skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> He never actually questions his own system, because he's ultimately an engineer. He's clueless on social structures or systems.

I'm sorry, but that is a false dichotomy and downright ridiculous assessment. Being a good engineer does not disqualify you from deeply understanding social organization or dynamic systems.

I am an engineer and those two topics are among the most critical which guide my work. I'm obsessed with these topics. Being an engineer makes thinking about these things easier, not harder.

Are you next going to proclaim that actors are clueless about politics?
Working without an IDE, I have less confidence when making potentially impactful changes. Where else is 'foo' used? What are the code paths that lead to method 'x'? If I rename this, will my tests also reference the new name?
Damn that's crazy. Users seeing ads, watching them in their entirety and writing about them?! An advertiser's wet dream. Unparalleled engagement
Was it? Vitalik's essay studies a case where that was alleged, and it was found that Twitter hadn't intervened. The note appearing then disappearing was organic and driven by user interactions. If you or Gizmodo want to claim otherwise, this is the standard of proof now expected. That's the power of decentralized systems - you can audit them!

Looking at that specific note, it's obvious that the note was extremely open to dispute and that's why it was voted down. You don't need to invoke the spectre of The Terrible Elon to explain that. The medical establishment has by their own admission created an endless torrent of false claims about vaccine safety, so it's something where you just aren't going to get bipartisan consensus about anything at all.
Imagine solving the affordable housing problem, but by doing so you create a nation scale ponzi scheme with trillions of dollars on the line because it also simultaneously made up the majority of your country's economic activity for 2 decades. That's what China is in the pickle with.

It's great they have all this housing, except there's both nobody to live in them (they were investment homes) and there's all this debt tied up in even completing the ones that were ponzied out.

They basically took the US 2008 Mortgage fiancnial crisis and said, WE CAN MAKE IT BIGGER, BY A LOT.
Not complaining really. I mentioned this mostly for entertainment value, besides pointing out that things are not always as straightforward as it might seem. (Also triggered by the absurd precision of the number in the title.)
Something I have been pondering for a while: Is there a demand from hobbyists for custom, low-grade home-grown ICs to such a degree that somebody could make side money from it? Sam Zeloof is now going "all in", but we don't know how it will turn out, and it definitely seems more serious than low-grade hobbyist ICs.

I know that I would be willing to pay for such a service, and doing it myself is definitely out of reach. OTOH this is really a niche even among hobbyists, and hard enough that making a 2-NAND in the $10-$100 range could be considered a huge success already.

(The other special appeal to hobbyists, other than just doing it, would be a shorter turnaround time than getting your place on a multi-project wafer and waiting 1-2 years to know if you made a mistake)
"Do this only orally" is always to hide evidence from a future court discovery.

I don't think Tesla would do this unless management consider it very serious.
It’s basically the front subframe.

https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/tesla-m...

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-y-front-megacast-giga-...
Oh wow. Details show how bad my memory is as well - stories fade and change over time :)

Well over a decade has passed now and I have nothing to do with Windows whatsoever any more and am running fully Apple on the desktop and Linux on the server side of things. I wouldn't have anything to do with it any more. That was a completely wrong prediction. I inherited a lot of Hyper-V infrastructure with SCVMM which really finished it off.

What did work was CentOS on AWS EC2 though although I'm not sure that's good any more what with the whole RHEL controversy recently.

So for another future prediction which will be equally wrong: I don't have a clue any more and am trying desperately to find a way out of the industry.
Because large systems are complex and have very complex and hard to detect failure modes.

What is more impressive is how rare these events are, given the complexity of the underlying systems. Redundancy is not without its own problems (source of truth, for instance).
That's what assembly programmers do, they re-use code. They just don't need to ship huge runtimes to be then loaded into memory.
It is of course far better for a country to spend money on social programs than on weapons, but I don't think it's true that the Pax Americana subsidised it. The US started its social programs before WW2, and continued during and after WW2 when it was also spending a lot on weapons. All NATO countries spent a lot on weapons during the Cold War while also funding social programs.

So if you see the Cold War as the Pax Americana, then they did go together, but I don't see how one subsidised the other. And plenty of countries that stayed out of the Cold War had similar strong social programs.
...racism against little kids?
carnival weight guessers are about to have a new Renaissance
Not OP but I prefer trailing return type syntax if I were designing a language from scratch... I sometimes wish C++11 would have added the `func` keyword as an alias for `auto` in function declarations.
When confronted with a pile of shit, one should not conclude there's a pony in there somewhere.
Edit: whoops, thought this was ask HN due to the question mark. Pretty cool stuff.

Sam Zellof (YouTube) is probably your best answer. My project civboot.org is basically an attempt to answer a similar question and my answer is: reduce the complexity of technology and then build the simplified but effective systems.

It's not going to be "at home" (the tech is way too complicated for that) but it could be a university or similar (hopefully).
> Unfortunately instances need to make money to be sustainable to cover the hosting costs as they get more users.

That's true, but instances do not need to continuously get more users for the Fediverse to be successful. In fact, that would lead to an unhealthy federated network. See what happened to XMPP with Google Talk for example.

For the Fediverse to be successful, the cost of running it must be distributed.

> In the end, the only instances that will be around are the largest and most centralized instances that have the most users.

I absolutely disagree. It's rare that small instances struggle to keep the lights on, because they are so cheap and easy to run. You can run Pleroma for a few people easily on a $5 VPS or a Raspberry Pi in your closet. Source: I did that. The only reason I don't anymore is because I migrated my instance to my Dell server, because I have one.

Big instances are the ones that struggle the most, because they're the ones that the cost is real enough to be a problem that needs to be considered. See rglullis' comment for an example of this. See the mastodon.technology shutdown[0] for another example.

> Thus, even if that happens, donations will not be a viable source of revenue to counter the increasing operational costs as an instance gets used by more users.

I agree.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33120136
Did you take your car this morning? A bike? A plane recently? All these were designed with industrial finite elements codes that are programmed in Fortran. Radioss, Ansys, Abaqus, LS-Dyna, Code_Aster… Fortran is all around you, in your phone that has been designed to survive drop test, the solder creeping of its BGAs, the thermals… Fortran is not dying, it’s supporting your standard of living.
For me, the most damning thing about the book is the invective against the passive. The book opens with use of the passive voice, its authors apparently unaware how idiomatic its use is in certain circumstances. It introduces the passive voice with a sentence that is in the passive voice but is so independently clunky that an astute reader would wonder "no, wait, why would anyone attempt the passive?" It then goes through a rewriting-several-examples section where only one of the four examples manages to start in the passive.

Why should one use a book on English grammar that can't correctly identify English grammar in the first place?
All that is is a style guide for government publications. It's not binding on anyone else, and certainly is not representative of how French people really speak or write.
> he's clearly the best male tennis player that ever lived

Who are the non-male tennis players that are better than him?
There’s a GNAT release for M1 now. The FSF Ada compiler is based on GCC so it has worked for RISC-V and other ARM CPUs for a little while now as well.

Ada’s dynamic memory principles are definitely unique. For heap allocation its based around memory pools, at least in GNAT. For the most part it’s RTTI but you can do manual new/free style too (though discouraged).

Ada uses a secondary stack as well for variable-length function returns, so in practice you don’t need to do heap allocation very much.

There are also equivalents of some STL containers like vector that can handle heap allocations for you safely.
In defense of your job, make sure you are constantly communicating how much uptime / how stable / reliable your services are. One reason why the people with lots of downtime are hailed as "heroes" is because they get more face-to-face time with upper management.

Of course, some managers will be dumb and equate instability with revenue.
Interesting. I did ride Finnish suburban trains a bit but never saw this. Those were single-floor though.
I don't have a Twitter account. How do I vote on a Communinty note?

Do I vote in the same or different place where my neighbor's botnet votes?
Version 1.48.1 on iOS has an on-demand setting like Wireguard does.

https://i.imgur.com/Orupuu8.jpg
Are cast structural parts common on modern cars? I thought the structure of modern cars was forged parts welded together by robots.
This is a stylistic difference, as there are some places where the leading return type is invalid, but a trailing return type using the -> is valid. For example, an immediately invoked lambda expression in which some of the returned values require type conversions.

For this reason, some prefer a “auto almost everywhere” style, in which you preferentially use trailing return types.
Luckily there's a website for that:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel

Shape rotator = someone who can rotate shapes in their head, a proxy for IQ. Someone with good mathematical or STEM skills and who feels unvalued for it.

Wordcel = someone good with words/rhetoric who feels like their skill in this field isn't valued enough / it doesn't get them far enough.
This gave me a good chuckle - thank you <3
I went on a road trip with my coworker last week. We were together and he had to attend to a retrospective meeting that was planned to last for 2 hours or so. The stand-in scrum master (their original SM was on vacation so someone stood in) said this would be an unusual retro because they had done 6 or 7 sprints and never did a retro on each of them.

I am in another section and we have retro meetings but they take 1 hour or less. Anyways, what caught my attention was two very stupid things introduced by their scrum master:

- estimating story points for completed tasks: they went over each ticket that was marked as done and asked how many days it took to complete the task. Me and the others on the car couldn't believe what we were listening to.

- making JIRA tickets for useless things like "how to install software X". We have a guide on Confluence with instructions on how to install said software and if you follow the guide from start to finish you can get it working and it shouldn't take more than 20 minutes. If, for some reason, it doesn't work, you can simply contact the author of the guide and ask them for help.

This is not what happened in my colleague's team. They had to create a JIRA ticket to track individual progress on installing the tool. I talked to this other colleague that created the guide and he said he was almost pulling his hairs out because he had to spend more than 2 hours debugging and troubleshooting with the people that apparently can't read a step-by-step guide on their computer. And then later they had to mark a JIRA ticket as completed.

This is very stupid and when I see this colleague of mine suffering with someone that is evangelizing SCRUM as any other meme scrum master out there just makes me hate it even more.
As part of my Physics with Computing degree at UKC (late 80s-early 90s) we learned Occam (pen & paper only!) and were allowed to see (but not touch) the Meiko Computing Surface drawing fractal landscapes in real time.
> add a postfix type if inference can't do the job for a reason or another

Ehh... not putting a return type in at all is a bridge to far IMO. Be friendly to the casual reader of the code, and help them understand what the function returns. (Yes I know IDE's can do this for you, but not everyone uses an IDE, and not everyone is reading the code in the context of an IDE... for instance code review, etc.)
I think the Gripen would make a good standard for low-budget air forces. It's designed to be cheap and easy to operate with fairly simple logistics, while still being able to keep up with more expensive jet fighters.
Sorry, but that's ridiculous. Any general purpose programming language is a vector for bugs and security problems, but come on: you're genuinely trying to say that a kludge of bash+sed+awk is objectively more "secure" than a single perl script to solve the same problem?
In our case, we have a codebase that involves two submodules: one for persistence and one for python based management of internal git repos. Both of these are standalone applications and can run on their own. They are then used in a parent repo which represents the overarching architecture, which calls into the submodules.

The advantage of this is, that work can be done by devs on the individual modules without much knowledge of the overarching architecture, nor strong code ties into it.

Right now our persistence is done with SQL, but we could swap it with anything else, e.g. mongo, and the parent codebase wouldn't notice a thing since the submodule only returns well defined python objects.

Of course, this comes at the cost of higher number of commits as you mentioned. But in my opinion these are still cheap because they only affect trivial quantity and not brain-demanding quality.
It makes enterprise sales easier, since it removes a common objection from security, privacy and compliance teams.
> Tesla cutting corners?

Given what we have seen from Twitter, cutting corners and ignoring laws and regulations seems to be an Elon thing.

The guy is even skipping rent.

So why not?
That is pretty neat, but what about the road with no markings? None of the road leading into the town where I live have road marking or reflectors or are you able to target the reflectors on posts by the side of the road as well? I mean see through the snow on those.
One DB server can have multiple DB's. In this case we are talking about single DB (not server) containing multi thousands of tables. And im curious what is the use case for such designs.
Tangentially, I'd like to just plug the translations Robert Fitzgerald made of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 1960s and 70s. Your experience of these books will very much come down to the translation you choose. In America at least, his are not the most commonly found in the classics section of a bookstore. I'm told he plays a bit loose with Homer's word choice (I don't read Ancient Greek), but personally I don't mind. Pasternak, when reproached for his loose translation Shakespeare, responded: "Who cares? We're both geniuses."
> it was found that Twitter hadn't intervened

At least, that’s what the centralized authority says.

No one outside Twitter can verify that claim.
Many/most People only support democracy when t is perceived their "team" is the one that controls said "democracy"
occasionally someone will push "therapeutic worms" as an idea, forex: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/helminth-therapy

They rarely talk about what happens when the worms go their own way, as living things often do.
It's also one that is insufficient, you just have to look how often fascist-like parties are classified "right wing" (while they are centrists), or the likes of Gandhi and Stalin get put in the same "left" box, while they are polar opposites.

Unless I have misunderstood it, this algorithm sounds particularly bad, because it's either only able to see the world through a single dimension, or worse, it's even forcing it into the same dimension (criticizing from competent mathematicians/staticians would be welcome).

But in the end, I guess it doesn't change much : it's worse than useless, just like Twitter and the people that use it, for the last decade and counting.
I'd say "co-opted" more than "tainted".
Thank you for your response. We'd need a podcast to unpack everything, but I appreciate your willingness to be constructive--thus I'll try to give my 2 cents and call it a day.

> [...] Faith only has anything to do with success if you squint.
I understand that the original post puts "success" on its title, and hence justifies your wording. But I find success irrelevant to the discussion that the--not any more--downvoted comment hinted towards. Secular achievements are mere byproducts of a Faith-fueled life in my view. Reconciliation with the prospect of death, defeat of despair, and the sense of a life well and fully lived, are more at the center.

> [...] putting faith in ones destiny above all else tends to be adjacent to people that are delusional about the effort they need to actually put in to the task.
Not my experience at all. It has to do with the weight and meaning one puts on words, I guess. Yes, Faith means, at least according to Kierkegaard, that everything is possible. But as regards the needed effort to attain said everything, if it's downplayed by the actor then it's not Faith we're talking about--but rather, as you say, delusion. If anything is implied by Faith, it's seriousness.

I am with you on your point about judging programmers according to their provable merit. I am certainly not with you on framing Faith as "being certain he's the next John Carmack". I believe lots of people carry the same misconception, and it's a fact that saddens me.

BTW, I ceased being an Orthodox Christian a long time ago, and was quite fervent about religion until that point. I am not trying to any dogma here, other than that Faith breeds Greatness if done right.
"get any senior dev to move away from using references instead of const pointers."
...
"the reader has no idea whether the argument will be modified or not without reading the header file."

It sounds like the problem is not using an IDE.

Use references whenever posssible. Then you don't need to do a null pointer check. C++ is a footgun. And like with all guns, security first. With guns - put the safety on. With C++ - check the pointers are not null.

OFC one can argue that with proper instrumentation invalid pointers are captured sooner than later, but the fact is it's much easier to represent invalid program state using pointer than references.
As you noted, there are "other guides". As an antidote to Strunk & White, I have always liked the Fowler brothers' The King's English (1906):

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_King%27s_English

Just a small sample:

"The 'split' infinitive has taken such hold upon the consciences of journalists that, instead of warning the novice against splitting his infinitives, we must warn him against the curious superstition that the splitting or not splitting makes the difference between a good and a bad writer."
When do we just fix airplane design assumptions to match the real world instead of forcing the real world to comply with the "reasonable" assumptions of the engineers / aircraft firms.

I'm almost a full stone lighter than the 75kg assumption, but I'd never walk into an office and just say I'm average, lets just assume that when designing. That is garbage engineering. Your built in assumptions should include projections that cover the expected lifespan of the product, not what is average in the here and now. A simple regression fit would be better than nothing.

We should better plan for the extrema of humanity as to not implicitly dehumanize people with averages. That just blows.
Don't forget the workday is not just 8 straight hours for most folks, there's a 30 to 60 minute lunch in the middle of it which if you're in the office is 100% wasted time.
A Harvard professor became the world’s leading alien hunter
I like to write short fiction sometimes as a hobby (usually just for myself, or occasionally posted anonymously on the internet), with a big reason being that I have something to think about when I'm trying to fall asleep or distract myself from anxiety. The only annoying thing is that sometimes I come up with a great idea as I'm falling asleep, and get excited to put it down in writing, only to find the next morning that I can't remember what it was.
WFH is one solution, but it's not free in terms of collaboration costs. There's a reason no one thinks college is better remote, for example. Sure, it's fine for some jobs but it's not super obvious that it's a net positive for output.

People can also live closer to work, or use other methods (biking, running, etc.) to combine exercise + commute. Many studies have indicate that people overestimate the happiness of a larger house and underestimate the daily happiness toll of a long commute
"If you don’t think every business that makes it, and even more so for those that make it big, don’t have shady dealings to thank for getting them there, you should join one of these megachurches."

I was a contractor for one, so I had an insider look at the donation page optimization, dating apps, marriage counselling (90% of which involved a pastor in some way, including the stereotypical), seeing how people were pressured into donations, what interns were picked for, grandma being pressured into living her last $10 so that the IT team mostly there through connections could have $50-100/person lunches, etc.

And no - there is still a difference of outright misleading the most vulnerable, and I say this regardless of your views on religion.
Right, this has been the problem with FSD is that it is incapable of dealing with situations that it did not see in its training dataset. It seems incapable of abstract general reasoning that AGI would have, and that humans do.

This is important for all the generalized cases of mayhem you see driving on local roads. Wrong way drivers, cars driving in reverse, emergency vehicles driving in opposite lanes, bikes not in bike lane going wrong way, etc.

There was a nice YouTube video last summer of a Tesla FSD car perfectly identifying that there was a tram moving in its direction & rendering it in 3D on the center screen. However, FSD tried to make an unprotected left turn in front of the tram anyway, the excuse being the usual "well it hadn't seen an unprotected left in front of a tram in its training data".

AGI/more abstract and generalized reasoning is required for "things that never happened before happen all the time" state of the real world.

None of the self driving systems seem to be able to infer intent from other vehicle behavior/pedestrian body language. Something that any B- or better driver should be able to do. Signals, coasting, braking in certain manners that you can infer they are about to turn, change lanes or try and park. Or that they see an obstacle in the road, etc. This is free information that these systems do not attempt to use.