skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I could see C++ or Rust maybe adding that eventually, but it seems unlikely for Zig unless they relax some of their core design goals. The problem with invariant assertions is figuring out when exactly they should run, and that idea that something might run _every_ time any public method is called or whatever definitely conflicts with the design they're going for.

That said, Zig does make it pretty easy to handle a lot of the features you might want. As a library, you can offer the ability for a person to rewrite a type (maybe only in non-optimized modes if you want) and check the invariants before/after every public function call. You can always add explicit pre/post-condition checks to any function you'd like. Invariants in your inputs/outputs can be hoisted to the type checker (I wrote a toy project doing this [0]). Like...at some point you have to describe what you want to check and when you want it to run for the invariant checking to be useful, and Zig allows you to write the checks and use comptime magic to place them where you want them to run, all in the userspace of the language. Which language features would you like to make the process smoother (automatic subtype resolution on a lattice of constraints, a bit of syntax, ...)?

[0] https://github.com/hmusgrave/pdv
// The US was winning the shooting war

How would we know? I live in the US but speak fluent Russian and have lots of family from Ukraine, and yet I don't feel like having access to all these perspectives enables me to have a sense for where the truth is.

I can say that what we see in the west is not the whole story - lots of victories, footage of droned Russians, and an occasional reference to a fallen Ukrainians hero. In more pro-russian sources, you get exactly the opposite idea and visuals - lots of blown up Ukrainian and destroyed equipment. If you don't see that on regular basis and what I described sounds surprising, you are getting a very filtered view of what's going on.

I can't claim where the truth is but I know the picture most westerners get by default is very rosy vs reality.
Surprised I never ran into his channel before. Amazing content.
I also almost 20x my salary in 15 years, but I went from e16k in Spain to $350k in Seattle, so when adjusted by inflation/cost of living it isn't that impressive.

Care to share more about your salary history and how you got there? I wish to move back to Spain but I would take a massive pay cut if I choose local jobs, so I am looking into freelancing.
Extensive pair programming can also be massively draining and burnout inducing for certain types of people. I hate it when companies mandate pairing. Some people's brains just don't work effectively in that type of environment.
Based upon the description in the operator handbook, this reminds me of Microsoft’s Courier notebook project.
That's actually a decent comparison. "We're spending just as much, but we're deploying lots of smaller containerized applications instead of one giant on-prem monolith."
In the early minutes they mention his time at the BBC - I wonder if his website articles are still in the online BBC archives somewhere.
It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience.

Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently write 5000+ lines per code per week, regardless of how many features they actually ship and how many bugs they introduce.

As a team lead and engineer who has managed some complex projects, the idea of someone writing over 2000 lines of code per week terrifies me... That's over 100K lines of code a year. Think of the unnecessary complexity. There is a very good chance that the same feature set could have been implemented with just 10K lines of code, less buggy and in half the time though that would only amount to 380 lines of code per week! Management won't like that.

I tend to think that the dev who can churn out thousands of lines isn't thinking deeply enough about the long term direction of the project; all the code they're writing is essentially throwaway code.
You say your intent is to teach and to inform.

I don't doubt that this is the case. The reason why I found your response triggering is that you did not come off, in this exchange, as genuinely having that intention, from the very beginning.

To be completely frank it just looked as though you were looking for a fight.

I recognized your username among the responses. I knew you had that kind of background and wanted to hear from you.

I am not an expert nor I claim to be, mine are just fade memories, but as far as I know using "proof" to mean "derivation" is not uncommon, see for instance[1][2][3]. I was very particular about separating the "formal" and "informal" kind in any case. I don't think I can be accused of playing fast and loose with definitions.

If you are trying to correct me on something else, I don't understand what it is.

Since you brought up that point yet again, by "proofs just are", an unfortunate choice of words, I do not mean anything mystical or platonic. I never had any intention of making such claims and I certainly don't stand by anything like it. I wanted to say that derivations (I used the "proof-in-the-formal-sense" language to which you object, I am amending it here) are mathematical objects, proofs (meant as you do, informally) are social processes.

I do not understand your response as saying anything different.

As far as I understand, all you're objecting to is my use of language. This is perhaps fair, but not terribly interesting. If there's something else, I'm afraid I failed to understand what it is.

In any case, thank you for this exchange.

I would like to encourage you to keep sharing your knowledge if you can make the time. I am sure this common space would benefit from it.

---

[1] https://www.ams.org/notices/200811/tx081101395p.pdf
[2] https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-0...
[3] https://monks.scranton.edu/files/courses/Math299/math-299-le...
2k is IMO a poor price point as it’s too much for the minimal utility but not enough for meaningful power. IMO solar roofs are useful at the low end for ~400$ ICE cars could top off their battery and run a solar fan to keep the temperature down when parked in the sun. Not a huge deal, but still a nice luxury feature.

Or a significantly more expensive solar roof could add meaningful highway mileage per year. You both largely offset its cost via less charging and have the option for a low speed crawl to a charging station.
> relying on a company that has never reached orbit and still struggles to make suborbital hops

This is sadly far too common in most rocketry endeavours. spacex (any maybe some of the "private" chinese companies) are really outliers in this industry.

The timelines are absurdly ambitious, and by the time you're doing regular flights the company you want to contract may have merged/split/been hit by sanctions three or four times.
I think inline ECC (the module performs the ECC) is mandatory with LPDDR4 (the error rates on current silicon are too high to leave it out), but link ECC (between the CPU and the module) is optional.

Note that link ECC + inline ECC don't give you end-to-end protection, since the controller in the memory module can still flip bits. DDR5 is moving to on-die ECC (which, unlike DDR <= 4's side-band ECC) also isn't end-to-end.

I'd like to see side-band ECC continue to exist, but I think it is going to be phased out entirely.

This article defines all the terms, but is very vague about what things are mandatory, or how reliable the error correction schemes are. For instance, it carefully doesn't say that SECDED schemes detect all two bit errors, instead it says they detect at least some:

https://www.synopsys.com/designware-ip/technical-bulletin/er...
Scientists use quantum device to slow down simulated chemical reaction by 100Bx
> > First, I want a replication strategy. Nostr messages get lost in time, and many of the clients end up just blasting an entire message history at your client. Because there's no clue in the protocol how messages are related other than a timestamp this also means you can fake timestamps and write fake messages in the future or back in time

> You can do this with email or git too and it doesn't make it any less useful.

In the sense that you can fake timestamps, you're of course correct on git and anything else beyond public blockchains.

In the other sen, git is a counter-example of what I take the author's main point to be, in that commits do have an mandated relationship and linkage that Nostr noted don't.
Had Windows NT fully embraced the POSIX subsystem, maybe I wouldn't have bothered to install Slackware 2.0.

Microsoft most likely repents of selling away Xenix, and not fully embracing POSIX at the right time.
The reduction of infant mortality is kinda the low-hanging fruit of modern medicine.
If all you need is "a little trust", there are also plenty of options
From the second sentence of the article, The Craft of Experimental Physics, by P.M.S. Blackett.
When we transition to 4WD in-wheel motors the drivetrain and the moving parts could become standard. The inverters could become programmable. We designed programmable networks of per-battery-cell (dis)charger computers that would take the danger out of clusters of battery cells of unequal batteries. When each battery is wired in parallel, not in series not only can you go from 800 charge cycles to 20000 cycles (lifetime nearly 50 years) but you would eliminate fires and prevent short circuits in the power networks. It would thus be possible to build cars completely from standard parts. Mind you, not a single company has tried this yet, but there is no economical or theoretical impediment to build from off-the-shelf components in the next two decades. EV car kits will be poossible and probably cheaper. After an amateur has build one, for example the Dutch Government RDW would test the car for safety for less than a thousand Euro's, like they already do for car, truck and camper conversions. I remember an Scientific American article in the 90's predicting single mechanic African custom EVs as a future possibility.
He's holding it wrong
Which do you suggest?

If it doesn't have rich text support, isn't lighter than anything in the OpenOffice family, and is as unstable as AbiWord, don't bother saying it.
That's really idiotic.
>>You can order Uber WAV - Wheelchair Accessibility Vehicle.

That's cool - wish Uber would have that option worldwide.

>>If you choose to use much less convenient taxis instead of an Uber because of a refusal to use cellphones that’s on you

If you think my message is about refusal rather than physical impossibility of using a smartphone, that one is on you I'm afraid.

>>And Google not having accessibility options as good as the iPhone sounds like someone needs to be suing Google under the ADA.

I don't live in the US, I don't know what ADA is.

>>But do you really think blind people are not buying devices that actually work for them?

I know some blind people and they are all on government benefits and way too poor to afford an iPhone. They all have those "old people" mobiles with huge buttons and braille on them. A modern smartphone is both out of reach financially and as far as I understand it just doesn't work for someone who is completely blind.
Because it's a bogus argument. The productive person doesn't need a paper weight at lunch to act as a shower thought generator. Management can get it wrong sometimes, but in broad strokes, they're right.
Texas is certainly not a flyover state.

Moreover, it's in the article:

>>> Greater Appalachia (pop. 59 million)
Settlers overwhelmingly from war-ravaged Northern Ireland, Northern England and Scottish lowlands were deeply committed to personal sovereignty and intensely suspicious of external authority.

>>> The geography of U.S. life expectancy — and the policy environments that determine it — is the result of differences that are regional, cultural and political, with roots going back centuries to the people who arrived on the continent with totally different ideas about equality, the proper role of government, and the correct balance point between individual liberty and the common good. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into Americans’ overall health and longevity are revealed, along with some paths to improve the situation.
What symbolic rule systems are matching the performance of GPT4?
> As someone else mentioned, it's probably also true in Europe that a lot of people would see having WhatsApp as close to essential.

What are you referring to? While it may be the most popular messaging app, it's not in any way, shape, or form essential. SMS is also universal, mostly unlimited, and much less weirder than it is in the US.
Sounds interesting, but after reading the entire page I’m still not sure I understand it.
I agree. In Python terms "Easier to Ask for Forgiveness than Permission" (EAFP) is preferred over "Look Before You Leap" (LBYL).

https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html#term-EAFP comments:

> Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. This common Python coding style assumes the existence of valid keys or attributes and catches exceptions if the assumption proves false. This clean and fast style is characterized by the presence of many try and except statements. The technique contrasts with the LBYL style common to many other languages such as C.

and there are any number of essays on the topic, like (random DDG search) https://programmingduck.com/articles/lbyl-eafp .
This is exactly the info I was looking for, thanks for sharing!
In a remote world, can that person exist?
I don't even know if it's true, but if it is I'd guess the Typical Mind fallacy: most of us have blind spots where we don't think about how "good" people in a hurry would react, let alone the power-hungry actively trying to break it for their own gain.
It's worth noting simple solar 'trickle chargers' can be had for less than 100 bucks, today. They are awesome for such things like additional confidence while overlanding in a remote location, or for a trailer with a winch, or an electric boat lift on a dock without shore power.
Right to repair eventually runs head first into security and encryption--how do you allow right to repair and TLS, encryption, secure computing, etc to coexist? Get rid of IoT black boxes like Google Homes? Allow Linux on Xbox?

How do you create secure platforms while also giving consumers the keys to their devices?

(FWIW I'm not advocating against right to repair, I actually hope it helps to get rid of black box IoT devices. My device, my keys, etc)
Yes, the market has gone steadily downhill in 2023, both for freelancers and for people looking for permanent work. I think it is recovering really slowly, let's see how the next few months shape up.
Maybe, or maybe human endeavour is more complex than individual efforts.
So I used to kind of think like you, but I think that's just not a practical approach. Yes, you could alter the system in this 1 exact situation if you know exactly what to change, but there will be dozens of other failure modes too (engineer releases code that breaks in 2 months, engineer deliberately mis-estimates story points, engineer doesn't comment their code so that nobody else on team can do certain work, etc)

So if you have a manager who is a dialed-in coder who's going to keep updating the jira-point formula based on spending more than 1 hour a day reading code, and keep tuning it around the ever-more creative loopholes engineers employ, then yes, you may end up with a workable system. But never yet in my long career have I seen that.
"Fail safe" is slamming on the brakes on a power failure? I heard a funny story about a guy who was used to chewing while driving and he'd open the door a crack to spit. Apparently some cars engage brakes if a door opens and he was driving his son's new Jeep going 50 mph.
If you want to have laws treating abortion as murder

then you have to treat cops who kill pregnant mothers as murderers.

After all, the unborn/fetus is innocent ...
It’s Like Coding in the Dark [pdf]
The last few months have been like this. I also think freelancers just find this thread and post the same message every month, but most don't upvote the post. So it's never on the front page, reaching few people who aren't freelancers. :(
I remember talking to some MS dude (from the NT group) at a conference, I think in 1993, where I said something to the effect I was waiting for them to add sockets support to the posix subsystem. He response was almost to laugh in my face. Nice to be proven correct 30 years later.
Which free/open source alfernatives to WordPad for Windows do you recommend then? LibreOffice is huge and slow, MS Office Online requires Internet. How to edit simple RTF/DOC documents offline on Windows without downloading >300MB full LibreOffice suite? Only Abiword comes to my mind.
it’s been done

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)

they were probably 25 years too early
I think this makes sense for complex apps like games, CAD and design software, etc.

I hope it doesn't replace the lowest common denominator of HTML for generic apps, though, if only because it would dramatically raise the barrier to entry (not that your typical React app is particularly readable in the inspector...).
Windows and Mac did a huge disservice by making people think that a GUI (or a desktop) is part of an OS.

This looks like a nice way to think at common office tasks, but it doesn't need to be an OS - it's just a set of UI conventions participating programs would adopt along with the APIs to help those communicate.
SEEKING WORK | Europe | Remote preferred, Onsite possible

Hi, my name is Till.

I always like to help people, so if you need help with anything, let me know! :)

I usually work remotely, but I'm open to traveling to visit you. I can help get things running, especially when you're a young startup or launching a new project.

For example, maybe you have written a web app and need it deployed to the cloud. Or maybe you want to scale your product to meet the demand. Or maybe you want to launch your app in a new market, requiring a translation system and a new cloud deployment strategy. I can help make these things possible!

I most often write back-end services or cloud deployments.

Buzzwords: C#, F#, .Net, JavaScript/Typescript, Rust, Elm, C/C++, AWS (Cloudformation, CDK, S3, CloudFront, ECS, Lambda, RDS...), CI/CD, Rust, and Terraform

I've also worked with hiring and product planning. You can also reach out if you just want feedback on your app or code.

CV: https://docs.zohopublic.eu/file/6ptn130f37fb9bb38457b94cd56c...

Email: till at specificadvice.com

Website: https://specificadvice.com/ (for my company Specific Advice)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/till-schroeder/

I'd love to hear from you!
Disabling some of them in release builds makes sense. Like, say you have a binary search routine. It's totally fucked if the inputs aren't sorted, so you add that as an invariant. Now your log(n) performance sank to linear because you have to check the invariant. Invariants you can't express with your type system should have the option to have their checks disabled in release builds.
> My point is that no one gives a shit about making them part of society.

Those who want to become part of society are carried on hands and portrayed proudly in the media as examples of the success story of Swedish migration policies - unless they dare to criticise those same policies of course. The problem is that people are not encouraged to integrate or assimilate into Swedish culture as that goes against the multicultural ideals written into the Swedish 'constitution' (Sweden is actually governed under a collection of law instead of a single constitution but these serve the same purpose). Encouraging newcomers to...

- learn Swedish as soon as possible...

- try celebrating midsommar (the midsummer festival) and jul (Christmas) in some way to show they are interested in the customs and culture of the country which took them in instead of segregating themselves into their own cultural traditions....

- make eye contact with 'strangers' - the person at the cash register, the conductor on the train, etc - instead of looking away as is common for women in many middle eastern cultures, telling men from those same cultures than a woman who looks them in the eyes is not 'interested' in them but simply follows western-European customs where it is considered proper and polite to look others (of both sexes) in the eyes.

- keep check on their children when they are out in the streets. Swedish children are raised by their parents, not by the neighbourhood. Sending your children out on the streets without supervision will and does lead to problems since Swedish adults will not tell of misbehaving children other than their own.

- etc.

...is frowned upon since it goes against the aforementioned multicultural ideals.
It might be from the great book The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner (p 135).

'In the midst of Shannon’s career, some lawyers in the patent department at Bell Labs decided to study whether there was an organizing principle that could explain why certain individuals at the Labs were more productive than others. They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.” More than anything, Nyquist asked good questions.'
This is the third place I’ve encountered your work in as many days. I first read it from a social media post, then saw it had been covered in the Star Tribune, and now here. Good to see such hard work getting noticed and appreciated.
I wrote an article about the app Im building
I walked on that bridge on 8/30.

That night, this article appeared in my Google feed.

Today 9/2 it's on my Hacker News feed.

Wtf?
I often wondered why s/w development is always a rush at the expense of quality.

Well I do know why just don't agree with the principle of seeing how much the company can get out of a developer in x hours.
Ah yes, the platform formerly known as twitter shall surely NEVER allow the weights produced from analysis of its conversational data to go into the production of spambots!

After all, there's definitely no market for a product that has been finely-trained on social media posts to the point where it can perfectly ape social media posts. There's no money for Twitter to make there, so the technology it produces from this analysis shall certainly never find its way into spam bots that create content indistinguishable from genuine humans on Twitter.
Html with contenteditable I guess?
> Covid still exists, but most everybody has natural or induced immunity

That’s why I compared to 2021, not 2020. In 2021 anyone who wanted a vaccine could get one.

> it just isn't as severe (new strains)

AFAIK this is still unproven, do you have a source?

> If you want to live in a state of emergency in perpetuity, go for it

I don’t, and never did. You’ve understood my point exactly backwards. I don’t think QR code menus make sense, and, along with a lot of other pandemic theatre, I don’t think they ever made sense, as evidenced by the fact that once people decided to stop using them, nothing catastrophic happened, despite the fact that the state of the pandemic is not meaningfully different from 2021.
They introduced plenty of meaningful features for WinRT development, unfortunately they managed to kill most of them on the years thereafter.