skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can run a moderate amount of deficit without anything bad happening, and governments can do it indefinitely. HOWEVER, the amount you can run is not unlimited and can collapse the system if it gets too high. So you should be very careful with how much debt you are actually carrying and how much you add to it. Also you need to be careful because the amount it costs to carry your debt can fluctuate.

The same is somewhat true for corporations as well.
> If they wanted, they could mint a few $1 trillion USD coins and whoosh the money exists.

of course this is true - that's what sovereign power means.

And yet, other entities have trust that the US gov't doesn't just do it. Thus, the 'general trust' as you said. And this special status as being a reserve is mainly due to this trust - no amount of coersion is going to make an untrustworthy currency a reserve.
Just because you don't use "free" federal money doesn't mean you can't provide for those people.

We don't live in a black and white world where Medicaid alone is the answer to all our problems. If anything, these centralized mandates have caused significant price increases and less competition, in multiple sectors, including thr currently apparent housing shortage and affordability crisis.
Could it be that Little Big Adventure had this shading? I remember it looking rather “plastic” just like the examples you shared.
This is a useful insight, but I think that many automations really are based on solid, honest-to-goodness abstractions of the same type you would find in math. Furthermore, that's good and important!

It's true that a compiler is merely translating a high-level language into the actual machine code, but it's simultaneously true that you can (generally) talk sensibly about the high-level language, and maybe even prove theorems about it, without making any reference to how it will be realized on the machine. That's a good abstraction.

The better your abstractions, the more your automations make sense, and the more you can reason about them. Automation without abstraction gives you biology, which is a gnarly mess of accidental complexity that's very difficult to reason about and control.

That said, I'm going to start thinking of my code more in terms of creating efficient and low-risk automation, and less about creating nice abstractions.
I agree with all the points you've made, but I would add that the PMs and managers and directors and whatnot are never that keen to help engineers out on this front.

It is a rare person indeed that can do software development and think (and talk) in business terms. As a dev, being able to talk in business terms about the problems you face in creating software is really, really handy.

But I can count on one hand the number of POs, directors, managers that want to engage in that conversation with developers. Most of the time a solution is thrown over the wall and developers are told to build a thing.

An actual conversation about a business problem between the people that actually have the problem and the people that will build the software that (hopefully) solves it happens way, way less often than it should.
That's actually rather impressive then that if they have significant taxes on the bottom 50% that they still get the majority of their revenue from the top 5%.
> Your precious ML/DL libraries may not even be upgraded, because writing neural network code is not the same as writing thread-safe code. If it comes from a CS lab, its authors have already left, and there's nothing worthy of a publication in adding thread-safety.

PyTorch and sklearn won't stop being maintained though. I don't rely on unmaintained research code in production, I adapt what I need under MIT license. Any other way sounds crazy.

Plus, most research code is very high-level and uses the same facilities (from e.g. PyTorch again) that everyone else uses, the actual distributed and multithreaded work happens in the main libraries. You'll still be able to use the same neural network code that worked before.

I don't see a huge problem for people who already had their dependency list under control. If you had anything that's both hard to replace and not big enough to be upgraded though, I'd argue that it was always going to bite you at some point.
> edit: Hacker News also doesn't sanitize escape characters (...) will turn your screen red

No, it won't:

wget -qO - https://news.ycombinator.com\
/item?id=37963815|grep 31M|xxd -g1 -c6

(...)
0108: 74 3b 26 6c 74 3b t;&lt;
010e: 45 53 43 26 67 74 ESC&gt
0114: 3b 5b 33 31 4d 26 ;[31M&
> Quite sure you answered your own question here. Survivorship bias isn't a valid argument. Lebanon, Greece, Pakistan, Turkey all come to mind in the last decade, all with unsustainable amounts of debt.

Incompetent government is the higher risk.

And with Greece, the problem was only partly created by themselves: it was also the French and Germans who insisted that their bankers (who held a large portion of Greece's bond) be paid back and were willing to blackmail the Greek government. This is evidenced by the fact it all went away when the ECB said (Draghi: "whatever it takes") it would be the lender of last (like the US Fed is).
Completely different topic. I'm not even referencing "my workplace", I'm talking our entire industry.
>How did ticketmaster get so big to begin with to force / convince people of signing exclusivity clauses?

By dangling more money.

In the 1980s, Ticketmaster beat the competitors (e.g. Ticketron) by offering the venues a better financial deal.

Ticketron charged the venues a service fee. Venues pay Ticketron.

Ticketmaster flipped that around and made a clever proposal: instead of charging the venue, we'll charge the concertgoing fans extra service fee(s) and we'll give the venue a percentage of the fees collected. To sweeten the deal, we'll even pay the venue _upfront_ money as part of signing an exclusive deal.

https://thehustle.co/the-sneaky-economics-of-ticketmaster/

That's why most ideas about creating a new ticketing startup to "disrupt Ticketmaster" are naive about how the underlying business deals actually work. E.g. if the well-meaning programmers have idealistic motivations to create a new "fair ticketing" system that doesn't charge outrageous fees, the venues will not sign up with you which means you have no tickets to sell at the "cheaper & fair price".

Why would the venues use your new "fair ticketing" system if it means they get less money?!? That's the financial puzzle a viable Ticketmaster competitor has to solve.
For very foundational stuff, Charles Petzold has put out some great books.

His book Code is fantastic. He starts at simple battery and lightbulb circuits and builds and builds towards a simple CPU.

He also wrote The Annotated Turing which is a breakdown of Alan Turing seminal paper and you only need high school math to get through it.

When I was in school my favorite course was compiler design and we used Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (aka the dragon book). It’s one of the best textbooks I’ve used but that was 30 years ago. There might be something better now. Understanding parsers and lexers and (especially) state machines is something that will serve you well.
I suspect rising interest rates and stable gas prices are what is causing lower inflation. The parent stated a link between more debt and more inflation and was hoping for an explanation that would explain the link.
There's one register called CCR on m68k and CR on PPC, so that's probably not an accident ;)
Agreed!

It reminds me of:

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

and how many of today’s CS-degree holders would barely understand any of it. As someone who has also “grown up with all the technology”, I’ve learned and experienced all that. But as a percentage of “software engineers”, there’s fewer and fewer that do every day.
When could we realistically expect a nano-version of this to scrub blood vessels?
People that use Google News probably want to know if Google is removing resources from the app.
I would even say the iPhone Mini isn't small enough. It should have been 5.2" Screen which would make it nearly if not the same size as iPhone 5.

But the biggest problem with Mini was the battery. And I dont see how we could solve that without some battery breakthrough. Which isn't going to happen any time soon.
>I would never use the STARTTLS port (opportunistic encryption) if I knew that the server had a regular TLS port...

That is what XMPP clients tend to do...

These days XMPP servers tend to default to requiring TLS on both 5222 and 5223 (Let's Encrypt has changed everything). Prosody does this for example. It doesn't even support port 5223 by default anymore. Port 5223 was never an official port assignment.

So it is very possible that the MiTM was only done on port 5222 because that was the only port that clients were using.
If you ask for a lower estimate it means that you are providing an estimate. Why people that are not qualified to estimate, scum masters, team leads, product owners, provide estimates? The whole management structure is upside-down and then we wonder why software is crap and people quit.
News that affects the news industry always has a priority for news outlets, obviously. The fact that it's a tiny percentage of the staff is neither here nor there: if Apple laid off a few dozens from its core hardware design team, that'd be newsworthy too.

There is a lot going on right now, with Google + Meta at the centre of possible regulation over news links; with the wars in Israel and Ukraine causing spikes in misinformation; with American trust in news at historic lows, and with X's disbanding of its Trust&Safety team leading to a rise in misinformation on the platform; any withdrawal from a service as prominent as Google's News is going to be noteworthy.
I use Windows as main OS and I am absolutely not comfortable with using either Vim or Emacs. Caret handling, search and file explorer view is much better in sublime and vs code. But both of them are not as quick for large files and files with weird encoding schemes. NPP is the onlyone which for me has kept the encoding intact even when edit binary-ish files.
Predictability is arguably more important than speed, especially when you have a lot of moving parts.
When you have a developer that is slow, but constantly delivers on his estimates, you have a reliable IC that you can count on not failing to develop an API for some other team to integrate with.
Fast and ambitious guys, who frequently fall behind their own estimates, are a pain in the ass to manage in large teams/companies.

Sure, with startups on the bleeding edge and with RnD it's different, but most of devs aren't doing that
Those terms go hand-in-hand. Like a compiler, abstraction in art is essentially delegating some of the work to the audience.
I came here to ask this too. I've had recent examples where the business has explicitly said the opposite (but we're long term greedy). I'm sure there are businesses on the verge of collapse where staying alive is the objective function. I'd be interested if there are other more common/healthy situations?
One way to solve this is to have per-player task queues in the game server which processes tasks sequentially (but concurrently with other player task queues, this is actually a perfect use case for async/await style code).

Critical actions should also have a sequence counter to make sure they are enqueued in order and to detect whether actions got lost somewhere (especially when using an unordered networking protocol like UDP) - message ordering usually already happens on a lower level than the game code though in the code layer that sits on top of UDP sockets, but a higher level per-player action counter can't hurt either I guess, if only for debugging)
You're mixing two very different classes.

The land belonging to an aristocrat can only go to another. Sales are regulated by the central government. Additionally, aristocrats have a de jure place in the government hierarchy, military rights, and the right to enforce laws on their own land.

Gentry are just rich people.
It seems like a weird bit of culture in the Land of the Free, where it's somehow acceptable to be surveilled by drone so people can see what you're doing in your own yard, so they can fine you.

I understand it if someone is doing it in view of other people, causing an eyesore, but if you have to go to such lengths to see what they're doing, then whom exactly are they harming with what they're doing on their own property?
Why the hospital pager withstood the test of time
KV Stores seem to be in a kind of split place, existing either as embedded, or full cluster mode. There isn’t really a “sqlite” or “postgres” of persistent KV stores. Cloud providers ship their own proprietary KV-stores: Dynamo in AWS, Bigtable in GCP. If you are ok with hosted, Scylla is also an option.

I’m always shocked that people use Redis for anything other than an ephemeral cache.
The 1970s Economic Theory That Needs to Die
Sublime is not as fast. My main problem was with large files and files with weird encoding schemes which I can usually safely edit in NPP but not in sublime
Without this sort of nonsense sucking up thought and debate we could have had a colony on Mars by now.
The same attack could be mounted against a Matrix server tbh. But the fact Matrix is E2EE by default would mitigate it a bit, and if folks verified who they were talking to then the attack would be defeated.
Riskier still making a dad joke on HN.
Code is an awesome book. Those first few chapters were nothing but lightbulb moments for me (pun intended).
Yahoo OAuth 2.0 Guide
What kind of latency did that approach manage to achieve?

From your description elsewhere was it using the WebRTC data channels to deliver DASH/HLS style segments or actually using the MediaStream stuff?

I think the magic info we're missing here is what the Twitch viewers are watching on, and my hunch is it's a lot of mobile for which the P2P idea will not work (and/or provoke angry messages from mobile operators). In the case of smart TV then I can see the P2P idea saving a lot of money, but I don't believe there is even an official Twitch app for Samsung TVs so they don't seem to think that is where their audience is.
I am an absolute 'Glasshole' [video]
I think it’s very common for developers to mistake indirection for abstraction.
Paying ChatGPT Customers Now Have Access to DALL-E 3
Ludicrous abstraction story.

I was once managing a few large file servers, with bog standard users as well as devs using a pretty complex directory tree of "assets".

There was a pretty high-up, specific directory level, which was where the ZFS file servers were given their different loads to handle. This was a directory level where new directories were created rarely (99% at the start of the project).

For reasons of money as well as speed, I asked that the server admins (ie. me) be the ones to create any further directories needed at that particular level. The head dev refused to entertain the idea of not being able to create directories anywhere he wanted at any time, and therefore, a new system was brought in at five-figure costs in order to make the file servers into a large abstracted blob that users never had to think about the complexities of managing.

I was given an opportunity to exit the IT dept and become a Python dev and I took it, shortly before that system came in, because it caused many problems which were much worse than needing to have an admin create a directory for you maybe once or twice, and the evident ignorance of everyone I spoke to at the vendor made it very clear ahead of time that it would.

This was not the only such massive expenditure on a toxic boondoggle in the name of "simplicity" that I witnessed.
Good news is that you don't need that much, something like 4 video segments is more than enough.

(Edit: I love how I get downvoted when saying that although I literally built a p2p streaming software and I'm citing actual configuration requirements we had in production back then)
I've always thought a solution like LetsEncrypt would be an ideal backdoor for LEAs wanting to circumvent SSL/TLS.

The same thing applies to VPN services. Why bother trying to develop tools etc that can decrypt traffic when you can just have people send their traffic to you?
The version of this story I heard first comes from the (absurdly fun, if you’re into that sort of thing) 65scribe YouTube channel’s video on the PowerMac 8100:

https://youtu.be/XYWp_R33mDs?si=4czECGOaHiM-MQqt

Roughly lines up with the history recounted here:

https://lowendmac.com/2014/ibm-apple-risc-and-the-roots-of-t...

Apple was planning to go with a radical new design, breaking with the past in both software and hardware, but Gary Davidian & co. saved them from their own foolishness via a skunkworks project that actually could ship.
> Power steering is yet another level of abstraction that further improves the driving experience.

I am a pretty firm believer that antilock brakes are a bad abstraction that might cause fewer accidents, but often more dangerous accidents than they prevent.

They avoid a class of accident caused by the brake’s locking limiting your ability to steer. They cause a whole class of accidents where you hit things at a higher speed than you otherwise would have because your ability to actually slow down is greatly diminished. It’s a trade of braking distance for control. Basically we’re prioritizing rapidly swerving around an obstacle over less controlled but far more rapid deceleration.

I really don’t think this trade off makes any sort of sense in anything but the most sparse rural environment. In urban and suburban areas, swerving blindly around an obstacle will just mean hitting something else. Yes, you missed the car that pulled out in front of you but now you’re either throwing your vehicle into pedestrians on the sidewalk or into oncoming traffic. Both cases likely a far worse outcome than the accident you are taking evasive actions to prevent. The sanest option becomes just to hit the obstacle you would have been able to stop for were it not for antilock brakes.

In my eyes, the most fundamentally frustrating part, and what makes them a bad abstraction, is that the problems antilock brakes solve are entirely preventable by human intervention. Namely, pumping the brakes. The class of accidents antilock brakes cause are largely unavoidable. You can stop lessen their affect by not fully depressing the brake but it is still a much longer deceleration than no antilock brakes at all.
Well then bussiness people are also disconnected from reality. If a developer can write code and estimate and deliver in time for bussiness, then he is not an employee. He is a founder. What you want is people that deliver like a founder but that don't get any share of the profits. You want gullible people.
I suppose it can be newsworthy to the extent that Google's news division has any editorial control over its content and influence on global discourse, and to what extent are those ~40 people a significant proportion of Google News itself—are they 5000 staff total, or are they just 200? What department took the brunt of the layoffs: admin, engineering, content...?

To be clear, I have no opinion or information either way. I'm just providing some conditions under which it could be considered newsworthy.
Scientists propose super-bright light sources powered by quasiparticles
Many countries are demanding Google pay for news reposting. This, while likely not linked, makes it more newsworthy.
What it might mean that they are specifically reducing headcount in their news division is the interest point. Not the impact to the company as a whole.

Not just this, but for example, the discourse around big tech companies introducing bias into "news" is increasing. So reductions in those teams is itself newsworthy.
Tesorio (YC S15) Is Hiring a Sr Data Engineer and Sr Back End Engineer in Latam
Hey I've struggled with this notion as well.
But then I sometimes compare this with crypto - or how a bunch of kids simulated the entire financial system and made the same mistakes made 100s of years ago, with the end effect of an new generation that taught itself finance.

I suppose that is what will keep happening. At some point, someone will decide to re-write everything from scratch and re-discover lower layers of abstraction or challenge them.
And what will this AI support mean ? Better branch prediction ?
Many news writers can easily be freed up and replaced by procedural text generators such as llms. Both generate equally misleading and inaccurate “news”, but at least procedural generators are more humane.
Estimate high is the mathematically most valid thing to do in the face of uncertainty. This is more or less the fundamental theorem of finance. Expected rate of return increases with risk as compensation for the risk. Project planning should be following the same principle. If you're uncertain of traffic conditions, you leave earlier to be safe. If you're uncertain of future work unknowns, you estimate longer completion time to be safe.

If management is pushing for lower estimates, it's typically going some reason along the lines of:

- Someone higher up gave them a fixed budget or a fixed deadline and they can't exceed that.

- They're expecting market conditions to reward earlier delivery more than higher quality.

- They don't understand the problem domain.

- They do understand the problem domain but don't understand limiting factors like tech debt or organizational process hurdles the developers face that preven them from hitting timelines they would hit under ideal conditions.

If it's one of the latter two, they need to have a come to Jesus moment with themselves because you can't run a team if you don't understand what they do, how they do it, and what obstacles they face.

If it's one of the former two, great, communicate that, but then whoever is ultimately accepting or using your product needs to understand the basic release models that you can either get a complete set of well-defined features or you can get a specific release date but you can't get both, except by luck. And you need to have an organizational culture that isn't going to punish developers if they don't get lucky and meet only one of those goals.

Companies purchasing labor output don't get to violate the basic constraints of being a consumer. If you've got a fixed budget, fine, but you get what you pay for.
If what you claim were actually the case, the names we assign these "abstractions" wouldn't matter, they could be any arbitrary sequence of characters, since all you'd be doing is grouping code into procedures for the sake of automation. But the names we assign things obviously do matter, not only to make the reader grasp what the abstraction is about, but to decouple the abstraction from its implementation; two different abstractions may have an identical implementation and still be different abstractions, and an abstraction may remain the same abstraction even if you alter its implementation.
There are multiple software packages to do this already.

Why are you commenting on something you clearly know nothing about?
> Knowing what the foundations are that the edifice you've constructed sits upon allows you to affect repairs when it crumbles unexpectedly.

Finally get to use this bit of knowledge: 'effect' (the verb) was the word you wanted there.
It doesn't support HTTPS, which is to say, kinda.