skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my career as a software dev I've found one thing to be true - Every Paradigm I ingest that opens new windows of opportunity are great at first pass and as I learn more the more narrow the scope they can be applied. (This is kinda true in life, too. Like when people say, "Its econ 101 or bio 101." etc. What seems like a statement about 'common' knowledge is actually an indication of how shallow your knowledge is!)

Specifically related to this topic is a talk by Dan Abramov called, "The Wet Codebase" - He says it better than I can sum up and has visual aids : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17KCHwOwgms

Other have pointed out code that is similar in function vs similar by coincidence and I think that thought alone is worth chewing on.
Well, it depends. They set the policy to say you should go work 3 days a week at the office even if you are a single member of a team in a different country. Something that's not so rare, after the pandemic and the way the teams are configured multi-region.

They claimed that it will make you learn the culture, just by working in the office, but having Chime meetings with your team, etc. And there was not (as much as I know) any interest in trying to "reshuffle" teams to be more geographically closer...

It doesn't really make much sense to me
Those people made a choice to uproot their lives completely of their own volition. Sometimes those choices don't work out and they always come with consequences.
At Twitter/X HQ they have these, and you can "trick" it into going express to your floor by pressing the button in the hall repeatedly so the car then thinks it is full and won't stop at other floors.
Despite good intentions, extreme poverty cannot easily be solved from outside a country. Looking at some of the worst countries: When they receive aid, as often as not that aid is sold off, and the proceeds land in the pockets of corrupt politicians. Or it is destroyed in continuous civil war. Or it puts local farmers out of business, because they cannot compete with "free". Etc, etc.

Solutions must come from within the countries, and those solutions must involve cultural change: reduced tribal hatreds, fewer civil wars, less corruption, and so forth. Without such change, a lot of external aid just worsens the problems it is supposed to solve.
That's so interesting, GCHQ! I don't know if that makes me trust it more or less than other random code online. (It's a little like installing some nice free software from the friendly people at the NSA, in case you're unfamiliar.)

I did have a quick look at the repo, in case there were some useful security practices I could learn from. But it's just your standard NPM dependencies with a 20K-line package-lock.json. I wonder if perhaps they don't use it internally. Or if they do, perhaps they shouldn't.
Telling the LLM that it must do something is not a guarantee that it'll follow through.
I think this is the biggest thing people generally misunderstand about "duplication".

It's really about if two concepts need to change together over time. They should be singularly defined.

If they can move independently they should be two definitions.

It's not literally about the code looking the same.
Why not just keep the water warm in an electric samovar?
This doesn't make sense to me. Firstly I'd be surprised if Amazon execs thought it was a good idea to get massively into CRE even pre pandemic given that Amazon/ecom was really starting to bite into CRE values with the shift to online shopping. A lot of retail space was starting to tank well before the pandemic hit.

Secondly, even if you did have a load of CRE investments, you are likely to have more in AMZN stock itself. Surely you'd prioritise AMZN over one of your investments if you were an exec?

Finally, commercial real estate is a large but niche asset class, typically held by pension funds wanting very long term income sources. I believe in the US there are lot of tax advantages you can take too, but they only apply to people that are primarily active in real estate, which would be a pretty hard push with the IRS if you were a c-suite amazon exec.

My view (being remote first/only for many many years) is that WFH can work really well with the right team and culture, but hybrid doesn't. It's hard to get everyone on the same page when some are remote and some are WFH, plus it means doing loads of calls in the office when you are there with WFH people - which there aren't enough meeting rooms for. It's a mess.

So, given most CEOs of large companies aren't going to commit to remote-only, which is too scary for them, in office will continue. I personally expect 4 days to become the norm in most companies (it was already moving that way pre covid, at least in London, with a lot of people WFH on Fridays).
Thanks Luke, we greatly appreciate your engagement and help in hardening this ecosystem!
In many ways i think the fashion is the most interesting part. Only 30 years ago but feels so different.
What do you mean? Comparing a UK Bosch induction hob with a US one, they both seem to offer roughly 2.5kW of power in normal mode, and both offers a "boost" functionality that boosts the output temporarily to 3.6kW.

Stove outlets can handle 12kW in the US... So there's plenty of power to go around. Built in outlets can go even higher, with 240V/60A being somewhat common for larger appliances.
This Isn't Science Fiction: How the CIA Stole a Russian Satellite (2019)
I'm in Europe and I've been shocked a few times by 220V and I know plenty of other who has too. It's usually not from regular wall sockets, but wires with broken insulation or working on things where parts of a circuit is uninsulated.
In Europe the wiring in the ground is always 3 phase, they just connect only 1 phase. You can upgrade to 3 phase for a fee and then a guy comes and switches it over. They don't need to open up the streets or anything like that to get you 3 phase power.
It is the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
The government is just not "a client". There are special rules if you want to sell anything to them, because you're playing with taxpayers' money. This is one such rule.
I think your experience is common.

I have been a paid AI practitioner since 1982, and everything feels different now.

I have CoPilot always on in Emacs. I use Bing/ChatGPT, ChatGPT, and Bard to bounce ideas off of and research. I used MidJourney t9 create the cover for my last book Safe For Humans AI.

I can’t imagine not having these tools handy.
I actually ended up getting to teach a 20 minute segment on neural networks to my fellow philosophy students during a senior seminar on phenomenology, was great fun
Bitcoin trading volume is at its lowest in more than four years
Lol. OpenAI blocks your access of you use a VPN. So not really impressed with some orgs deciding to block it.
Macros (and in C++, their neighbor templates, since both are ways to make conditional decisions about what code to generate evaluated at compile time) are definitely the way to test out the limits of the compiler's performance. I haven't done enough Rust yet to hit this, but I don't doubt it happens. I did once make vscode scream on a very intricate family of conditional TypeScript types... Code compiled fine, but the editor started to take dozens of seconds to determine on-the-fly if types were sound.

Back in the day, I once worked with a C++ game engine where the developer was obsessed with interfaces vs. implementation. Every class, even if there was one implementation, had an abstract interface wrapper. It was the first codebase I ever encountered where the compiler (on my Mac laptop) choked on it because it ran out of RAM trying to compile it.
I'm still waiting for the single-player Wing Commander-alike game that was supposed to be the whole reason to bother buying into this Star Citizen thing in the first place.
The other 'Niño' that fuels the most destructive hurricanes
A little known phenomenon produces the Atlantic's most powerful hurricanes – but will it play a role in this year's storm season?
yeah, it's not a big deal for people that are already there or were already commuting, maybe. But there were so many people hired, told they can work remote, and now are told they must uproot their and their family's life or be without a job.
Show HN: Open-source tool to limit AWS spendings
What's "other languages"?

IO lists, which are the foundation of anything that build a string incrementally, are managed with vectored IO syscalls out of the box (readv/writev), which you'd have to handle yourself in most other languages, or resort to allocating and endless memory copying which Erlang is able to avoid.
Elixir/BEAM's (Erlang Virtual machine) frugality isn't just theoretical; it's got real-world creds. Originally tailored/optimized for 1980s telecom switches (a fleet of single core extremely low powered machines.) Fast forward, and you've got a setup that's less demanding on your A/C and optimizes multi-core usage like a champ. it utilizes the same concurrency abstractions whether its 2 cores across two machines or 64 cores on the same machine, it makes no difference to the BEAM

Take the hot code reloading and actor model-based concurrency as a prime example. It's like getting AWS-level functionality without the steep bill for a lot of companies.

Though, I gotta admit, it used to be a hard sell for CPU-heavy workloads, especially number crunching. But Elixir is stepping it up with their Nx library, so that's changing.

Examples of companies cashing in on BEAM's efficiency:

Bleacher Report: Went from 150 servers down to 5. No joke.

Discord: Handles millions of real-time users without breaking a sweat or the bank.

Financial Times: Their content recommendation engine got both efficient and cost-effective.

Change.org: More petitions, fewer servers.

Podium: A million SMS messages a day and didn't have to massively scale hardware.
I've started donating blood and eating cabbage regularly on the story that those things are good at getting crap out of the system and good for me otherwise anyway.
This is certainly true for consumer products, but it’s a lot less true for enterprise. Google Cloud had a few missteps with product shuttering (domains?), but largely google has a better track record serving enterprise customers.

Google has to slowly build better trust among customers, clearly. But “new provider” may sound like it’s logically obvious but the benefits of an established relationship goes deep into the complexities of businesses managing contracts and payment relationships. It’s a huge effort for random teams in big companies.
> An early abstraction that would've grouped those coincidentally similar pieces of code would then have to stretch to cover both evolutions.

This seems to be the underlying assumption behind most uses of the "duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction" quote, but the assumption is simply incorrect. You should almost never try to expand abstractions in this manner. If you don't treat the abstractions relating to the thing you want to change in your codebase as "the" place where you need to make your change, and instead eagerly make new abstractions and throw old ones away as required, you won't really run into this problem.

In fact, this predominant mindset where creating abstractions is strongly discouraged leads to the very problem that mindset is based on, as it will simply encourage junior developers and the like to modify the existing abstraction, creating the aforementioned kind of mess where abstractions become complicated through repeated modification, instead of creating new abstractions when appropriate, because creating abstractions has a stigma attached to it.

Additionally, if someone has made a "wrong" abstraction based on something silly like two pieces of code simply being similar in terms of their structure and those use cases start to drift apart, you should feel eager to simply split apart the abstraction, be it into bare implementations or two new abstractions, or any other combination. Abstractions are cheap as long as you don't give them special significance.
This article puts the description of it at the bottom, but APCA Contrast—which is the readable contrast test in the WCAG 3 Draft Standard—is much more fair to some colors than WCAG 2.1's Contrast Ratio was.

Good reading for the color theory behind perceptual contrast: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2022/09/realities-myths-con...

And a distilled description of APCA: https://typefully.com/u/DanHollick/t/sle13GMW2Brp
If I'm understanding what she reported, Booz was losing $XX on commercial contracts and billing $XX excess on government contracts. There was a direct link between the two, which is prohibited.

And her case was strong enough that the government decided to pursue it. That doesn't always happen - whistleblowers sometimes have to pursue these cases on their own (crazy as that sounds to me).
But Amazon could liquidate it all and make enormous cost savings going remote only if they wanted to. I'm sure any loss they would take would be recouped by reduction in office costs and access to cheaper workforces outside of Seattle etc very quickly. It doesn't make sense.
I have far more lithium batteries on my desk than I do gas appliances on my entire property.

I'm not an outlier either. Most of us carry at least one fragile lithium polymer battery on our person at all times.

I understand that larger packs like those on my bicycle are more energetic, but I'm still not convinced that it is more dangerous than something as mundane as the grill on my patio, and the stats seem to back this up.

The point is, though, that both are pretty safe as long as some standard safety protocols are followed. Should you be allowed to spot weld 18650s on your kitchen counter? no. But you also shouldn't be building experimental grills in your living room either, or playing with gasoline.
SSH traffic is encrypted, so to an observer, the packages look like random data already.
It's not obvious to me why you made this comment in this thread. Are you under the impression I would disagree?

Making choices based on the best information you have, because your employer provided it to you, and then having your life unilaterally uprooted by that same employer seems like a bad thing. It also seems like something that an employer should probably explain / justify with a business reason other than "vibes" and "everyone else is doing it." If the employer doesn't do the bare minimum to even explain the decision to the employee, people are gonna use words like "exploitative behavior" and "kinda fucked up" and I'm going to agree with them.
Yeah, but so many? I'm counting 47 alone on the LangChain page.
In case anyone who is not familiar with Indian money is wondering, that is a lakh of money.
Like a cow’s opinion.
>IU is a psychological construct referring to a personal trait of seeking sufficient information to predict an unpredictable event and reacting negatively to unexpected or unknown events. The uncertainty tolerance model was initially developed with reference to generalized anxiety disorder, characterized by excessive and uncontrollable worry. Recent studies have demonstrated that autistic individuals exhibit stronger IU than their typically developed peers. Individuals with IU consider it unacceptable that a negative event may occur, however small the probability of its occurrence. This differs from the similar concept of intolerance of ambiguity. Recent studies have shown that IU can result in anxiety in autistic individuals. Moreover, a recent meta-analysis has confirmed that IU is involved in anxiety.

I've been meaning to follow up with an exploration of this concept of "uncertainty intolerance" in this literature. Particularly because it seems to be conceptually related--but possibly distinct from--the notions of uncertainty and ambiguity attitudes in economic theory.
I don’t think my words were abrasive. I was just pointing out that there exists financial incentives that disfavor co-op formation. If my argument, which is opposed to your argument, assumes “founders act as rational market participants” doesn’t that imply your argument assumes market participants act irrationally? Of course people act irrationally all the time, but what seems more likely on the whole, especially in regard to money?
In about 1990 I got tasked with building an installation and configuration system for the hardware and software package my company built. It was an Ethernet card and a TCP/IP suite being added to the PCs of the era (that had an AT/ISA bus where you had to find a free address block, then jumper the card to have the correct address, lotsa fun.)

I wrote the first system targeted at AT&Ts Unix for the 386. After it was completely done, I was assigned to do the same for Xenix. After that was completely done, I got assigned to do SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) Unix. After that, Interactive Systems (ISC). Each system had its own architecture for installation and configuration. I didn't know in advance anything about the different systems, nor any knowledge that the other systems were on the horizon. As I was writing the second system, I was refactoring like mad to avoid duplicating code, and feeling very proud due to previously learning the horrors of duplicate code. I can't remember details, but among other things files had to be placed in a specific directory hierarchy for each system, and various files had to perform certain (different) functions on each system. When I turned to the third and fourth target systems, the refactoring just became weirder and more complicated, but I was determined to avoid duplication.

Historically it turned out we never revised these releases. With 20-20 hindsight, it's a case where the refactoring was completely pointless, and code duplicated 4 times would have been way faster to create, and easier to maintain if we had made new releases. I think part of Sandi's point is that YAGNI applies as well ... a higher level abstraction may accommodate changes that never arrive, or the changes may be so large that NO abstraction will cover it.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, in 1980 (yeah, I'm really old) as a summer-hire, I'd written in HP-Basic this very funky single-purpose very primitive data base system. When I returned 9 months later after graduating, two full time guys had made small changes to the system, but one guy had made a breaking change, the other guy got pissed off and duplicated _the entire program_ (a single file, to be sure) and made one small change. Thereafter I had to maintain two versions of the thing. Gaaack. It was the ultimate lesson in "don't duplicate code". (It was also in the days before we had a version control system or diff, so backing out and correcting the change wasn't practical.) Mel, where are you now?
Most languages have naturally evolved as far back as we can track them through history, and beyond that we just don't know. As far as we know, most languages could just go back to one Ur-Tongue (sometimes called Proto-World).

But some spoken languages are newer and we can prove that.
The youngest language in the world is arguably the Nicaraguan Sign Language[1], from the early 1980s. The only possible progenitors are home sign systems the kids who developed it used at home, which were not full languages and were themselves quite new, so it's got a pretty strong claim.

Beyond that you've got pidgins, creoles and mixed languages which develop by combining two or more languages. You can argue whether or not their entirely new, since they generally borrow vocabulary from one language and grammar from the another, or just mix several languages more freely together.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
An End, and a Beginning
> I'd like to see a new regulatory regime that allows individual health care providers like doctors, nurses, etc to start their own practices that are cash only.

We already have that. Medical practices aren't required to take health insurance and can charge cash for services.
To be clear, I am talking about consumers having to explicitly opt-in to those things and to have a clear understanding of what data and rights they are giving up. If someone wants to allow advertising and behavioral tracking, that should be their explicitly-authorized option. And definitely not the default configuration.

The current status-quo is that TV manufacturers abuse and intrude with abandon because nobody is making a fuss about it and politicians are too busy trying to throw each other in jail.
Phantom Power
Without doubt the best python dependancy manager.
Give Directly has an interesting approach, direct cash transfers. Seem to have studies that show it helps.
That's a shame about The Three Body Problem. I have it on my list to read. There's a chance I might like it, of course, but because you said you like The Forever War I think perhaps not.

Where would you start with Neal Stephenson? Have you read Iain M. Banks?
We need to have a kind of a footnote in the pedagogy of software engineering, and engineering in general that states to avoid advice (“wisdom”, lol) expounded by blowhards. You can identify it usually by the title - it’ll have a Grand Style that betrays arrogance.

Lots of people from GoF onwards think they qualify to preach bullshit ultimatums, thinking they have it all figured out. I don’t think any of them have any fucking clue what should actually be considered harmful, what should be the two/three “hardest things in computer science”, and other nonsensical bullshit they write. With apologies to Dijkstra who I do find to have been one of the shining lights of computer science and engineering but is often misquoted/out-contexted for that considered harmful thing. His letters do betray a higher plane of wisdom.

The more recent “what programmers need to know about {x}” as if the author has any clue is just the continuation of “I’ve learned this last week/in my last project and it’s the most important thing,” instead of the trivia that it really is, or shit that’s abstracted for us nowadays and only serves to make the author feel superior. Just fuck off with all of that nonsense.

Coincidentally, I’m going to go and read the Hamming book as it’s got tangible value having been written by someone who has done something worthwhile in their career.
From the article:

> USA uses 230-240 VAC, too. The only difference is that we ground it in the center, creating "split" phases, reducing the peak voltage relative to ground and making it easier to interface low-power loads. But high-power loads (stoves, water heaters, clothes dryers, etc.) operate across the full voltage, reducing the current required.
I'm only referencing EVE because OP did, but I don't think the comparison is unreasonable: using a simpler architecture doesn't mean you don't use beefy machines and write your code in C instead of Stackless Python to get better performance in your physics simulations. It just means that instead of being overly clever in your network infrastructure from the get go, you pick something simple that works and iterate from there.
I still find the rule of 3 to be the most pragmatic balance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_progra...
A central aim of of SSH is confidentiality. There's a lot besides passwords that you can deduce with traffic analysis, especially if you can correlate with other observed events.
The technology for this type of generation (ControlNet) is already open source and relatively straightforward to reproduce the charts demoed in that post without shenanigans.

There's no moat.
There are two situations I’ve observed where Sunk Cost Fallacy reliably doesn’t kick in. One is three line functions and unit tests. The other is duplicated code. It’s better to err on the side of mistakes that people don’t get precious about fixing later.

A lot of the arguments I have with coworkers end up being about friction and blind spots about friction. “You” think these things don’t slow you or others down later, but I have a bibliography of incidents that say you’re wrong. Wishful thinking is married to magic thinking, and they have a child named “mortgaging the future”.