skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No mention of APL here or on retrocomputing. We had a decwriter at uni in the 70s/80s timeframe with APL key caps which was always the last terminal available to login to the Dec-10.

IMP (the Edinburgh programming language behind EMAS) used %op% notation which is very like early Fortran .and.

To repeat my comment from the earlier posting, 7 bit ASCII and upper case only terminals meant limited symbols were available universally. Using "." for multiplication would have made parsing decimal fractions and floating point numbers significantly harder despite the commonplace availability of full-stop in the character set to hand. Thus use of

a . b

as the nearest available notation to

a • b

(Using unavailable characters of the time, • not being in
7 bit ASCII) So

a * b

Seems logical. Remember that six bit byte notation was also in use for BCD. Even less characters.

ASCII is a neologism for IA5 and the Baudot codes available before ASCII happened. People who worked on that standardisation process are still around, and active as are people who worked on early Fortran if not the ground states.
His book, the Algorithm Design Manual, gets a lot of praise. But I found it far too fluffy, and lacking in rigor. And he doesn't even do a good job of talking about applications.

https://www.redblobgames.com/ is a really good resource that gives a lot of context, and doesn't shy away from technical details.
https://www.redblobgames.com/ is a really good resource that gives a lot of context, and doesn't shy away from technical details.
What a classic ending to that article
Can you suggest a book for these kind of calculations? (or lecture notes , preferably free)
Ha, okay why isn't monocular depth estimation sufficient?
I thought the video he posted showed two extremely intelligent men that had a huge depth of the topic. It was one of the very best things I have seen in HN in years- besides LLMs of course.
It took me a while to realize it, but Jax is actually a huge opportunity for a lot of scientific computing. Jax was originally developed as a more flexible platform for doing machine learning research. But Jax's real superpower is that it bundles XLA and makes it really easy to run computations on GPU or TPU. And huge swathes of scientific computation basically run large scale vectorized computations.

When I was in astronomy (about a decade ago) I did large scale simulations of gravitational interactions. But at the time all these simulations were done on CPU. Some of the really big efforts used more specialized chips, but it was a huge effort to write the code for it.

But today with Jax, if you want to write an N-body simulation of a globular cluster, you can just code it up in numpy and it'll run on a GPU for free and be about 1000x faster. From what I can tell though, very few people in the sciences have caught on yet.
Not a fair comparison IMO. Jax is low level library used to make ML frameworks while pytorch is a full blow ML framework.

In terms of is it worth using it - that depends on what you're doing. If you just want to start with ML training probably not. If you have something already and you want to take it to next level (e.g. influence how training and inference work) than it's a good choice. You might be interested in looking into flax or haiku instead of using vanilla Jax. These are closer to pytorch.
It does seem to be missing quite a bit. I was sure Fenwick had to be there under another name, but I don't see it. Union-find is an even weirder miss, that's a _great_ data structure and very useful. I couldn't think of any other term it'd be hiding under.

The few I couldn't find off the top of my head: square-root decomposition, heavy-light decomposition and really anything at all on Range Minumum Query, one of my favorite general problems (IMO far more interesting than sorting as a group of techniques to focus some time on).

> I think this is where I saw union-find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGZ64ob440I Except I remember a dictionary/hashmap implementation, not a fixed size array.

I think you usually see ufds on fixed arrays because it makes the algorithm analysis a bit more interesting. If you have lookups cost more than O(1) I think you'll wash out the fun parts of the analysis.

The ds still works well of course regardless.
wouldn't care, I know it's just a tree.

circle of life.
It's a very finite collection, obviously almost everything will be missing. That's inevitable.

Eg they don't have a soft heap or a finger tree either. They are also missing many purely functional data structures that eg Okasaki talks about.
Personally, I find all of these changes a big upgrade. I never used the old quick switcher menu, I use control center constantly, etc etc.

Making things configurable could make sense but it will make writing any kind of manual, guides or support a nightmare as most users are very confused about the settings they change.
These are terrible examples.
I absolutely don't want Sweden to turn into either those countries.
Extreme class divide in the 1st case, massive judicial injustice, plus the US has kind of been trending downwards since the 1970s...
And Singapore is an extremely authoritarian country.

Anyway, these countries have not invited 1 million+ people from a dramatically different(read: backwards) cultures that are completely incompatible. Singapore has invited skilled labor from all over the world.

If 1 million Polish or 1 million Portuguese had migrated to Sweden over the last 20 years, I doubt we would be having such problems.
Debugging a Bit-Flip Error (2023)
That game apparently got a reboot 2005. But yeah, that seems to be a true cooperative games, no player forced to play the enemy team, be a spy or a dungeon master or the like. Thanks for telling me about it!
I've not read the EULA but why not just have an actual IP router?

Pay the signup charge, and also stand up a wifi network. Call it "Foo discounted" if the plane's SSID is "Foo". Put up a captive portal that lets the user claim various "discounts", like veteran, senior, child, etc. No matter what they choose, charge them $2 via a payment page. Once you've been made whole on the service cost, future visitors get a notice that "all discounts have been claimed, please use Foo".

Now you have free internet and all those using your router/portal have $2 internet. The upstream bandwidth is certainly atrocious so you will easily be able to multiplex all the data onto your connection.

Bundle it into a RPi kind of device (has to look finished, like a music player or smth, to get past security) so that you can continue to operate the device even when tray tables have to go up, when you go to the bathroom, etc.

I find it extremely doubtful that the airplane has WIPS or WIDS that will deassociate
connections to your rogue wifi. And after all, are you not allowed to have a LAN party?
I've seen complaints about it on HN before, so don't go claiming that this has never come up before.

The term is widely used by younger programmers in online discussions to refer to unnamed (and it oftens seems as if the name is almost not actually known) older programmers. I've seen it on HN, Reddit, Twitter (RIP) and Mastodon. It's not a reference to specific person, it's a reference to a perceived role.

Even if a person has/had a gray beard, why is that the characteristic used to describe them?

And it is sexist only in an implicit sense: it is obviously a term used to describe (a) only men (b) older programmers. There is absolutely no chance that someone says "I talked to a graybeard about it" to mean that they spoke to a (older) female programmer.
Unrelated but I think WatchOS10 has something wrong going with how often the watch faces update the complications like heart rate, weather, etc. I have found it showing heart rates recorded as long back as an hour before I manually click on it and have it launch the heart rate app which was never the case with any of the previous versions.
Ephedrine will let you go until you die.
Wouldn't the cardiologists be able to scan your arteries and see they are inflamed ? Honest question ?

They must have some way of doing this because how else do they know to prescribe stents ?
That’s just ad hominem and it adds no value. Doesn’t disprove anything.
> No code is just an extension of this problem because it still requires developers, internal to your company, to maintain and extend the no code solution under the same limitations as before.

I don't want to dismiss this point, because it's real. But there is an alternative.

I've been brought into these talks with other departments before, and I evaluate the tool from an engineering perspective. If they want to use a true no-code solution, we don't block it but raise to the director level that we will under no circumstances support the use of the tool - we are developers by trade and that's what we're paid for, so they are responsible for everything to do with it and bear all responsibility if it fails to adapt.

If it's low code and has an API, we generally much prefer that because it means we can actually deploy and properly maintain the code that might be needed to support integration with it.

We don't copy and paste fucking code and we don't drag around UI elements with if-else statements - it's simply not our profession. You wouldn't ask a carpenter to assemble IKEA furniture. It's a waste of money and time.

So yes, the solutions might "need" a developer, but no sane director would allocate one. It makes no sense.
No, I was curious ?
As a person who uses low/no code platforms to ship real products I fully disagree with this.

Low code and no code platforms can do a lot to make implementing back office functions easier. It enables things that you'd deprioritize without these tools. That said, they also need to be managed like software: versioning, beta releases, risk mitigation, tech debt trade offs.

While there are things that can go wrong with these tools, they do strictly make things easier rather than harder.
> Forcing one person to be the enemy team is not very nice, [...]

In my play groups, whenever Scotland Yard comes out, people usually jostle for the opportunity to play Mister X. We have to 'force' people not to be the enemy team.

Of course, different people have different preferences.

Btw, table top role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are cooperative and have been around since the 1970s.

(Keep in mind that the Dungeon Master is _not_ the enemy. If they were, they could just always kill all the player characters almost immediately.)
Epic Games Sells Bandcamp to Songtradr
Agreed. I used Jax about a year ago to estimate some diode parameters for a side project of mine.
I seem to be moving further away from the passwordless world with each new account created.
> our 2 year old is obsessed with trains of any type,

It was just the local Caltrain commuter (and some freight trains) but I remember my 2yo commenting that we were so lucky to live close to a train crossing so we could hear the horns and the trains go by.
No, it really is not that hard. It truly is ridiculous to state that it’s impossible to read.

If that were true how would you know what it was saying in order to disagree with it?

But like your ad hominem, it’s an irrelevant point, sorry.
MS PowerApps, PowerAutomate and related offerings are truly awful products. I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt and been burned repeatedly.

Don’t tar all no/low code tools with the same brush though. I’ve had good success with Retool, for example.
6 months of pay is insane. Quite honestly, it'd tempt me to volunteer to get laid off. I think one can get unemployment as well? That'd give someone 6 months to recharge and probably while having more income than before.
> The problem with the speed of the melting is that neigter we, nor the nature has time to adapt.

It sounds like a theory that could be easily verified since Switzerland already lost 50% of its glaciers. Have there been deaths associated to it? Did rivers dry up? Did forests disappear? Did people lack time to adapt?
> "An array language is a programming language that supports the manipulation of entire arrays – or portions of arrays – as a basic unit of operation."

I agree with this definition. In neither Haskell nor Python does this count as a ‘basic unit of operation’. As the sibling comment mentions, it requires a lot of extra work in both languages — hardly ‘basic’!

> Let us look at Wikipedia [2], where Ada is considered an array language.

As for this, it appears from the manual that arithmetic operators are overloaded only for 1D vectors and 2D matrices. So in this regard Ada is much more limited than ‘real’ array languages.

[manual link: https://www.adaic.org/resources/add_content/standards/05rm/h...]
Ok I find it amazing it’s cheaper to host your own on bare metal ? I was also curious what type of stuff you’re building as a web developer ? Django ? Must be decent scale?

I host things on GCP which scale to zero in quiet times, they saved me a bunch of cash…
Yes.

Tesla don't need to invent safety standards they only need to implement them.

BTW you can't compare the first year of the Audi factory with the first year of Tesla because the Audi factory is much older and back then totally different safety standards existed.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who tried it! Didn’t seem that difficult to me?
the issue here is that if your ideal algorithm isn't simply expressible in numpy (which many aren't), you're pretty much out of luck. As a result, imo the better approach is to use a fast language that also compiles to GPU (e.g. Julia)
Security is all about risks. Most companies aren’t at the scale of Facebook so the much rely on simple heuristics.

Facebook likely has enough ancillary data to not really even need your password. They’ve seen a bunch of prior usage from a device identical to your current one. Your IP matches known Ip for your session. There’s some cookie on your system that’s associated with you. Perhaps, even Facebook knows the handful of people that ever share WiFi with you.

Essentially, they already know who you are, so they’re willing to take anything that’s close to a known password.
Jax is super useful for scientific computing. Although nbody sims might not be the best application. A naive nbody sim is very easy to implement and accelerate in jax (here’s my version: https://github.com/PWhiddy/jax-experiments/blob/main/nbody.i...), but it can be tricky to scale it. This is because efficient nbody sims usually either rely on trees or spatial hashing/sorting which are tricky to efficiently implement with jax.
If you use/consume 4 of anything and 3 of those things are a bad experience, I think it's reasonable to have a bad opinion of said thing.

Imagine buying 4 Cokes in you life and 3 of them being flat. Most people would probably consider Coke a bad product at that point, even if the sample size _is_ small.

Or imagine going to a restaurant 4 times. and 3 of those times getting food poisoning. Most people would probably consider it a bad restaurant.

I don't even know if most people would even manage 4 visits after getting food poisoning twice, let alone thrice.
I use PuTTY weekly
It’s been interesting watching the open source community get ROPE working well. I find it interesting that the method appears to be as good as retraining a large model.

To me, that reads like models can be much smaller, understanding of human language at a fraction the size. But we then need a technique (such as this) to expand the context window to interpret larger inputs.

This could dramatically democratize model development.
It’s a fine line isn’t it?

We enjoyed the overcooked stuff, but came close to arguments a few times. Worked best when we communicated what each of us was doing.

“It Takes Two”, OTOH, was really good and worked very nicely, at least in part because division of labour is built into the game mechanics in various places.
Pretty sure that's Jupiter for us it sucks up a lot of crap.
you fairly easily tell on Android as well.
If you cannot see how I reach the conclusion, then you’re not equipped to reply to it —doesn’t that follow?

What you’re saying is just ideology, you don’t have any facts or sources to back it up. I get that you don’t like article, but that’s insufficient to make it untrue.
First off, welcome to Third Party Doctrine. If you don't like it, write your Congressperson and get them cracking.

Second: this is only a problem where you have significant pressure/attempts to specifically avoid leaving paper trail in order to do something dicey. If you're fairly sure you shouldn't be doing it, and the only thing keeping you from talking about it is being on the record, then blurt that shit out on the record, because odds are you shouldn't be doing it.
China has about three times the US population and it’s almost entirely concentrated along their coast. Passenger rail makes sense for that kind of population density. Where the US has similar density, it has Acela, which is the profitable part of Amtrak.

China also has a massive construction bubble that the government keeps propping up in order to delay the inevitable correction. As a result they overbuild a lot of infrastructure, including passenger rail, well beyond the point of diminishing returns.
If that's true, isn't it just a matter of time before it gets shut off? I don't really see a way to keep this working without somehow crowdsourcing accessing X. Even with an automated way to create fake accounts with phone verification, it would eventually be detected or guarded against.
Give it a couple of years and you can put them on a Tern GSD or similar.

(Don’t know if Amtrak would carry that. You can just about get away with taking them on UK trains.)
It puts a premium on in-person face-to-face communication.

I'm okay with that, so long as any potential employer understand I also put a premium on it.
They should just buy Kagi and make it part of iCloud.
Ha ha ha ha these ‘confessions’ read like a retro computing anonymous group.
Original source, as cited in the article:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-offices-france-raided-...
Thanks for reminding me of that classic Madonna hit
> I'm curious what math led to that funny exponent in eq.(5): ρ(r) ~ r^{-9/4}.

The actual exponent and its workings-out almost certainly comes from Gott 1975, which I do not remember ever having read <https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1975ApJ...201..296G>, so I cannot do it any sort of justice at this time, but see my comment on Gunn 1977 below.

Theres an early history of pre-NFW power-law dark matter density profiles swept up in ref [34] of the Planet 9 preprint, which is cited just before the equation that piqued your curiosity.

[34] is <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985ApJS...58...39B/abstra...> which turns out to be part of a 1984 Princeton doctoral thesis, and I am unfamiliar with it although I recognize its author Edmund Bertschinger as well-known from his later 1980s-2000s work in cosmological perturbation theory and cosmological simulations.

[34] also lists Gunn & Gott 1972, Gunn 1977 and Gott 1975 in the references section (bottom of 1st to top of 2nd column). Surprisingly the Planet 9 preprint lists none of these papers.

However, in a way that could be serendipitous: you might enjoy the "funny exponent"s in many the equations of [34], since some involve powers of -8/9, 8/3, -5/2, among others.

I wrote but abandoned an attempt to tease out the detail using the following two seminal papers.

Gott & Gunn 1972, "On the Infall of Matter into Clusters of Galaxies and Some Effects on their Evolution" <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1972ApJ...176....1G/abstra...> (PDF via top right box), contemplating a Friedmann universe with a spherical homogeneous overdensity that collapses into a galaxy cluster.

Gunn 1977 <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1977ApJ...218..592G/abstra...> contemplates a spherical but inhomogeneous perturbation, and arrives at a power law of density \propto r^{-9/4}. It relies on Gott 1975 for that, however. This paper is the basis for a "universality" result which indicates that the shape of an overdensity's boundary is essentially preserved over time, even as the matter within the overdensity collapses into various structures. That universality was convenient at the time to avoid having to treat spirals specially, and is in effect claimed as applicable to a PBH equipped with a DM microhalo in the preprint linked at the top.

The "funny exponent" appears in the text just after eqns (8)-(9b) in Gunn 1977.

All of the NASA/ADS abstracts linked in my comment have PDFs available in the top right box on the page.

From the abandoned first attempt (which grew in length and messiness) I'll save two things: the "curious" equation's r_eq and \rho_eq are fixed at the transition from radiation-domination to matter-domination at z ~ 3200 (47 thousand years after the big bang), after which radiation pressure is insufficient to keep perturbations from growing. The transition is also when scale factor a \propto t^{2/3}, and energy density \rho \propto a^{-3(1+w)} where w is close to 0; self-gravitation in the overdensity causes its \rho to drop more slowly, and furthermore draws in matter from the surrounding ~average density shell.
I used Closure at Google after coming from a Java background. I always described it as "Closure puts the Java into JavaScript". The team I was working on found several bugs where live code was removed from the dead code removal too.

Now Closure (at Google) meant a couple of different things (by 2010+). First it was the compiler. But second it was a set of components, many UI related. Fun fact: the Gmail did had written their own set of components (called Fava IIRC) and those had a different component lifecycle so weren't interoperable. All of this was the most Google thing ever.

IMHO Closure was never heavily pushed by Google. In fact, at the time, publicly at least, Google was very much pushing GWT (Google Web Toolkit) instead. For those unfamiliar, this is writing code in Java that is transpiled to Javascripit for frontend code. This was based on the very Google notion of both not understanding and essentially resenting Javsscript. It was never viewed as a "real" language. Then again, the C++ people didn't view Java as a real language either so there was a hierarchy.

GWT obviously never went anywhere and there were several other Javascript intiatives that never reached mass adoption (eg Angular and, later, Dart). Basically, React came out and everything else just died.

But this idea of running the same code everywhere was really destructive, distracting and counter-productive. Most notably, Google runs on protobufs. Being a binary format, this doesn't work for Javascript. Java API protobufs weren't compatible with GWT for many years. JS had a couple of encodings it tried to use. One was pblite, which basically took the protobuf tag numbers as array elements. Some Google protobufs had thousands of optional fields so the wire format became:

[null,null,null,null,...many times over...,null,"foo"]

Not exactly efficient. Another used protobuf tag numbers as JSON object keys. I think this had other issues but I can't remember what.

Likewise, Google never focused on having a good baseline set of components. Around this time some Twitter engineers came out with Bootstrap, which became the new reset.css plus a component library and everything else kind of died.

Even Angular's big idea of two-way data binding came at a huge cost (component transclusion anyone?).

Google just never got the Web. The biggest product is essentially a text box. The way I always described it is "How do you know you're engineering if you're not over-engineering?" Google does some absolutely amazing technical infrastructure (in particular) but the Web? It just never seemed to be taken seriously or it was forced into an uncomfortable box.