skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A concise syntax to define structs and functions, with a usable expression syntax. [...] I've always found it ridiculous for people to claim it's holding hardware back.

You just looked in your fish tank and declared what the weather is going to be like in the Atlantic ocean... Like... these things have nothing to do with each other. The fact that C has functions or structs has nothing to do with it being awful influence on designing hardware.

Here are some reasons why C is awful.

* It believes that volatile storage is uniform in terms of latency and throughput. This results in operating systems written with the same stupid idea: they only give you one system call to ask for memory, and you cannot tell what kind of memory you want. This in turn results in hardware being designed in such a way that an operating system can create the worthless "abstraction" of uniform random-access memory. And then you have swap, pmem GPU's memory etc. And none of that has any good interface. And these are the products that despite the archaic and irrelevant concept of how computers are built have succeeded to a degree... Imagine all those which didn't. Imagine those that weren't even conceived of because the authors dismissed the very notion before giving the idea any kind of thinking.

* It has no concept of parallelism. In its newer iterations it added atomics, but this is just a reflection of how hardware was coping with C's lack of any way to deal with parallel code execution. C "imagines" a computer to have a CPU with a single core running a single thread, and that's where program is executed. This notion pushes hardware designers towards pretension that computers are single-threaded. No matter how many components your computer has that can actually compute, whenever you write your program in C, you implicitly understand that it's going to run on this one and only CPU. (And then eg. CUDA struggles with its idea of loading code to be executed elsewhere, which it has to do in some very cumbersome and hard to understand way, which definitely doesn't rely on any of C's own mechanisms).
I wonder if the new version takes the opportunity to make the muxer faster. I needed a path matcher / muxer and I settled on forking julienschmidt/httprouter [1] into my own project, pathmatcher [2]. What I like about the original it is that it uses a trie for mapping paths to handlers, which can look up routes very quickly [3], and is optimized for low/zero allocations. My changes generalizes it (the 'handler' value can be any generic type) and exposes the underlying data structure so you can do non-http.Handler things with it if you want.

[1]: https://github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter

[2]: https://github.com/infogulch/pathmatcher

[3]: https://github.com/julienschmidt/go-http-routing-benchmark
I used to work in the cleared space -- i.e., people with top-secret security clearance. My first job in this space was at AWS, where we probably had about 1/4 of the qualified, cleared talent pool in our space. It was almost possible to hire people with sufficient technical skill who also had clearance -- but it was equally hard to get people cleared, because we and Microsoft were pushing so many people through the pipeline that clearance decisions were often taking 2+ years. We would have people get hired, get a promotion, and leave all before getting their clearance decisions.

My team started taking a different approach: We started hiring people at the lowest level we could ("associate", below even entry-level engineer), with minimal tech skills, but with active clearance and some adjacent skills. STEM background, or tech writing, or just someone who was a hobbyist. I started interviewing people on troubleshooting -- someone told me a fantastic story about troubleshooting a comms issue while deployed in the middle east. The fix involved copious amounts of superglue on a ground-based satellite. Switch out the words, and you could easily have a story of a grizzled old sysadmin patching in production.

We actually ended up being pretty successful. Sure, a substantial portion of our hires were still misses -- but that was already true. Meanwhile, we hired some really talented people from this route, who I ended up trying to poach years after leaving AWS, and leaving the cleared space entirely, because they were just genuinely great engineers who needed to be given that chance.

tl;dr, I agree, and it's nearly always a good idea to look at expanding the talent base in some way or another if you're struggling. In many cases, it means hiring people who have potential, as long as you have sufficient numbers of senior staff to help get them up to speed.
The difference is corporate culture. Blue Origin (not "Ocean") behaves like Old Space, companies like Boeing, who spend a huge amount of time designing and debating before they even bend a piece of metal. SpaceX on the other hand likes to move fast and fail forward. They'd rather build a lot of prototypes and blow up a few, and learn a whole lot in the process. Also, Musk is a fanatic and workaholic, and drives his employees hard, whereas Blue Origin is more laid back and "normal" in their work ethic.
This article begins with victim blaming the software engineers in full-throated support of hardware engineers. If, and I do mean if, anyone should be exalted it is the fact that software engineers have been coping with C as a stable-but-difficult programming language specifically for the benefit of the hardware engineers’ desire to have a stable target. The fact that the specification is ambiguous at all is so that hardware manufacturers can port a reasonably small, expressive, and powerful language to their hardware.
And, no, making a new language that targets the platform for the ease of hardware development and exploitation of system-specific benefits is not the answer. In fact, it’s the literal reason why C is still as popular as it is.

Nobody wants to learn your programming language, write thousands-to-millions of dollars worth of software, just to have it become obsolete two days after the new-hotness processor comes out. Been there, done that.

Alternatively, perhaps, we can place the blame on hardware manufacturers who were looking to cut corners for improved performance and produced insecure machines because they lied to us non-expert hardware users about how fast their systems could go and what we were getting for our money.
I think a lack of loneliness is generally good, but I worry that this is just a band-aid on a much larger, deeper societal issue. What about when the only emotional support that some lonely kids have comes from a software powered by a startup, and the company that hosts their AI friend for 5+ years of their lives goes under? They lose the only friend they have in the world because it wasn't profitable enough?

Really scary implications if things like this become too normal, imo. We need to fix the foundational problems first.
Exceedingly little, considering it's illegal, and the NYSE employs technological measures to prevent it as well.
GPT4 was trained to be multimodal from the start.
Because the company can offer a weekly paycheck at market rates, of course. Why else would someone work at any company at all?

VC funds with dozens or hundreds of investments may like a landscape where one or two make a 10x or 100x valuation and the rest go bust chasing that goal, but I personally can't afford to gamble my family's future with my 2,000 hours per year on a 1% chance that my employer will rocket to the moon. Also, job-hunting is a pain, I'd prefer that my employer not go through massive layoffs or risk bankruptcy unnecessarily. Equity growth or profit-sharing bonuses are just that - bonuses, mostly ignored when comparing total comp unless the 'bonus' is extremely stable and reliable. I need to take home a reasonable salary in exchange for my labor.
> I guess some people have an inherent inability to adopt some kind of middle ground stance

Try "almost all people". People crave certainty.
Aswath Damodaran: https://www.businesstoday.in/crypto/token/story/currency-tha...

Bitcoin is the currency that nobody uses and a collectible that doesn't behave like a collectible.

He also questioned its role as a hedge, stating, "It's gone up as stocks have gone up, it goes down when stocks go down. This is not the way a collectible is supposed to behave."
> in C you basically have to be really meticulous about free()-ing memory

only if you malloc()/free() for every allocation/deallocation. if you use any other allocation strategy then this is never an issue.

for example: see the "Rewriting the memory management" section in this article: https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/rewriting-wipeout

> I'm not sure what the original PSX version did, but the PC version had a lot of malloc() and little fewer free() calls scattered around. Now I can assure you that the game doesn't leak any memory, because it never calls malloc().

> Instead, there's a fixed size statically allocated uint8_t hunk[MEM_HUNK_BYTES]; of 4mb that is used from both sides:

> A bump allocator takes bytes from the front of the hunk. This is used for everything that persists for many frames. When the game starts, it loads a bunch of assets that are needed everywhere (UI graphics, ship models and textures etc.) into this bump allocater and then remembers the high water mark of it. When you load a race track, it loads all assets needed on top. After finishing a race, the bump allocator is reset to the previous high water mark.

> On the other side, a temp allocator takes bytes from the end of the hunk. Temporary allocated objects need to be explicitly released again. This is used when loading a file into memory. The file is read at once and unpacked onto the bump allocated side. When done, the temp memory for the file is released again.

> Temporary objects are not allowed to persist over multiple frame. So each frame ends with a check to ensure that the temp allocator is empty.

> Somewhat related, the OpenGL renderer does the same with the textures: It bumps up texture memory (more precisely space in the texture atlas) and resets it to the previous level when a race ends.

if you use a system like this—either malloc() just once (or a few times) at the start of your program and then never manually free(), or just use statically-allocated arrays—then you never have to worry about "meticulous free()ing". I'm not sure why this never seems to be taught in early CS courses that teach C—it seems that basically everyone comes away thinking malloc()/free() OCD is the only way to manage memory with C, and is thus undesirable compared to the ease of use of garbage collection.
The model discussed in the article is MiniLM-L6-v2, which you can run via PyTorch from the sentence-transformers project[1].

That model is based on BERT and not LLaMa [2].

[1]: https://www.sbert.net/docs/pretrained_models.html

[2]: https://huggingface.co/microsoft/MiniLM-L12-H384-uncased
I mean, insert any "year of linux on the desktop joke here"

In terms of usage numbers, X is very, very dead. Android uses something that looks a lot more like Wayland than X (or arguably Wayland looks a lot more like Android's SurfaceFlinger than X, but whatever), and ChromeOS is Wayland as well. I'm pretty sure Steam Deck is also Wayland.
> C is low level for at least one reason: manual memory management.

Manual memory management isn't that much faster than a modern GC, sometimes even slower. I'd argue that C programs are typically fast because there is just less rope to hang yourself with, leaving aside memory safety.

The anemic abstractions provided in the language and the tiny stdlib means it takes a lot of work to achieve something, so developers simply do less. There isn't even a Hashmap (or a proper String), while in Kotlin, you can perform a deep copy of the object graph and convert it to json in parallel in a single line if you so wish.
Is there any evidence most wild fires are not direct consequence of human action?
This "act of good" argument seems disingenuous as even if no direct human action caused the fire, there is evidence that human actions caused general higher risks for wild fires in certain areas.
The only people who benefit are the app developers.
Does anyone actually run windows on arm in any meaningful day to day job?
When comparing a signed and unsigned integer, the signed integer is promoted to unsigned integer.

So if you have a = -1, b = 1000 and compare the two, a > b is actually true.
It isn't like that good this past 3 years, isn't it?
As another user pointed out - Elizabeth Holmes got 11 years. What are the odds that Caroline won't be out before she's 40 and still have millions in the bank?
Original e/acc manifesto [0]

[0] https://www.effectiveacceleration.org/posts/4LtypqdAmQ3AgKtJ...
Yeah, everyone knows that mean is a bad estimator in presence of outliers or long tailed distributions. The distribution of startup outcomes is exactly that yet people talk about EVs all the time.
That is a good question. I would hope not, but I suppose an argument could and would be made that you are still violating the TOS by blocking trackers, and by blocking them, you are depriving YouTube (and its creators) from another means of compensation by stifling the effectiveness of adverts.
Only if you sell me a cryptobro course on how to become a millionaire for $99.99
I went digging for information on this because somewhere in my mind this claim was installed as true, but your skepticism re-activated my skepticism.

It seems that the Matrix protocol offers optional end-to-end encryption on a room-by-room basis via Double Ratchet Algorithm that was introduced by the Signal Protocol [0]. This is the academic paper that Wikipedia cites for that claim [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol#Influence
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45982-0_...
No, revenue is not funding. Funding is debt and equity. Revenue can become equity if you retain profits after expenses but the lions share of funding is debt and contributed capital.

Market share does mean something specific, but you chose to specify which market, and that wasn’t the important one, so your definition was not useful.

Most of Apple’s revenue comes from the hardware sales. But the hardware sales are very expensive. Even at 110%+ markups. The App Store sales is by comparison basically free. The majority of Apple’s contribution margin is coming from sources like that. Which is doubly toxic because this is only due to Apple forbidding competition against itself on its hardware.
If they pay an agreeable salary and the work sounds interesting, why wouldn't they?

Even if you're wary of startups you have a founder that seems set for a predictable direction instead of hypergrowth and you might have a better chance of it not going bust next year. Then again if you're in it for the shares and the big opportunity, then probably not.
> I'm pretty sure that this is one of the unsafeties that rust borrows from c

But integer arithmetic is safe in terms of Rust.

> Checking every addition adds a massive slowdown

It only does so for debug mode. In release mode, it uses modular arithmetic.
Game characters will need to be trained to enforce boundaries the same way people would in real life, whether they are NPCs or major characters.
Where is 'here'? It's $22 here in the US, but that is for the family plan (6 people, so just under $4 per person).

> but 2$?

Yeah, I highly doubt that covers the cost of serving up videos ad-free while also being able to provide anything of substance to the creators (which earn more per user from premium viewers than from ads).
It shows culture is more important than conventional wisdom
Wayland is developed by the same people that have spent their time implementing X.

So one either shuts up and accepts that the X developers know what they are doing, or comes up with an alternative that beats Wayland.
Sigh, sad b/c I actually know this, but just a small correction.

That's an anonymous Twitter/X account @BasedBeffJezos not the actual head Jeff himself.

Founder(?) of the e/acc philosophy
> But it is really just the consumer facing prices that go up. A lot of inflation is profit taking on the corporate side.

The US CPI went up 21.9% over the past 5 years[0]. The PPI went up 27.3% over the same timeframe[1]. So it's untrue that it's just the consumer-facing prices that have gone up; the producer-facing prices went up even more.

Corporate profit margins are high compared to historical averages, and total corporate profits went up by 40.7% over the past 5 years[2]; but the money supply went up by even more, by 47.1%[3]. So perhaps it's fair to say that businesses have been good at capturing the bulk of the additional money supply. Real (as in inflation-adjusted) personal incomes went up 9.4% over the same timeframe[4].

Consumer behavior was in turbocharged spending mode, fueled by rock-bottom interest rates and fiscal largesse. When supply remains constrained and demand goes through the roof, prices rise. Nothing too mysterious there.

[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PPIACO

[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP

[3]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

[4]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W875RX1
Can't we force the compiler to define the behavior with flags like -fwrapv? I use them as a matter of course. Also use -fno-strict-aliasing.
For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this – until recently.

We really didn't. At least, not at the time, and certainly not everyone. Plenty of people throughout history have been adamantly against the rapid progress of technology. The Luddites are the most famous group but there have been lots more.

Even if you ignore those people for being frankly a bit weird, the driving force behind technology for the first ten thousand or so years has been the improvement of the human race and to win in the struggle to survive. Those were definitely noble goals. Compare that to the past 200 or so years and much of the progress has been about the consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of a few extraordinarily rich people. The technological gains have been spread widely, sure, but they've come at a high cost. That's different to the past where the gains have come with very little cost.

We could transform society to benefit everyone using technology if we wanted to. I suspect we won't though. We'll sell a few AI powered gadgets to the masses, and that will cause power over everyone to coalesce in the hands of a few people. That's not really much of a win.
There is a little bit more to that story. Canonical had initially chosen Wayland to be the successor of X11. Then they dropped that plan in favor of the in-house Mir project, citing problems with Wayland. The Wayland developers debunked all of those points, but Canonical just neglected the reply. As I remember it, it was this incident that irked a lot of people and gave Wayland the push to become what it is today. Wayland wasn't as popular before that.
The largest offshore wind farm produced its first power
I'm very skeptical of anyone trying to fit history in a single narrative. This whole text sounds like an over simplification.

It also presents the usual contradiction that any neo-liberal argument is "not a political argument". The author states :

> Techno-Optimism is a material philosophy, not a political philosophy.

Then proceeds to glorify the techno-capital (their term) and shun communism. How is that not political ?

While I do like technology and optimism, I prefer a more honest view. I think I'm glad this manifest exists: I disagree with almost every item of the list, but it's useful as a reference of the views of rich techno-advocates capitalist and everything wrong with it.
A.I. Could Soon Need as Much Electricity as an Entire Country
Yes they should block IPs for countries they dont want legal exposure to
Dark Matter is the opposite of String Theory imho.

String Theory was about desperately seeking a Grand Unifying Theory that everybody wants and mashing math together until you figured out something that matched the evidence but was so overcomplicated it was completely untestable.

Dark Matter is about having evidence that something is terribly wrong with the math, and the evidence pointing to something goddamned absurd that everybody hates, and reluctantly finding more and more evidence that this thing everybody hates might be true.

The main thing they have in common is that they're both incredibly ugly solutions to problems in physics, but one is invented to reconcile a an inconsistency in theory, and the other is invented to reconcile an inconsistency in evidence.

And honestly, that's why I'm comfy thinking dark matter is probably real: I'm a pessimist. The ugly solution that everybody finds kinda gross is probably the truth.
Yes, let's keep believing that the increase in wildfires isn't in any way related to human activity at all (climate change and bad forestry practices don't exist).

Dust storms in Asia spread further and further (because of deforestation), is that also totally unrelated to human activity?
https://archive.ph/jPlRr
I'm aware. But it does reduce the value of data mining, simply by reducing the amount of data.
Popular Myths About Software Engineers Debunked
I'd love to get some closure in my lifetime about Satoshi and the creation of Bitcoin. Which human(s) actually wrote the paper and the initial code?

Afaik that's still an unsolved mystery with several competing theories.
> Finally, I think Minds need humans... all the minds that had no humans with them (that I remember, at least) where the "unstable", eccentric or downright crazy.

Well okay; the humans aren't pets, they're emotional support animals. Not a huge improvement though.
It doesn’t lead to reproduction yet
What Happened at the Hearing for New Hampshire's Free Software Law?
> “uPdAtE yOuR pRiOrS”

LOL. One thing I’ve learned so far halfway through the middling Michael Lewis book is that the lives of people who talk in Bayesian jargon and obsess about Magic: The Gathering don’t make for exciting reading even if you have a world-class author and the best editors. Sometimes a boring person is just a boring person.
I wonder, were you being ironic? It seems both of these things sound pretty decent. There are millions of people that treat depression with drugs and horniness with porn... I can't say I see any problems with either.
The Cheapest Solar Powered Car [video]
"Jack heads to Breda to drive a prototype of the latest innovative solar-powered electric car to come out of the Netherlands: The Squad Solar. The brainchild of two former Lightyear employees, is this tiny, cheap and allegedly 'uncrashable' electric solar car the future of urban transportation? Or is it just a posh golf buggy?"
Stanford plans to put a 3D-printed human heart in a pig by 2028