work, and if they are being used to spy on people connected to internet, the attackers won't announce it.

If you really care about secrecy of your data, you would not be asking - you have to enable all mitigations, and do much more work to change patterns of computer use in a radical way to make your data somewhat secure against this level of craft.

If you care about sane practices that don't cost a lot but you don't consider yourself to be an interesting target, or you're not going to change your habits of computer use, chances are, someone on the internet slurping your data randomly is not the end of the world. If that is the case (most people), then on your personal laptop you can turn the costly mitigations off. After all, keeping them all on won't by itself give you solid security, most probably there are many more attacks on CPU/kernel out there for which there are no mitigations yet.

About the only scenario where keeping mitigations on is important and also "enough" is hosting/cloud vendors. "We follow the minimum industry security standard, but we don't guarantee someone else is not reading your data, that would be almost impossible."
This can't go on (2021)
Incompetence is the wrong word, but in an industry that grows so fast that 3 years of experience is considered senior, many people aren’t even aware that the old ways are an option.

In my experience, the percentage of large react sites where someone sat down and seriously considered using old fashioned server side rendering, but decided on React because the site actually required a huge amount of interactivity is close to zero.

Every React site I’ve ever been involved with in in the last say 7 years was using React because “that’s the way it’s done”, and anything else was just a post hoc justification.
> Sure, I suppose we can all use more transparency, especially with a non-profit, but legally, they don't need to tell you more than they already do. Solution is easy: don't donate. But why write a hitpiece?

When you assume it's just going to Wikipedia, you don't know not to donate. Thus, you see articles like making people aware in the first place.
We moved from downtown in a city to an hour from the nearest store, in the middle of a 20,000 acre expanse of national forest. My life long allergies disappeared inside of a year
Solar Panels Won’t Work in Power Outages
>The companies are producing climate emissions on your behalf
Let's not be naive, most if not all things they produce on my behalf could easily be produced with a more ecological process, it would simply require reduction of profit to retool/rebuild infrastructure. Which we all know is only going to happen by enforcement/regulation. If all of that's true, political action is the answer for "most effective individual action you can take to impact climate change", not "abstaining from vacation and plastic straws".

>A lot of stuff will become green when energy and transport is green.

Exactly, which is why we should utilize regulation to tip the economic scales of profitability in different methods of energy production... And other such legislative tools we can use to incentivize such transitions... All of which relies not on "paper straws" but on concerted political action.
For one, the linux kernel itself relies on this UB - https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=93031#c5, linked from OP.

And indeed linux would hit UBSAN reports on those, but just disables it if native unaligned load/store is configured - last paragraph of https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/706a741595047797872e6...

At present there's almost no reliance on this UB by compilers on something that actually has a chance of affecting real code, so it's not particularly unexpected that software appears to work.
> They’re very useful. Although it’s sometimes hard to get eSIMs direct from carriers internationally since many only grant them on post-paid contracts.

Exactly, this is a huge problem for me because I don't do post-paid (after one bill with unintended overage charges, I much prefer them just cutting me off until I pay again).

The sim swapping being controlled by the provider (every time you need a new QR and they need to 'grant' it to you) is more restrictive too, and they usually enforce only models they sell directly. It's a real loss of flexibility that we used to have with hardware SIMs.
And what happens after they're caught...?
It was fine. There's a number of related projects that are all incredibly minor who had similar demos and somehow were also managed by similar personality types. I've worked with many people over the years but somehow they get their own special group.

Sometimes you run into them at SigGraph, they're these emperors where their kingdom is their mind. They have those messy sprawling websites that read like Doc Brown's scrapbook.

It's an archetype I feel certainly adjacent to and fearful of.

Regardless, about 6 months ago I left my job trying to catch up on all the AI craze because I think that might be the missing piece in moving this class of projects to the next step.

It's going slowly, motivation is hard and this is still kind of a moonshot.

The information organization required to make these memex inspired thought navigational systems truly useful was fleeting, subjective, and labor intensive. AI can do that, pretty well actually, and in personal, subjective ways.

VR and AR can as well and I explored that enough to conclude it's too complicated. You can certainly express the dimensionality needed and tune things accordingly but it's too complicated to be useful.

There's a cognitive limit on the amount of dimensionality and complexity that most people can handle.

There are certainly some brilliant people who don't seem bound by these limits but that's not the point here. It's about taking the information that usually only brilliant people have access to and expanding that so that merely average people like myself can gain competence in it as well.

Chat bots are fine but that's not going to get you from 0 to say, abstract algebras, modern quantum physics, or field theory, which I strongly believe should be accessible to say, 40-60% of people motivated enough to learn it and I strongly believe it currently is not because of the cognitive limits I expressed above by the traditional linear instruction methods.

Getting to the next paradigm is something more people should be working on

Turning the Internet into a true learning machine needs more work and hopefully AI can help
The blog post is also kind of unhinged because in the incredibly rare cases where you would want to write code like this you can literally just use the asm keyword.

I think it's also worth considering WHY compilers (and the C standard) make these kinds of assumptions. For starters, not all hardware platforms allow unaligned accesses at all. Even on x86 where it's supported, you want to avoid doing unaligned reads at all costs because they're up to 2x slower than aligned accesses. God forbid you try to use unaligned atomics, because while technically supported by x86 they're 200x slower than using the LOCK prefix with an aligned read.[^1] The fact that you need to go through escape hatches to get the compiler to generate code to do unaligned loads and stores is a good thing, because it helps prevent people from writing code with mysterious slowdowns.

Writing a function that takes two pointers of the same type already has to pessimize loads and stores on the assumption that the pointers could alias. That is to say, if your function takes int p, int q then doing a store to p requires reloading q, because p and q could point to the same thing. Thankfully in some situations the compiler can figure out that in a certain context p and q have different addresses and therefore can't alias, this helps the compiler generate faster code (by avoiding redundant loads). If p and q are allowed to alias even when they have different addresses, this would all go out the window and you'd basically need to assume that all pointer types could alias under any situation. This would be TERRIBLE for performance.

[^1]: https://rigtorp.se/split-locks/
Bob Frankston discusses his experience in writing VisiCalc back in 1978 [video]
Your first point is addressed in the article. For the second point, my experience is that the backend probably needs some work in that case anyway. If the backend is well designed, then only the presentation API endpoint needs to change. So a BE engineer is doing the tweaking instead of a FE engineer; not a big deal. Less of a big deal if there's no line drawn between FE and BE engineers.
Yes, this is how marketing works. Brands try to expand the appeal of their products beyond their existing user base.