skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> author decided it was a good idea to prepend the message with the message length encoded as a varint.

> WHY? Oh, why?!

Uh oh. Is this my HN moment?

This is exactly how I implemented it at my company. We had to write many protobuf messages to one file in bulk (in parallel). I did a fair amount of research before designing this and didn’t find any standard for separating protobuf messages (in fact, found that there explicitly isn’t a standard in that protobuf doesn’t care). So I thought rather than using some “special” control character, like a null byte, which would inevitably be not-so-special and collide with somebody else’s (like Schema Registry’s “magic byte”), I’d use something meaningful like the number of bytes the following record is.

As for why I chose varint instead of just picking an interger size, well for one I got nerd-sniped by varint encoding and thought it would be cool to try and implement it in Scala. Secondly, I thought if I chose a fixed size integer, no matter what size I pick, my users will always surprise me and exceed it at least once, and when that happens, kaboom! I wanted to future proof this without wasting 64 goddamn bytes in front of each message, and also I got nerd-sniped, OK?!?

Someone on my team recently shared one of these files outside the company and so I really hope she’s not talking about me but that’s a crazy coincidence if not!
I got a ticket due to a poorly designed "smart" parking meter.

I parked and put change in the meter and it didn't seem to register. I was a little confused, and put it in the meter for the adjacent car and a coin would register and increment the time.

Ugh. So I put a post-it note on the windshield describing the problem and went to eat.

Came back, and you guessed it: post-it gone, replaced by parking ticket.

It wasn't obvious what was happening, and I kind of put it all together afterwards.

The parking meter seems to have some sort of occupancy sensor. I suspect it might reset your time to zero if you leave the spot. reading your comment, it might be a max time in spot sensor? who knows.

I think it needed my car to be detected to add time to the meter. Because it was too far away or not reflective, or whatever, the coins were not accepted to add time. But it did keep the quarters. geez.

I complained on the ticket when it came. Had to pre-pay, but went in and pled my case at the parking authority court. Took two witnesses. They filed something to talk to engineers and said they'd let me know.

And then they denied it. I had the ability to appeal, but by then it was several hours of my time taking off in the middle of the day and I just let them keep the $40.

jerks.
> Isolated tribes that have never been conracted? Antarctic researchers?

Ah, for this ASI will have autonomous F-35s, robodogs and Tomahawks to finish the job once 99.(9)% is off the way.
We have very similar tastes! CFTBL is my #1 favorite.
Aren't webmentions/trackback/pingback supposed to solve the "replying to" use case? Is the advantage here that this works on static content?
> F-1 Race is attributed to programming genius Satoru Iwata, who’s appeared on this blog before.

I still have his gold pants Mii on my 3DS. ;-)
The example looks like this:

class A {
protected:
A() {}
}

class B : public A {}

B x; //ok
B y{}; //not ok, can't access A::A()

Would the T val = T(); example work if you don't have a copy constructor at all, or no move constructor, or custom ones which do weird things?

Edit: I checked, and you're right - the syntax seems to be fully equivalent in C++17 or later. Great to hear!
It is pretty clear considering his past behavior and own admissions to the effect he was lewd drug addict and turned a new leaf a few years back.

But justice must still take it's course - even decades later - the truth will no doubt come out during the investigation.

What is maddening is his cult on YouTube who did not bother to watch the documentary and the testimony of the accusers before jumping all in to defend him.
I think about this pretty often from the opposite perspective. As a frequent user of software, I can't get over how much it all sucks. Nearly every nontrivial piece of software I've ever used has had annoying and frustrating bugs and it feels to me like that's only getting worse. I agree that there's no correct software and I think the software engineering discipline needs to be blamed more for it. I don't think we deserve these salaries just to churn out broken code. I love programming but you can bet that the second there's an AI that can write perfect code, I'm advocating for it to replace us all because I'm tired of broken software.
We're back to what psychopathy is all about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Signs_and_symptoms
> A few days ago, i saw this article in SF Chronicle; a joint opinion piece from MIT professor Carlo Ratti:
"Uber was supposed to help traffic. It didn’t. Robotaxis will be even worse"

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/robota...

The basic gist was, convenience of ride-sharing / seduced us into over using cars. It was supposed to have the opposite effect

"...ride-hailing and ride-sharing could make our streets cleaner and more efficient. ... With minimal delays to passengers, we could match riders and reduce the size of New York City taxi fleets by 40%. More people could get around in fewer cars for less money. We could reduce car ownership, and free up curbs and parking lots for new uses"

but ... they did not take into account changes in human behavior. People stopped walking, using bicycles, etc...

"On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced."

I think this is what will happen with these drone delivery services. As it becomes easier to order a box of bandaids and have it delivered in 4 minutes, people will change their behavior, we will be ordering more frequently one-off things from Walmart several times a week, and the sky will be filled with drones...

and it will be hell.

People have a right to convenience and a better quality of life. Urban planners have a similarly flawed argument — tearing down highways will reduce traffic because everyone will take public transport. It merely forces the lower class and poor to suffer through public transit. The upper middle class, and similarly the tenured academics and policy wonks who came up with this sort of nonsensical arguments, never have to suffer the consequences of their own policies. It is a great thing in America that everyone can easily buy a car and enjoy the freedom. If cities want better traffic, then spend more money renovating or widening roads, not forcing poor people into crowded and uncomfortable public transport.
“Silent” is a stretch, though it doesn’t seem too bad: https://youtube.com/shorts/W_WDw1KFHUg
This branch of thread is sad. For everyone.
Zipline doesn’t pay like google but is decent, they post salaries for their roles. A Stanford classmate of mine works there according to LinkedIn.
Stoning is also a long-standing practice, is that not an aberration in terms of human rights law?
Yes, they're lying.

The 'traditional order of society' is a society run by psycho pathological individuals and benefits nobody except for those individuals.

But you already knew that, didn't you?
Thanks for this link -- really interesting.

I like the suggestion to rethink whether you actually need to be doing asynchronous computing with a message broker/queue/stream or whether you can represent your work another way.
> Sure. But the attacker needs to actually get in, which is considerably harder than getting into a hotel room.

It depends who is the attacker. There are countries (western democracies) where the police regularly "visits" datacenters.
Silq: A strongly-typed high-level programming language for quantum computing
that would bother me to no end.

it is one thing to create a space exclusive for men but quite another to not allow women to do the same, or reject mixed groups.

that would be like saying that girl-scouts are not legitimate or to reject mixed-gender scout groups.

that's not creating a space for men but it's exactly the kind of gate-keeping men are being accused of doing for centuries.
Something like that would fail the code review at any large organization. Why? Because ternary operator is hard for maintenance purposes so the reviewer would simply ask to use if..else syntax instead. I gather you never worked in such organization.
Is this a new page? Don't remember if I've read this one or not.
We call that a conviction and a system of law for this. We should use it. I don’t think private corporations that are monopolies should decide who can speak and who cannot. Obviously they can protect their business, but then they shouldn’t be allowed to be universally dominant in a technology category like video.
> Anyway, that 1 cent charge just infuriated clients for some reason, and every month or two we'd get bug reports about it or requests to explain why it kept showing up.

There is an obvious alternative here, which is to just absorb that fraction of cent, so the customer doesn't see it. Handling bug reports and infuriated clients costs more.

You could even just round up to the penny and ding the customer; if there is a 0.3 cent fraction coming from the payments gateway, turn it into a customer-facing penny, thereby collecting an extra 0.7 cents.

That way, too, there would almost certainly be zero complaints and bug reports.

If the customer is supposed to pay $103.45395 every month, you could turn it into $103.46, pocketing an extra $0.00605, or into $103.45, where you're out $0.00395.

Think about it; when you eat at a restaurant, often the prices for a meal are round like $11.50, even though the restaurants expenses are down to the penny. Why is that? Because they arbitrarily set the price. They don't say, oh, our ground beef supplier charges to the penny penny, so lunch will have to be $11.57.

Oh, the business teams found the approach puzzling---but what do they know, right? If they were smart, they would be software engineers.
Rails was initially too slow for Github, so they forked it, didn't use "Rails" for a while [1], lost literal engineering years to upgrading it (same for Shopify), and now Github has an engineering department dedicated to working of the Rails master branch directly, which is huge engineering overhead and a problem and solution that shouldn't exist. Github co-founder Tom lamented using Rails at Github and has stopped using it [2].

If you're Github or Shopify and can throw (waste?) engineering years at solving a framework specific ecosystem nightmare problems, and have the klout and runway to hire core Ruby and Rails maintainers, then you're probably in a highly unique situation and could use any framework you want.

The rest of us don't see Rails as a great choice for Github. Doubt and questioning.

[1] https://videos.itrevolution.com/watch/550704376/
[2] https://youtu.be/GfhPeOiXDLA?t=725
> Reminder that Google is utterly a joke

IMHO, misplaced blame. Rather let us think as _Amazon_ is utterly a joke, because they sprayed infinite(in terms of plebs like me) cash into drone delivery and still didn't make much progress in the space. Google is not even in logistics business and drone doesn't make any sense for them.

> Yet almost every CS major at Stanford still stays up all night doing leetcode or whatever stupid thing they're doing to try to get a place there.

In long-term, nothing trumps comfortable money and the prestige that comes with the name "GOOGLE" on a CV and opening more useful doors later on, compared to Zipline, which could've been any one of the other thousands of drone startups that came and went silently and didn't turn up much. We don't live in an ideal world, something all of us should remember.
I'd actually say many Tier 1 talents would rather get a lower salary and work on higher risk/more creative projects in startups than get bored to death in these big companies that have for the most part stopped innovating.
That's the second half of my beef with the city - you can only fight these tickets on Thursday afternoons between 2-4 by going in to "traffic court." Bull crap.
You can just run Pulsar standalone which is super-simple, it is a great start and scales just fine for one machine. Once you outscale one machine, you can refactor Pulsar into a distributed setup. The advantage is that everything is still familiar.
Now imagine this scenario however unlikely - Microsoft licenses a bespoke CPU only design from Apple derived from the M3 coupled with an AMD Navi GPU for their console.

Apple get a new revenue stream and, tech bragging rights in a market, where it will never compete.
GPT 3.5-turbo-instruct can play full games of chess without losing board state
Nobody seems worried about how this standard gets applied down the road. They all seem focused on the case study but don’t see how this example applies directly to them so obviously.

I am genuinely confused how so many smart people can be so short sighted.
Yes, yes there is: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/767.pdf
Show HN: The Saturn of Elite
Title screen alghoritm of the original Elite implemented in JS using canvas.
Assume they could at least do the 30,000 car backlog
Let's not pretend our industry doesn't immediately up the prestige and desirability of anyone who has worked at Google.

I can already think of a friend off the top of my head who worked there. They will tell me their engineering work at Google is not even that impressive compared to her other technical accomplishments. Our industry doesn't seem to care and she gets immediate extra-prestige just from having "(ex-)Google" on her resume independent of her actual technical accomplishments at Google.

Those Stanford grads aren't dumb. They are reacting to the incentives of our entire industry and making a wise decision that favours their professional growth through accruing status and wealth - both resources which can catapult you to finally having what you need to go do "the thing" you actually want to do. Hence all the ex-Google startup founders.
Without /:go:build tags, you can just define 1.21 as your Go version in go.mod to opt out of new features while getting other benefits of the new compiler
I don't think we should equate demonetization with censorship.
The size of these vehicles is certainly absurd, but flying packages with drones that consume most of their energy to fight gravity does not seem particularly efficient either, (e.g. compared to small road electric vehicles with the same payload, which would have its own practical problems).
Langkit is an option. WhyLabs has published a number of blog posts on this subject recently: https://whylabs.ai/blog/posts/monitoring-llm-performance-wit...
I thought I was going to find this far more entertaining post when I read the title: http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Well the “community” doesn’t include anyone outside of Google. So, it’s not really a “community” by definition.
> Yet almost every CS major at Stanford still stays up all night doing leetcode or whatever stupid thing they're doing to try to get a place there.

It's about the money.

Work at a startup, and get paid meager table scraps to "follow your dreams" and "work on something meaningful." Watch all your friends become millionaires while you work 14 hours a day to afford name-brand ramen noodles.

Or, work in Big Tech, get paid an actual decent salary, clock out in 60 hours or less every week while getting every perk imaginable, and retire into the upper-middle class before 50 (or 40, or sometimes 30).
> Was it wrong for his production company to fire him before a judge had rendered judgement?

Yes. One's support for universal rights is really tested when the accused is clearly Not A Nice Person.

Imagine of being accused of rape, even though you're totally innocent, and your employer (or your customers) suddenly dropping you. Would that be fair?
This isn’t a new idea. In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons pointed out that increasing the efficiency of machines that burned coal would lead to more coal being burned, not less.

Making something more efficient makes it cheaper, unlocking new use cases and consumption by people who couldn’t afford it earlier. That’s what we call Jevons’ Paradox.

Jevons was worried that the UK would run out of coal entirely. This question, asked in 1865, is similar to the 20th century worry of Peak Oil.

> Are we wise in allowing the commerce of this country to rise beyond the point at which we can long maintain it?

Jevons, William Stanley. The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines. Macmillan and Co., 1865.
> freer money for education

You mean the unlimited tuition increases coupled with crippling student loan debt?
Peer review, no. Review by a substantial percentage of world-wide immunologists along with everyone who's even remotely interested and a bunch of people who believe your work is killing people, still not a magic spell, but it's a hell of a lot better.
You can also define a wrapper message with a single repeated field. The resulting encoding would be `varint(field id * 8 + 1) varint(length)` plus the actual message, so it can be also easily generated from and parsed back into a raw byte sequence without protoc.
Does the creator influence their audience, or does the audience influence the creator?
who called?
This is google+cloudinary published benchmarks of jpeg-xl vs avif vs webp

https://storage.googleapis.com/avif-comparison/index.html

https://cloudinary.com/blog/contemplating-codec-comparisons
Forgive me if I sound negative but I don't actually get this.

> standard to allow websites to link to each other.

But websites can already link to each other, using html links? There's even XFN to add metadata to such links.

We used to call this a "blogroll".
For other platforms it should check to see if it's more efficient to serve a JPEGXL WASM polyfill
This only works in sparsely populated areas like the US though. I can't imagine this working in European countries (or cities like New York) where most people live in multi-story buildings in the city that are shared with other people. Where would the drone land?
Or postgres. If you are under 1000 messages a second it functions well as a transactional queue.
This doesn't surprise me, because unlike Google, they actually have an innovative contribution in production; and given all the evidence, it ain't gonna' be cancelled any time soon.
The PDF format was intended to be an explicit per page device independant description of text, line path, and image layout subject to clipping with no "program running" elements to it.

It followed PostScript which was a programming language that was intended to be directly undertood and runnable by Postscript enabled printers.

Postscript could easily do the job here, it had "arc" drawing primitives that described circles (both full and partial).

The 'failure' of Postscript was that as a programming languge a bad .ps job could crash a printer and a 1,500 page .ps document had to be internally fully rendered just to print out page 73 only (potentially code on any 'page' could loop back or forward and generate image elements on any page).

As a not-quite PostScript simplified 'other' the PDF formal languaage spec only allows the drawing of lines and 'curves' and curves are explicitly 3rd order bezier splines.

See: Path Operators (Page 95)

Portable Document Format Reference Manual (230 pages)

https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...
The end user is the final boss, and your job is to keep them alive.
Some points:

1. he wasn't "corrected", he was attacked

2. even if he was "corrected" that makes no sense since the dictionary literally agrees with him

He was attacked for being a male that knew he was male. That was the attack. Quite absurd.
Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game on Hulu is awesome if y'all have never seen it.
Grouping digits in SQL
> Irrelevant
Except it was relevant as a response to the OP in that: I was pointing out their conflation of two different DRBGs.

Having an SP 800-90A DRBG does not mean you support all of them, nor does it imply the user could change between the 3 (or, in that hypothetical, 4).

Outside of that, it is unlikely that this module had Dual_EC_DRBG at any point in time for three reasons:
1) Submitting a hardware module that has an entirely new DRBG would require a lot of low level work from Cavium, and the modifications made to the physical module would likely constitute more than an updated certificate (i.e., a new certificate).
2) Even though the DRBG was withdrawn, the CAVP lists algorithm certificates, and this includes historic certificates. Cavium doesn’t have a Dual_EC_DRBG certificate for any operating environment. A list of Dual_EC_DRBG certificates can be seen here: https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/cryptographic-algorithm-valid...
3) the earliest security policy for the module that I could find dates back to 07/22/2014, and it still uses the CTR_DRBG. Security policy here: https://csrc.nist.rip/groups/STM/cmvp/documents/140-1/140sp/...
> the only thing stopping their immense success was the requirement to reduce the noise by an order or two of magnitude

I mean, i know its different context, but in general, a 1-2 magnitude improvement in hardware capability does not sound crazy on its face for most of the computer industry. Most computer hardware has improved by that much over very short time periods historically.
This is just one city.

I could imagine they won't be allowed to spread to any more cities due to actual or exaggerated noise complaints.

Every competitor has an incentive to delay them - and therefore there are lots of people who want to set up 'salt lake city quiet sky protest group'
> Ruby processes don't return the memory to the system

That is not correct. Ruby do unmap pages when it has too many free pages, and it obviously call `free` on memory it allocated once it doesn't use it.

What happens sometime though is that because of fragmentation you have many free slots but no free whole pages. That is one of the reason why GC compaction was implemented, but it's not enabled by default.

But in most case I've seen, the memory bloat of Ruby applications was caused by glibc malloc, and the solution was either to set MALLOC_ARENA_MAX or to switch to jemalloc.
Unix shells used to be used as an access control mechanism
This idea that multiple redundant voting computing units would be magic to Johnny VN seems unlikely. This is because that exact scheme was used with manual "computers" (people with desk calculators) for example in code breaking and nuclear weapon simulation. You'll find descriptions of these techniques for example in Feynman talks.
They’ve been doing those deliveries in Rwanda for 6 years! Very impressive. This video has a bit more info and is less rushed: https://youtu.be/jEbRVNxL44c?si=vWGAmhDr2nyA-vDu
Calculators don't use floating point for a reason.
seems like there is a missing option?

- Message retention (like Kafka)

- Easy consumer scale out (like RabbitMQ)

- No particular ordering guarantees (like RabbitMQ)
Yup. Guess this is yet another moment to tell the next generation about it.
> However, in-person-branch-verification is a big non-starter for me. It needs to be more convenient than visiting a branch.

This is an issue with using AliPay and WeChat Pay in China as well. If you want to access the full spectrum of services including reserving train tickets, flights, and hotels with online payments, you need to get a local SIM card and mobile phone number, and then with that plugged in and working, visit a bank branch and set up a bank account in-person. In theory you can do both of these things in the span of an hour if you go first thing in the morning, but not every bank employee knows how to open an account with a passport and sometimes you'll have to visit 2 or 3 branches until you encounter someone know knows how to do it in their system.

Mobile payments are convenient once set up but they have made the world more fragmented with every superpower country implementing its own system.